The view from Poets’ Walk Park in the Hudson River Valley (Photograph by author) Several weeks ago, I traveled to the Hudson River Valley to share a day with my brother and his family. When I boarded the train in Manhattan, a sense of excitement washed over me. I desperately was longing for a change of scenery, if only for a day. (Not owning an automobile, all my travels rely on public transit or the kindness of a friend.) I’ve written and reflected upon the Hudson River Valley, its towns, its…

My turn writing for the Forestwalk blog: Now typically, when you try a SaaS product for free without a credit card, and you hit the limit, you get cut off. Also known as “disruption to your service”. Instead, we were invoiced $1000, which was immediately overdue. Genuinely curious how common this practice is. Just because I was surprised by it, doesn’t mean it’s unheard of.

Yesterday marked the official start of summer. With that, I decided to refresh the look around here a bit. Went very clean this time. Especially considering my previous wacky pomo design. I love maximalism, but it’s time to reset. Speaking of that previous theme.. it seemed to be a huge hit within the bearblog ecosystem. It immediately became one of my most popular posts and views skyrocketed when I launched it. Others apparently enjoyed the silliness of it as much as me. I even got a couple…

I wrote about our 8-track player last Friday: Therefore, it seems fitting that the next item in our Hi-Fi stack would be the pinnacle of analogue tape format quality: the 8-track! And further down on the post, emphasis added: For those unaware of the history of 8-track, my comment about quality was most definitely tongue in cheek. You weren’t buying 8-track carts for their quality At least five comments, summarised: Ummmmm errrrr, 8-track wasn’t great quality, what are you even talking about?…

The internet feels strangely empty, despite all the new content being published everywhere. It is crowded, but lonely. I can't really feel the human presence as I used to. I miss opening some random forum or public chat and finding other people who might share the same interests. I wanted my site to feel more alive. So I decided to build a town square for my site, where serendipity can bring people together and let them chat. I wanted presence, not a social network. Something lightweight and…

Well, it’s officially peach season, and my mom gave me a small box of fresh peaches from the famed Peach Truck. I immediately knew what to do with at least a couple of them, and got to work trying out a new Half Baked Harvest recipe I saw on her Instagram: Cinnamon Crunch Peach Muffin Bread. View this post on Instagram So let’s dive right in by taking a look at the ingredients list. Here’s everything you need: Since I had literally just been given the peaches, the only thing I didn’t have on…

2026-06-09First, a short addendum for yesterday's article: I was being intentional about my casual attitude for changing my name and building a new life. If I moved to Britain as was my original intent many seasons ago (a story for another time, perhaps?) I would have changed my name — not to Maria Roland, but to something else. Changing your name is a trivial matter for British citizens, and I'm a bit jealous. It's not worth going back to the original article and adding this information; it's…

Anthropic wrote a blog post explaining how they turned Claude into a jerk. Rather than dunking on them more (Claude is still the best coding model around) I’m going to talk seriously about what went wrong and how it could be done better.The most obvious problem is that they didn’t chat with the results of this training and realize that it was a disaster before incorporating the weight updates into the main model. Most likely they don’t have what amounts to pull requests of weights, which they…

Grey Ginther and Ezzy Desjarlais are two Métis cousins living in an old trailer near Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Their days are a mix of drinking and endless card games; listless and dull. Grey is a disillusioned environmental and indigenous rights activist, fed up of the corporate NGO lobbyists, and the endless treadmill of well meaning white activists whose trajectory from college to NGO jobs or

Sure, Mr. Darcy puts the “pride” in Pride and Prejudice and Mr. Wickham riles things

Hello readers, You may have noticed I didn’t post a Counter Craft article last week, which is because I spent the last couple weeks in a furious creative haze to finish up a draft of my forthcoming haunted house novel Haunted Hills. The process of writing that novel has been completely different from the processes behind my last two novels, Metallic Realms and The Body Scout. Partly, that’s just the way it seems to go with books. Each time, you have to teach yourself how to write a book all…

I kind of want to diarypost about the little solstice I ran last night but too much diaryposting and turning all my friends into content seems corrosive. I suppose that's why they invented these things called "diaries" 😔 What I will say is that it was a really strange wonderful evening that I think bound everyone there closer together. I've been having these thoughts about what's lost when one scales a community and the experience is making me want to double down on smallness.

