I feel like I’ve written about the idea that God does not coerce but instead lures us toward greater justice, beauty, and etc a few times already. So rather than focus on this, or indeed the relational nature of the text [Matthew 10:40-42], I want to point out that process thought insists that every small thing is important. In fact there are no ‘big things’ really – only collections of ‘small things’. Everything is made up of cells, cells are made of atoms, atoms are made of sub-atomic…
Last week, I shared my frustration with not getting a solution to work out for the new project I was working on–a design/build for the True Woman ‘27 Conference that Revive Our Hearts will put on at the end of September 2027. Over the weekend, I had a new idea on how to tackle the problem and was successful in pulling it off. The evolution of a solution As I mentioned last week, one of the logo variations had a “punched out” shape element. I wanted to punch out that shape from a div within the…
Ready for a confession? I didn’t love Balatro, the roguelike poker deck-building game from a couple years back. Don’t get me wrong, the number-go-up part of my brain adored Balatro. But the rest, the foam of consciousness so certain it’s in control of the mammalian beast, the me suspicious of anything hypnotic, found the whole process incredibly off-putting. Which, of course, is why I played it for (oh no) 76.9 hours, about which I cannot tell you a single anecdote. Which, incidentally, is also…
Loop engineering convinced me. Not because it’s clever — because done right, it doesn’t bankrupt you. This post captures where I’ve landed: a responsible way to run loops at scale without burning a hole in your pocket. Naysayer → Believer ## I’ve been a vocal naysayer. Not because the approach doesn’t work — it works. The costs never justified it. No surprise — the people singing its praises usually aren’t the ones paying the API bills. But when Peter & Boris tell you something, you look…
How the most disrespected role in software quietly became everyone's actual jobFor about a decade we ran a quiet campaign to abolish the manual QA. Nobody announced it from the stage at the all-hands, but the intent was unmistakable. Shift left. Automate everything. Build the test pyramid. If a living human had to open the app and click a button to confirm it worked, that was treated as a defect in the process - a smell, evidence that someone upstream had failed to write enough Selenium tests.…
Actually, the best of Ludlow was two posts back, but as I haven't included the brewery tap or Black Country Ales pub, I figured I could squeeze in one more Shropshire blog post.If only as an excuse for a little bit more timber-framed glory...And one of the more unusual places to find Union Berlin stickering...Normally we would have made a beeline for the brewery not long after arriving in town. But Mrs PropUptheBar diligently checked opening times before letting me make a wasted journey after…
Time to curl into a ball and hug my Steam Deck (I initially wrote Machine in a Freudian daze). So, the time has finally come, Valve has now announced the price of the Steam Machine, and as feared, it is expensive. Even at the low end with the 512GB version without a controller it is £879!! Then at the other end, for the 2TB version with a controller it goes up to £1,208!! Oh, but it does come with two additional face plates. Now, is this extreme price point Valve's fault? Technically no. It is…
You can already point an AI agent at your Filament admin panel and have it click around like a human. Take a screenshot, find the button, fill the form, submit, screenshot again to check it worked. With computer-use or a browser MCP, that works today. It’s also slow, brittle, and spends a small fortune in tokens describing pixels to figure out where the “Save” button is.
The latest State of Unreal happened at Unreal Fest and, as I had a feeling would happen, the other shoe of Epic’s grand plan has finally dropped. Unreal Engine is about to change. Significantly. Before I harp about Epic’s changes, I should probably set my stall out. In my opinion, Unreal Engine is the best game engine that I’ve ever used. By far. No question. It’s not without its problems, but in terms of workflow, speed of development, shipping, scalability and stability, it is years ahead of…
Leisure LINC went online as a Tymnet/Telenet-hosted service in September 1986, offering game matchmaking, news, member chat and mail. It was especially known for its chess focus, including an official partnership with the U.S. Chess Federation, but it also supported other classic games such as checkers and backgammon. What helped set it apart from similar services was the dedicated client software, LINCware, which was intended to give users a more graphical experience. It apparently had a lot…
Sam Taylor Wood, Still Life (2001) It’s amazing how long a nation can live with a bad idea. And how that idea ages, sours, rots and attracts all sorts of rodents. Of course I’m talking about Brexit. I was ten years younger when I watched the Newcastle results from a hotel room in Anstruther, where I was taking part in a workshop organised by Mozilla with people from all over the world. I would later spend almost £1.5K to get naturalised in January 2018. I learnt how to deal with…
I just realized I’ve had a link to this post by bulbul sitting around for months, and by gad I’m finally gonna share it! In the history of native Syriac linguistic tradition [1], Išoʕyahḇ Bar Malkōn (d. early 13th century) is the odd man out. It is not that he is unknown or forgotten: his grammatical works are preserved in a not insignificant number of manuscript copies and his name is listed with other grammarians in overviews of Syriac literature compiled by modern scholars, as well as his…
the light never goes out only the colour changes just enough to know it is night there is no shadow to hide in when you slide my dress off one shoulder then the other you hold my gaze as you hold my body warm against yours not leaving any room for shame
Here are the Pokémon that can learn two of the most popular weather-setting moves in the game.
