I Need Coffee - Episode 222 - Weekly BC Review!   (August 28, 2026)

1. Weekend Trip & Supercar Observations
   - Drove to Malibu to deliver ramen and supplies to his daughter’s dorm, visited a friend in LA, then drove home.
   - Noted the density of exotic cars on PCH (McLaren with pneumatic spoiler, Ferraris, Porsche GT3 RS, etc.) — estimated well over $1 million in vehicles around him at times. Highlighted the stress of braking near very expensive cars on a two-lane road.

2. DIY Brake Job Journey
   - Dealer quote ~$400 just for rear pads + resurfacing (Toyota, not luxury). Labor estimated at $150/hour.
   - Past dealer service experiences were poor (misinflated tires, unbalanced tires requiring another shop, etc.).
   - Bought tools at a Harbor Freight parking-lot sale (~$250–260 total, including a discounted high-end jack and stands).
   - Purchased a 1-year Mitchell (EA) service manual subscription (~$39) with official Toyota procedures.
   - Also bought a dial indicator for rotor runout measurement.
   - Plan: replace pads and rotors (no bleeding needed). California cars have minimal rust. Will also tackle his daughter’s leaking washer fluid bottle (part discontinued).
   - Theme: Doing it yourself teaches unexpected lessons (parallels to doing their own marketing).

3. Health – Phantosmia / Silent Migraine
   - Experienced phantosmia (smelling something that isn’t there — previously thought it was burning wires).
   - Identified it as a migraine precursor. This time had a “silent migraine” (no classic throbbing headache but other strong symptoms). Took Monday largely offline.

4. Stripe Fraud Scale & Specialized AI Models
   - Noted a report that Stripe blocked over $300 million in credit card fraud in a short recent period.
   - Highlighted the “Thompson 1.0” small model on Hugging Face: a mixture-of-experts style approach that strips out unwanted expert pathways to create a specialized model focused on high-stakes domains (legal, tax, journalism). Still loads the full model in memory but activates far fewer parameters at inference time (e.g., 3B active out of 35B). Interesting for domain-specific open-weight use.

5. Claude Code Automatic Transcript Deletion
   - Discovered Claude Code silently deletes JSONL chat transcripts older than 30 days by default.
   - Lost valuable wireframe-related prompts from June (evidence of the folder remained, but content was gone). Current directory held <15 MB total.
   - Fix: Edit `~/.claude/settings.json` and set a much longer `cleanupPeriodDays` (up to 10 years). Strongly recommends checking this setting for Claude Code, and being aware of similar auto-cleanup in other tools.

6. LLM Impact on Linguistic Diversity
   - Referenced a *Nature Human Behaviour* paper showing LLMs reduce linguistic diversity (more predictable, narrower vocabulary).
   - Linked to a GitHub project analyzing 461,000 PRs / 51 million words: the phrase “loadbearing” (almost nonexistent before mid-2025 Claude/Opus models) exploded in prevalence and displaced other wording in pull requests.
   - Criticized LinkedIn for being flooded with AI-generated “slop,” especially promoted posts.

7. Business Central Performance Issue
   - Customer experienced 5–35 second delays opening individual sales orders (blank spinning cursor).
   - Recommendation: Use the in-client Performance Profiler to capture the specific action rather than broad telemetry.
   - Plan to have the customer open a few orders while profiling.

8. Teams Recording Permission Nightmare
   - Franklin scheduled a meeting; Steve started the recording. Neither could properly download, share, or adjust permissions on the resulting file.
   - Required diving into SharePoint User Profiles and adding Steve as a OneDrive co-administrator on Franklin’s account — illustrating how messy the underlying Teams/SharePoint/OneDrive architecture can be.

9. Customers Who Don’t Know Left from Right + New Navigation Aid
   - On a support/test call, a customer (and later others) stated they literally cannot distinguish left from right. Made screen navigation extremely difficult.
   - Created **bcnav.me** (hosted on their docs site) as a shared visual navigation language.
   - Uses numbered zones (1 / 2) instead of left/right, plus labeled UI elements (fact box toggle, action buttons, environment switcher, etc.).
   - Plans to expand for different page types (list, card, document, Role Center). Built in one evening with Claude’s help. Contrasts with the much simpler windowed UI of Dynamics GP.

10. Upcoming Events
    - Partner Vibe 2.0: September 21–23, Provo, UT.
    - Summit NA / Community Summit: October 11–15, Nashville, TN.
    - Dynamics user group / Dynamics Con Regional dates mentioned (Montreal, Frankfurt, Houston — verify current listings).

11. Power BI Project Retrospective with Claude
    - Large multi-hundred-hour Power BI reporting project with complex org structure, unclear requirements, and significant scope creep.
    - Fatima extracting VTT transcripts from dozens of Teams recordings, summarizing them consistently with Claude, then running a full retrospective prompt across all summaries + original documents.
    - Goal: Document original scope, timeline of change requests/scope creep, informal “sure, I’ll add that” moments, and lessons on exposure from not enforcing formal change requests early.

12. Veeam Backup Tech-Debt Rabbit Hole
    - License renewal notice arrived. Discovered the critical backup had last run 321 days earlier.
    - Email notifications had been broken for months (invalid remote certificate).
    - Attempting to fix led to: failed route registration, a Linux VM stuck in kernel panic, inability to install Veeam 13.1 because of a .NET 10 prerequisite failure, and deep registry/ACL permission issues.
    - Classic “just change a lightbulb” cascade (Malcolm in the Middle reference). Got nothing else done that day.

13. Cybersecurity Notes**
    - New Log4j vulnerability diclosd (not as severe as the original, but still caused concern).
    - General reminder that vulnerabilities continue to appear across the stack.

14. Epistemic Loneliness / Companionshi
    - Discussed the concept of “epistemic loneliness” — isolation when you cannot share complex technical thoughts with people who understand them.
    - Framed the audience as his “epistemic companions” in Business Central, security, and related geeky topics.

15. Team / Excellence Updates
    - Joselyn: Continues full-time financials work across multiple customers.
    - David: Data imports and configuration packages.
    - Ronald: Running one Continia Document Capture project and preparing a second; leading ERP Academy content (weeks ahead); also running the Berlin English academy for occupational/job-related English.
    - Franklin: Handling PTE change requests and researching subtle app/BC bugs.
    - Fatima: Driving the Claude-based project management/retrospective work; internal IT (ThinkPad repairs — thermal paste, keyboards, batteries, Windows refreshes — now routine in ~15 minutes); planning the El Salvador Christmas festival (December 11).
    - Daniela: Learning website maintenance (Astro, CSS, CLI tools, GitHub) once her laptop stops randomly rebooting.