The shiny new tech syndrome makes us focus on always wanting to work with the latest greatest AI models, almost by default. And switching away from one of those to something else is then tied to the question if it is as good or better than the frontier model you already use. I know companies who switch between various models based on task considerations, and use a router of some sort in between to seamlessly switch, but it will still be switching between frontier models. For me some of my use…

Sign my Guestbook | Contact Me

I’ve been blocking new posts to this blog because I want to do entries for my many travels this year first, but I can’t find the time. Here I aim to get back to blogging… The dahlias are still in bloom at Britzer Garten︎. In a fourth visit to see Dahlia Fire this fall (see the 1st, 2nd, 3rd times on my micro blog), the theme of my pictures is autumn juxtaposition – the surrounding trees framed the flower beds in yellow, green, and orange. Even though it was cloudy grey, the colors were glowing.…

• 3-star hikes • 2 to 4 mile options • Easy | Gain 70 to 440 feet • Concord, MA | MetroWest Region . During his two-year stay at Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau immersed himself in simple living and the close observation of nature. His reflections on living in the area culminated in his writing of 'Walden', now a celebrated work of American literature. Today, the glacial kettle pond where his small cabin once stood is preserved within the Walden Pond State Reservation, leaving visitors to…

Dedicated to producing plays with a ‘Victorian’ flavour – adaptations of detective and horror literature that have a touch of the macabre – Don’t Go Into The Cellar theatre company’s latest show focuses on ‘folk horror’. Performed by writer/creator Jonathan Goodwin and dressed in the pre-20th century attire, the character of McLaird divulges to the audience three tales that deftly peel back the layers of the modern, rationalist world to reveal the primal fears that still reside in the…

Home Network Update I spent the day changing how my home network works. Or rather, how I make services on my home network available when I'm on the go. I run two servers at home. My NAS, which uses Docker Compose to provide a bunch of useful tools, mostly for internal use, and a mini server that runs my Home Assistant setup. For the last few years, I exposed Home Assistant directly to the Internet using a port forward on my FritzBox router and a DuckDNS dynamic DNS setup. If I needed access to…

I’ve recently joined a new team that’s focused on performance, stability, and scalability – a change from my previous projects, where traffic was low enough that performance was rarely a concern. This codebase has already gone through multiple rounds of optimisation, so there’s no low-hanging fruit left. Any proposed change is inherently complex, and it’s rarely obvious whether a tweak will actually speed things up or slow them down. To measure the impact of our work, we’re leaning on the…

Your browser does not support the video tag. Got it, thanks.

Jeśli macie jak ja tylko 16GB VRAM a bawicie się w lokalne modele - jestem pod wrażeniem Qwen 3.8 9b (distill by Empero).Oczywiście kiedy trzeba czegoś z sensownym kontekstem do pętli agenta. W tym przypadku kwantyzacja Q8_0 mieści się z 80k kontekstu i to bez kwantyzacji K-V. Opencode spokojnie dostarcza pojedyncze zadania w takim kontekście.To jest Qwen 3.5 9B który ekipa od Empero wytrenowała przez destylację dużego Qwena 3.8 2.4T, więcej technicznych szczegółów i omówienie ogólnych…

A Job of Procedures and Checklists on the Path to EfficiencyMy previous job as a semiconductor fab engineer came with a lot of procedures and checklists. They’re great because they both teach and remind people the proper way to do things, ensuring the task is done the same way, the best way, the safest way, the most efficient way, and the properly ordered way every time. This strategy minimizes variation in the task, in turn minimizing the amount of troubleshooting, redos, and issues later on.…

Shared the results of an internal accessibility support survey with my manager this week. Nothing particularly surprising in the findings, but hopefully having some data to back things up will help make the case for positive change. Deeply saddened by yet another horrific train crash in Spain last week. I've never travelled on a high-speed train in Spain and whilst it hasn't entirely put me off going one day, it does raise some questions and hesitation about planning a trip by train there one…

Reviewed by Chris ArnsbyMark Franklin: “DJ Slipmatt and Lime together with MC JJ kick off this spooky edition of Top of the Pops they’re SL2 and DJs Take Control.” [24] SL2: Dj’s Take Control. A spooky edition of Top of the Pops? Ace. Let’s hope its as barmy as the edition broadcast on 28/10/1982; that well know occult date. On that memorable occasion viewers were horrified to see Simon Bates conspiring with a six foot black dog that walked on its hind legs, suckling a bat, and summoning…

This year I’ve made it a point to return to seeing movies in movie theaters, which in Los Angeles is something special. So far, I’ve seen The Devils and The Odyssey at Quentin Tarantino’s Vista Theatre, Mirror at the Egyptian Theatre, Stalker at the David Geffen Theater at the Academy Museum of Motion PIctures, and I’m looking forward to seeing Alice in Wonderland at the El Capitan Theatre this coming weekend. About I My Book | Consulting I X I Instagram I Newsletter I Email

Original, useful, respectful. Read here.

