I kinda like this framing of doing work vs. going to the gym: At work, if your job is to move a bunch of heavy things from one side of the room to another, you should use whatever assistive tech you have on hand: a wagon, a forklift… even an AI-powered robot. But at the gym, it makes no sense for that robot to lift weights for you. The point of weightlifting isn’t to move heavy things across the room; it’s to actually lift those heavy things.
[🎶 Look out! Here comes the Spider-Man ad! 🎶] Surprise! You don’t really own your BMW.Link: https://www.techspot.com/news/113327-bmw-putting-spider-man-ads-dashboard-after-promising.html
Celebrating 25 years of blogging with gratitude, reflection, and a sweet slice of success surrounded by creativity and joy. August 6, 2001, 25 years ago. I started blogging. I had a website made by Microsoft FrontPage and hosted on GTE (now Verizon) in the homepages they offered back in those days for residential customers. In fact, your ISP provided everything for you. You had so much website space and an ISP-provided email, which you lost if you changed providers. That's foreign today. But I…
This is a survey for developers about everything but coding, that is accepting answers up to September 5. If you’re a developer, it’s worth participating! It doesn’t take long to fill and can help understanding the current environment of the dev industry in such chaotic times.
Low resolution, high compression, wonky colours and press-the-button-and-hope photos! Yes, it's the shitty camera challenge!
We were on a challenging hike recently, and a few of us got to talking about what a lovely analogy hiking is for life. When you’re working your way up a steep climb, you have to take it one step at a time. There’s little point looking back at how far you’ve come or ahead at how far is left — both just pull you out of the only step that matters, the next one. Along the way, you cross paths with all sorts of people, each on their own version of the journey. And the encouraging thing is that…
General anesthesia using gases for surgery is one of America's great nineteenth century medical achievements. In early 1845 dentist Horace Wells used nitrous oxide to painlessly extract a tooth. In October 1846 dentist William T.G. Morton successfully demonstrated ether anesthesia in Boston during an operation by John Collins Warren. The Morton/Warren event soon made it's way around the world. The Wood Library-Museum of Anesthesiology outside Chicago maintains an extensive timeline that covers…
As part of building a service for automatically publishing blog posts from RSS feeds into atproto's standard.site lexicon, I implemented atproto OAuth for logging in and getting access tokens to publish for the user. This means that any user with an atproto account, whether they created it on Bluesky, Eurosky, or Blacksky, or any of the other Personal Data Servers available, can log in to your service. Atproto OAuth does not require pre-registering clients with a service, one implementation…
Another interesting recent topic of discussion in the OSM community has been on corporate influence on the project. The concern about corporate influence on OpenStreetMap is fairly old. For some time there had been substantial concern about a direct takeover of the OpenStreetMap Foundation by large US tech corporations. I had commented on this in the past. But i realize that the focus of that discussion had been somewhat one sided, looking mostly at the influence of individual business…
I’d mentioned earlier in the spring that Kim picks up two new hanging ferns every year so the birds can nest in them. This one has had two separate momma birdies choose it to birth and care for their young this year. And yes, that’s a lot of poop! 🤣
POSSE it, they say. Own your content. Publish once, fork it five times. RSS, Mastodon, Bluesky, webmention, pick your parasite. Fix the typo in two minutes. Already too late. Five fossils wearing your name.
tl;dr: After almost seven years my Netgear Nighthawk M2 has started rebooting on its own, reporting nonsensical battery percentages and ignoring most of my presses on its touch buttons, so I spent the past three months replacing it with the GL.iNet Mudi 7 (GL-E5800), a 5G NR Sub-6 travel router with two nano-SIM slots plus an onboard eSIM, Wi-Fi 7, a 2.5 GbE port, two USB-C ports and a removable 5380 mAh battery. It is the most capable mobile router I have owned, its 13.5-hour battery rating is…
I wish I could have been there for you when you needed me most. I wish I could have been there every time you felt lonely. I wish I had kept you company on the nights you stayed awake. I wish I had told you it was okay to feel like crying your heart out. I wish I had made you feel normal when you thought something was wrong with you. I wish I had hugged you every time you needed someone and no one was there for you. I wish I had comprehended you. I wish I had supported you. I wish I had given…
One of the abiding problems in working on strategy is that people like to set goals for complex problems. In my experience the hardest part about accepting complexity as a real thing to be wrestled with, is that one really, truly doesn’t get to set goals. What happens instead, is that one can decide on a direction of travel and then look for the different ways one might move in that direction. It’s deceptively simple, and the hardest part is stopping oneself from measuring progress against…
I thought this was poison ivy because I'm a west coast idiot at heart We moved to our New England place in the fall of '21 so it wasn't until the following spring that these vine plants with three leaves in the pattern I'd thought was a shoe-in for poison ivy danger (which I'd never seen before, coming from the west coast) started growing in the yard...but that's when I learned that despite having oil that will fuck me up, poison ivy will never have thorns. I idly wondered what this thing was,…
I’m on holiday so I shouldn’t really be writing a weeknote but I’m getting lots of designers reaching out to me on Linkedin who have never worked in the NHS, wanting to work there. This is my personal view and not my employer’s. Being a designer in the public sector might not mean a public sector job. It’s important to understand that an opportunity might not come directly to you as a freelance person. Public sector bodies like the NHS and others both hire people directly and procure services…
I spent two months cloning almost every OS posted to r/osdev and running the code through an analyzer. Almost everything was a reskin of a reskin of Linux, and almost nothing boots on real hardware. Then I said so in public, and 137 comments taught me more about the AI hobby economy than the code did.
