American robin fledgling in Frick Park, 16 May 2021 (photo by Charity Kheshgi) 22 June 2026 Nesting is at its peak, June flowers are blooming, bugs are buzzing, and robins are fledging their second brood(*). Join me for a bird and nature walk in Schenley Park on Sunday, June 28, 8:30am to 10:30am. Meet at the Schenley Park Cafe and Visitor Center where Panther Hollow Road joins Schenley Drive. In addition to birds we’ll see wild urban plants, including native Daisy fleabane (Erigeron annuus)…

The i Paper has a useful overview by Lizzie Dearden of how the Keir Starmer “rent boy” conspiracy theory spread on social media following acts of arson at properties linked to the prime minister: Less than 15 minutes after [Roman] Lavrynovych was arrested, and before the arrest was made public by the police, an account on X describing itself as a British “patriot” claimed to have the answer. “Angry unpaid rent boy,” it wrote in reply to a British news aggregator with more than 400,000…

gonna rank from worst to best song ranking system 😇- need to have a looong conversation with whoever made this song 🥹- teared up a little 🥰- i love love love 😊- very good 🙂- good with some issues 🤔- i would let it play in the background ig.. 😪- not feeling it 😠- no this is bad. 😡- this is really bad. 🤬- play this around me and im taking a gun out. for both of us. pinocchio 😡 you're not serious. 96ers 😡 you're not serious. stupid idiot 😠 you're not serious. overall this is what happens when you…

Interviewed by Anamarija Pogorelec on Help Net Security. “It’s probably aimed a little more at newcomers than experienced Homebrew users.”

I have been listening to a fascinating interview between Diana Butler Bass and Elizabeth Schrader-Polczer. Several years ago, Bass preached a sermon using Schrader-Polczer's work, which Bass points out is one of 3 of the most watched sermons of all time; the other two were Bishop Budde's sermon at the interfaith worship service after the second inauguration of Donald Trump and the sermon preached at the wedding of Prince Harry and Mary Markle.In that sermon, Bass presented the work of Elizabeth…

“The University of Dundee has announced it plans to cease offering Philosophy as a named degree from 2027. This news has come as a complete shock to students, staff and the wider Scottish community. We, the philosophy community of Dundee, are determined to fight this.” So begins a petition protesting an aspect of the University of Dundee’s administration plan to address a large financial deficit. According to the BBC, “Despite already cutting about 675 jobs through voluntary redundancies, the…

I found out about human.json so I added it to my page. I thought it was rather interesting idea, and might as well participate to it. I do not plan to use "AI" tools for the ethical reasons alone, so it seemed fitting to have that. Now to find more people to vouch for. :) And I'm interested seeing if others have it added now that I use the extension too.

(Previously) In 2003 I visited Barcelona and spent all day wandering around the mighty Basilica de la Sagrada Família, the architectural masterpiece of Antoni Gaudí. It had been under construction since 1882, and at the time only four of its 18 planned spires had been built. In the basement there was a museum with plans, renderings, and so on, and I discovered the plans for what it would look like when it was finished. Then I waited 23 years, and now the moment has come. The largest and best of…

Learn how to write a coding agent in Python in this tutorial that teaches how to interact with an LLM through an API, how to manage the context, and how to do tool calling. Introduction This tutorial will show you how to create your own coding agent from first principles. By doing so, you'll understand how coding agents work under the hood. Prerequisites To be able to follow this tutorial, you'll need prior Python experience: this tutorial is not suitable for people who don't have programming…

Learn how to use Eloquent Query Classes to organize important database logic in Laravel without adding a full repository layer. Read more

Big Tech bad. We probably agree that much since we are here in Bear. Big Tech US-based (at least mostly). US not privacy friendly. US ran by absolutely insane unit of a person. Need to run from US. Change tech to EU-based alternatives. Because EU has GDPR. EU privacy friendly. EU friendlier in general. They are on Mastodon too! If you believe that EU-based technology is fundamentally "good" you are either uninformed or crazy bananas. If you believe that the EU is friendly to its citizens'…

