Ethan Gach, Kotaku: It’s been almost a month since Sony announced the end of PlayStation discs for new games starting in 2028, and a loud contingent of angry fans has continued to criticize the company for going all-digital. Asked about the ongoing backlash during its latest earnings call, Sony said it understands why people have strong feelings about physical games, but it’s still going to move forward with getting rid of them. “There are various reasons we made this decision, the biggest…
I love reading. I caught the bug as a middle-schooler when I got caught skipping school, and as punishment, I had to read The Chronicles of Amber and do a book report about it. Even today, opening a book and fanning the pages to get the paper smell activates very fond memories and emotions. I remember a time before e-readers came out. I always thought reading on one seemed very futuristic. In military sci-fi books, characters are reading on their data pads, and reading on an e-reader makes me…
Anthony Kenny, professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Oxford, well-known for his work on the philosophy of mind and history of philosophy, has died. Professor Kenny wrote widely on the philosophy of mind, history of philosophy, and philosophy of religion. He is especially recognized for his work on Wittgenstein, Thomas Aquinas, and Descartes, including his critique of Cartesian dualism. Professor Kenny is the author of numerous articles and books. Some of his more well-known…
This is a Blaugust 2026 blog post. I’m now in my third term of music theory. Back in the first term, I created a handy reference sheet for major and minor scales. I just added a new ref sheet for what’s called applied (or secondary) chords. A Bit of Music Theory (If you know basic music theory, go ahead and skip this part.) First, listen to this music snippet: Here is the music score for what you just heard: If you enumerate the C major scale – C-D-E-F-G-A-B – you see that C is the first note.…
Over the years, I've bought a lot of tech. Some good, some bad, but not a whole lot that I've been crazy about. I've spent countless days researching, pouring over reviews, videos, and the like only to buy a piece of equipment that ultimately ends up collecting dust (I'm looking at you RetroPocket 2S and Y1 Mp3 Player). You know, pieces of tech that I convinced myself would be daily uses and fill some strange gap in my day. Yet, outside of my phone, iPad, MacBook, Xbox and Playstation, nothing…
Submission for AuguStory 2026. I thought I'd make several posts for AuguStory. Not sure if they will all take place this month, because I assume there will be another AuguStory next year and I don't want to run out of ideas.* * Though I do think Chloe's prompts will keep me covered for a while.In this introductory post, I'll cover these questions that Robert asks. ✎ Story timeHow did you first start blogging (what got you into it)? The timeline and details are all a blur, but I believe I…
Get the information you need right at your fingertips with Lost Art Press pocket books – and right now, you can get all six for the special price of just $99. Though our pocket books are small in size – just 4″ x 6-1/2″ – each one is full of expert guidance on a given topic. Here is what comes in the complete set of six books: “Woodworker’s Pocket Book”Edited by the great Charles H. Hayward and first published in 1949, “Woodworker’s Pocket Book” is a guide to everything from finishing recipes…
First, to recap The newsstand cover of Loadstar #1. Way back in 1984, having had success with their first product Softdisk, the nascent Softdisk Publishing released the first issue of Loadstar, a “magazine-on-disk” for Commodore 64 microcomputers. Softdisk is mostly known these days as being the former workplace of several people who would go on to found Id Software, creators of Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake. Softdisk published, as the Id guys’ last work for the company,…
Every zeitgeist comes with new design idioms unique to its challenges. Many of them disappear as fads change, but others bake themselves into deeper parts of existing software interaction paradigms. For example, there’s the hamburger menu (≡) which saw a proliferation during the rise of mobile due to the constraints around screen size. It has since spread to many other parts of software interaction design and will likely remain prevalent for a long time as a terse way of indicating “more…
While I mainly used the PDF reader integrated into Firefox on Android to view PDFs on my phone so far, I now have a new favorite PDF reader. What bugged me about the reader in Firefox was especially the performance when viewing big PDFs like newspapers. It always took a second or so to rerender when zooming or going fast between pages. Not so with MJ PDF. The app, which isn’t available on the Play Store but is available using some alternative download methods and is fully open-source, is…
A selection of street portraits taken on Portra 400. Grassmarket, Edinburgh, July 2026.
