The Model Spec is potentially OpenAI’s most important document. It outlines what they aspire for the model to do, and how it should think. I’ve already covered a previous version in depth, so my strategy this time is to look at the diff. I had a Google Doc created for this purpose, and will be working from there. A bunch of things get moved around or reworded, often piecemeal. There are a lot of line edits, most of which are improvements. I’m focusing on what looks new and important. My main…

It is time for a special Election Day edition of the Pook-Emu Bee links. However, I do not have many election-themed links in my backlog after yesterday. I do have to vote, but we’ll deal with that later (I hope without ode to skunk). But what is later can be done later. Now is the time for links. Cause and Effect? 1 | Mamdani bans NYPD from responding to 311 calls on homeless encampments (Larry Celona, Craig McCarthy, and Jorge Fitz-Gibbon for the New York Post. Sep. 23, 2026.) Beautiful…

I was struck by this ad on the bottom corner of the front page of The Globe on Feb. 13, 1913. The newspaper was founded in 1844, and later absorbed The Mail and Empire to form The Globe and Mail in 1936, according to Wikipedia. A friend of a friend found it in an old cabinet. The ad points out that much of the money Canadians spend on American goods is influenced by U.S. advertising. Over a hundred years later, that still holds true. Ask yourself why you buy certain brands. Are they really any…

Patrick Welsh retired in 2013 after teaching 43 years at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria (VA). Few high school teachers write op-ed columns and of the few that do, Welsh is one I have read many times. He is a clear, crisp, and coherent writer whose work as a teacher and writer I have admired. This article appeared in the Washington Post “Outlook” section on September 27, 2013. Erika Dietz was overwhelmed when she started teaching English at T.C. Williams High School two years ago. Not…

The Endless Museum “3D Wikipedia Game” Every article is a room, every hyperlink a doorway. Wander Wikipedia as an endless museum - or race friends through it. [ 📌arnicas ] Cherry (github) An open source self-hostable bookmark service [ 📌dbuscher ] Welcome to Wildebeest (github) “the Fediverse on Cloudflare” ...an open-source, easy-to-deploy ActivityPub and Mastodon-compatible server built entirely on top of Cloudflare's Supercloud. If you want to run your own spot in the Fediverse you can now…

This is an irregular column that rewinds the clock back some years to see what was on the taps at certain pubs. Too many of these will no doubt be from my local, The Great Northern Railway Tavern (GNRT), in North London that has been a tremendous pub over the years for its beer selection.…

The Green Man's Heirby Juliet E. McKennaGenres: Fantasy, Mystery Pages: 368 Series: Green Man #1 Rating: Synopsis: A hundred years ago, a man with a secret could travel a few hundred miles and give himself a new name and life story. No one would be any the wiser, as long as he didn’t give anyone a reason to start asking questions. These days, that’s not so easy, with everyone on social media, and CCTV on every street corner. So Daniel Mackmain keeps his head down and keeps himself to himself.…

Danmei Web Novel Review: Game Loading by Long QiDo you like stories where it’s only the main couple, with no love triangles or rectangles popping up? Stories where it's just that couple and they’re solid from beginning to end. It’s the two of them against the world, that ride or die kind of relationship. What about the opposite end of the spectrum? Do you prefer harems? Those stories where one character, usually the main one, is the center of everybody’s attention and the object of everyone's…

Another spooky halloween novel. This sci-fi classic written in 1897 was a treat – a horror but v funny in places. The protagonist is a learned but irritable psychopath who uses science to become invisible, a condition that turns out to be in fact an enormous hindrance. Not least because england’s terrible weather and cold proves deleterious to his nefarious schemes as he has to do them all naked to avoid detection. What fun! Download free from Standard eBooks

This is coffeeneuring 1 of 8. I’m sorry to say I did not bike to the coffee place, I walked. I did respect the 3.2km roundtrip minimum, but I had cycled to do errands all morning and really wanted to enjoy the sun for a longer time. My walk brought me to a nice coffee shop that I’ve seen many times but had not visited yet: Gwendoline, in the city center. There’s nothing like a sunny terrasse in November. Lots of sun and nice vintage furniture with a green and pink color scheme. This café has…

