Patrick Stewart was an icon of my youth. His career-defining portrayal of Jean-Luc Picard represented, for me, a rock of stability in a tumultuous childhood.PicardCaptain of the Enterprise D, Jean-Luc exemplified everything I wanted to be in a man. He was contemplative, patient, erudite, and measured. He forestalled his passions in pursuit of principal.He was just trying to read his book.Picard listened to the voices around him and, what's more, he trusted their expertise and council.…

One of my strongly-held opinions, and one that helps understand a lot about both politics and real life, is that most people are conservative. This is distinct from as being a conservative in the way that those who want to deport undocumented immigrants or pay as little taxes as possible or allow prayer in schools are, but rather simply that (aside from whichever issues happen to specifically matter to that specific person) most people want things to generally stay the same or slightly improve,…

Link: Manifestos, Fear, and ‘Loser Thinking’: Inside Proton’s AI Reckoning, by Joseph Cox at 404 MediaProton is a service based in Switzerland that offers encrypted email, file storage, calendars, and more. It markets itself as a privacy-oriented alternative to Google Workspace, based in a neutral territory that is generally outside of the jurisdiction of the United States. I’ve generally been glad that it exists — but stories like this give me pause.404 Media reports:“Our reporting also paints…

[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.] If you’ve done Fourier series approximations of functions, you had three reactions to today’s XKCD comic: First, of course, was a smile of recognition. Then came a “wait a minute” as you realized that the Gibbs phenomenon doesn’t get smaller as you add more terms to the Fourier expansion; it just concentrates itself at the corners: That ringing never goes…

For the past few years, I’ve been looking back at creative and business decisions I made, and wondering how wise they were. This is the story of one of those decisions. In 2008, A List Apart, for people who make websites reached its tenth year of independent publishing. Looking back on ten years of the magazine’s web standards advocacy, I decided it was time to broaden out ALA’s mission. It was time, in short, to take a more holistic approach to web design, covering all the skills required to…

So if you missed it, Proton was in the news recently because of their CEO (and CTO, for what it's worth) both seemingly in the throes of advanced AI psychosis (on top of just, you know, standard employee abuse). While Proton-the-product seems currently stable, I don't have confidence it will remain so. This is a bummer! I (mostly) liked Proton, and it has proven its historical strength as a privacy-focused online suite. I knew things were going bad when they introduced an AI Assistant (oof) but…

I read a post this morning: Leaving BearBlog | Yunzi's Blog This isn't the first such post I've read before. There have been a few. But the shared points are usually these: They feel attacked by meta reply posts They think their blog has been shadow banned (or it has been) And therefore they are upset with censorship on the platform I've definitely seen some of the back-and-forth posts that sometimes get heated, but I don't feel that anybody has piled onto someone else. I can't speak to the…

I need to talk about grapes. Not in a “here’s a recipe” way or a “let me tell you about the health benefits of antioxidants” way. I just need someone to acknowledge that grapes are candy. They are literally candy that grows on a vine and somehow we all just agreed that they’re a health food. You can eat an entire bag of grapes in one sitting and not only does nobody judge you, people are impressed. “Oh wow, you’re so healthy.” No. I just ate what is essentially a pound of Skittles that happe...

i probably spent around eight hours from the last couple of days tinkering around my blog. note that they were weekdays. i barely slept but i thank this specific hyperfixation of overhauling my blog for keeping my sanity intact. i said i wanted some change in my last post, retracted it, but then ended up doing so anyway. the voices in my head had many complaints about my blog (that i share too much, that i write either like a robot or a hyperventilating typewriter — there’s no in between, that…

#Leaving BearBlog After giving it quite a lot of thought, I’ve finally left BearBlog and moved to a self hosted setup with Hugo. Happily I have the knowledge and means to do this and hopefully can keep finding the inspiration and time to keep writing and maintain the site as well. If anything doesn’t work then someone please let me know. It should all be nicely setup, fully https, images on a subdomain and everything logging and lovely, but still its possible I’ve missed something.

I see where Kevin is ripping out his Fediverse support from his blog comments based on a post by Manu, and I was moved to follow suit. Like every blogger in the history of the world probably, I post on my social media accounts when I post a new blog post: that's POSSE. I was using my own version of Bridgy to check those social media posts and then bring back any interactions to my own site. So, if you liked or commented on something I posted from my site to Mastodon, for example, the like would…

I've had this love/hate relationship with achievements in video games since their inception almost 2 decades ago. Getting an achievement and hearing that little "ba-dunk" chime on my 360 is straight heroin in my veins. However the hate comes from the near-compulsive behavior to ruin my own fun due to the pursuit of achievements. Some instances where the achievement is quite literally impossible to get, no issues. I accept that I can't get the multiplayer achievements when servers are shut down…

Blog post: https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1182/the-poisonous-appearance

It seems like we're in a golden age of software documentaries. As a card-carrying computer history nerd I'm having the time of my life, so I figured I'd share some of my favorites. If you're into programming languages, open-source software, or really computers in general, pull up a chair (and a cushion for your aching coccyx) and check these out. The Story of Python and how it took over the worldLink: YouTube I think this is the one that got me started on my docu-binge. Python is one of the…

Reddit administrator “judy-funnie” (via Michael Tsai): Because RSS is now a common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse, we’ll stop supporting RSS feeds on November 13, 2026 while preserving moderation workflows that depend on it through supported alternatives. […] To close this gap, in the next few months, we’ll further limit access for logged-in users to only those who have used Old Reddit in the last six months (which covers the vast majority of all Old Reddit users). […] Old…