What is Dave wearing today? Dave looks athletic this morning in a a white running top, green running shorts, white socks, and gray sneakers. How does Dave feel today? Dave feels good and you knew that he would now. What are the factors affecting Dave's mood? Dave enjoyed a sunrise constitutional, and the reality of the new workweek has not yet set in. What are Dave's thoughts about the World Cup so far? Dave is befuddled by the lackluster showing of some powerhouse teams, and was surprised by…

Laravel Octane promises a faster Laravel: keep your app booted in memory, skip the framework bootstrap on every request, do less work per request. We run a fleet of uptime-checker boxes at Oh Dear that do nothing but fire HTTP, TCP, and ping checks at the sites we monitor, so I figured they’d be a good, low-risk place to try it. We moved a handful of them from PHP-FPM to Octane on FrankenPHP , measured it properly, and then moved every one of them back.

In the past few months I have unwittingly become an expert on all things W Social: the microblogging platform that is a fork of Bluesky and bills itself as Europe’s alternative to X, with identity verification “to fight bots and misinformation” and data hosted in Europe “to promote European digital sovereignty”. Why am I fascinated by this topic? I find the discrepancies between their public image and the reality behind the scenes truly striking.Over the course of the past few days I have…

It's been fifteen months since the first installment of SPECIAL EVENT MINI-POSTERS! Was it worth the wait? I say yes!This first example is a bit different, dating from March of 1967; ROHR Family Night. What the heck is Rohr? After some Googling, I am guessing that this was Rohr Steel, located in Pomona, California - about 30 minutes from Disneyland. Or maybe I'm wrong! Participants could enjoy the new It's a Small World, explore New Orleans Square (though Pirates of the Caribbean would not be…

Robertson knows everything's enshittified. He's been online since Before eternal September. He watched War Games, used BBSes On an old DOS box back in the day, called AOL users n00bs, Watched the dot-com bubble float & burst, lost thousands on Pets.com. He was there when GeoCities closed up shop, watched Tom from MySpace sell & duck away. Robertson's seen flame wars you wouldn't believe. Robertson watches Netflix. Robertson watches Apple TV. Tired of streaming price increases he sails the seven…

This time, my trip to Chennai was also a road trip. I got a ride with friends in the car, and it also gave us lots of time for conversation. As we were going to the convocation, the discussions turned to education and degrees. Though there are lots of folks dissing college education and degrees in the tech world. I thought that a college education and formal degrees have value. And to know its value, one should speak to someone who is the first graduate in the family and what kind of changes it…

On Saturday Michael and I went to Public Knitoxication, a knit in public event at a local winery – we’d gone to this event back in 2018 and had a great time. Michael worked on the second sock of his Ugly Christmas Socks, which is already past the gusset decreases and onto the foot… …and while we sampled tasting flights of white wine and cider and listened to an excellent guitar/drum duo playing all the songs we like, I finished a slouchy hat that I’d started the day before on the machine,…

I wanted to put yesterday into perspective. Or better yet, I wanted to add color so that I could find contrast in the shadows of this thing I called my youth.And, so, I had to count backwards to make this possible. Of course, counting the years that went back was enough to make me shake my head. This is crazy for me to realize that, including yesterday, 38 Father’s Days have passed since The Old Man, my Father, was around. 37 years have gone by. This means I have made 37 trips around the sun…

[Now “excellence” means “A.I. hallucinations”] Last fall, a report on how businesses are using A.I. contained A.I. hallucinations about A.I. usage by businesses A KPMG report on how AI is being used by businesses across the world exaggerated adoption of the technology with bogus case studies that appear to have been based on AI hallucinations. The October report, “Redefining excellence in the age of agentic AI”, made numerous false claims about the use of AI by organisations including the Swiss…

