On June 21, 2026 I switched the site from Jekyll to Astro and rebuilt the theme from scratch. Here's why.

Through a glass, brightly A window in a lovely old Yorkshire hotel Quote of the Day ”The markets are moved by animal spirits, and not by reason.” John Maynard Keynes C.f. the current AI ‘investment’ bubble Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Abdullah Ibrahim | Bra Timing From Phomolong Link Long Read of the Day Sovereign AI is really hard to achieve This is a really sobering read from Anton Leicht on what Europe would need to do to achieve AI sovereignty. It was prompted by the fact…

This article was originally (partially) a thread on social media,which is why it is formatted with lots of images and short responses.The text is about the image below that paragraph. This time we”ll be looking at ‘De boerendans’ (the farmer’s or peasant’s dance) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, from c. 1567.I love Pieter’s art & of course I love art that depicts an era generally still considered to be bland, dark & horrid, as also being a bit fun. Adorable, big kid dancing with little kid, I…

On the blog this week, we’re talking about melting down, and not just because summer in the northern hemisphere is hot. Add your thoughts here. In honor of the recent release of The Elusive Earl as an audio book (see Apple, Spotify, Audible, and the library channels), I’ve discounted the ebook edition in the web store to $.99 for the rest of June. I’ll probably discount The Besotted Baron next month, so if you don’t yet have that ebook, be patient and save a few bucks!

Another bit of nostalgia to file under: Things that influenced me beyond measure.Currently Listening: Depeche Mode “New Life”Reply via email

Once a month my coworkers and I play a game together. This is the story of a game that I worked on for 47 days, a game meant to be played for only 30 minutes at one of those sessions. My turn to host our team’s online “Social” was on May 28, 2026. Far in advance, I already knew what I wanted them to play. This game was just an idea in my head, but no matter: I figured that I could manually “run the game” by hand using ChatGPT. My personal philosophy is to first do a thing 100% manually, then…

Photo by Garonzi Stefania via Wikimedia CommonsA pizza wheel — also known as a rolling pizza cutter or just a “pizza cutter” — is not a great tool for cutting pizza. I know that’s a statement that’s going to anger a lot of people when I say it, but it’s true. I’m hardly alone in saying this — Wirecutter, Eater.com, and plenty of others have noted the same drawbacks. But anyway, let’s go through the many reasons why pizza cutters are not fit for the job they’re named after.First, it’s hard to…

Fables de La Fontaine - Epinal (public domain) Earlier this year, Antrhopic announced a large language model (LLM) called Mythos, a model they claimed to be so powerful for finding software exploits that it was too dangerous to release to the general public123. Instead, they provided a limited release of this model to select organizations as part of Project Glasswing4. Then, last week, Antrhopic released a version of this model called Fabel5. Current subscribers were allowed an entire three…

☀️ Happy Summer Solstice everyone. As a Humanist I feel like celebrating specific scientific world events. Also I kinda like the fact that the first day of summer is ‘linked’ to Father’s Day and Mother’s Day is linked to the first day of spring. The next one is the Autumn solstice.

Beautiful art from No Score Draws to commemorate Cabo Verde’s first ever goal at a World Cup, scored from a long range free kick by Kevin Pina. The post A Cabo Verde shock on the card appeared first on Playrface.

I can’t talk to people, especially women. From the start, I have had this problem. With people whom I think are richer than me or in a better condition than me, my voice automatically goes down, and I start acting like that woman who is around a group of her boyfriends, just staying there in silence, maybe looking at the phone, but I don’t like to use the phone other than in my personal space. I don’t even like to watch pirated movies, just sitting there observing everyone. And with women, if I…

When I was a teen, I liked buying incense from the alternative/hippie stores downtown. I burned it in my room, with the windows closed, and never gave a thought to what I was inhaling or what it might be doing to my lungs. As a middle-aged person, I've given up on incense, but I have many, many scented candles. Some of these have a story: they were gifts, or were acquired on a trip or other memorable occasion. Most are without provenance: I have utterly no recollection of how or when they were…

Next tickets available 18th July for The Gentle Author’s Tour of Spitalfields Ron McCormick photographed Whitechapel & Spitalfields in the early seventies and these pictures were exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1973. Hessel St Royal Oak, Whitechapel Rd Old Montague St Blooms, Whitechapel High St Old Montague St Old Montague St Princelet St Black Lion Yard Fournier St Brick Lane Club Row Brick Lane Settle St, Whitechapel Great Eastern Buildings, Quaker St Woodseer St Great Eastern…

There are many terrific titles coming this summer from the Warner Archive Collection, and I've already discovered a particular favorite, POSSESSED (1931).POSSESSED stars the sizzling team of Joan Crawford and Clark Gable. I'll mention right off the bat this movie has no connection to Crawford's later film of the exact same name.POSSESSED is a very "pre-Code" fantasy in which lower class working girl Marian Martin (Crawford) goes to the big city and lands herself a big fish who will make all her…

