It’s so easy to encounter people battling depression. It’s so easy to hear someone say “I wanted to kill myself” or “I felt my life wasn’t worth living.” It’s so difficult to hear someone say “I’m getting happier every day” or “I’m excited about my future.” Why is that? Some say we are born to suffer indefinitely. Some say, living in this materialistic society as laborers and consumers, we can’t break free from the race to prove our worth by accumulating more wealth. I look around. Even monks…

I mentioned in a prior post that I’d noticed the report cards and the grades were inconsistent. Nobody asked about it, but it bugged me, so I’ve gone in and tidied things up a bit. Graphics The card at the top of every report card is now generated. For years I hand-built each one. Not only were there inconsistencies, but it meant I occasionally had to do rework. But now the site builds the card itself using the same layout, type sizes, and spacing every time. Twenty-four of the twenty-eight…

I came across an interesting framework of AI accountability, in an article by Olivia Farrar in Harvard Magazine (not yet online). The following are reading notes.First, Olivia brought up MyCity, which is an AI chatbot launched by New York City in 2024. As with other customer-service chatbots, the AI was trained on data about business rules and regulations, in order to answer people's questions about business rules and regulations. It probably answers quite a few questions competently but it's…

The world is such a mess, partly this is because we use fear as a motivation to grasp for control were we should be reach for competence instead. The mess this makes needs shovels to work at composting, it is what tools like the #OMN are trying to provide, but to close this circle we have to first make them, then pick them up, then use them to shovel the #techshit into compost that is in part feeding this mess. So what is blocking this work? In part it is we use language irresponsibly, and…

A philosopher who has “long been skeptical of journal rankings” based on polls or Scopus data has developed a new way of assessing philosophy journals: by how frequently their articles are cited in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Tadeusz Ciecierski, a philosopher at the University of Warsaw, describes his method: The idea is simple: rank journals by citations to their articles in the bibliographies of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy…

No one talks about the different degrees of manhood or the early years when manhood is on the horizon. But I often find myself questioning the past or the times when I was disloyal to my truths and failed to follow my dreams.No one notices how the younger freedoms of an earlier life is a fleeting thing, which is moving fast and growing farther behind me. No one sees this until it is too late and the past is a far-moving thing that grows more distant without closure or a proper goodbye.I say…

Most AI coding stories start from a blank page. Mine did too. When I built ScottAdamsSaid, I started with an… The post Vibe Coding a Legacy PHP App: Web2Project Edition appeared first on Caseysoftware.

The Midterm elections have me pondering political dysfunction in DC. My ire is focused on the Republican Party and Donald Trump. His policies come from a series of space balloons he floats to see what gets MAGA traction, or from neural misfires that history has proven do not work. Trump’s leadership has nothing to do with governing the country. It is about what is good for Donald Trump. His Presidency is a triumph of ignorance. His eruptions of unexamined thoughts provide a capsule review of…

“Autumn leaves don’t fall, they fly. They take their time and wander on this their only chance to soar.” - Delia OwensHello friends! I’m hoping today turns out to be an auspicious day for democracy. Migration seems to have picked up, even though it is running “late” by my calculations! I saw loons for the first time this week. Now I just need them to come closer!Here are my photo choices for today:Sunrise, October 30, 2026, with the winds of migration blowing.Nothing says “harvest moon” like…

Operation Sea Orbit: On 31 July 1964, USS Enterprise (CVAN-65) (bottom), USS Long Beach (CGN-9) (center) and USS Bainbridge (DLGN-25) (top) formed “Task Force One,” the first nuclear-powered task force, and sailed 26,540 nmi (49,190 km) around the world in 65 days. Accomplished without a single refueling or replenishment, “Operation Sea Orbit” demonstrated the capability of nuclear-powered surface ships. The world’s first nuclear-powered flattop and the longest carrier ever constructed (at…

B&T has been around since 1991 and has an interesting history, along with some seriously top-shelf stuff. (Photos: Chris Eger/Guns.com) B&T’s facility and headquarters in Thun, Switzerland, suffered a catastrophic fire late last week, and leftist terror groups are claiming responsibility, apparently tied to the company’s less-lethal offerings being used against riots elsewhere in Europe. No one was injured, but the damage is estimated at 12 to 20 million Swiss francs ($15 to $24 million USD),…

Patriot, Vietnam vet, publisher, and Cold War legend Robert Brown has passed away, leaving behind generations of gun enthusiasts who spent much of their youth scanning newsstands for his publications. Born in Monroe, Michigan, in November 1932, Brown served in the U.S. Army from 1954 to 1957 and again from 1964 to 1985. A Green Beret, he served with Special Forces in Vietnam and retired as a lieutenant colonel. Long the beacon in the newsstand for those who yearned to meet interesting people in…

Everything changes, although some things change slower than others. Scientific writing and publishing are among those slower things; and yet they do change. One of the more dramatic changes in the publishing landscape over the last couple of decades has been the rise of preprinting – or more accurately, the spread of preprinting from physics […]

