Yesterday I made a final batch of butter mince tarts, this time taller to fit in nuts, mince, and plenty of butter batter, baked forty minutes 400/350, and they are very close to perfect. Soft fruit, crunchy nuts, sweet caramel, buttery crust. Caramel got a touch overbaked; probably too hot oven temp and/or too much cornstarch (1t, to 2T each brown sugar, vegan butter, and coconut cream).

Washed the socks; did the crossword. Finder continues with a touch of, I suppose it’s not deus ex machina exactly since it was reasonably thoroughly set up, but still an unlikely bit of suspension of disbelief. Hopefully it’s part of the meta arc and will be carried through sequels.

Finished my Villanelle exploration project, packaged it up and sent it off. It’s been a long time since I enjoyed programming in my time off so much, so thanks due to C 🙏

Dinner, Voyager, snack, sleep. Dreamt of being unable to find my high school math teacher for a test I was supposed to take; getting lost in the shuttle bus system; some dude trying to get change for a fifty from me; confusing collaborative messaging software.

Yesterday was user study day. I’m pretty sure F didn’t sleep; she and M were up working until 4, at which point the bitbucket repository had a hissy cow and switched into read-only mode. Some frantic emails to me and bitbucket support later, it was all resolved, but yeah no fun at all. I went in on the 10:15 to help set up. We went through our set of use cases and struck a balance between debugging low-hanging fruit and jettisoning cases that resisted fixing. Out of 80 use cases we wound up with 9 that at least one of us could get to prove. Late lunch (pasta from the CUC, with cheese! Did well), and we were working right up until participants arrived at 3. We ran one time through with very little training, and one time through with more instruction and some extra hints printed by the reasoning system, but the only person (other than us) able to get anything to prove was the one with prior contact both with prolog and with LIA. We will probably include the expert performance statistics in the paper along with a brief acknowledgement that the NLG for eliciting information doesn’t work for novices yet. I stuck around until 6:30 hacking on the paper with F, late snack, shuttle home. Was disinterested in dinner so just sat with P chatting while he prepped and ate. Third session of classes for him; he’s at a low spot but can tell it’s concave up. Crossword, then gave him a brief intro to unit testing in python, then sleep.