So... I wanted to describe a situation I came across on the BR side of Bear, but some men here are, for lack of a better term, weirdos. This is a topic that women will likely understand, since we pick up on these things more easily, but maybe some men notice it too (and maybe choose to ignore it). Years ago, when my blog was primarily in portuguese and I used Komments on my posts, there was this guy who used to reply to me. I got curious and checked his blog, and well... if I could have blocked…
In “Why Sheep Need Pigs in Sheepdog’s Clothing,” Robin Hanson asked three LLMs to score how much status, social skills, and judgment matter for influence across five domains. Judgment came back higher than his argument wanted. So he asked again. The second prompt told the models to focus on “who is selected or is influential in the short run,” and — read this twice — to “consider if they have any concrete basis for seeing judgment as mattering more re intellectuals and innovation.” Judgment…
Why read the book? Nick Needham wrote 2000 Years of Christ's Power Volume 4: The Age of Religious Conflict. It is the fourth book in his clear and readable church history series. This volume covers the years from the late sixteenth century to the early eighteenth century. Needham shows how the Reformation left Europe in a state of deep uncertainty and conflict. He gives clear accounts of Lutheran orthodoxy, the Thirty Years War, the Arminian controversy and the Synod of Dort, the rise of…
Most of the attention around AI in recent weeks has been on the nervous stock market and on hacks carried out by poorly controlled tools. Here are some more stories from the floodwaters. AI-using college graduates are hitting the workplace. Students’ reading ability improves after removing tech from classes. AI companies are buying millions of rare books, scanning their contents to train their models, and then shredding them. Burning the Library of Alexandria to build Borges’ Library of Babel.…
A lot of my time is spent in reading technical blogs and news. Mostly from my RSS feeds and Hacker News, Lobsters, and Reddit. My browser has dozens of open tabs of articles I want to read, but think they’re too deep for just a quick scan. A lot of these texts require some further research on the subject or new concepts I’ve never heard before. So I realized that taking notes of these articles is the best way of understanding it, along with the further links I’ll follow, improving my chances of…
mv gives you no progress output at all, which is not much fun when you are moving 100+GB of Google Takeout archives and cannot tell if anything is happening. Two tools fix this: watch and progress. With your move already running, open a second terminal and enter the following: watch progress -w This refreshes every 2 seconds and shows a live view of the running process. Progress probably needs installing first, but it is a quick job with your package manager. On Bazzite, I installed it using…
✨ In This Edition ✨ 📟 Short-Form Content: On the genie 🧞, its biases, and going rogue; Fake imagery for both birds and satellites. 🌞 Good News!: The EU & AI content marking; Australia & data centre energy. Edited & glitched version of an image by Fethi Benattallah on Unsplash. 📟 Short-Form ContentChatbots ("AI") You've probably heard that one of OpenAI's models went "rogue" and hacked things outside of the sandbox it was supposed to be contained in. This is somewhere between "Look at all the…
New England’s investment in solar has paid off in electricity savings during this summer’s heat waves. Italy could be the next country to build a solar railway after Switzerland’s successful trial. MIT engineers have created an energy-storing supercapacitor from ancient materials. This new kind of cement could turn homes and roads into giant batteries. China has put a battery that lasts for thirty years on the grid. The death of a girl in a Chinese gene-editing trial was never made public.…
Heather Williams on covertracklistAbbie Neal & Her Ranch Girls - Newton's Law.mp3 Babe Wayne - Dance The Whiz Wosh.mp3 Barbara Compton - Mining Men.mp3 Bonnie Bombshell Lee - My Rock And Roll Man.mp3 Choo Choo Collins - Baby's Gone.mp3 Dusty Springfield - La Bamba.mp3 Heather Williams - Celebration.mp3 Lady Nell - Loving Daddy.mp3 Marva Allen - I'm Thru With You.mp3 Mona Kerry - Don't Hang Around My Door.mp3 Peggy Phillips (& The Patterns) - Is That So.mp3 Tanya Day - His Lips Get In The…
Back a couple of years or so ago, when the evidence of an AI bubble was just starting to accumulate, the standard rebuttal to skeptics broke down into two basic categories. One was that large language models were going to have such a huge impact and make so much money that a massive ROI was all but guaranteed.The second argument, specifically addressing the comparisons to the dot-com bubble, was that this time the capital expenditures were coming from some of the biggest and most successful…
It's now been around 18 months since I ditched Chrome as my daily web browser, both on desktop and mobile. Not once have I missed it. Chrome has for a while been a joke when it comes to performance and that was a part of what led me to moving away from it. At the time I was still using my old Dell XPS which - according to Microsoft - was coming to end of life (EoL). Even though I do still use that laptop, but with Linux (Bazzite for now) Chrome was really starting to chug a bit on that machine.…
Thinking about selling the 64GB RAM from my laptop and paying off my mortgage... Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.
When I was about to park my car for a house inspection, all the spots were taken. I asked the homeowner if it was ok to park on the lawn. She didn't mind, and then added: "We need to be a little flexible in life." Imagine how many of our so-called problems would vanish with a little flexibility. Simply adapting to the current situation instead of resisting it. We might even make some new and interesting discoveries by being open-minded and curious instead of stiff and stubborn. — I'll have the…
When you see a text a second or third time you recognise it, and that feeling of recognition is easily mistaken for actual understanding. This is the fluency illusion: the ease of processing something gets read as a measure of how well you know it. Rereading and highlighting raise how easy something feels right now (retrieval strength), but they barely build the deeper storage that remains once the text is no longer in front of you (storage strength). Take the source away, and the illusion of…
Wooh! The last few weeks have been absolutely mental here in Casa del Quirk. Around 2 months ago we started renovating the stables to make things better for the goats and chickens. We've had an extraction system put in so fresh air is always circulating, as chickens are very dusty and goats don't like it too hot and stuffy. While we were at it, we also had some new fencing and gates put in, as well as better hard standing around the stables. Finally we had the old, rotten windows and doors…
I just came across the Done by Humans “movement,” which appears to similar to not by AI: both offer badges to display proudly on your human-made website after some kind of vetting process. I don’t understand the appeal of sites like these or what they offer, and I think it’s possible they represent a new way to mislead people about AI use on the web. There are three main reasons I am wary of these efforts. 1. They’re unnecessary I don’t use AI on my website: I’ve coded it all by hand and I…
I've been going down lots of rabbit holes on finding new blogs last day or so - mostly tech as that’s what there is, some accessibility (in tech), some books (about tech) etc etc. Today I was met with this. Look I know I know only too well this is a result of ridiculous UK Internet law. I know its a problem brought about by various streams of idiotic, tech illiterate, hateful UK political parties... but please please if you're a blogger and you want things to be accessible to the UK audience,…
Being on vacation always reignites my motivation to read books. I mostly read on my Kindle, but during this vacation I read an entire book on my phone. Because the ebook library service we have only exists as an app. While I do like physical books, I am not overly attached to the medium of literature or text in general. Still, it is difficult to completely ignore the sort of stigma associated with reading (staring at) on your phone. Staring at your phone is, with at least some valid…