…was the day I finally stopped over-optimising my plain text lists Moving my tasks away from apps to plain text lists was supposed to simplify everything. To take the pressure off. So why have I spent so many years optimising them? Because I didn’t understand the job they did best. Every task manager does these 3 things Before getting on with the doing, task management requires you to identify three main things — What needs to be done, broken into discrete steps When you can realistically do…

So the management company called us last Monday and sent a guy to check out our fan last Wednesday(They said that it would take about an hour)What I was impressed with was this...this thing that has tape (green) attached to plastic filmHe used it to cover areas that he didn't want to get dirtyThen he took the fan apart, measured things and took photos of thingsHe said that easiest way to fix

Lena and Ian's house is finally done! Or it's done enough...for now. These projects have a way of stretching on and on, because there's always some cool new accessory or decoration that can be added. For example, not only did we squeeze in a record player from the last review, but Lena will be sifting through some Mini Brands Masterpieces artwork today to see if any of it can be

There is this amazing thing that exists in the indie dyer world: Advent Kits. If you’ve never seen one, picture this: an indie yarn dyer puts together a set of yarn and little goodies, packaged so you get to open something fresh every single day leading up to Christmas. A new mini-skein. A surprise notion. A little stitch marker shaped like a tiny disaster. Every day, a new present to yourself. Sarah has been telling me about these for ages, and they are genuinely some of the most creative…

We just witnessed our eleventh straight IndyCar race (twelfth, if you count the 2020 double-header), and I can honestly say I’ve never seen a wilder race at Road America than the one we saw this afternoon. Christian Lundgaard won a whacky race that saw him fall back to dead last after contact with Scott Dixon […]

When Peter Bogdanovich was considering directing DUCK, YOU SUCKER! for Sergio Leone (he everntually chose not to) he asked the maestro “Are you SURE about that title, Sergio?” “YES! IS AMERICAN EXPRESSION!” replied the burly owl. Apparently, any American expression can be relied upon to be a workable film title. Try it yourself. I await […]

A sandboxed target, inputs that influence task difficulty, tools, and a grader.

This takes hours of reading, researching, and spiraling so you don’t have to. Subscribe if you appreciate having a professionally concerned friend in your inbox :)Okay, so I’ve been watching the World Cup like everyone else, which mostly means I’ve become a fake expert on 48 countries I maybe couldn’t have found on a map a month ago. I’m rooting for Côte d’Ivoire against Germany because some choices make themselves. And I’m basically spending every match day praying France doesn’t win. Sorry!!…

I’ve been passively assuming that ANC is bad for you, that it causes tinnitus or something, but it looks like it’s more of a mixed bag. I finally got around to looking this up last week when I was trying to decide which headphones to bring on a flight. The general answer seems to be that, on a flight or other scenario with a steady, loud background noise, ANC works to actually cancel out the noise through destructive sound waves. That means less pressure on your eardrums, making ANC good for…

Been such a cozy weekend with my partner. It's our ten year anniversary tomorrow and while we'll be stuck in with bad weather, it's been a nice weekend regardless. Yesterday we went out and ate at a restaurant we hadn't eaten at before, a nice kinda boat bar right on the river. I love the vibes of the place, and I even treated myself to an alcoholic drink (a Peach on the Beach) which is extremely rare for me (before yesterday it had probably been years). Then we came home and watched Project…

I was reading my blog today. Yes, I do re-read my own writings! Most of them help me realize that you can do the things you fear most. Many … 🐞 Read more about it ➞ ➞ ➞

There’s a new paper out called “PivCo-Huffman” (HTML version with annotations here) and it’s very interesting. Normal Huffman decoding (and, to a lesser extent, encoding) is inherently quite serial. We can get explicit parallelism by using multiple streams, which scales just fine to moderate numbers of streams – something like 4-8 is usually not an issue. Not very suitable for vectorization or wide vector machines like GPUs, though: every extra stream adds signaling overhead in the bitstream,…

Sunset on the longest day, the summer solstice, from the Weston Hills overlooking Baldock. The skies had been cloudy but cleared to reveal a fiery orb in a haze of grey and pink.

Enjoyed the last of the Selkirk Bannock A busy week catching up, dealing with a bit of fallout while I was OOO, picking up a few high-priority bits and doing some product-y evaluation of our backlog Some more good work on rootly-go this week oapi-codegen's now - on main - got initial OpenAPI 3.1 support, which we'll release in a few weeks One night, Morph was wailing at something - it turns out another cat was in one of our flower beds, and didn't want to leave, but don't worry, Cookie helped 🤭…

6 years ago, my son was born on Father’s Day of all days. Today we celebrated both his birthday and Father’s Day. Next one will be in 2037 (I think).