Academia neglects interdisciplinary work that combines insights from multiple areas. Each field has expert versions which experts use among themselves, and public versions seen by outsiders, and people in field B won’t accept your using the expert version of A if that differs from the non-expert version of A that B folks have in mind. Also, if you hold an academic event on the topic of A intersect B, you’ll usually invite the most prestigious people you can get in A, and in B, but you won’t…

As it was a beautiful day with a gorgeous photographic sky, I went out yesterday and made some photographs. As it sometimes happens, I had forgotten about the time change and did not change the time on my cameras’ clocks. This morning I remembered and changed the capture time (in LR Classic) in the metadata. Yikes! I will change all of them this morning. Just FYI and a reminder.Join me over at my website, www.dennismook.com . Thanks for looking. Enjoy! Dennis A. Mook All content on this blog is…

Books and some interesting stuff I read in October 2026 Non-fiction Life in Three Dimensions by Shigehiro Oishi (2025) 256 pages 4 stars What is a good life? The usual answers are either a happy life, or a meaningful life, or both. In this book the author makes a case for a third kind of answer: psychological richness. The book explains all three terms, a happy life, a meaningful live, and psychological rich life, and how these relate to personality types. The second half of the book is about…

I don’t know who the target audience is for this. As much as I do preach the virtues of the play culture surrounding D&D Fifth Edition, it’s with no thanks to the actual ruleset itself; and most others in this sphere don’t seem to care for either. But I had taken a Tumblr poll with my partner to assign D&D races and classes to each member of the Hermitcraft SMP on YouTube, and it got me thinking about how the latter are… messy. I think it was Chris Perkins who had expressed regret that Fifth…

A stack of primitive whirligigs that Mr. Ivan Laycock built and covered the hills with near his house not far from Mt. Pleasant, MI. Ivan retired from being a “fill in” guy at the auto plants in Detroit. He took any position on the line were someone was absent. Upon retiring he took a “mail order” wife up to Central Michigan and began cranking out whirligig’s and birdhouses with slightly naughty illustrations painted on them. I bought this pile and had them mailed to me in one LONG box in 1990.…

The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX/BSD/Linux systems. Whenever I stumble upon something worth mentioning on the Internet I just put it here. Today the amount information that we get using various information streams is at massive overload. Thus one needs to focus only on what is important without the need to grep(1) the Internet everyday. Hence the idea of providing such…

What happens if you ask two dozen researchers, artists and explorers of AI where they think the field is going? The result, in the case of TEDAI in Vienna, is an overwhelming vision of the world we are creating for ourselves. How it’s ruining the psyches of data laborers, how it can be used for duetting in music, how it’s being used to reconstruct war-torn nations, how it’s allowing us to peer into our inner worlds, how copyright holders are exploiting the future economy, and more. Each…

I recently watched an episode of The Infographics Show that fascinated me. It had the sensational title of “Holy sh*t spacetime is fake…” Because I don’t trust YouTube videos, I run them by Gemini, the AI I use. Below is the video, and then the transcript of my discussion with Gemini. It was quite intriguing. I have serious worries about how AI will impact our society. One impulse is to boycott AI. Other feelings suggest I should try to understand it. This transcript shows how I’m working with…

I’ve spent the better part of a decade in therapy trying to understand my CPTSD. I’ve learned an enormous amount about how childhood trauma affects the brain and why experiences from decades ago can still influence how I react to things today. But lately, I’ve found myself thinking about something different. For all the work […] The post Who Am I Without Trauma? first appeared on About That Jack.

Why Large Language Models Are Not Good For Us List Grokker succinctly summarises why LLMs (so-called AI) are bad for us. Here are a few more reasons: Using LLMs makes your brain lazy. Your brain is like a muscle – use it or lose it. Yes, doing hard tasks is taxing. That’s the point. The work you are sweating through right now is making you better able to try even harder things later. LLMs make you feel like you are being productive while you produce mediocre content. While, yes, you can tick…

Q: In the Game of Thrones TV series, Tywin Lannister says to his son, Tyrion, “You’ll bring that boy-king to heel, and his mother too, if needs be.” Why is “if needs be” constructed with the singular verb “needs.” A: The word “need” can be a noun, a verb, or an adverb. It’s a noun meaning a “necessity” or an “obligation” in the expression “if need be.” But it’s an adverb meaning “of necessity” or “necessarily” in “if needs be.” Both expressions have been around for centuries, and are generally…

Retail kiosks suck. They kinda suck for customers, and they definitely suck for workers. So why do companies turn to them? One reason companies turn to them is the rising cost of workers. Indeed, as you can see from this, any time minimum wage goes up, kiosk promoters publish dreck like this: You can see … Continue reading Retail kiosks suck for everyone

chatJPt (chat.jpaul.me) answers Zerto, HPE Morpheus, HVM, and OpsRamp questions from the official docs. That’s mostly true. The docs servers behind it also carry a layer of curated material that isn’t on help.zerto.com: hand-written notes on Zerto REST API gotchas, version pairing rules, per-platform capabilities, upgrade traps, and the working code samples from Zerto’s public… The post chatJPt Update: a Tribal Knowledge Switch, and Why a Search Kept Answering the Wrong Question appeared first…

📷 289/365 - Candy hunting.

