I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.— Jacob Coxon (@hilbertspaess) September 9, 2026 This is how Jacob Coxon said goodbye to the AI industry, on X, last week. And in a follow-up post: “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of…

I’m not getting any less mad about this, didn’t you hear me the first time? The New World, when the Old World was full of all kinds of people, had nobody. NOBODY WAS HERE. THEY ALL CAME HERE FROM SOMEWHERE ELSE. Everybody here was at some point AN IMMIGRANT. And yes, I’m shouting, why can’t we get this into our tiny brains? This first ran Feb. 26, 2024, and I learned it because I was working on the profile of one of the scientists figuring out where we all came from, for a magazine, Hakai, that…

Completed my 25-hour service on the four-wheeler this weekend. I’m happy with this machine so far. I still need to install a winch, which I have, because it is too heavy for me to move on my own and I ride alone a lot.

If you ask me, I’ll probably say I’m not writing much. Because even I forget about the poor little thing. “My blog.” I periodically slip into sentences in conversations with friends mention of “my blog,” knowing none of them read it. There is invariably no reaction, or a furtive look away. “Blog,” I think, has come to mean long-winded all-about-me blather that no one wants to read, although if you put it up as a video on TickyTacky I guess it might be a viral Thing. I wonder if I called it “my…

Last week, most, if not all, of the week I had some sort of a bug in me. At first I thought it was pollen, but I just felt off in general. Really stuffy head and weak with low energy. For my lifts, I did them, but I did the bare minimum effort, and actually squats felt the worst. Finally I am feeling better, starting over the weekend. Go figure; I feel better when Molly’s vacation is over. We weren’t able to do anything anyway for ourselves, so I guess it didn’t really matter. This morning I…

A haiku Source

Based on this article from The Telegraph, I should walk more, eat more fruits and vegetables, and go play football at my void deck. (Two out of three is probably not that bad?) ~ Link: The Longevity Lessons Britain Can Learn from Singapore, by Ella Nunn, The Telgraph

In I forgot webrings exist, Joel wrote: Last year I wrote a pretty extensive list of every blogroll, webring and site that links to me, but well, I always enjoy belonging to more of them, I guess. Checking his list out reminded me of my own private list of blogrolls and sites that link to me. I thought to myself, "Why not make that public?" After some reformatting and removing dead links, I ended up with the following list. If a link back to my blog exists in yours or someone else's blogroll or…

Imagine if you productised a really cool technology that would absolutely change the way we live and work forever, would absolutely generate bazillions of dollars of revenue and profit, but you wanted to secure your spot in the market. You would make a big song and dance about how there was always a very small chance that someone could get hurt, which would seem like a generous act, but what you’re actually doing is just locking out future competition. Am I talking about airlines in the 1920s…

ldstephens: I often find a site I want to follow, only to discover that its RSS feed is hard to find. With RSS Lookup, you paste in the site’s URL and it searches for available feeds. There’s also a bookmarklet you can add to your bookmarks bar and use while you’re on a site. This is a feature I use a lot! On Vivaldi this is a built-in feature and probably the one I miss the most since moving to Firefox, where I use this extension. I like that it finds multiple feeds on a site (e.g. one for…

When he actually spoke up, I could understand him perfectly, but he insisted on whispering even though the place was pretty noisy and I obviously couldn’t make out what he was saying. The interaction was somehow even more absurd in real life than it is in this comic.

A lot of digital technology is not infrastructure for living. Endless feeds, notifications, commentary, product cycles, arguments, and updates. Remove it, and your life might become less convenient or less "connected", but it doesn't necessarily collapse. It may improve. Habit to send minute updates to someone, banking and other nonsense? 100 EUR smartphone and you can do all of that without friction like you can do it on 1000 EUR machine. Corporations release new products every year. Reviewers…

One hundred years ago this month, my late father-in-law arrived back in the United States after touring Europe as a piano player for a "American college jazz band." Edgar James Wood (1903-1986) had been an undergraduate at Tufts University (then Tufts College) until May, 1926, but he didn't graduate because he couldn't pass his last class. This image shows Ed as a member of the Zeta Psi fraternity, in the class of 1926. Ed had fond memories of his time at Tufts and he attended reunions on and…

So many anarchist principles seems like they would “never work”… because they literally cannot under capitalism, but would work just fine under a different system. One really good example of that is abolishing patents. Patents are silly, actually A patent says a person or company legally owns “an idea” or way of doing things, and no one else can use that idea or approach for many years. If you think about it for a bit, that seems really silly, doesn’t it? How can anyone own an idea? If you talk…

I realised something when I woke up in a panic last night about my hospital visit today (update: the results were perfect): fear only works in absolutes. You either die right away of the disease or you live. Fear doesn’t do in between, and boy, it’s good at doom scenarios. Every time I walk out of the hospital after my quarterly visits I decide not to let my anxieties take over for the next visit in three months. Every time, it sneaks up on me, and I wake up after dreams of horrible deaths and…

I don't write code anymore. Maybe an exaggeration... the writer's oldest privilege. The honest version is that I barely write code. And I used to get paid for it. These days I describe what I want in plain English, and a machine builds it. First drafts, reports, double-checking other people's work, meeting notes, the to-do lists that keep a team on schedule: all of it now has AI riding shotgun. My job used to be doing the work. Now it's mostly knowing exactly what I want and being stubborn…

Long Island woman rescued after plunging into hole in her backyard on her birthday New flavor of quicksand just dropped. My inner Gen X child smiles and nods, vindicated.

