Someone pointed me to a series of applied economics papers: 1. George Borjas and Nate Breznau, Ideological bias in the production of research findings: Our study exploits an opportunity to observe 158 researchers working independently in 71 teams during an experiment. After being asked their position on immigration policy, they used the same data to answer the same empirical question: Does immigration affect public support for social welfare programs? . . . teams composed of pro-immigration…

Hemel has long been known for its military and tool watches, and while it has continued those themes with its Eyelandt collection, the sub-brand has also provided a place to… The post Hemel Eyelandt Aurelian appeared first on The Time Bum.

Kris Kristofferson as “Rubber Duck” in Convoy (1978) Vitals Kris Kristofferson as Martin “Rubber Duck” Penwald, maverick trucker Arizona to New Mexico, Summer 1978 Film: Convoy Release Date: June 28, 1978 Director: Sam Peckinpah Costumers: Carol James & Kent James WARNING! Spoilers ahead! Background Today would have been the 90th birthday of the late Kris Kristofferson, likely best known as a pioneering singer-songwriter in the 1970s “outlaw country” movement alongside friends and fellow…

Brides, have you ever had a lofty cake dream... ...fall flat? Or have you ever wished for pretty-as-a-picture polka dots...

If you look back at the "cardboard starship" tag, you'll see there have been a couple of previous builds... and #3 was never updated. That's because I never finished it. I was unhappy with the foam I'd used to make it, and decided to scrap it. That was 5 years ago. Now that I'm actually playing Stargrave again, and the next official scenario requires a crashed ship with a 10x4 cargo area that the crew can go into, it's time to build my next cardboard spaceship!The only requirement for the…

When I review a new color or style of a product that I’ve already reviewed many times, I am looking to answer two things: 1. Has anything about the core feature changed, and 2. Why would I choose this model over any other within the same series of products?In the case of the Uni Kuru Toga Metal Mechanical Pencil, the mechanism is the core feature, with its auto-rotation lead system, and this model is the premium barrel Metal version, in this case a brilliant Orange.

I felt like a skating coach hearing someone say that it's impossible to do a triple axel. Of course it's possible. It's hard, but it's possible. -- Paul Graham on earning a billion dollars***In the wake of the latest populist drivel against "billionaires" by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, venture capitalist Paul Graham decimates her assertion, notably its smuggled-in premise that one must necessarily cheat others on the way to amassing a net worth of billion dollars.The crux of Graham's argument is…

In September, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor will be bringing out the above, this year’s big book on fascism. Given Klein’s well-earned public reputation, as well as the genius of her book Doppelganger, this book is likely to be popular with activists. For people who want to get a taste of its contents; there’s the […]

Just submitted a public release candidate of @hypertexting.com for App Store Review. 😱 Time to start recording some demo videos and writing some blog posts! 🚀

Ran 5km along the Thames, won the pub quiz then watched England “kick the ball in the square” two more times than Croatia. Pretty much the perfect evening.

Around 15 minutes ago I finished excercising. Why this matters to me: I was feeling guilty for not attending my calistenics class yesterday. Most of my night terrors are health related. I mean, not really like something's happening but more like my mind shouts that we should be worried. It is actually medically prescribed to me as part of my health treatment. And yes, you could and you should prescribe it yo yourself, I'm that kind of person now. I have probably more reasons but those are the…

London is a dizzying delight, full of pomp and pedigree, a place where high culture and cutting-edge trends feed off one another. Suzane Rowan Kelleher, Donald Olson and Darwin Porter, Frommer’s Europe by Rail

(Significant amounts of sexual crudity, so not for the eyes and ears of kids or the sexually modest) Niall Maher’s New Yorker daily cartoon for 6/15/26: (#1) To make any sense of this wonderful cartoon, you need to have detailed knowledge of two different events: from 5/19/1962 (I was just a month away from graduating from Princeton); and from 6/14/2026 (essentially, now), with a glance forward to 7/4 — events celebrating the birthdays of two different US Presidents (John F. Kennedy then, our…