[Sports are enjoyable, all on their own.] Since the Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on sports betting in 2018, gambling has gone disturbingly mainstream. I don’t wager myself, but I don’t have strong feelings on whether the activity should be legal. Still, it’s probably not something we should be encouraging. Sports gambling causes myriad problems1 with minimal benefits.2. And yet, If you watch any sports at all, it’s become impossible to avoid the constant pushes for gambling. There…

My blog lately is just watches and Emily St. John Mandel novels but what can I say - every time I finish one of her books I am immediately drawn to her other titles, and watches... watches are a different beast altogether. Lets just say the algorithm on my only social media app (YT) is now completely revamped and I'm only being recommended more watch videos. Guilty as charged but I enjoy it. I recently finished Emily St. John Mandel’s latest novel, Exit Party, and wow, this one is eerily…

sourcenot that the original author will ever READ this, but...i have some pretty strong opinions about writing cleanlinessand i completely disagree with the original poster here!like, i get where the op is coming from herebut NOT EVERYONE CAN WRITE LIKE BRENNAN OKsome people seriously struggle to communicate oklike meshould people be excluded from the public discourse because they cant write flawlessly?we shouldnt be grading peoples posts like theyre in schoolmy point is that like people should…

Another useless AI rant, me screaming into the void, feel free to ignore. When we see someone brandishing a knife, we tend to go "They have a weapon." Then they use it to cut a rope or open a letter. Or just cut some bread. Then we go "It's a tool." When we see someone holding a firearm, we immediately go "They have a weapon!" But then it turns out that it was a flaregun, which they fired in a forest to help the helicopter pilot to find the person in trouble. Then we go "It's a tool." Now…

I've been a spreadsheet user for years. Yes, they are not always the best but it's a powerful tool where data comes to life. Now the pipeline I keep hearing about "prompting". It boils down to "Hey AI make a spreadsheet of all this random data and add this and that", click the button and that's it. But do you actually KNOW what data you are asking to be pulled apart and smooshed together? What its headers are? The final outcome? Can you READ the data? The loss of knowledge of how to pivot,…

I love when people are passionate about things. I love it even more when people are passionate about the same thing in completely different ways. It started with Joel who is getting a little fed up seeing AI used for blog posts: Every day I am more and more annoyed by the way some of the blogs I have followed for years have started to “get with the times” or “catch up” on using those “tools” to “improve” their blogging in one way or another. Which prompted Dale to share what he thinks is…

Cat about to catch a rodent. (Photo by Alexa from Pixabay) Introduction One of the most common things that we hear these days is that we shouldn’t be concerned about AI because it is “just a tool”. My initial reaction to that statement is: it doesn’t fit what I think of as a tool, especially the concept of a tool as defined in the Unix paradigm. But still, I am thinking, maybe there is something to the concept of AI being a tool, so let’s look more closely. What is a Tool? Merriam-Webster…

In my post about Scraper Junkyard results, I proposed the existence of a centrally-controlled web crawler that made requests from Alibaba Cloud IP address ranges. After a closer look at the Apache combined format log files, I can confirm that at least one web crawler works out of Alibaba Cloud IP address space.

A lot of Vim tricks are geared toward working with source code, which I don’t do so much anymore. Below are some that are specifically helpful for working with prose. This list is not remotely exhaustive. I’m limiting it to stuff regular folks like me might use on a regular basis. I’m also skipping past the basics like w / W / b / B / etc. (If you’re new to Vim, try vimtutor in your terminal.) If you have a favorite tidbit that I should include here, or if I made any mistakes, please email me!…

begone, pesky blocks

Last week, my partner and I performed a familiar ritual of modern co-parenting: I told him that I felt overburdened by mental labor, and we made a plan to adjust. The logistical work of managing our kids’ lives has recently ramped up steeply, and while we’d been sharing the hands-on work equally, a lot of the ramping up had fallen into the category of family managerial work that can get out of whack without anyone meaning to shirk or to let-shirk. The challenge, of course, is that managing and…

indiewebblogging Polish Your Postings, Please https://khleedril.org/blog/2026-10-27--polish-your-website.html khleedril.org/2026-10-27--polish-your-website Dale Mellor https://khleedril.org/dale-mellor 27th October, 2026 Joelchrono at https://joelchrono.xyz/blog/unpolished-human-websites writes that they want to read rapid, raw thoughts, quickly and messily put down by human bloggers. Thatʼs fine, but I donʼt. In fact, I take a diametrically opposite view to almost all of Joelʼs opinions (apart…

Yesterday I had a rough, small idea for a post: The Mythical Man-Month in the age of AI. It was an open question: more like thinking out loud for myself (for me, this is one of the fun things about blogging). I wrote these thoughts down and went about my day. "Publish and proceed" as they say. A few hours later I was browsing Hacker News and saw my own post near the top?! Well, that was a surprise. This meant my post should be generating some traffic? And indeed a tail -f on my logs confirmed…

I recently stumbled across The Cyclist, a British mystery by Tim Sullivan, among the new books at a local library. I had never heard of it or the author, but figured I’d give it a try. I was very glad that I did. ‘The Cyclist’ is actually the second book in a series featuring Bristol police detective George Cross. I enjoyed it so much that I immediately looked for the first book in the series, The Dentist. Cross has Asperger’s Syndrome. Being on the autism spectrum, he often struggles with…