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…

Close to the temple still north of the lake a new structure was founded. Wise Vengeance had need for a public hall where people could find justice. Attached to the hall, they built a prison, cells for all perpetrators. Those living nearby and also afar traveled to the Justice Hall. Their complaints were heard, also pleas for aid, by judges and magistrates. People were serving in these offices appointed by Wise Vengeance. Judgements decided conflicts untangled lawfulness spread far and wide.

I will not be adjusting to Daylight Savings Time. Now, again, or at any point in the future. Thank you for your support in this trying time.

This article explores a video game software licensing system from the early 2000s used in a number of video games. The system operated on the basis of ‘electronic licences’, with licensing data directly exchanged between client and server. Despite promises to purchasers of lifetime licences, the software licensing servers have now become inoperative. Obtaining code for static analysis Opening the video game software licensing interface, we see there is an option for a proxy server. By setting…

It’s no secret that the Hollywood Comet loves musicals. In 2010, I revealed I had seen 400 movie musicals over the course of eight years. Now that number is over 800. To celebrate and share this musical love, here is … Continue reading →

A simple definition for AI work slop: it’s when the output outruns the thinking. Or to use an old saying, it’s when you see a ton of lipstick on a pig.

Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone:but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.–John 12:24 In The Karamazov Brothers, a grievance can become so precious that giving it up feels like a kind of death. Dostoevsky’s people protect their resentments with an ingenuity they seldom extend to anyone’s happiness, then wonder why their lives have grown uninhabitable. Before we meet the family, the Gospel places something almost weightless…

As we’ve seen The Autocollants are back again and releasing a new album called “Hidden Smile, which is on pre-order now, I thought it would be worth rescuing another of Laura Watling’s projects, Cartwheel. Cartwheel released just one record. It was a 7″ in 1999 that came out on the Brooklyn based label Sandcastle Records (SAND002). The 7” was an EP titled “Tumble”. The EP included four wonderful indiepop acoustic indiepop slices. “Halfway There” and “Circles” on the A side and “Please Don’t…

As previously established, I like making websites classification results Together with several collaborators, we've just released a beta version of Fanobase: a database of Fano 4-folds constructed as zero loci on products of type A partial flag varieties. type-a.fanobase.net For more on what we are doing, see the announcement blogpost. This is very much work in progress: we will be releasing more examples and data on a regular basis, with updates on the Fanobase blog. Have a look, and let us…

I love testing in production. The thrill of accidentally publishing some dummy data - or taking down an entire website - is similar to skydiving without a parachute. Exquisite excitement followed by heart-stopping terror. Before going live with a new website or service, it's sensible to test how text looks on it. Most people don't test with readable text - it's too easy for management to start reading the content rather than looking at the layout. So the default is the Latin text "Lorem ipsum".…

Enjoyed some liquorice all-sorts. So good. Sure, I had to trade some Kingston biscuits for them, but totally worth it.

Welcome back to the Gridiron Deep Dive everybody, where today, I’m going to be walking you through every piece of work I’ve ever done on QB evaluation, across NFL (and football) history.This is a landing page, primarily intended for the new subscribers, who may not have been around to see these articles come out. However, this page will prove useful to current subscribers as well. Some of my work, which I’m very proud of, was published when I had ten subscribers, and has largely disappeared…

By this gets posted, there's a good chance that retail investors will be cheerfully buying the dip and Wall Street will be sunny again but a lot of veteran observers are still waiting for the really scary part.“.. Everybody is trying to raise money for their build-outs before the liquidity dries up,” said Ben Connard. “Ultimately, there might not be enough ..” @wsj.com www.wsj.com/finance/the-...[image or embed]— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla.bsky.social) October 31, 2026 at 4:59 AM (WSJ)…

We’ve been living in a heightened state of economic uncertainty since March 2020. A lot has happened and is still happening. This platitude seems more relevant than ever: “Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.” But we also have to be honest. The Stoics talked about preparing for the worst 2,000 years ago. In a letter to Lucilius, Seneca wrote: “We should therefore reflect upon all contingencies, and should fortify our minds against the evils which may possibly come.” And while you’re…

