History shows that societies can normalize destructive ideas until they become “common sense.” The tragedy of the Irish Famine illustrates how blinded dogmatic thinking becomes more powerful than human need. Food existed, yet the prevailing political economy treated markets, property rights, and profit as more important than preventing mass suffering. The disaster was not simply natural; it was shaped by human choices and by the values those choices expressed. Today we face a different crisis,…
NASA has released a new 3D model of the Earth’s gravitational field. “The geoid is an equipotential surface that can be thought of as the shape an ocean surface would take due to the Earth’s… More
♠ Today I learned: Atuin ships hooks that capture commands executed by AI LLM coding agents into the same shell history as mine. As of today there are hooks for Claude Code, OpenAI Codex and Pi. % atuin hook --help Manage AI-agent shell hooks Usage: atuin hook atuin hook <COMMAND> Commands: install Install hooks for an AI agent to capture commands in atuin history help Print this message or the help of the given subcommand(s) install --help doesn’t list which agents are supported, but a bogus…
Last edited 0 minutes ago. This is my 37th month of August on this earth as a human being. The past year of my life has been... eventful. Unfortunately. One might even say it's been a series of unfortunate events, but I've heard this is copyrighted or whatever. I've been financially struck due to my own mental issues, lost a couple of big jobs and with it a lot of my professional confidence. It's been a very slow path of trying to get out of this mess I've created, and there's been plenty of…
A horror lede from Bloomberg's Olivia Carville:→ Bloomberg
On July 20, 2026, I saw the Union Pacific "Big Boy" 4014 steam through Valley Park on its way from St. Louis to Jefferson City. Camera issues with my large Sony prevented me from taking pictures--my batteries just had to die at that moment! However, L. held my iPhone and captured a 49-second video of the train passing through, so this was my best view of the locomotive as it breathed its way through humid Missouri air that morning: ✉️ Reply by Email 🫧
Thin fog forms as the rising sun begins warming the humid air and rain-soaked vegetation. I look for the half moon, still high overhead, in a large patch of blue.
More or Less If anything, he looks as surprised as I am at the notion of being awake. Or surprised at the notion that I haven't done a true "Snowapple says good morning" post since December. He's been in other posts but the format itself really stopped a long time ago and I hadn't even realized. The sleeping habits of all the cats have shifted over the year and Snoops generally sleeps in our room upstairs, which means when I get up for work and do my morning stuff downstairs (which usually…
The Juilliard School announced a multimillion-dollar acoustic renovation to its legendary Morse Recital Hall this week. Known for its intimate setting, the upgrades will enhance the reverberation and tonal warmth for both soloists and small ensembles. The space has long been celebrated as the premier venue for musicians demanding absolute acoustic fidelity.“The new paneling will allow performers to fully explore the dynamic range of the room,” said Juilliard’s director of contemporary…
In 2003, Nintendo solved their own problem it had spent more than a decade creating.The original Game Boy Advance was technically brilliant, but it inherited one frustrating flaw from every Game Boy before it: unless you happened to be standing beneath perfect lighting, its screen could be pretty difficult to see. The Game Boy Advance SP changed everything. Folding neatly into a pocket, introducing a rechargeable battery, and eventually receiving one of the most beloved backlit displays…
Charlie Kurth, currently Professor of Philosophy at Clemson University, will be moving to the University of Georgia. Professor Kurth is known for his work in ethics, philosophy of psychology, and philosophy of mind. He is the author of The Anxious Mind: An Investigation into the Varieties & Virtues of Anxiety (MIT, 2018) and Emotion (Routledge, 2022) as well as many other works. For more information on his publications, see here. He will be taking up his new position at UGA as Professor of…
In the autumn of 1998, a hedge fund called Long-Term Capital Management lost roughly $4.6 billion in about four months and had to be unwound by a consortium of banks assembled at the Federal Reserve’s request, for fear its collapse would take the rest of Wall Street down with it. The fund’s principals included two Nobel laureates in economics and a team that had, by any ordinary measure, done the math correctly. Their models of bond spreads were not naive. They had been checked, refined, and…
Annexing the Bronx made perfect sense from the perspective of nineteenth-century New Yorkers. The city of New York was growing northward up Manhattan island and, while it had not yet filled all of the space, the end of that form of expansion was in sight. The semi-rival city of Brooklyn had far more space to expand and, prior to the completion of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883, discussion of New York and Brooklyn being something other than rivals was rare. The area we call the Bronx, on the other…
You could read today’s Cory Doctorow column or you could watch this Nathan MacIntosh bit. 😉
I’m in an Air BnB in Wilmington, Delaware right now and somewhere between airport layovers, North Carolina micro-breweries, high school golf tournaments, and road trips through the Piedmont of NC and Virginia, I lost track of what day of the week it was. For some reason, it has really bothered me that I got my days messed up and double posted on Monday and posted on Tuesday thinking it was Wednesday. Here’s the fix: Music Monday:…
From time to time I venture opinionated answers to questions people have about making notes — and right now is one of those times. NB: A Zettelkasten is a simply the German term for a box with paper slips in, a once-popular way for scholars and writers to make and keep their notes. By extension it’s the name of a contemporary method for making digital notes too; but is there a Zettelkasten method? — Question: What made it click for you, and what do you wish you knew before starting? I’ve been…
Hey, Bear. The deployment was somewhat chill and short, 17 days. We setup the new position and worked without being hit. The way back also was easy and fast. This post is not about it. I am actually home right now. Just washed off the donbass dirt from myself and lying on my huge and clean bed. I am renting this place for about 10 years. I wasn't here since I got enslaved by this system. Almost everything at the place where I left it.. I know where is my stuff and I have everything I need here.…
Whereby I discuss why we're seeing an increasingly aggressive rejection of LLMS by niche hobby communities...