Reminds self I live seven miles and work two miles from nuclear ground zero if in fact the first direct side-effect of the heavily anticipated Trump electoral humiliation is Trump angrily dropping nuclear weapons on Iran and the descent into nuclear world war that follows and my concurrent incineration in the literal fallout. Vital Reminder One:Life in the Rootcanalocene. I confess, until a month ago I thought there'd be a major false flag operation in the week before the midterms, someone…

To An Important Midterm Election Day Not that most midterms aren't important in the states (in fact a lot of messes we get into as an electorate often stem from not caring about these elections) but fuckin hell if this one ain't a doozy because a flipped senate could actually be a ray of hope in the constant shitshow that is US Politics. I don't have any hopes in a "blue wave" actually happening; obviously I want that, but there's a loooooot of lingering worries: Right-leaning people tending to…

Watch on YouTubeWork unit routing analysis is one of my secret favorite methods for quickly getting a group’s current state written up with enough detail to get into decision-making, troubleshooting, and fixing stuff. It’s a go-to when I hear people saying ‘we don’t have a process.’ That just means there a bunch of different processes and a chance to fill out a little table so we can understand and compare all of them in a reasonable way.Having tried and failed to write up this method a few…

If you practice writing every day (or anything else, really), you’ll remember quickly that you need to work with what you have. The spare 15 minutes in the morning. Your life experiences until this point, because you don’t have time for research. And no new equipment, just your usual laptop or a pen and paper. Even if you have higher aspirations, it needs to be enough for the day’s practice. This prompt, along with six others, appears in the first chapter of my book Creative Doing. I’ve made it…

I continue to avidly build with the robots on a daily basis. One of the more continually helpful use cases is summarization. Plop in the long, useless marketing email from United Airlines and figure out if there’s something useful in my endless quest for airline status. The answer: it usually finds something worth my time. More importantly, I don’t have to read a long, useless email. Over on the Rands Leadership Slack, I get a lot of questions about “Did you write about wolves at some point?”…

"People don't want to work anymore" is a dead horse that's been beaten to the point of glue. Usually uttered by boomer, petite-bourgeoise types who can't wrap their senile brains around why people don't want to work at their shitty Arby's franchise for $7.50/hr in an area where cost of living requires $15/hr. People who are indignant about forcing people to work have got a neoliberal brain worm eating at their frontal lobe. "People don't want to work anymore", yeah no shit dude, you just…

Having lost a bet I submitted something I was sure would be rejected to the #40C3. Which was rejected as expected. I am going to try to find another home for this talk, let’s see how that goes. Abstract: For decades we have been grounding our infrastructures in free and open source software stacks. But where corporate accumulation and embrace has put pressure on that idea, “AI” is really throwing a bomb into what we thought could be the future, splitting communities in half and cutting off…

Writing and structuring can be highly pleasant tasks. But switching from writing to structuring and formatting is like jumping between your favorite song and your favorite movie every few seconds. You ruin both. The more we enjoy doing one thing, the harder it is to abruptly shift to something else, even if we normally enjoy it, too. — Separate Writing and Formatting Separate the tactical stuff like new functionality, tests, design, refactors, etc. from the strategic stuff like design,…

In the bustle of modern city living, I find that the meaning of the word "pastime", as in something leisurely done to pass away time, without any direct goal of production, is fading away. That a craft set might be designed to be done in multiple sittings (or for multiple people to do together) instead of one-sitting quick wins is becoming a strange concept to people growing up believing that everything must be measurable in terms of output. A scarf might await in the end, a painting might hang…

The lead image, credited to Jobanny Cabrera/Getty Images, for Dhruv Mehrotra, Maddy Varner, and Dell Cameron’s “Massive Leak Exposes 41,000 Homeland Security Workers—Including Undercover ICE Agents” at Wired (28 October 2026) features masked agents linked with pixelated white lines. ▲ Dhruv Mehrotra, Maddy Varner, and Dell Cameron, “Massive Leak Exposes 41,000 Homeland Security Workers—Including Undercover ICE Agents,” Wired (28 October 2026), image credited to Jobanny Cabrera/Getty Images ▲…

A year ago, I started working on an app that was supposed to make journaling feel like posting on social media. I've been using it ever since, and I absolutely love it. I recently finished working on version 2.0 of Zeitgeist, and somehow, it got even better. I'm not shy about complimenting myself, but this app really is something. I love it.

