Don’t deny real risks, but don’t accept the AI industry’s mythology as the starting point for discussing risks. The useful question is what currant AI’s actually do, who controls them, and what infrastructure and power relationships we are building around them. AI is useful technology wrapped in a massive social, political and financial mythology. The #OMN is less interested in the usual argument between “AI will save humanity” and “AI will destroy humanity”. as both become noise in the current…

Online warriors feel righteous while exploiting the planet. They attack individuals like the guy vibe coding Arch Linux distribution from his laptop or random nobody for his presence on social platform X. That fight costs them nothing. It's a digital witch hunt that doesn't interrupt their Amazon deliveries or Netflix binges. Confronting the actual meat grinder, like the global war machine and the kids dying in African mines to build their Intel chips, would require them to stop consuming. To…

I am a better person without my phone. In fact, I would go so far as saying there is a negative correlation between the amount of time I spend on my phone and the likelihood you would want to be around me. Last Saturday it was hot outside. I was bored and in a state of malaise. So, I picked up my phone. I used my browser to check a few news sites. Then I "surfed" over to X to see how "people" felt about current events. As if I couldn't predict. I spent an embarrassing amount of time scrolling.…

Which song would you use to introduce yourself to someone new? Has to be rock music based but with a twist. Well, that makes it easy then. “Renegades of Funk” by Rage Against the Machine Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. Listen to Gordon McLean's Apple Music playlist View original post on Crucial Tracks Thanks for reading and keeping RSS alive. Visit my site for more.

A weekly recap of the articles and posts I’ve read that I think are worth your time. Everything Flows: The Koln Concert — I can play the piano, badly, with a lot of practice. So when I hear talent like this I am utterly captivated. Great post, with the back story almost as good as the performance. Watch Footage from the Psychology Experiment That Shocked the World: Milgram’s Obedience Study (1961) | Open Culture — Aware of this but not of the detail. Fascinating if scary. Prepare your “no” and…

My feet hurt. In the best of ways though, as we spent several hours dancing last night, alongside a couple of thousand other people, as AnnieMac did her thing. Shout out to Jade Edwards who got us well warmed up with some slick grooves and mixes, deffo one to keep an eye out, she cranked the tempo up and you couldn’t help but start moving. Before Midnight — named because “nightclubbing is not designed for people who need sleep” — is in the same vein as daytime discos but, of course, with…

I've genuinely haven't had much to write about. There's been some post ideas, but most of 'em have ended up shelved for one reason or another. These past months have been a real creative drought for me. I think I need a shit-post side blog. One where I can kind of write about whatever without worrying about the content or if the posts starts to sound like a journal entry1. I think since this is my first blog, I overthink too much about what I put into it. Speaking of getting too into my head, I…

Hello, I have nothing to say, really. Fall is here, I have even made tomato soup because my parents had so many tomatoes in their yard, that I had no idea what to do with them anymore. Next year, I am going to learn to can things just to can be able to deal with this. Anyway, recently, I've been doing more chores than usual, spending my oh so little precious free time after work to go buy groceries, cook, and clean even if the whole thing took me like 3-4 hours. Why? Out of spite. Why should I…

Stickers on the lid so far. I’m leaving room to add more.Since installing NixOS on a little Minisforum PC, I’ve been a full-time NixOS user at home (I use a MacBook Pro at work). I’m going to be finishing work next Autumn, so I will probably put some form of Linux on the MacBook at that point. However, as it is an Apple Silicon machine and it has a T-whatever-it-is security chip in it, my options may be practically limited to installing Asahi Linux rather than NixOS. I may also dual-boot with…