Yesterday I wrote that a lot of the special functions that pop up in mathematical physics are solutions to second order linear differential equations with polynomial coefficients. More generally, holonomic functions are defined to be those functions that are the solutions to linear differential equations, of any order, with polynomial coefficients. Most special functions are holonomic. To quantify that statement, I went through the special functions covered in Abramowitz and Stegun. The large…
A minute in the world's life passes! To paint it in its reality, and forget everything for that! To become that minute, to be the sensitive plate... give the image of what we see, forgetting everything that has appeared before our time. Cézanne title here
Wavyleaf basketgrass (photo from Wikimedia) 6 August 2026 Have you seen this plant? Its wavy leaves are nothing like the plants I’m used to in Pennsylvania so I was surprised when I saw it at Bear Run Nature Reserve in late May. Was it a new wildflower? No! This is wavyleaf basketgrass, an extremely invasive plant that is just starting to take hold in Pennsylvania. This month the Pennsylvania iMapInvasives Program is holding a statewide blitz to find it so we can beat it back before it covers…
Following up on yesterday's post. If you're not interested in the AI bubble, you might want to come back next week because this thread is going to be running through Friday.Here is Ed Zitron discussing the AI industry's huge off-the-books debt. Before we jump in, however, there's one point I want to emphasize (we'll dig into this even deeper tomorrow when we discuss Patrick Boyle's analysis). This story is Enron-esque. It is Enron-reminiscent. It is "a little bit Enron." It is not, however,…
I have had the Arch Linux linux-hardened kernel installed on my Qotom fanless server since I bought it a couple of years ago. The Qotom has had kernel panics on the last two linux-hardened updates. I changed to the plain linux kernel. It was pretty easy, even though I had a case of the nerves about it.
A couple of months ago, I put together a post—not entirely serious, but also not entirely joking—about how corporate personhood might provide an opportunity to wipe out almost every exploitative organization. I won’t rehash that blog post, but at the end of the post, I joked that the idea could probably gain some traction with the cynical addition of a clichéd dystopian logo for hypothetical branded merchandise, coming up with this example. Maybe surprisingly, I haven’t gotten any feedback on…
Bruce Schneier has a great post about separating “work” tasks from “gym” tasks when it comes to AI usage: At work, if your job is to move a bunch of heavy things from one side of the room to another, you should use whatever assistive tech you have on hand: a wagon, a forklift… even an AI-powered robot. But at the gym, it makes no sense for that robot to lift weights for you. The point of weightlifting isn’t to move heavy things across the room; it’s to actually lift those heavy things. The same…
A kid was turning away to return to his group of friends, but pauses. He then turns around to the viewer, asking "Wait a minute. Who are you?"In a bid to try and be more active on Blacksky, I agreed to be asked a bunch of questions about my blog, like who my target audience is. And it kept stumping me because I don't really have one in mind. I mean, I guess if you like nostalgic navel-gazing 40-plus people, you should sign up! But I'm not after a specific demographic. I'm just a nostalgic…
♠ Today I learned: Atuin ships hooks that capture commands executed by AI LLM coding agents into the same shell history as mine. As of today there are hooks for Claude Code, OpenAI Codex and Pi. % atuin hook --help Manage AI-agent shell hooks Usage: atuin hook atuin hook <COMMAND> Commands: install Install hooks for an AI agent to capture commands in atuin history help Print this message or the help of the given subcommand(s) install --help doesn’t list which agents are supported, but a bogus…
On our particular Mastodon instance, Electromagnetic Field (EMF; #EMFCamp on the socials), a festival held every even-numbered year, is not something you could miss becoming aware of. Hence, we (that is James and me) have known it exists since its last outing in 2024. But it’s got to be the ultimate of fediverse influence to actually take that one stage further and buy tickets. And then some imposter’s syndrome started to set in about it. To back up a bit, EMF isn’t a music festival, although…
I found Blaugust following a Mastodon tag and took part in it for the first time last year. I enjoyed the sense of community and the many new blogs I visited. I found plenty of interesting posts and thoughts to read. I can't wait to discover new fellow bloggers. Originally, I didn't plan to take part this year. I have less time to write and read. I also struggle more with each post. Hard times... I changed my mind when I read that Belghast is no longer with us. I decided that I'd like to honor…
They don't gotta burn the books, they just remove 'em. Rage against the machine - Bulls on parade There's been a lot of discourse on my remaining social media this week about certain AI companies purchasing what used to be called 'long tail' books when I worked in a book data company (admittedly it was a long time ago). The purpose being, that these books of all types are a form of undigested, pre AI information/sentence structure ripe to be absorbed.…
Thin fog forms as the rising sun begins warming the humid air and rain-soaked vegetation. I look for the half moon, still high overhead, in a large patch of blue.
