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,…
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…
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.…
♠ 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…
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…
Bridge heading into the smokey landscape. License: CC-0 I read Brennan Kenneth Brown's What have note-taking PKMs accomplished, really?, and found myself writing a lengthy response. But, after I wrote my response I reread Brennan's article and found myself in a bit of a quandary. I found myself asking a simple question: was it intentional that he presented both arguments and counterarguments in his piece? That seemed to have a simple answer: yes. Any good piece of writing should undertake to…
Read the full post at - TIL About The Heritage Conservation and Recreation Service Exhibit 5000+ that Jimmy Carter was a brilliant President -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritage_Conservation_and_Recreation_Service The Heritage Conservation and Recreation Service (HCRS) was an agency within the United States Department of the Interior which subsumed its functions from the National Park Service and Bureau of Outdoor Recreation.[1] It was created under the Carter administration by order of…
A weird coincidence.Read more
I am encouraging it because I actually watch them. Not included here is the raw milk christian trout farm it kept showing me videos of. I can't actually recommend that you watch videos of raw milk drinkers raising trout.
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.
Photo by Jp Valery on Unsplash🍕 I’m JA Westenberg. I write essays about technology, philosophy, productivity, and what it means to be human. If you like ideas that take their time, you’re in the right place.While you’re here, a few things I’ve built: Kerouac, a writing app | Post Through It, a solo microblogging tool | Distributism.ai, my MCP platform | Laterware, all the AI news you need | Studio Self, a thought leadership agency for founders x VCs.You can buy my book Permissionless…
In the last post, I wrote about Forever Goals, which are outcomes I will always want. It’s something I can approach or maintain, not achieve. They are not SMART goals (i.e. Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound). For example, a SMART goal is phrased like this: “losing 5 pounds by the end of the year by doing 4 hours of cardio per week and tracking calories.” A Forever Goal is more like “be fit.” A Forever Goal could have a logo. It should make a good tattoo. I think a SMART…
Anthropic’s “Frontier Red Team”: After reviewing 141,006 evaluation runs where Claude could have obtained internet access, we identified three incidents in which a model accessed the internet from within or while interacting with the evaluation environment of Irregular, one of our third-party evaluation partners, and then gained unauthorized access to the production infrastructure of three different organizations. I do not think A.I. companies are disclosing these security breaches for cynical…
A mistake for them, for you, it's a crime. Only you've seen it done, countless times. Normal things, you claimed were my sins. I felt those crimes. I did, but didn't mean. A small spark, it burned you like a flame. When you noticed what you feard in them. I had kept repeating, that it's not all men. Now myself alone, count as three in them. Just to make a sound. It scares me now. Every step I take, always wrong somehow. I fight them too, the norms that you hate. Unlearning fake privilege, that…
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…
Today, I launched I RSS, a directory for people who love RSS. I’ve already added the badge to my footer and submitted my site to the directory. It also shows a nice live blogroll on the homepage (powered by FeedLand). If you love RSS as much as I do, take a look and add your own website.
Someone says something true and sharp. The response is never "you're wrong". Never "here's why". Always "your language is inappropriate". The content vanishes. The tone becomes the trial. The person who said the thing is now defending how they said it. The person who did the shit walks free. IRC, fediverse, the office, corporate email, academia. Same script. No argument required. The tone was the crime. Someone gets censored. Their response: "it just felt weird". Not "this is nonsense". Weird.…
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…
Today it’s a big talky thinky post, that doesn’t have much to do, directly, with video games. Sorry for that, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while and wanted to get off my chest. If you leave things like this spinning around your head for too long they begin to fester, and I’d also like to give my reasons for having grudges against the likes of Fandom (the wiki company, with a capital-F). Until recently I didn’t have a specific list of things I absolutely won’t give the…
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…
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…
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…
It's now been over a year since I started blogging with Pagecord (and almost as long since I started paying too). Pagecord was not my first blogging platform this decade, nor is it my only one. But, even in just the past year it has really grown as a service. It's partly why I will be allowing my paid subscription to auto-renew, the other is that it was great last year and those key parts that made it great are still there. I have two main blog, this one and my research blog with Pika. Why two…
You could read today’s Cory Doctorow column or you could watch this Nathan MacIntosh bit. 😉
I’ve got a lot going on at the moment which means I’ve not been posting here. Big whoop, right. Yeah, work is busy. At home we are in the last week of Jack attending nursery (his last day tomorrow!) and we are spending next week in Nethybridge —yes the one that was evacuated last week cos of the wildfire in the Cairngorms. I’ll still be working but at least it’s a different location, different (quieter) roads to ride on my bike. As ever this blog is the place that gets dropped, but that’s only…
My Third Blaugust entry, In Which my Gardening Adventures Lead me to find a very pleasant suprise.
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:…
I'm doing (a very lax) Blaugust. This is 3/hopefully 31 posts in August. This is a post I started writing on the 19th of July. I was on holiday in July and I stayed in a little town in France called Vallauris, which is famous for its pottery. It was historically famous for pottery but the artistic side of things really kicked off in the 1950's, when Picasso moved there and started creating ceramic art. This is a Picasso plate, I quite like the layout on this one The cute exterior of a pottery…
