It goes without saying GPT lags at writing. Even a pro subscription of Astra produces prose that is predictably AI, and easily identified by readers and software like Pangram as such. It has usual “failure modes” such as wordiness and lack of affect. Why can’t it do writing as well as it does math or coding? That is the million dollar question. I think this needs to be reframed; it writes well…for an audience of other agents. Agents have no concept of wordiness or overuse of hedging language.…

It's been three months now since I last posted here (!), but I have been very busy with work. Most significantly I have been working steadily on the Cornell Woolrich biography and I have finished seven of its projected ten chapters, amounting to 105,000 words. That's 35,000 words a month, almost 9000 words a week. I feel it's gone really well, I very much am pleased with what I have written and the more narrative approach I have taken with it. I've actually discovered a lot of new information…

Houses perched above the beach at Cannon Beach, Oregon. The post Beachside Living appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

Happy Jimi Halloween to everyone who celebrates. It’s that wonderful time of year when our favorite Japanese festival, Jimi Halloween, is on full display. Mundane Halloween, as we coined it back in 2018, is when people dress up in costumes so mundane they have to be explained. The tradition was started in 2014 by a […] Related posts: Japan’s Jimi ‘Mundane’ Halloween Costumes of 2024 Japan’s Jimi ‘Mundane’ Halloween Costumes of 2023 Scenes From Japan’s Jimi “Mundane” Halloween Contest

Happy Halloween! I hope everyone has a safe, fun, and spooky night!Lily: Host a Ghost Doll, $29.99.I have a few de-boxing pictures of this doll that I'll post tomorrow. I ran out of time today! She's poorly made and not worth the $30, but she did fine as my halloween model. 🎃

Exidy’s run of ’80s light-gun games starting with the letter ‘C’1 have been long forgotten outside of Chiller, which only has any collective memory around it thanks to its complete tastelessness. Even if one were to get past the initial two torture-chamber levels, the final one lets the player shoot the clothes off of a woman half-buried in a graveyard, revealing her breasts before dismembering her piece-by-piece. It’s not as nauseating as that description implies thanks to its unshaded, jagged…

GitLab has a public story about deleting the wrong thing. In January 2017 an engineer who was trying to restore replication wiped a data directory they believed was on the secondary. It was on the primary. The postmortem they published afterwards is still one of the better things written about a database outage. At PGConf.EU in Valencia last week a few people from GitLab came to me with the inverse problem. They have one table, 4 TB, on a primary with ten replicas, and they want it gone, on…

for november, i've decided to explore a country whose literature i haven't read before: thailand. i've picked bangkok wakes to rain by pitchaya sudbanthad. i don't know much about the book or the author, but what caught my attention was its focus on bangkok and the city's history. i'll share a few thoughts once i've finished reading it. as for the october's pick, the beauty of the husband by anne carson, it was an interesting read, for sure. the book brings together poetry, criticism and…

I’ve focussed in the last 12 months on being more deliberate on the news, websites and podcasts I consume. One that has shone is the Glasgow Bell. Three journalists publishing great stories about Glasgow with a little bit of dry humour thrown in. They are currently running a subscription push – gain 1000 new subscribers by Nov 15 and they will deliver on these pledges: The Bell pledges You get 3-4 more mails a week and the quality and variety has been excellent, learning a little bit more about…

A recurring, and inadvertent, theme has started to develop from the movies I’ve enjoyed the most this year, and that is: “I wouldn’t have been able to appreciate this if I’d seen it on release.” I’ve seen a lot of stuff that forces me to imagine myself in the 80s or early 90s, with my still-developing understanding of movies, and art in general for that matter, and wondering whether that version of me would have been able to understand how it works. I’m certain, however, that I would not have…

The humidity is warping everything again, curling my calendar against the plaster. I woke up in recognition of my body in fragments, flung out into infinite orbits. I feel when you touch me like a mobile set spinning. Remember, the word precarious is rooted in the latin for prayer. There is a thread of breath always stitching our bodies. Over under. Over under.