Had a very nice Father's Day yesterday, beginning with a wonderful brunch at the Stonecat Café. Perfect weather, three guys playing some blues, and an excellent meal. We stopped at Overlook Coffee in Burdett on the way, so Caitie could get coffee up to her fancy LA standards. I missed the turn into the parking lot, so I parked in the back and it was a fortuitous mistake because I'd never seen the falls the shop is named for! There they were, right behind the place! Very cool. We came home from…

About two years ago, I learned that I’m not just being a grumpy “back in the good old days…” style about toilet paper. The article I read was good, and if I recall correctly, I emailed the author and also learned from him that something similar is happening with our sweaters. The takeaway is thus: toilet paper is expensive, and manufacturers are using less and less paper. The result is that it runs out more quickly and tears more easily. My solution to this problem was to start buying my toilet…

Last week I arrived home with a delicious pear frangipane pie from the local bakery. The contents of the cardboard pie box didn’t last long, but on top of it, in a corner, a pink round sticker caught my attention: it read WEEK VAN DE ECLAIR (8th Edition). Today marks the last day of that special week so perhaps it’s not too late to rush off to fetch some after finishing this article, even though I’m not particularly fond of them. You see, exactly ten years ago, during this period my friend & I…

gonna rank from worst to best song ranking system 😇- need to have a looong conversation with whoever made this song 🥹- teared up a little 🥰- i love love love 😊- very good 🙂- good with some issues 🤔- i would let it play in the background ig.. 😪- not feeling it 😠- no this is bad. 😡- this is really bad. 🤬- play this around me and im taking a gun out. for both of us. cbz (prime time) 😪 i sat here for most of the song wondering when it was gonna start....disappointed. it sounds like music for an ad.…

The link. The paragraph. With a background in fine arts, I focus on design and refinement, coupled with an essential intellectual humility. I encourage peer review and believe all “institutional knowledge” is merely a hypothesis awaiting scientific editing. That said, I enjoy the occasional off-script random brew day, following what is in inventory and creating something wacky and undefinable. The point of emphasis. “institutional knowledge” is merely a hypothesis awaiting scientific editing.

A collection of links found around the web. This time we have three sections, inspiration to do things – things that have inspired me to do something, visual niceness – things that I enjoyed looking at, and creative play – things that remind us that we’re human. Inspiration to Do Things Make Believe by Robin Rendle, doing the job of making me finally get Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children by Mac Barnett. In April A-N held an interactive workshop for artists, discussing the…

What do we mean by attention? Is there attention when I am forcing my mind to attend? When I say to myself, I must pay attention, I must control my mind and push aside all other thoughts," would you call that attention? Surely that is not attention. What happens when the mind forces itself to pay attention? It creates a resistance to prevent other thoughts from seeping in; it is concerned with resistance, with pushing away; therefore it is incapable of attention. That is true, is it not? To…

There's a scene in Angeline Boulley's novel Firekeeper's Daughter where the main character, an Ojibwe teenager, describes her coming-of-age "berry fast." She loves berries of all kinds, so she committed to not eating any for an entire year. She otherwise lived a normal life - going to events where berries were served, going berry picking, and so on. She describes how her aunt even tested her by leaving her alone in the berry patch to see if she'd cheat (she did not). I have a bumper crop of…

Gave up on something today!! Finally. I spent about 14 days or so on it, which is actually less than I thought but probably still too long for what this was. At least now I've learned a bit of Blender (but I haven't gone through the 4-hour donut tutorial, and I don't think I will for now. Next time I want to model something in Blender I'll warm up with that). I think if anyone actually saw what I modeled they would 100% say that it was not worth 14 days of work, even if that work included…

Evidently we are now on track for our seventh prime minister in (checks watch) fifteen minutes. The Met Office has issued a rare red warning for 09:00 on Wednesday to 21:00 Thursday for parts of England and Wales.This means the heat is likely to bring impacts to health and could be a danger to life, but also a risk to infrastructure such as power supplies and transport.Temperatures will increase significantly in the next few days with the potential for 38 or 39C by Wednesday and Thursday.…