My discussion with @ZackKorman on whether Dario and Anthropic are good or bad for the world.Some quick post-debate thoughts:I think Zach is very wrong about the tech itself and its capabilities, and the speed with which it's improving. And I think this is a big part of our disconnect.I think his core argument is bad, and I'm looking for a great analogy for it. But it does hinge on the point above. It's something like,We should give our new mini-nuke rocket tech to prison populations and 18-year…
Long Island City Grows Up – New York, New York I’m on the Number 7 Subway train going east through Queens. Long Island City is one of the first communities on the other side of the East River from Manhattan. It was once filled with warehouses, but things have changed a lot. Back when I lived in New York, for the longest time, Long Island City had one high-rise with the Citi logo emblazoned on top. Slowly, new skyscraper developments have compounded into something significant. Now, the cluster…
IntroductionIn this inquiry, we build a sequence from a single 2. The first rule of this sequence is that it has to describe itself.Starting with TwoHere is a 2. 2It says, "There are two here." The first number is a 2, so the next number has to be a 2 as well, so that there are "two here." We now have two 2's!2 2When it's not a two, it's a oneHere comes the second rule of our sequence. When it's not a two, it must be a one. What comes next? To start, our sequence says there are two of one thing…
While I am known to some of the LLMs (link via Flutterby), my own score (or “strength” as the site calls it) is in the upper two digit range. It picked up that I'm a blogger, but it also confabulated that I worked on the Apache module mod_python. Heh … close, but no cigar!
I look at the Japanese symbols that carry meaning entirely on their own.
Oh man it’s gonna be hot sauce time soon! Gonna try lacto-fermentation this time. Just gotta decide how much I want to temper the heat of these habs… 🌱
The more I read about “Dialog” — a Peter Thiel-adjacent semi-secret society — from the likes of Andrew Gelman and Cory Doctorow, the firmer my belief is that America has zipped through its oligarchy phase to become a full-blown kakistocracy. These people are morons.
Bunny is doing as well as can be expected, given that she really can't use her arms to get out of bed or a chair. But she does like looking at the finches they have in the main hall:
Approaching from the south on NV-321, we saw the sign welcoming us to Pioche. Our free subscription to Travel Nevada has inspired us to visit lots of towns and out-of-the-way places that we’d never have known about or visited otherwise. Many times we’ve whizzed past a town on our way to somewhere else, unaware of what there was to see there. So, on our way back from Cathedral Gorge State Park, we decided we’d stop in Pioche after having just read an article about why it might be worth a visit.…
See pt 1, about SSN 1 ep 15, if you want. Now I'm in SSN 2, maybe ep 8, of BBT & the misogyny is much better. Its still there, in pretty much every episode, but its better. Or less bad, I should say. Until. Howard is once again being an absolute creep to Penny. She tells him off, that he's creepy and will die alone. GOOD. About fucking time. But the guys need Howard (the engineer) for their robot destruction competition, so Leonard cashes in his ONE FAVOR with Penny to get her to go over to…
My love for sunscreens knows no bounds so when I see an interesting sunscreen in the market, I take notice and most of the time, I will end up adding it to my cart and eventually checking it out. When it started getting hot and humid this summer, I began to look for lightweight sunscreens […]
Mortal Kombat X combines unparalleled, cinematic presentation with all new gameplay. For the first time, players can choose from multiple variations of each character impacting both strategy and fighting style. Mortal Kombat X combines unparalleled, cinematic presentation with all new gameplay. For the first time, players can choose from multiple variations of each character impacting both strategy and fighting style. I got this on sale as well for the Steam Deck, even if I already had it on…
90 days of running, I’ve run a total of total of 275 miles since I started and my fastest mile was this past week at 7:36 (my goal was under eight minutes). I also completed my goal of running a 10k in under may age minutes. My 10k time was 54:45 – which in addition to being a nice palindrome it means I made the goal I actually set out to do last year. I’m Pretty proud of this accomplishment, but also looking forward to just going running again without this speed goal. 85/100 days dieting, I…
when i was in college learning software engineering, my professor told us that there's no way to say with 100% certainty that your software is bug-free. even if everything is working perfectly now, there's always a chance that some kind of race condition or memory leak will rear its ugly head down the line. that doesn't mean you should never celebrate a release, just that there's a level of humility needed to align with reality. i bring that up to show that i know that there are caveats when i…
After a short break, I returned to the race track parking lot yesterday for another exciting round of local autocross competition. The forecast had once again called for thunderstorms all weekend, but the weather took pity on us. We had just some light sprinkles during setup and the first set of runs but that quickly cleared up, and we then had scattered clouds and a nice breeze the rest of the day. It was hot, but not uncomfortably (or dangerously) so; June autocross weather could be a lot…
Sorry I’ve been offline for so long. I’m back. For now, anyway. Among other things I’ve been writing a little bit about what it was like for me being a teenager involved in left wing politics at the beginning of the 80’s. This is the first (and far the longest) of a series of reminiscences that were prompted by a casual conversation with one of my excellent graduate students. Feel free to ignore! If you like them, I’ll also be posting them on a substack. Here goes: We moved to Oxford in the…
StarringEmilia Clarke, Haley Lu Richardson, Adrian Lester, Artjom Gilz, and Vic MichaelisOverviewIn 1977 Moscow, two "PONIES" ("persons of no interest") become CIA operatives and uncover a Cold War conspiracy their husbands were killed for.ReviewPONIESA buddy cop dramedy with wanna-be CIA agents against the KGB in the late 70s? Sign me up. It was fun and a full of twists, but the two stars are what really sell this show. Emilia Clarke might be the most expressive actress out there and Haley Lu…
ALTALTALTALTALTALTALTALTALTALTSelect’s Images pullout from July 1993.Subjects and photographer credits can be found in both the front page and the alt text.