Dire Garden of the AgesOut 29th May on Naturmacht Productions The second album from this Irish solo project could be framed as a transfer of styles from one zone to another. Whilst the debut behaved like an epic fable heavily rooted in Viking and Celtic metal stylings, the follow up offers a rather dramatic volte-face into industrial and electronic territory. But both expressions are characterised by a swirling, atmospheric panorama that creates a clear continuity within this project despite…

It had been a while since I wrote about making our online life saner and safer.I should write about it more often, but on the one hand, many people are writing about it in more detail than I ever will. On the other hand, the online landscape is changing a lot these days. It seems that we're nearing an upheaval similar to the burst of the dot-com bubble in the early 2000s. This makes me adopt a "wait-and-see" position more and more.So-called AI is, of course, to blame—or rather, the way it is…

RFC 10008 was published on June 15, 2026 and defines a new HTTP method: QUERY. It fills a gap that has existed for as long as I have been building APIs. You have data to send to the server in order to describe what you want back, but GET does not have a body and POST is neither safe nor idempotent. QUERY gives you a method that accepts a request body while remaining safe, idempotent, and cacheable. If you have ever built an SDK that talks to a JSON-RPC API you have felt this pain. JSON-RPC by…

GLM-5.2 arrived last week. It boasts excellent benchmarks and looks strong. Benchmarks here are a de facto ceiling of how good it is, not a point estimate. Essentially all other aspects of an open model like this, beyond speed and price, will almost always be worse than the numbers suggest. Still, impressive. It is definitely a large step up from GLM-5.1, and likely the strongest open model. GLM-5.2 is still substantially behind the absolute frontier, although plausibly on the cost-benefit…

On the first day of our roadtrip down the Izu Peninsula, we stopped by a local coffee roaster called ITOKU COFFEE. I’m amazed by wherever I go in Japan, there seems to be a coffee roaster somewhere nearby (isn’t it great). They have a range of beans available, including both single origin and their blend beans. The main display at the front of the shop stocks medium to dark roast beans (from left to right). These are at a fairly reasonable price point - around 1600 - 2000 yen for 200g. They…

I found out this morning that Josh Baer died last night. He was on a small plane heading back to Austin from Cabo. It had mechanical trouble and went down near Laredo, on a highway, a couple of miles short of the runway. Five other people on board survived. Josh did not. He was 50. I’ve been sad all morning. One way I deal with being sad is to hide in my computer, which is mostly what I’ve been doing today. Many people in the startup world knew Josh as the founder and CEO of Capital Factory,…

i have been looking for the next job for a little bit, and i've noticed that most job ads now not only rely heavily on ai for writing the actual job description, but working with ai is one of the main tasks on the job. one such position i had applied for "ai-powered fullstack engineer" (they ended up going with someone else for the position). i am fighting an internal battle: do i go deeper into the ai bubble, apply for "ai-first" companies, or do i try to do what i feel deep within me is right…

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)…

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…

I think that noa makes a great point about the nascent “choose European!” trend going on over there. While moving away from American hegemony is a necessary step (and not only in the tech or services realms), replacing one hegemon for another is a mistake humans have made again and again throughout our history. Online, we’ve seen the Twitter-to-{Threads,Bluesky,Mastodon} exodus (I include Mastodon, even though it’s part of the larger fediverse, because it’s positioned itself as a platform more…

“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…

Status: The big crash came last night, though it mostly subsided by this afternoon. I’m reluctant to assign a cause: could have been Sunday’s allotmenteering, could have been the psychotherapy. Could even have been the rejection I got from the art thing I applied for. That was a funny one as I really wasn’t expecting to get it and had only really applied to get some practice at interacting with the world again. If I’m honest I was relieved when I was turned down. But it definitely hit me in a…

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'…

Football may be the last mass spectacle that still resists instant gratification.

Technically it’s a big fancy wrapper around Postgres but that still counts!