I’m really enjoying Tariq Goddard’s occasional forays at The Quietus; the lad’s got a fine turn of phrase about him. There is a tentative Curtis consensus which allows those who rate him and those who don’t to coalesce round certain qualities inherent in his work that the latter simply don’t attribute as much value to as the former. Tariq Goddard https://thequietus.com/quietus-reviews/live-reviews/adam-curtis-party-conference-review/ I like to think we could have a very enjoyable chat over a…

I drove my son to school this morning. Not something I do often since he catches the bus. But as part of class, they are going fishing and he wanted to bring his fishing rod.1 After dropping him off, I made my way home. Thirty seconds later, I was off the road, forced off by a mom in a white minivan in a school zone.2Not exactly something I had on my bingo card to start my morning. The most ridiculous part of this entire story is the fact this all took place in slow motion basically, at 25 MPH.…

Remember our backyard plum tree, the one felled by Hurricane Fiona? The remediation of the tree to vertical didn’t work out—we followed advice from our Siberian handyman that, untethered, it would find its way back; it didn’t.But the tree is undeterred by its near-horizontal state: after a mediocre plum crop two years ago, this year’s harvest is bountiful, and the tree is filled with beautiful, firm, tart plums like this:I picked a few pounds of plums yesterday, and turned them into a plum pie…

No matter what you call them, Beholders are vile servants of the coastal wizards. But worry not. They have monstrous cousins that can be used to populate (monsterate?) your dungeons. Less common and less popular, perhaps, but not less worthy.MumblersAlso called: Omniphagists, Gabblegob, Chew-OrbsArt by Felipe FariaThis spherical monster levitates through gaseous sacs in its body. Its central cavity is a gnawing mouth of yellow teeth which leads into an extradimensional space (similar to a bag…

Bobcat kittens in North Texas (photo from WIkimedia) 21 September 2026 Another rainy day in Pittsburgh with yesterday’s Flood Watch lasting until noon today(*). So to take our minds off the rain … Let’s watch wild bobcat kittens at play in Connecticut in late July 2025. By autumn they will be able to hunt alone. Though they can stay with their mother for up to a year, they’ll probably leave earlier. Ready for new adventures. video embedded from Jay Cromak on YouTube (*) Flood Watches have…

When you are naming a pen model after after the eight-legged horse Norse god Odin rode in on, you better get it right. Luckily for us, Hinze Pen Co. always gets it right, and the Sleipnir model is just the latest example of their craftsmanship.When you are dealing with a magical creature as inspiration, how do you bring that forward into a pen design? For starters, how about an eight-sided barrel, matching the number of the mythical beasts legs. If eight sides weren’t enough on its own, they…

It’s the economy, stupid.

Day Eleven in Tokyo. Kagayaki finally lost for the first time this tournament, now 10-1. Hitoshi (8-3) henka’d and drove Kagayaki out, picking up his kachi-koshi. Kayo is the only wrestler at 9-2 in Juryo. Nishikigi looks ready for Makushita. On the flip side, Asahifuji looks ready for Juryo, twisting Meisei down to the ground … Continue reading Aki 2026: Day Eleven

I have tried diagramming on a couple posts but never had a good workflow because I didn’t want Mermaid.js with a massive payload, but maybe D2 is a contender!? I watched this excellent video: Beautiful diagrams in Emacs by Torstein Krause Johansen and it got me interested in reexamining an easy way to integrate diagramming that is both declarative and tangled out, my Mermaid attempt wasn’t that. Yak shaves I’ve started this blog post as a way to try it out directly in my workflow, so this is…

I recently played the Tom Sharkett Edit of LCD Soundsystem's beautiful Home. I ended up playing it several times and dancing around my living room. This then sent me on a bit of a trip down the rabbit hole of LCD alternative mixes, edits, remixes and also Franz Ferdinand covering All My Friends. I'll definitely need to feature this as a cover version of the month in the future.As I listened I made a playlist of my favourites. Expect radical reworkings, prepare to get lost in the music, marvel…

I have been using Typefully for a long time and it is genuinely great, but it supports a fixed set of platforms and I wanted to decide that for myself. So I built my own. Say hello to CogSend, a self-hosted social media scheduler. CogSend is open source under the MIT license and it runs on your own free Cloudflare account. There is no monthly fee and no account with me, and your platform credentials stay in your infrastructure. It currently supports Mastodon, Bluesky, LinkedIn, Threads and X…

Today’s TDC says Invariably I take unintended photos when grabbing my phone or those weird compositions featuring a blurred thumb selfie. Can you make/shae art from an accidental or unntended photo? I usually delete any blurry pics I take, but here’s a long exposure one I took at the weekend by mistake. It was very windy! Windy Findhorn flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license I headed over to Lunapic to artify it Artified Findhorn flickr photo…