Paper Trail (2026, Don Hertzfeldt) Following the life of a guy named Steven through marks he has made on paper, all kid drawings then love letters then lease agreements then forty years of signing off on bland work documents. Subtle! Will revisit it at a later date (haha). – Duck Pimples (1945, Jack Kinney) Hoped from the title this would be a Daffy, but it’s a Donald – fortunately one of his more insane ones. Home alone and easily scared, he’s attacked by scary stories from inside radio and…
So… it happened again, today, but this time at home. First goal of the day was to make a dump run. As usual, I back the truck up to the house to load it up. My brother and SIL are out for the weekend and my SIL was using their beautiful zero turn mower, so … Continue reading I admit, this terrified me
I seemed to do quite well in the racing-car department, at Sandown, I rarely go to Sandown with anything like a shopping list, it's a question of what's there (and cheap) on the day! And, a month or so ago, it was racing cars, apparently?Rather highfalutin instructions, and blurb, bigging-up a basic mechanism in this Maserati, which had been known to aficionados of balsa flying machines for
Two days ago, I was at home and ordered food online. I went to pre-approve the delivery on the apartment's app, and saw an ad selling an old MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014, 16 GB RAM, 120 GB SSD) for only ₹12,000 (~$130) from another resident. I inquired immediately and went there to take a look at it. The laptop seemed in good condition, I used it for a bit, checked random stuff, and then was ready to buy. I was ready to pay the listed price, but then just asked if they could lower the…
The vast majority of national-level Democrat politicians are what we call “AIPAC Democrats”. Not because they have Israeli citizenship, or are Jewish, or religious, or concerned with Israeli or Jewish safety, but because they are charisma-challenged, bad at their job, and unable to win their elections without the massive election interference, financial help, and smear campaigns that AIPAC provides. Of course none of this has helped win the AIPAC Dems much in the way of political power, but at…
While waiting Hopp - Estimated time 07 minutes then 14 minutes I am not sure if you know this game: played back home when I was little. All I had to do was look to the mirror until not recognizing me anymore. The fun of this game was being caught surprised by what was to look human. So I was the form made of a funny jelly, but still solid consistency, with a smooth surface - skin - and holes on each extremity of this thing called the HEAD. There were also holes in the thing called the NOSE, and…
Shane Hickey wrote in the Guardian back in May, quote marks added: Criminals use a variety of tactics to convince people that they are from McAfee and are becoming more sophisticated with advances in “artificial intelligence”, according to the company. There’s a broader discussion about the necessity of such AV tools, and McAfee’s own… shall we say, history! If you have a spare half an hour on your Sunday, do check out the history of the company and its eccentric former CEO; they read more like…
Yesterday :: Saturday, 20th June 2026
Lady-Birdby Fabrice Sapolsky, Dawn J. StarrGenres: Fantasy, Graphic Novels Pages: 120 Rating: Synopsis: Two young women, Vega and Mina, living 100 years apart share the same strange abilities. They hold the genetic key to saving the world from all known viruses and diseases, but they've been captured and taken advantage of by people more interested by power and money than anything else. In 1909, Vega is trapped. Forced to be a warrior when all she wants is love. In the present, Mina has…
Beach roses only bloom for a few weeks around the start of spring, and I love them as a marker of the start of the beautiful Maine summer. I somehow didn't notice the bug in this one until I processed the shot. On the same photo walk, my 9 year old son shot with his mini instax camera, and came up with some lovely ones. He also art-directed this shot of a bloom he plucked and put in this littlle puddle:
About a year ago, I had a terrible, horrible, awful very bad morning, at the end of a week that included successive days of excessive heat, being physically assaulted by a program participant, crossing swords with several people in quick succession… and at the end of that week, it’s fair to say, I lost my filter. (I posted about it here.) My pre-frontal cortex went off-line. I ranted, I demanded, I insisted, and I generally went on a verbal rampage that the people on the receiving end of my…
Mirror your phone's camera to your computer with scrcpy, and record it with OBS.
