statusbar v0.3.0 got a nicer help (and other goodies)

I came across an interesting passage in THEM Anime’s review of a 2023 anime series titled The Dreaming Boy is a Realist. The line and the review were authored by Allen Moody, who I quoted once previously in a New Leaf Journal article on review systems. I emboldened the key point of the quote: Kei sits behind Wataru in class, is apparently much more social (Aika seems fairly reserved), routinely talks to Wataru despite Aika’s supposed annoyance with him, and in general seems a much more FUN…

Big Brother's best winner and Twitch streamer Dan Gheesling is not handling criticism well for his participation in a live-streamed U.S. Army reality competition, e.g. propaganda.

Outside The Met – New York, New York Remember yesterday when I said all that stuff about preserving the purity of street photography by using a manual-focus Leica camera? I truly believe that, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t still use a backup camera for some autofocus insurance. I wanted to make sure I successfully captured the scene outside The Met after closing. When I’m shooting with the Leica M 246, especially during fast-changing scenes like this, I don’t have time to check focus and…

Bloggers, can we make better titles for our posts? michaelharley.netBy Michael HarleyRead original post → I came across this blog post by Michael Harley. I started following him after I came across some of his blog posts on bubbles.town (I want to call it button.town every time I type it, and I don't know why 😀). But he does have a point, and I am guilty of making bad titles too. In fact, if it were up to me, I probably wouldn't have any titles. But I think most things in writing do deserve…

Daily Drawing 997

After 300+ posts in a row I almost forgot today. The most surprising thing is that I made it this far. Entries have may been not my best the past few weeks but what are you going to do. It did scare the shite out of me as I was almost in bed. Still no idea why I do this. More tomorrow…

Not everyone can debug code Counterfactual reasoning is a technique where you assume alternative scenarios that could have happened, but did not in fact happen. You assume something is true when it is, in fact, false. A question involving a counterfactual is "What if dinosaurs had not gone extinct?" Reasoning with counterfactuals is considered an advanced cognitive skill, and it comes in quite handy when you are debugging code. To debug effectively, you have to entertain insulting falsehoods.…

Came across this review of Shock and Awe online and was reading it, nodding along and thinking 'this is rather perceptive' and then realised it was AI generated!Still more acute than most of the actual reviews by living-breathing consciousnesses.It's from a site called RetroForge about which I will be saying more at the other place in due course.Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, from the Seventies to the Twenty-First CenturyGlam's artificiality is not an escape from meaning; it is the…

"Art is domination. It's making people think that for that precise moment in time there is only one way, one voice. Yours" - Maria Callas

I’m currently doing a trial of a site that lets you access a bunch of different AI tools in one place. Having all those services easily accessible through one subscription instead of multiple different ones has its ups and downs in terms of feature parity, and some other issues. But it does let you work relatively rapidly in a single shared UI to generate multiple different assets pretty quickly in parallel. From that experience, I just wanted to capture a really simple workflow to use for…

Brioche month continues, and this time Dorie’s buttery dough takes a savory spin with Cheese-Swirl Babka Buns. Think cinnamon roll, but with a spiral of cheese! Actually cheeses (plural)- a smoosh up of ricotta, cream cheese, Parmesan and cheddar. Minced shallot and scallion greens break the creaminess a bit. More cheddar appears in the streusel topping, which tastes like Cheez-Its. As usual, this brioche is a two-day affair, the first day dedicated to making and chilling the dough, and the…

My head is a fog from cold pills, and I left the house a minute later than I should have, but the traffic lights aligned and I did not miss my bus. Is there a Patron Saint of Public Transportation? If so, they turn a blind eye on OC Transpo most days, but they smiled on me today, so there’s that. Maybe they feel bad because I’ve been taking the wrong cold pills for the past month and I just figured that out. It turns out the “Plus” in “Cold & Sinus Plus” is very important in cold and sinus…

We've had our parklet for 15 years, and now SFMTA says they're going to fine us $500/day if we don't demolish it in two weeks. We have spent nearly two years trying to negotiate with them to figure out some rational way to satisfy them, and they have been 100% unwilling discuss any alternatives. In their view, they can demand whatever they want and we just have to suck it up. Over the last few months, we have reached out to Mayor Lurie, and to District 6 Supervisor Dorsey (through various…

Perfume PosseCheap and Cheerful: Acqua di Selva I actually got reminded of this one from a FacePlace post that a friend commented upon. I’ve never owned this but I know I had smelled and liked it and this past week (first week of August) has been fairly… Continue Reading → Perfume PosseCheap and Cheerful: Acqua di Selva

by Eurocheese Heading into my screening of Elsinore on the last day of the festival, I had heard a number of mixed things on the ground. Some said the film pulls too readily at heartstrings without much plot. I’d heard rumblings that it was likely to win an audience prize, and it ended up taking the International People’s Choice Award before I saw it (yes, it’s eligible since it’s a UK production and La Bola Negra became automatically disqualified for the honor when it won TIFF’s general…