This post is a reply to: https://kevquirk.com/no-i-dont-want-you-to-summarise-the-page I read Kev’s post this morning. And, I completely share his opinion on this. I’m fed up with companies forcing AI into every fucking app. At work, we use the full range of big tech packages: Zoom, Slack, Okta and many more. Of course, they all have their Companions, which the Stasi would have loved 😡. The other day, I was joking about something with my manager, and usually, he loves those kind of jokes. But,…
This comic was originally funded by members of my Patreon, to whom I am endlessly grateful. If you like it and want to see more, why not become a member yourself? The post Greebo Chapter 2: Enter Car Maiden appeared first on Other Strangeness — merritt k.
Solstice day in Iceland, from midnight to midnight.
So as I start writing this piece, I have just finished (remotely) watching Nicholas O'Brien's talk at Narrascope, "I know narrative designers who use branching dialog and they’re all cowards". I'm not going to get into summarizing the exact contents of the talk itself, I think Nicholas can do that in his own words, but here's the summary as given on the conference schedule: Branching narrative is widely used in indies and AAA games, but does it inherently increase player agency? I argue that if…
Esmeralda Whitammer, Sara Wade, Vincent Fortuin, Konstantina Palla, and Theodore Papamarkou write: We are organising a focused workshop on Rethinking the Role of Bayesianism in the Age of Modern AI from October 26 to 30, 2026, bringing together researchers exploring the frontiers of Bayesian machine learning and deep learning. The meeting will take place in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK, and will be hosted by the University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics. This workshop follows in the footsteps…
Many typists, including me, were sad to learn that Charlene Oesch died recently. Her small business, Baco Ribbons, was my go-to source; I used hundreds if not thousands of her nylon ribbons on Underwood-style spools, as well as several big rolls and some specialty items: she could provide narrow ribbons for adding machines, toy typewriters, and more.Baco was not the last typewriter ribbon manufacturer. You can find some other sources here. But Charlene will certainly be missed.In The Typewriter…
When did summer arrive? The last few months have flown by. Summer is my least favorite time of year, and also the season that feels like it drags on the longest. The excessive heat and humidity keep me mostly indoors, making exercise a lot harder and less enjoyable. We do enjoy visits to the nearby pool with friends, at least. A long expected tripWe are freshly back from a two-week family vacation across Europe. We have been planning this trip for over three years, but we kept pushing it back…
Butterfield Market, NYC Permalink. Tagged chocolate, france and nyc. Reply by email.
In economic terms AI will make super intelligence a factor of production.
I've been taking my tarot study more seriously this year and observed that being separated from all my books while I was in NJ for a month forced me to reflect on my personal interpretations. We just came out of Gemini season which is said to be connected to the suit of swords, and I realized I have a lot of problems with the suit's popular associations. Firstly, why are swords associated with air? People say that the air element represents one's mental state, but I can't reconcile the idea…
Let f be an even function with period π. Then the following remarkable theorem by Lobachevsky holds. This theorem is useful in Fourier analysis and signal processing. It’s useful to know even in the special case f(x) = 1. Related posts Sinc and jinc integrals Sinc and jinc sums The post Lobachevsky’s integral formula first appeared on John D. Cook.
So the Steam Machine's pricing was just announced. As a refresher:Semi-custom AMD Zen 4 6C / 12TSemi-custom AMD RDNA3 28CUs16GB DDR5 + 8GB GDDR6 VRAMmicroSD card slotWi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3, Gigabit ethernetIntegrated Steam Controller wireless adapterSmall form factor, ~6 inch cubeSteamOS 3And there are four total SKUs:512 GB model: $1,0491,509 CAD / 1,039 EUR / 879 GBP / 1,609 AUD / 4,389 PLN 512 GB w/ Controller: $1,128 USD1,628 CAD / 1,108 EUR / 938 GBP / 1,728 AUD / 4,698 PLN2 TB model:…
okay whats up vibe: drinking a coffee i made and then got cold because my dog seems to know when i make a fresh cup of coffee and thats when she wants to go outside and i'm lazy and not carrying a cup of coffee around while i stand and watch my dog sniff the same spots she always does. and texting a few ppl... trying to make summer plans even though june is mostly over. gas is $5.45 a gallon!! which was suspiciously cheap for a chevron... summer blend works like shit. thanks california. i have…
I think a lot about rot and rotting because the rot is something that's featured prominently in my life in recent years. In my mind, the rot is something that creeps up on you when you aren't doing enough to take care of yourself. The rot may creep up on you even if you are taking care of yourself, if you aren't doing enough to take care of others. After all, we all live in one world, and when the rot comes for others it will inevitably come for you too. The rot has both an individual and…
Miles in a experimental mood. View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize A different Miles album for sure from what I’m used to, where he steps into his electric period. The music is stretched, experimental and is very much jazz fusion.I like this stuff and we still have Shorter, Hancock and Williams from the second great quintet. Some other great jazz cats as well in Dave Holland and…