The ancient oceans were full of watchful eyes. Some bulged. Some perched on stalks. And some belonged to animals that looked at the world through crystal lenses.Meet the trilobites.Armoured, joint-legged and occasionally extravagantly spiny, these marine arthropods had a remarkable approach to eyewear. Many built their eye lenses from calcite.Yes, a mineral.Long before anyone peered through a

If you have stopped by Spam Resource or Wombatmail recently, you might have noticed a few changes around here. It’s been updates on updates on updates recently. Updated design, templates, styling, code, cleaning up cruft left and right. And, also, updating the data shared over on Wombatmail.That data refresh brings us right to the latest snapshot over on Wombatmail’s Ranking Mailbox Providers by MX page, calculating counts for where inbound mail goes for the top domains.For the first time in a…

When I first started playing dance weekends I would fly Friday and Monday, and I quickly realized that if I took two vacation days for each I'd run out of vacation. [1] The typical dance weekend schedule, however, is Friday evening, all day Saturday, and Sunday until early afternoon: if you live near an airport with a lot of direct flights, it's possible to do this without missing any work! The pattern I've used for most dance weekends is: Fly Thursday evening, after work. Work remotely Friday.…

The BBC considers how today's elections might turn out and offers three possible outcomes -- Democratic wave, Democratic trickle, and a good night for Republicans -- as well as why each could occur, based on polling data and its limitations.More importantly, it offers early signs as the results come in for election-watchers who value their sleep.I value my sleep even more than most and almost always skip the news entirely on election nights, and plan to do the same here.Nevertheless, if I do…

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I had such a great time guesting on the latest episode of In Research Of... with Blake Smith and Jeb Card, where we looked back on a late 1980 episode of Leonard Nimoy’s In Search Of... about the real threat of volcanic eruptions in the US. This particularly episode of ISO was aired only about 5 months after the huge eruption of Mt St Helens. The focus was on how it could happen again. We discovered some interesting side notes about the show and the people who appeared in it. Enjoy it on you…

10:58 - I can confidentially say that 7.5 pancakes is too much for one person. I gave the rest to Daniel who ended up having to lie down afterwards. (I mean, he had to eat 7.5 of his own pancakes.) I think we're gonna have to take a pancake break after this...

We've had a few cold and almost snowy days, but Halloween was nice. I was itchy to get out of the house and take one of the cameras for a walk. I went down to Fish Creek, walking a short loop from Shannon Terrace to bridge 1 and back.Just so you know, none of these photos are immortal winners that will change your life. These are whatever caught my eye, without thinking about it much. I've been mostly doing film lately, and I think about that completely differently. All of these are places I've…

The post Oct 2026 | Photo 365 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

One way to think about the impact of social media on a person is to think of the two things it does at once. On the one hand, it keeps feeding you people and content that align with your worldview, confirming what you already believe. At the same time, it sprinkles in people and content that are the exact opposite, enough to spark outrage. Both extremes generate engagement, so the feed keeps serving both. No feed is built to make you think better or sharpen your views. It’s built to maximize…

A checklist to move from HTML Minifier Next to HTML Minifier—now maintained again—, which is mostly a matter of renaming.

A checklist to work through the breaking changes when updating from HTML Minifier 4.0.0, released in 2019.

Now that we understand Euhemerism we can look at Ælfric of Eynsham's example of it in his essay De falsis deis ("On false gods"). A handful of manuscripts survive, at least one of which is a translation from Anglo-Saxon to Old Norse.Ælfric's goal was to explain away all the heathen stories of gods and legends and put the world into a Christian context. Archbishop Wulfstan of York (previously mentioned here) "borrowed" Ælfric's writing for his own homilies, also known as De falsis deis as well…

Monthly reflection and outlook. October was social.Namely the last week. Let's reflect. + Celebrated 10 years in Lucerne. Here's to 10 more, and hopefully a Swiss passport in the near future. I made a new acquaintance in choir. She's also based in Lucerne and I think she wants to be friends. Attended my first queer*space event. Said acquaintance helps out a newly-founded social gathering for queer people in Lucerne. I met some nice people and even got to sing karaoke! Cooked more at home. I'm…

At the recent EMFCamp, I bumped in to Professor Kate Devlin who was talking a little about the AI Resist List. I think one of the useful things we can do is loudly complain about shitty uses of AI. Here's an example. As mentioned in a previous post, I'm contacting companies which send malformed calendar invites. One of the organisation I contacted was the British online supermarket Ocado. They don't have an easy way to contact their technical team, and no obvious paths to raise a bug report, so…

Spherical geometry is very tangible because we live on a sphere. Projective geometry seems much more exotic, and yet they’re closely related. To show how they’re connected, let’s go back to the origins of non-Euclidean geometry. Euclidean geometry Here are Euclid’s five postulates, statements about what geometric objects can be constructred. To draw a straight line from any point to any point. To produce (extend) a finite straight line continuously in a straight line. To describe a circle with…

The Peter Principle posits that people are promoted until they reach their level of incompetence. What happens after that point? The implicit assumption is that they stop getting promoted and linger at whatever level they’ve arrived at, and surely all of us can point to mediocre leaders who seem to exhibit exactly that circumstance. But in fact, that situation is not stable but subject to career pressure, as Christian Gläßel and Adam Scharpf define it in Making a Career in Dictatorship. Unable…