A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review by Ellen Nehr ADAM HALL – Knight Sinister. Pyramid, US, paperback, 1971. Harper, US, paperback, 1990. First published in the UK in 1951, written by Elleston Trevor under the pseudonym Simon Rattray. Before he became famous as Adam Hall with the publication of The Quiller Memorandum, Elleston Trevor produced five chess-oriented mystery/suspense novels; these were published in England under the pseudonym Simon Rattray, and reprinted here under the Hall name after the…

I write a lot, and I use AI a lot. But AI does not write my blog posts. Mostly. AI is useful for making some of my writing less tedious. Recently, I asked GitHub Copilot CLI to read a few dozen posts from this blog and derive a VOICE.md to assist my writing. The result is now checked into this repo and linked from AGENTS.md, so any AI agent working here gets the same reminder: this blog is authored by me, not by AI and the agent’s job is to help me rather than pretend to be me. The useful and…

In this essay, I argue that an artificial intelligence modeled on a specific human cannot independently preserve the human particular developmental continuity after their histories diverge. Imagine that a person provides an AI system with every available detail of their life: memories, written messa…

I believe I was in seventh grade when I first heard a meaningful conversation that contained the words “austerity budget”. Two bus drivers were talking during a field trip stop; one of the bus drivers was a fiery woman named June Lavezzo. She really was a bit of a spitfire and she also had a heart of gold. She was discussing with another bus driver that a neighboring school district had just voted down the yearly budget for the second time, which meant they were going on “austerity”. No field…

This is a recap-ish of the latest podcast episode. You can listen to the episode below before or after you read. That’s because I tend to expand on topics from the pod as well as straight-up write about things that we did not discuss. The choice is yours in how you want to proceed! Hello my friends! This was a fun pod, all about what the guys and I have been up to in these last days of summer (who am I kidding, it’s still hot as fuck here in LA). Spencer recounted a particularly fun wedding…

Between the quietand the quiet as tin,I heard the flowers fall...padpad.

I want to talk about my flair tonight1: I had a bad session. I consider myself a journeyman Game Master, one with a lot left to learn about our craft. I have run two longish campaigns so far, and many one shots in a few different dungeon crawly RPGs. My first effort was a 24 session online 5e campaign that crashed and burned when a couple players got bored--totally fair, I was beyond stressed at work and thought DMing required writing half a novel for backstory. My second long 5e campaign, in…

Okay, main goal of the day: getting the truck to the garage for our afternoon appointment. As usual, we planned on leaving early. My daughter was really struggling this morning, unfortunately. She’d had a bad night. We’ve had more outings than usual that she came along with to help me out, and it’s starting to … Continue reading Almost…

Introducing Claude Opus 5.5 \ Anthropic Because Opus 5.5 is comparable to Claude Mythos 5.1 in biology and cybersecurity, we’re deploying it with safeguards similar to those on Claude Fable 5.1. Vetted organizations can apply today to our Life Sciences Verification Program to use Opus 5.5 for biology research. In the coming weeks we will also be expanding access to our Cyber Verification Program, and verified cybersecurity practitioners will be able to use Opus 5.5 for their work. If it’s so…

I had so much fun in August on HTML Day. (htmlday.joespartydepot.com) I think it’s time to do something similar but maybe not the same, again. December will be the 4th San Diego IndieWebCamp. (indieweb.org/San_Diego) It’s fun to get get together and write HTML. Websites are so great. Where should we hold it? When should we hold it? Get in touch. Leave a comment. Send a webmention. Subscribe to the calendar on events.indieweb.org. Sign my Guestbook | Contact Me | Book office hours | Share

Today’s recording starts with some more Iain and Hacker fun. Then it’s Dinosapien – Saving Eno. Lauren tells Eno that the tremors they felt at the Badlands mean another portal is opening, and he might be able to go home soon. But then Eno gets worried and runs off. It’s a good thing too, as they leave just before two cars arrive, bearing Dr Aikens and the two poachers from an earlier episode. Aikens has Lauren’s journal so he knows everything she knows. And he’s looking for Eno. They find Eno…

The episode of The West Wing that’s always bothered me is “Evidence of Things Not Seen,” which is Episode 20 of Season 4. It takes place on the day of the equinox (in March, not September, but I remembered it because today is an equinox), and one of the continuing subplots is C.J. trying to convince the others that you can stand an egg on its end at the exact moment of the equinox and only at that moment. Oh, and it has to be the vernal equinox, not the autumnal one.1 That someone in the…

Autumn (finally).