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American crow, Quebec City, Canada (photo from Wikimedia Commons) 2 November 2026 “Should I do this? Or that?” How long will it take for this human to decide? Human tries to decide (image from Wikimedia) In case you haven’t guessed who can decide twice as fast as we do, a recent study in Science: Ultrarapid decision-making in an avian brain used the same decision reaction-time test on crows that has been used on humans and monkeys for 20-30 years. Here’s how each of us scored: Crows respond in…

Now it's been a month of so since the end of St Jude September I think enough time has passed that I think everyone's drawings should have arrived now so I can share them. It's hard to pick a favourite but here's a selection of them I wanted to highlight here because I enjoy them. I won't be including Jimothy because I included him in the last post, not because I don't love him. I can't wait to do this again next year. I scanned all the drawings this year so I've put them all up on the 2026…

I've been thinking about survivorship bias in the translator career for quite a while now — it's been on my mind for a few years, to be honest — and I hope I'm not the only one. It's a somewhat hard subject to tackle, and I don't want to write a full-fledged manifesto, so I'll try to talk about it in a few paragraphs. So, here's the thing: being good at my job took me far, but there was also a lot of luck involved. I got into gameloc at the right moment — just when the Brazilian market was…

Before our current health insurance runs out and our deductible has been met, we’re rushing to wring as much blood out of the stone as possible. I went in for a physical and had them do a full panel of bloodwork as well as cholesterol (it’s good news!) and a PSA (also good news!) and I still have to go in for an X-ray to check out my bone density. With the bloodwork I got a look at my numbers and plotted them in the graphs; it’s very interesting to see how my white and red blood cell counts…

Why people are using AI to generate content for clout, and losing their integrity?

How Jon Pertwee made a bid for chart stardom with a little help from Deep Purple...

Yesterday I was reading the weekend edition of the Irish Times and came across this article: It was only afterwards that the name of the author, Hagai El-Ad rang a bell. When I did a search for his name I found his wikipedia page that describes him as an “Israeli LGBT and human rights activist”. When I read further I remembered that I met him years ago at a conference in Casablanca, when he was a budding physics student with an interest in cosmology, especially in cosmic voids. I was alarmed to…

As a child, I recall turning the dials on the TV and adjusting the bunny ear antennas to watch Bob Ross paint. I remember I would copy him with my play set of paints, and imagined myself quite the accomplished artist. I remember it as almost magical. Life went on, though: school, marriage, work, where did that small child go? Occasionally I still wake up with a desire to paint something. I might give it a try for a few minutes, but nothing comes of it. The paint and brush just don’t seem to…

I’ve been browsing a massive list of blogs and personal websites, and I have noticed a pattern in the websites I just gave up on. This is my nerdy exploration of what the owners did wrong (and what some did right). To avoid shaming and general meanness, I took no screenshots and am naming no names. WTF is this? – The front page that fails its one vital job Whatever page a first-time visitor to your website lands on, it needs to do one thing for them. None more so than the front page of your…

By Mountainland GamesSelf PublishedShadowdarkLevel 1 The old northern road was once safe. Now travelers are disappearing—and the bodies that are found are missing their hearts. The trail leads to Blackstone Watchtower, an abandoned fortress that has stood empty for generations. Now strange lights flicker in its windows, goblins haunt the surrounding countryside, and something ancient has begun to stir beneath the stones. The characters are hired to investigate. What begins as a hunt for goblin…

This is the third essay in my series about metagames in tabletop RPGs. This essay is about mini-games and fragmented narratives. I wrote it in preparation for publishing Mousetrap: A cursed game-within-a-game that won't go back into its box.Mini-gamesWhen you think of mini-games, you may think of nested or embedded games that you can play through your characters. In D&D, for example, three-dragon ante is a canonical game nested within The Forgotten Realms with its own set of rules. A deck of…

"Hackensack Record," May 24, 1934, via Newspapers.com20-year-old Arne Gandy of Teaneck, New Jersey, was a restless, adventurous young man who, like so many restless, adventurous sorts throughout history, felt the call of the high seas. After several voyages to South America, in December 1933 he signed on to serve as “messboy” on the “President Harrison.” Gandy carried with him a letter of introduction to Stanley Dollar, president of the ship’s line. After the “President Harrison” arrived in San…