Discovered a whole anthology horror series I’d never heard of before, from a couple of Goosebumps producers, hosted (succinctly) by Henry Rollins. What joy! – Quiet Please (Joe Dante) Nervous city boy Cary Elwes goes camping to relax, only to spend the whole trip trying to get away from noisy, arrogant camper Brian Dennehy. But it turns out Cary is the serial killer the city news had been reporting on, bad luck for Brian. – The Occupant (Joe Dante) Someone is intruding in divorcee Bridget…

In 2019, I wrote the following: Submarine sandwiches go by many names. Hoagies, Grinders, Torpedos, Heros, Po’Boys… the list goes on and on. For the most part, these are all referring to much the same thing. There are outliers–Grinders and Po’Boys, generally, refer to sandwiches with hot fillings, for example, while the majority of these are stuffed with cold cuts–but the commonalities are clear. Long sandwiches, served in long, skinny bread rolls split open for the purpose rather than sliced.…

Three Spires, Old Inns & a Roll of the Bones: Lichfield to Sutton Coldfield I had a brilliant day exploring the pubs and local history of Lichfield before heading over to Sutton Coldfield for a couple more stops. My friend Paul joined me for the Lichfield part, and it was lovely catching up as we worked our way through a fantastic mix of old inns, modern bars and brewery favourites. There was plenty to see between the pints too, from the magnificent cathedral to little reminders of the city’s…

(It’s the last day of Halloween Week on Unsung, where we’re sharing scary, spooky, and creepy stories. This is a story of how my bug scared others.) In 2010, Google’s homepage celebrated various occasions with reimaginings of its own logo called doodles, but we wanted to do something extra special for Pac-Man’s upcoming 30th anniversary – and through a set of circumstances that began with me randomly sitting in the cubicle right next to the doodle team, I was asked to write the code. It was,…

I am a member of the “Beat Trump and his Minions” faction of the Democratic Party.The “Beat Trump and his Minions” faction is opposed to making non-negotiable demands of candidates who are running against MAGA Republicans, which in this election means any Republican (that Susan Collins is “concerned” does not count). To the extent we might have non-negotiable demands, they concern matters on which we suspect all Democrats (and Independents) agree. We think the United States should be governed…

Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg contains a feature called “Joycarry Games” similar to Animal Crossing’s NES game “Advance Play” feature. I wanted to extract the ROMs for these mini-games just like I did for Animal Crossing. Doing so wasn’t as straightforward; the ROMs aren’t available directly in the disc filesystem like they are in Animal Crossing. To extract the ROMs I ported an existing Rust program to Python (“rewrite-it-in-Python”, anyone?) that receives and saves the ROMs from the game…

Our review of A History of England in 25 Poems, by Catherine Clarke, first published in September 2025. Spanning from Anglo-Saxon England to the 21st Century of King Charles III, Catherine Clarke tries to look beyond what happened and show us - through poetry - how people felt.I found this an enjoyable and occasionally emotionally powerful book. ★★★★☆ There is a seduction in reading history via poetry. For one thing it is quicker to read a poem than a narrative, so you can rattle through the…

I’ve been kicking the tires of Herdr as a tmux replacement for the past few days. My initial thoughts are positive: The sidebar is nice for keeping track of workspaces and agents. Copy and paste over SSH just works, both from Herdr’s copy mode and from within Neovim. There’s even a little “Copied to clipboard” toast message to confirm it happened. I had to monkey with my tmux config several times to get both of these working. There’s a built-in git indicator in the sidebar showing when a…

Iranian officials spent October openly threatening the subsea internet cables under the Strait of Hormuz. On October 12, Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, said Gulf cables, data centers, and artificial intelligence facilities could get hit if the US and Israel restart the war.1 A week later, Revolutionary Guard spokesman Hossein Mohebbi pointed out the seven major cables under the strait and said new targets were coming.2 On October 23, two senior security…

I’m not really the type of Jeep guy that collects ducks. I’ve had one duck that was left on the Jeep a few months ago and that had been an object of contentment. Today we found another duck awaiting our arrival back to the Jeep in the Bass Pro Shop parking lot. It made me smile. We now have a green duck.