Welcome to Secret Breakfast / The right place to ask why Oktoberfest starts in September, and how Lo-Fi music snuck into your cookingHi there! On September 19th, Oktoberfest began in Germany, which literally means "October festival." So, naturally, it starts in September.It reminds me of Russia's October Revolution, year 1917, which by our calendar actually happened in November, because the tsars were still running on a different one.Two perfectly mismatched facts to sum up the disorientation…

it's weird that ai got too dangerous to keep advancing right around the time money got more expensive to borrow— dr. rich traditions, JD (@helldude.bsky.social) September 22, 2026 at 11:37 AMAt a time when everybody seems to be criticizing AI and particularly the large frontier LLM base models of companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, it is helpful to distinguish between the different schools of arguments.The group which initially dominated the coverage but which seems to be losing ground is the…

(Please Lord let me not become someone who regularly posts Daring Fireball metacommentary.)John Gruber:Why is it strange for an iPhone to have a similar price to a MacBook Pro? For many people the phone is their primary computer, the most important and personal device in their life. Not me. Not Oremus. Probably not you. But I bet there are a lot more people out there who would rather have a $2500 iPhone and a $700 MacBook Neo than who would want a $2500 MacBook Pro and a $700 iPhone.This is not…

Work hard, study well, and eat and sleep plenty! That is the Turtle Hermit way! An apt quote from our beloved Master Roshi. If Dragon Ball has taught me anything, besides that screaming your lungs out during strenuous work does in fact make you stronger, it’s that rest is as important to one’s success as the hard work you build around it. Rest of course, is earned. There’s an obvious difference between someone who is bone idle and someone who rests because they’ve worked hard or is feeling…

Mad Max: Fury Road is a great movie. I was thinking of it again today in relation to our current economy.

I returned home from an afternoon swim the other day and saw a juvenile cat literally eating the heart out of a bird’s chest cavity. She growled. Cats will stiff-arm each other over dry cat food, but they growl and viciously defend real meat. The ravenous cat ate her meal on some pine straw under an old holly bush near my front door. I could not identify what species of bird the cat was devouring–an unusual failure for me because I’m very knowledgeable about local wildlife. The bird was white…

many years ago, i subscribed to the listserve. this is my favourite, that i always keep in my notes app whatever it is. Try to imagine a life without timekeeping. You probably can't. You know the month, the year, the day of the week. There is a clock on your wall or the dashboard of your car. You have a schedule, a calendar, a time for dinner or a movie. Yet all around you, timekeeping is ignored. Birds are not late. A dog does not check its watch. Deer do not fret over passing birthdays. Man…

This morning while I was doing my morning routine of drinking my coffee. That routine is setting up the weather page for the current day. Sure, I could automate it, but it takes little time to do it by hand, and I’d have to edit the markdown file anyway to put in the summary. I actually do glance at it, and today I glanced at it out of curiosity to see what yesterday’s rain total was. Normally I would have looked at the Ambient app, but I had this page open, so I scrolled down to look. I…

Via Newspapers.comThis account of your basic friendly neighborhood monster appeared in the “Mexico Weekly Ledger,” December 13, 1883:MEXICO, Mo., December 8.--The neighborhood of Hopewell Church, near this city, is much excited over the appearance in the locality of a strange creature, which is thought by the credulous to be a ghost, and which is a puzzle at least to the most skeptical. The apparition is simply that of a lean monster man, between eight and ten feet in height, wearing a long…

I’m not gonna bother with the preamble about how I got to part six in this series1-5. You can read […]

I turn 35 today, which feels like an age where I should probably have some things figured out. Not everything. That would be ridiculous. Don't be ridiculous. But maybe a few things. So I spent an unreasonable amount of time recently trying to figure out what I believe in. Not necessarily politically, or in the "which dead philosopher should I make my entire personality" sense (looks at his Marcus Aurelius and Buddha tattoos). More basic than that. What do I think makes a good life? Turns out…

Mexican long-nosed armadillo loping across a field (photo from Wikimedia) 23 September 2026 Three years ago, in April 2023, I wrote that Armadillos Are On Their Way to Pennsylvania. Since arriving in Texas in 1849 they’ve expanded their range north and east in the U.S. nearly ten times faster than the average rate expected for a mammal. In 2023 they were two states away in Indiana. Not anymore! The first documented naturally occurring armadillo was found as roadkill near Oxford, Ohio. video…