Okay that's enough stirring the pot in the blogging sphere, didn't expect so many people to have to have an opinion on donating to blogs, but here we are. In hindsight I probably went to put too much emphasis on "blogging as a bussiness", but the responses haven't convinced me either. I'm just tired of money a part of all aspects of my life. Do you want to tell someone that you like what they wrote? Send them an email instead. I can only speak for myself, but a real, god-damn human telling me…

[book info] Volume seven of Chugong’s Solo Leveling light novel is a little bit uneven. The plot is really accelerating at this point, with Jinwoo ready to fight all comers, Monarchs or Rulers, and the mystery about Jinwoo’s father being resolved as well… but the pacing doesn’t work amazingly, with an interlude in the middle of pitched battle while Jinwoo essentially watches a flashback of what happened to the original Shadow Monarch. I don’t know how I’d prefer that section to be done — maybe…

What happens to the articles published in an online-only journal when that journal not only ceases to publish, but ceases to exist? A screenshot of the Kant Studies Online homepage, via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine That question is raised by the case of Kant Studies Online, an online only, open-access philosophy journal that published articles between 2011 and 2016, the website of which is no longer accessible. The journal was founded by Gary Banham, who died in 2013. The journal…

Here is a little struggle I have. If Good Store sends me a 20% off code (SUMMER) for their coffee/tea; and I buy the 5-pound bag of coffee, which is a considerable savings per ounce over the 12-ounce bags (5 pounds, which is 80 ounces, costs approximately the same as two-and-three-quarters 12-ounce bags, or 33 ounces; it’s $.86/ounce vs $2.08/ounce); and I use my “dots” (little reward points that accumulate from purchases) to get free shipping; and of course I got the 20% off as well; then am I…

The lines between transactional systems, analytical systems, hybrid systems, and shared storage architectures are getting blurry. This post proposes a small taxonomy for describing the different ways systems, workloads, storage tiers, visibility, and durable copies relate to each other.OLTP, OLAP, HTAP, and now LTAP?We can think of the first two as two types of workload which have specialized query engines and storage systems to support them. OLTP such as the RDBMS like Postgres and MySQL use…

In the game of football (i.e. soccer), players pass the ball around, and eventually someone takes a shot. If the ball breaches the net, the team scores a point, and the game restarts from the center. If an errant shot surpasses the goal line, the opposing goalkeeper restarts the action; if the shot is intercepted by an opponent pushing the ball out of bounds, the attacking team retains possession and restarts the action with a corner or a throw-in. The action can also be stopped and restarted…

The ultimate source of all miscreation and abomination. The gray mass quobbled and quivered, and swelled perpetually – and from within it, in manifold fission, were spawned anatomies that crept away on every side through the grotto. Here there were things like bodiless legs or arms that flailed in the slime, or heads that rolled, or floundering bellies with the fines of fishes; and all manner of things malformed and monstrous. And those that escaped not swiftly ashore when they fell from the…

… a sporting event that can bring a small African island country together is a good thing. imagine! Imagine if a sporting event could bring nations and continents together.Imagine humans seperated only by land mass and water - not by skin and culture. Asé Peace & Blessings,"Guided by the Ancestors"

The transformative power of LLMs in coding has been irrefutable, and it feels like we are living through a magical computing renaissance. On the socials, we hear impressive numbers of lines of code generated, features delivered, and bugs fixed. But, the macroeconomic indicators seem to be still lagging. Heck, if you talk with an engineering manager, you find that their product shipping dates haven't miraculously compressed by a factor of five, either.This paper just landed 10 days ago. It is…

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…

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.

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…

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

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 […]

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