Boooooo! What spooooky times we now live in, with AI rapidly advancing in capabilities and solving more and more major open math problems! So it seems like a perfect occasion to share yet another podcast. I know I’ve been dropping them like every day, but this is a special one, with Brian Greene for his World Science Festival, recorded in-person when I visited Columbia University a week ago. Note that we don’t talk about OpenAI’s refutation of the Exponential Time Hypothesis because the…

I made 120 candles for our Things 4 Good sale with some 0.5 inch wicks. I’m not sure what I was thinking. We typically use 0.75 inch wicks. I did a burn test and it didn’t work at all. Ugh! What to do. After some consideration I decided to see if I could use a plier and pull the existing wick straight out. It worked. Now the real challenge — could I channel a new wick back down and seat it in the clip at the bottom. 🤔 It worked! Mostly. Out of 120 candles there were only two that I wasn’t able…

⭐⭐ 2/5 Stars - Woefully underdeveloped, and neither satire nor literary fiction. The post Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke appeared first on The Wallflower Digest.

Nathan Heller writes for the New Yorker (archived) about James Daunt, who runs much of the bookselling world and apparently does so surprisingly well: Though less known than many authors, Daunt leads a bookselling empire of unprecedented scale. For seven years, he has been the chief executive of both the largest bookstore chain in the United States, Barnes & Noble, and the largest in the United Kingdom, Waterstones. He is the founder of what may be London’s most beloved independent bookshop,…

The truth behind burnoutsThree failures that look like laziness, are actually physics, and get worse every time you push harder. The wing did not run out of airThe word "stall" is one of aviation's cruelest jokes. Every driver on earth hears it and thinks of an engine coughing to a stop, which is to say they think of a fuel problem, a power problem, a not-enough problem. So when a wing stalls, the untrained instinct is beautifully, fatally wrong. The nose is dropping, the ground is arriving,…

On Your Marks — A Book You Can’t Wait To Read "Tempest" by Victoria Aveyard. I've been a fan for about a decade and have been very much looking forward to her first foray into adult literature. I'm hoping it's much more swashbuckling than romance though. Signature Bake — A Book From Your Favourite Genre I am bigly into fantasy and Bridget Collins is doing something interesting in that space and I haven't read its like before; whether that's due to my narrow experience or Collins' writing is…

Whether you call them gourds, squash, or cucurbits—I'll never forget one of the nerdiest (and funniest) quotes from a seed breeders' conference I attended was from legendary seed breeder John Navazio who said, "Cucurbits were bottle-necked a long time ago."*—they are found in nearly every cuisine in the world and seem to have the chameleon-like ability to complement every one of their unique profiles. Think squash is just butternut and acorn? Think again… local farmers are growing a rainbow of…

Last Wednesday I asked if it was time to get into domestic LTO. I reasoned that with the growth in slop-fuelled demand for hard drives and silicon, enterprise tape backups were interesting and potentially viable again, even in a residential or homelab setting. I also not so subtly implied that even if this wasn’t true, I like tinkering with different tech. The response on Mastodon and in email was surprisingly supportive of the idea, acknowledging that its trade-offs were offset by having…

Writing this post was a journey. It was turning into one of the longest I’d ever written. In the end, the process of writing it lead me to conclude that the entire exercise was a bad idea, so I’ve reduced it to the stub you’re reading now. NFS is sufficiently broken on the Mac that it’s not worth using. Stick with Samba. I’ll be adding more notes onto our family wiki if you really want to try, but I can’t recommend it. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-11-01.