1:4 It’s like a curse… on the first matchday after the coach was fired, the guys (finally) scored 2 goals and beat Fortuna Köln at home to nil, only then to concede 3 goals at home against Duisburg within 15 minutes of the first half just 4 days later. OK, MSV is currently at the top of the standings and on a hot streak, but the ease with which they outplayed our defense was shocking. Like a hot knife through butter. Although the 1-3 goal just before halftime and the team’s determination early…

By Close ReaderOriental Mandarin LegendOSELevels 1-2 In order to thank the PC for killing the monsters in his territory, the Boold[sic] Baron invited the players to come to the bright Red castle he built on the Wild Eagle Mountain. This 28 page adventure presents seven-ish rooms in a scripted human sacrifice ceremony dungeon/scene/event. It has both EASL issues and is overly scripted. Disclaimer: I think this is a difficult review to write. I suspect strongly, based on the chinese characters in…

Big Brother is watching and listening. I have noticed an increasing number of small black cameras (with an attached solar panel) perched high on light poles through out my home city (Canberra, Australia). Once you start noticing public cameras you see them everywhere…from traffic monitoring cameras at many intersections, to safety CCTV cameras in public spaces, to peoples public facing home personal security systems (sending their data to the system providers).These things are everywhere! The…

Did you know that it only takes one vote to send a post from New to the front page? Now you do. If you (like me) are tired of the same, multiple day old posts that you've already read staying on the frontpage, you should look through a page or two of New. But what about all those uninteresting, hard to read, low quality, or just posts that don't interest you? Well there is a Hide Blog function, use it well :) 2026/09/hidden_blogs.png

Lucky 13th Sept! A great day out. Maybe another last good day of Summer, although I think we must be into Autumn by now. I decided to visit Saltoun Big Wood again. This time I thought I'd risk the 113 bus and jogged up to Abbeyhill (rather than Carlton Terrace stop) because there is an electronic sign that says when the next bus will be along. (Yes I know there is an app but the built in redundancy of my iPhone can't download it.) Anyway the sign was temporarily fritzed and of no help. However…

2026-09-13Hello!I used editing software in post processing to modify the colors of red, green, and blue hues in this image. Instead of blue skies, the image has a gradient of red. Instead of green grass and trees, the image shows blots of teal(?). Instead of red railroads, the image has blue tracks.Infrared photography struck me as unusual, but interesting. It would require making permanent modifications to my camera, so it's not something I'm trying anytime soon for real. But the images that…

I met with a friend yesterday and the conversation got to what the next hype might be after the current bubble pops. We live at the height of the “AI”-hype and bubble, the hype that took over from the short Metaverse hype which in turn came after the crypto bubble. And the main actors are often the same. The same folks who told us crypto was the future now tell us that “AI” is. Tech these days is built less around actual products but hype, less around building actually functional solutions but…

Hi, baby. I'm 18 weeks pregnant today. 16 weeks ago, you were a single cell with two nuclei, about to mix it together and make a new human. Look at you now: a tiny baby curled up in a foetal position. Sometimes it feels unreal. I can't grasp how lucky I am to have you in my belly. I think it will be easier when I'll really feel you move. For now, I'm always afraid that you might disappear, even though I feel my uterus stretching to give you room to grow. How does it feel? Are you comfortable?…

I’ve been rocking an LG monitor that has noticeable burn-in. The old dog takes a while to flicker into life too. I’ve had it around eight years (the Dell before it lasted ten). I think the monitor is too dumb to be spying on me but I’m due an upgrade anyway.I picked up the BenQ RD280UG — the UG is the new 120Hz model.This dramatic reenactment is not me but my work day is worryingly similar.Was it worth the cost? It’s certainly not the cheapest monitor nor is it the most expensive. If it lasts…