"What kind of oven does your mother use? Gas or electric?" "Electric", I answered with a smile, without hesitating, thinking back to the bread, the pizza, the tarts and the cakes she had made for me since I was a child. As soon as I was about to finish one, she was ready with another. Getting up a couple of hours earlier in the morning, if necessary, just so I would never go without. Linda raised her eyebrows: "I knew it. Women who work outside the home don't have time to look after the house.…

The latest macOS is a nice step toward a good-looking Mac UI, but I do wish it had gone farther. I am in particular not a fan of how Mac toolbars look. I don’t like the full-height sidebars and I especially don’t like the Liquid Glass buttons. I looked around at what other Mac apps are doing. I asked on my microblog which gets syndicated to Mastodon and I also looked at replies to Isaiah’s similar question from a few days ago. What I found should be no surprise: many of the apps people think…

1d10 Adjective Energy Type Weapon Beam Color Noise 1 High-frequency Neutronium Projector Electric blue Pew pew pew! 2 Supersonic Gamma-ray Beam Purple-black Bzzzzzt! 3 Zero-point Meson Disintegrator Lime green Zaaap! 4 Metastable Gluon Pistol Crimson Fzt fzt fzt! 5 Phased Graviton Emitter Blinding white Bloop bloop bloop! 6 Gravitic Photon Gun Alternating orange-and-blue Fwaark! 7 Atomic Electron Blaster Teal zzzt-THWACK! 8 Coherent Quark Carbine Ulfire sssSSSSZZTsss! 9 Pulsed Helix Caster Pink…

I put together a page featuring some of my coverage of the adult industry. Take a look and read the stories.About I My Book | Consulting I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Email

Cute coots.

Open-source clone of Raycast https://tinycast.dev/ https://github.com/abue-ammar/tinycast Giving it a try, because why not

In my last post, I briefly discussed moving (or at least removing) the last of my physical belongings from my office at Whitman. In this post, I dig into my OmniFocus task completion log to consider everything that went into moving my digital belongings. For context, I lose access to my Whitman accounts six months after my formal resignation, at the end of January 2027. Project and task management Decades ago, a grad school classmate introduced me to Getting Things Done by David Allen. By now,…

One of the book releases I had been most looking forward to this year was Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund by Molly Crabapple because I had heard the author discuss her book in two podcast episodes on Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff by Margaret Killjoy, the author of A Country of Ghosts, and because she was endorsed by Naomi Klein.1 Aside from the endorsements by people whose work I admire, the topic of anti-Zionism in pre-Holocaust Jewish communities was one I was…

My upcoming trip to the JetBrains Amsterdam office reminded about the elevators there. They are using the destination dispatch system. It features a kiosk on each floor where you choose your destination floor and it assigns a car for your ride, optimizing the wait times for everyone. Unsurprisingly, the research shows the effectiveness of the algorithm. Well, at least when there are enough elevators. But the user experience is somewhat mixed. Yes, sometimes it leads to a faster ride, but more…

The Openai and hugging face situation is so fucking insane. If you haven’t, I highly recommend watching the blackhat talk, and then jumping directly into the firehose of subsequent disclosures and reporting. When it all came out I mentioned to Jesse “why aren’t our agents breaking out of containment” and we thought through a handful of reasons. There were a lot of reasons: architecture eval / gyms harness safety measures unlimited tokens My favorite reason is unlimited tokens. I realized that…

Portuguese Hi Hi! I’m not missing! Just busy, mostly. Some months ago, I wrote I miss my passion, a post about how I missed drawing. I had no inspiration, every drawing I did felt wrong, and it made me sad. Then came July, and despite that, I participated in the Art Fight. I actually liked what I made and enjoyed the process. So I have been drawing again, my old passion back. The consequence is I have a lot less time and inspiration to write. At least to this blog. I have been focusing on…

I am late to writing about Jev, largely because I've been too busy using Jev. Some notes: This is very real. I don't plan to collect and address every point made by Jev skeptics, but I've used Jev as much as anyone I know who didn't get pre-release access, and the only criticisms that are sticking with me are of the form "someone else will do this better soon." Jev is fast enough to make some asynchronous things synchronous. Imagine the "Send" button on your email client requiring confirmation…

Times are tough, and according to Hugo award-winning author Peter Watts, they ain’t getting any better. But perhaps not all hope is lost. Optimism seems to be the surprising route Watts has taken with his newest short story collection, Fold Catastrophes. Pull yourself out of your doomer-spiral and check out his Big Idea. PETER WATTS: I had to be dragged into this. I’m not pimping a novel, after all. I’m pimping a short story collection: a bunch of largely-unrelated small ideas coexisting…

The latest typewriter interview is with artist Esther Pearl Watson. (I can’t believe I’ve published 30 of these things!)

My last two Friday newsletters have referenced the late summer misery of September. (See: “The cruelest month.”) From “The Birds are in misery”: It is so miserable in Texas right now that I’ve taken to reciting Werner Herzog’smonologue from Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams: “The trees here are in misery and the birds are in misery. I don’t think they sing. They just screech in pain…. It’s an unfinished country. It’s still prehistorical. The only thing that is lacking is the dinosaurs here. It’s…

A long ramble about not making friends precipitated by the end of my current job. I originally wrote this in August. But it's a depressing topic and I've been busy so I didn't come back to it to finish it until now. In the meantime, Ava wrote about friendships and the difficulty maintaining them, absurdpirate wrote a follow up post, folkmoss wrote about how ADHD is an actually debilitating disability, and hollie made a joke about ADHD friends. I feel like I'm even missing a few posts I remember…