In Eating The Seed Corn I wrote about AI's destruction of entry-level jobs. But Karen Weise's Microsoft Offers Buyouts to 60,000 Employees as It Spends on A.I. reports on a different impact (my emphasis): Microsoft on Monday offered buyouts to a quarter of its work force, the latest effort by the company to rein in costs as it spends heavily on artificial intelligence. ... The “time-limited, voluntary” program grew out of the company’s first ever buyouts earlier this year, she wrote. In April,…

A few weeks ago on her podcast (join the Patreon to hear it!), Ana gave her spicy hot takes about stationery. Today I decided to share my 5 hot takes! NUMBER 1: Pens with plastic barrels and steel nibs with prices of $300-$400 are too expensive for me. Look I’m a fan of a lot of different kind of pens, and I’m not going to name specific brands. But at base, I have fallen out of love with plain plastic barreled pens with steel nibs that have huge price tags. Note, I’m not talking about resin…

Cartoon © KAL and The Economist Artificial Intelligence remains a pejorative term. Opposition to building data centers (the new NIMBY issue) features in our current election cycle. But, stop and look around, not everything about AI is bad. In addition to performing all sorts of routine back office work, AI just solved mathematical problems that had defied mathematicians for years. Actually by October 6th OpenAI was claiming to have solved 372 of them. No matter that a mathematician friend…

Chrome Chasm :: The Aquarium Drunkard InterviewI haven’t done a ton of interviews for Aquarium Drunkard this year, but they’ve all been good — Matt Valentine, Styrofoam Winos, Andy Beta, Willis Alan Ramsey … and now, Chrome Chasm! A cool chat that ranges from Tarot cards to Pink Floyd to Jandek and more. The multi-talented Chrome Chasm, featuring Tom Carter, Mlee Marie and Will Adams, just unleashed their first vinyl situation after a handful of cassettes. And it is magnificent, a total trip…

Yesterday night, after a lot of internal back-and-forth, I finally took the leap & deleted my Pinterest account that I created 10 years ago. As an effort to progressively reduce my online presence, I decided to start with this platform since I'm not using it that often. For me, Pinterest was always a place to daydream and to imagine other possibilities. One of the rare places on the internet where I would feel calm. Not overstimulated, not too bothered by the existing ads... just relaxed.…

Today's #30DayMapChallenge is Polygons.At the risk of starting World War III, I've created a map of Poland's Historical Borders. The map uses polygons to show how Poland's borders have changed at different points in its history. The historical boundaries were downloaded from OpenHistoricalMap.The map includes three snapshots: the semi-autonomous Congress Kingdom of Poland in 1815, the Second Polish Republic immediately before the German and Soviet invasions of 1939, and the post-war borders…

Here’s yet another from HongKongFoodies.com! Lots of hard to find Hong Kong Demae Iccho over there! It’s voting day! Go vote – or else! Satay sounds very interesting – let’s do it. Nissin Demae Iccho Instant Macaroni Satay Beef Flavour – Hong KongNissin Demae Iccho Instant Macaroni Satay Beef Flavour – Hong Kong Detail of the packaging (click to enlarge). Contains chicken, fish, and crustaceans. To prepare, boil pasta in 450ml water for 3 minutes. Add in sachet contents. Finally, stir and…

I got inspired to write this post after reading an article published on the BBC website entitled A bust-up between mathematicians is fuelling fears that AI could undermine science, that I feel compelled to demolish. The piece is written by a journalist who, according to his resume on the self-advertising platform known as Wikipedia, studied physics for 3 years. That would have given him a Bachelor or M.Sc. – clearly not a Ph.D., therefore someone like most M.D.: without first hand experience of…

This post went to Patronizers at the beginning of October, and to the public at the beginning of November. Not a Patronizer? You could be! I’d like to say that the title of this month’s post is a clever pun in some way, meant to either expand your vocabulary or troll your deficient vocabulary. It is not. Terry Pratchett said, “They say that the prospect of being hanged in the morning concentrates a man’s mind wonderfully; unfortunately, what the mind inevitably concentrates on is that it is in…