I took the day off of work today, mostly because I went to the Lucy Darling show in Baltimore last night, and didn't want to worry about if I got home late. I had planned my trains a little closer to the beginning and end of show than normal, because I wanted to play some mahjong too. (Yes, this has taken over a lot of my entertainment schedule.) Of course my trains were completely on time, and the biggest issue was that I was ravenous when I got back to DC. I had food at home, but decided to…

A few last thoughts on taking chances, getting buried in a mountain of new releases, and finding music without the pressure to keep up. Good morning! This week we’ve got some more thoughts on music discovery and a great mix of fresh tracks and fan favorites. Last week, I wrote about the idea that “new” music doesn’t have to mean something released last Friday, and how “new to you” is new enough. I’d also been thinking about how to put a bow on that (or at least tie up some of the loose ends).…

War Noir recently uncovered a short clip from Haiti’s near-lawless streets, apparently showing Galil-, Kalashnikov-, and M14-equipped members of the Unite Bawon Laplen (UBP) preparing for war as their leader blesses other gang members and their weapons with rum, as one does. Lanm SanJou, the gang’s leader, was shown mogging with a very rare American-made Colt R80 Monitor, a subvariant of the M1918 Browning Automatic Rifle. Colt produced only about 125 Monitors in its Connecticut factory, the…

The days of the old Spanish Armada have long gone, but today’s Spanish Navy just wrapped up a historic 160-day, 24,000nm globetrotting deployment that included the country’s first warship participation in RIMPAC. Spain deployed the CODAG Aegis guided-missile frigate ESPS Álvaro de Bazán (F101) to the Pacific during the biannual exercise, where the ship engaged in multinational air defense, surface warfare, and live-fire drills. The latter included a Harpoon warshot expended in a SINKEX against…

The pure, frank sentiments we hold in our hearts are the only truthful sources of art. —Caspar David Friedrich In this age of powerful processing tools and artificial intelligence (AI) models capable of generating photorealistic images, it’s no surprise that so many photographers go out of their way to present themselves and their work as “authentic,” assuming implicitly that the term is self-explanatory and refers to a singular, unambiguous quality: the quality of representing things as they…

Nintendo seems like an unstoppable, inevitable juggernaut in 2026. The Switch is one of the best-selling consoles ever, behind only Sony’s Playstation 2 and therefore ahead of every other major success in Nintendo’s own history. The Switch 2 is off to a tremendous start, both in terms of the quality of the games on the fledgling console, its own features, and how many people have already been willing to jump on that train. This is a very different feeling from how things were for Nintendo and…

Some 85 years ago. The siege of the Soviet naval base on Hanko Cape in occupied southwestern Finland, north of Leningrad, during the Continuation War, November 1941. Swedish Volunteer Battalion (Svenska Frivilligbataljonen, SFB) member Erland Petrus Malmström (#872910) seen on the line with a 6.5mm Gevär m/96 Mauser and a commercial optic. Note how he uses his thumb around the stock’s wrist to raise his view of the scope, which is mounted too far forward for a normal face-on buttstock position.…

A bunch of years back, my wife and I were walking through the woods with our friends, Rachel and Steve, on their farm in Sandwich, New Hampshire. Along the way, Farmer Steve, who knows every tree in those woods, stopped to show off a stand of ash. Then, matter of fact, he told us all those trees would soon be gone. That the emerald ash borer beetles were coming and would kill every last one. Simple as that. The moment stayed with me, and I’ve been drafting a story revolving around it ever…

Today we get to view America's two great pasions: football and politics. When they get to come together like this, it's the greatest combo since Reese's combined peanut butter and chocolate. Republican Vice Presidential candidate George Bush is on Face the Nation, while former President Gerald Ford is on Meet the Press. Paid political advertisements are scattered through the day, as are network analaysis shows predicting Tuesday's vote. On the football side, NBC has the doubleheader (and you'll…

Cast of Oreodont, John Day FormationWith a pig-like body, a sheep-ish silhouette and a distant connection to camels, an oreodont is a lovely reminder that ancient life did not always fit neatly into familiar categories. These curious mammals were enormously successful, leaving abundant fossils in places as far apart as South Dakota’s Badlands and Oregon’s John Day country. The specimen

It’s the beginning of November, and I’m sitting on my front porch writing this. My children have co-opted my laptop to play Minecraft, so I’m tapping with thumbs on a little phone screen. I don’t mind. It feels like a good day to take things slow. It’s unseasonably warm out for Minnesota November, although “unseasonable” seems to have less and less meaning these days, thanks to climate change. If you talk about Halloween weather with any middle-aged Minnesotans like me for more than two…

Models do disappear from Hugging Face. How I keep a local copy I can verify: pinned hf download, SHA256 manifests, Ollama's blob store, and a NAS or big drive.

In an ideal world the incentives on phone manufacturers would be to optimize useful lifetime, but instead people buy phones based on their as-new performance. Which means phones charge to 100% even though that's bad for the battery. Every time I get a new phone it feels a bit like magic: I no longer need to think at all about battery life. This lasts for a few years, and then at some point my phone doesn't always make it through the day. Some amount of this is normal, but some of it is just bad…

This week had two highlights: a trip to the cinema on Thursday to see Primetime, and a day out at Ironbridge on Saturday. The rest of the week was mostly quiet evenings at home. Out and About at Ironbridge Saturday was a day out at Ironbridge, and it single-handedly rescued my steps goal for the week. Every other day landed somewhere between 2,500 and 5,500 steps, but Saturday came in at 13,486, which is my highest day in about three months! That pulled the weekly average up to 5,203, which is…