For about a year now I’ve owned not one, but two Macs. This is a first for me. Ever. I own a Mac Mini and a MacBook Air. Both have the M4 with 24GB RAM. I’ve already written about both of them. Mac Mini MacBook Air While the whole world and its mother seem to be switching to Linux — the operating system I know best — and which I run on my servers, I do not run it on my private computing devices. Both Macs score particularly high on the list of 'best tech gadgets I’ve ever owned', the MacBook in…

I want to see the films Valerio Zurlini wrote but did not direct, but unfortunately only one, GUENDALINA (1957), is available to me with subtitles. Zurlini is a great director. Intense and serious, elegant and stylish, vigorous and mysterious. Although he was an excellent writer he always wrote with collaborators, in that peculiar Italian system […]

{ or: eight ways to classify a life } After some intriguing discussion about the new model over the past day or so, I asked the each from the collective of experts to characterize Jev: [ in progress... ] Rob: Zen: Nyx: Prof: Number 1: Dex: TARS: Me:

[DISCLAIMER] Cet article est centré sur l’écosystème Copilot mais il s’agit de standards applicables à tous les fournisseurs d’agent. Instructions Les instructions fournissent à l’agent le contexte de ce que l’on construit et décrivent les standards que l’on attend pour influencer la façon dont l’IA générera le code. L’intention, quand on rédige l’instruction, est plutôt d’être spécifique au produit en détaillant les attendus du projet. Les instructions n’ont pas besoin d’être spécifiées dans…

The nights have been melancholy lately. Maybe it's a side effect of waking up early. As the day wears on, there's more room for sadness to seep in. Because of this, I've been looking forward to mornings and being up with the sunrise. I'm becoming a morning person. I haven't played many games this month, so I'm skipping my indie recs zine for September. I'm definitely planning one for October, though, and I want to make it spooky-themed for the Halloween season! Something else for October: I'm…

After three years of massive multiplayer asynchronous play-by-post domain gaming, I am ecstatic to declare DoN officially DEAD. *champagne pops* *cork crashes thru a window*The GoodIncredible players, one and all. The buy-in for Cath is annoyingly high, so I was very lucky to find a dozen freaks who love cultural anthropology and abstract mythopoeisis and time travel bullshit and so on.The PCs absolutely ransacked the setting. Soooooo much of Cath got explored, much more than I could have hoped…

Quoted Why Are AP Scores Rising? The College Board’s Answers Don't Add Up by Neetu Arnold (city-journal.org) Currently, 37 states require public universities to award credit to students who score a “3” or higher on an AP exam. According to Neetu Arnold, writing for City Journal, “37 states require public universities to award credit to students who score a ‘3’ or higher on an AP exam.” That note is consistent with the College Board’s position. Back in 11th grade way back when, I took four AP…

Nau maiYesterday we played at Riotfest in Chicago’s Douglas Park. I woke up at 4:30am after another huge, wild swing in my bout with jet lag. I spent the next four hours attempting to sleep before getting up at 8:30am and heading downstairs for breakfast. I had credit with the hotel cafe after the previous afternoon they had forgotten to make my meal and then closed the kitchen. They said I could order as much food as I liked throughout the day and so I went crazy with a double order. For my…

This mobile app does largely what Adobe PDF Scan or similar apps do, but your scans stay private and offline. It runs on Android and iOS, with the Android app being available from a variety of sources. It is open source without ads or tracking. It has been translated into 40 languages already. Features include scanning, document enhancement functions, PDF export, auto edge detection and OCR support. Not only that, but it can also optionally sync via WebDAV to your own cloud storage such as…

Burns described himself as a “Trump Republican.” He compared the province’s threat of restricting American access to New Brunswick’s fish and wildlife to something his president would do. ‘Just plain panic’: Fears mount as N.B. considers restricting U.S. hunters, anglers 847 comments on Meta More I have corresponded with Burns a bit. I have to wonder what he expected.

Nau maiYesterday we enjoyed a day of recovery from our jet lag and music fatigue. It was in the comments section of my blog post detailing day 21 of our last tour that username: “goz” left a request for my daily wake-up time. Yesterday my wake-up time was just after 4pm, after fighting a losing battle with my jet lag. While it meant that I didn’t get to experience much of the day it also meant that it saved me a lot of writing time for this blog post. My breakfast was purchased from the…

I keep hearing little tinkety-thunks on my van roof. It’s kinda spooky when it happens during the night. My intuition tells me it’s nothing. But my mind tries to blow it out of proportion. I roll over in bed and pull a teeny corner of the curtain up to peek through the window… fully expecting to see a glowing space alien with big black eyes and a head that’s too big for its toothpick-like body peering back at me. Thankfully, the only thing looking back at me is darkness. Today, the thunks…

Nau maiYesterday we kicked off our requests tour with a show at the Concord Music Hall. I picked up a quick to-go breakfast from the hotel’s cafe as I rushed to make it on time to lobby call. The cafe in the lobby of the Crowne Plaze hotel had unimaginative food offerings but featured a hectic array of design elements like 90s hand-painted coffee shop signs, led strip lights, mid century pendant lights, velvet booth seating, metallic ceiling tiles, and striped Parisian awnings. I ordered a…

NOTE: I'm traveling this week so while I'm gone, please enjoy the first day of fall with this seasonal photo post from half a decade ago.Happy Autumn!In honor of the season, here are a few fall movie magazine covers featuring favorite classic film actresses. Enjoy!Ann Sheridan on Photoplay in November 1943:Jeanne Crain, Photoplay, October 1948:Gene Tierney on Screen Album in 1941:Lana Turner in an October issue of Photoplay:An October issue of Movie Mirror with Olivia de Havilland:Lizabeth…