TL;DR: I stopped exposing my homelab's dynamic Linkding instance to the public internet via Tailscale. Instead, I built linkding-ssg, a self-contained Go CLI that snapshots my 35,000 bookmarks into a fast static site with client-side Pagefind search—embedded binaries, Ivy Bridge quirks, and all. Photo by Jan Antonin Kolar on Unsplash Hosting overkill I’ve been running Linkding in my homelab for a while now to collect bookmarks. It’s a great app—clean UI, snappy, and it plays nicely with the…

The only way things get better is if we exercise the power we have, and one of the greatest powers we have is our ability to vote. I know, the choices aren't perfect. The system isn't perfect. Sometimes it's a matter of choosing the lesser of two evils. It can feel bad or wrong to participate in a system you don't agree with, or select a candidate you don't fully align with. Still, it's the system we've got. Not voting isn't an act of protest, it's a choice to not change anything. A choice to…

Is it worth it to play Order of Ecclesia in 2026—the last bastion of excellent (handheld-exclusive) 2D Igavanias? Perhaps that’s a bit of a dumb question: of course it is. I forgot what Ecclesia was all about and decided to replay it as part of the Castlevania: Dominus Collection I reviewed seperately so the screenshots here will be of the Switch version. The only thing I could remember from the last of the three DS ‘Vania games was that it was the most challenging one and that was definitely…

This circa 1920 Teddy Bear was manufactured, bit it has been so restored over the years he looks homemade. Just lots of surgery, I guess. C. 1920 much loved Teddy Bear collection Dull Tool Dim Bulb

There are many of these, scattered around Maryland. Although identified as county or public docks (and you are allowed to use them overnight for up to 24 hours), it's always been clear to me that these are loading/unloading areas that support the local fishing industry. Mostly, the crab boats don'teven stay overnight. I have stayed at a few overnight, years ago, but I always slide up the side into water so shallow no work boat would go there. They are often not fender-friendly and they arn't…

Prescription renewal time so off I go through the park taking this month’s photo of the tree. Journal Bit of a meh few days. Nothing too problematic but definitely struggling a bit with doing the human thing. Autistic traits are spiking and everything’s a mix of too hard and a threat. Probably means I’m tired. Populist science writing 50 years of The Selfish Gene: flawed, outdated, yet still a model of truly popular science writing Back in the late 1990s I ran a Popular Science department at…

The calendar says winter is coming but the temperature say not so soon.

When I said my farewells to Book Number Eighteen that for me just didn’t have the right proportions, I didn’t expect to fill Number Nineteen so quickly. That’s 245 unlined Leuchtturm pages from April to October 2026 which must have been a new record! I’m happy to have picked up the pace again after months of writing almost nothing. My renewed interest in fountain pens resulting in a new acquisition might have something to do with it. Book Number Nineteen (burgundy-coloured). Cover: The Master…

Catching some needed sun. This is my favorite season.

It is a rainy day in Arizona. That rates right up there with verified sightings of Sasquatch, snowballs in hell, and wins by the Arizona Cardinals. Rare. It's the perfect day for settling into a comfortable chair and reading. Speaking of reading, just yesterday, I ran across this quote by Mark Boyle from his book The Way Home: Tales from a life without technology. "I decide to take the afternoon off and to spend it reading in the sun. It is in these moments I find myself having to battle the…

Just back from a souvlaki dinner at one of my favourite places in nea ionia, Γεύσεις στη Λαδόκολλα. Unfortunately passing through a crowd of hundreds of sinister fascists dressed outside the golden dawn building where two were murdered 13 years ago. There were riot cops everywhere and they shut the roads, leading to a detour home. Grim stuff in the neighbourhood. Still, delicious souvlaki! Fun restaurant full of workers and locals, all dressed up in their big coats, hats and scarfs to ward off…

A weekly recap of the articles and posts I’ve read that I think are worth your time. Maintenance Futures – Christopher Butler — “The beams in a college hall were found to be riddled with beetles, centuries after the building went up. The college despaired of replacing them until someone thought to ask the forester, who explained that a grove of oaks had been planted when the hall was built and tended ever since, for exactly this purpose.” How To Deal With Life’s Toughest Moments: 5 Secrets From…

Why does a one-word reply in a coding agent sometimes cost 4 cents and other times 32 cents? I looked at a month of my Claude Code usage, around 440 sessions and over $2,000 at list price, and half of that money went on 4% of the tokens. This is a new video on what to pay […]

[This is a guest post by Frank Calegari. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] Why we should not be sad The release by OpenAI on October 6 of over 700 research papers was a watershed in the history of mathematics. AI is now undeniably capable of making groundbreaking contributions across many areas of mathematics. So why are some mathematicians so unhappy? Some of it is the apparent disregard by AI companies for the practice of…