I am delighted to announce that my book, Logic for Programmers, is now available! You can check out the release site here or go directly to buy the ebook or print versions. If you bought any of the early access versions, you can get the 1.0 for free from leanpub. This has been a long time in the making. Formal logic is an incredibly powerful tool to understand software. Everything from “what’s a left outer join” to “why shouldn’t Square inherit from Rect” makes more sense if you know just the…
TL;DR If you’re migrating between hosting services that both use Cloudflare then don’t be surprised when you see the old site after cutting over DNS to the new provider. Your request is going into the new IP, but being served from the old cache. The old provider needs to be de-provisioned so that Cloudflare can pick up the new content. Background My Atsign colleagues have spent the last few months working on a new atsign.com website, and yesterday was go live day. I was drafted in to take care…
Two boats docked behind a berm. Introduction Many years ago (over a decade) I wrote an article about RSS Feed reader alternatives after Google announced they were killing Reader in March 2013. That article attracted a fair amount of attention, including a request from RedHat to republish the article on their blog. On the ten-year anniversary of the death of Google Reader, the Verge published Who killed Google Reader?(pay-walled article), indicating (to me) that even a decade on there was still…
02-08-26 And a fantasic trip to Saltoun Big Wood. Things are beginning to kick off there but still a little less than full gas as the devil's bit scabious is only starting to bud. That is the purple flowering stems that line the back trail on either side and lure all the insects in the place out, to put on an exhibition of butterflies that I rarely see elsewhere in Scotland.red admiralI like to put festival in the title of a blog around now to remind readers that the 17 Edinburgh Festivals are…
What skillOverrides controls, its four visibility states, and why it touches your own skills but not plugin skills
This image was actually an accident (as is so often the case). I wanted to take a direct shot of the rainbow. But the autofocus decided to focus on the raindrops. By the time I noticed, the moment had already passed. And it just so happened to turn out to be a photo I couldn't have done better myself. Reply by email
Often, when leading a singing workshop, singers will start putting chairs out or standing in a circle. It’s maybe not the way I’d planned, but I’ll usually go with it. It turns out my singers are often more capable than they realise. I’m rarely fixed on how to arrange the singers. Sometimes we’ll work in a circle, sometimes we’ll face a wall so I can put large lyric sheets up. Sometimes we’ll stand, other times we’ll sit in rows. It depends on the songs I’m teaching, the layout of the space,…
In the last year, I've been through over a dozen cities and used public transport in all of them. It is wild just how confusing and complex buying a ticket can be. While some cities obviously take a user-centred approach to ticketing, others appear to take a Kafkaesque delight in a bureaucratic maze of zones, apps, and intricate restrictions. One of the seminal texts in computer systems design is "Don't Make Me Think". Every time a service forces the user into making a decision, it is placing a…
Time for a minor orchid update. First off the UK has essentially been seeing temperatures in the high 20s°C and regularly over 30°C since May. This summer has been the hottest and driest I can remember. I largely grow cool growing cloud forest orchids in a grow tent under L.e.d lights in my garage. It should be cool enough in the summer and able to be heated easily and cheaply in the winter. This year however the extreme temps and lack of cooling at night has meant utter disaster for my plants.…
Not long ago I revisited some favorite places on the National Road in Putnam County, Indiana. One of them was this short stretch of concrete road east of Reelsville. This photo is eastbound, from the intersection with CR 800 W. Notice how the concrete appears to curve off to the right, and the road beyond is gravel. It’s a long story that I told here, but the concrete was removed past that curve and no road exists there anymore. Here’s the westbound road toward its dead end just ahead of modern…
Mastodon is a truly decentralised micro-bloging platform. Anyone sufficiently motivated, and technically proficient, can start their own instance, or community. Depending on the administrator, instances can be completely isolated, accessible only to its members, or federated, that is, interconnected to all other instances that are likewise federated. Presently there eight-thousand instances, give or take, and each has, or can have, its own individual community guidelines and moderation…
I have a friend who was a pretty prolific guitar teacher. And he used to go to this super-rich guy’s house to teach him lessons. This guy was so rich (how rich is he?) that said friend actually had to go through a service door. Like, there was a different door for people who were coming to the house to work. LOLs. Then he would go into this room filled with super-expensive guitars, but in my friend’s words, not awesome expensive guitars. They were not cool, but stupid-expensive. And some…
