On Wednesday, I went to the Duke of York's Cinema in Brighton to watch Kevin Wright's Punk Brighton documentary. It's been 15 years in the making and quite a few years ago a whole bunch of us met up at the Prince Albert to be filmed yakking about our own experience of punk in Brighton.I wan't sure how it would turn out- I think Kev was born in 1983- but he had done loads of research. It wasn't just masses of old photographs: he'd found audio of Vi Subversa talking, some footage of Peter and the…

I am a proud and active user of Readwise. I've had an account since December 31st of 2022. Today I reached 1,400 days of daily highlight reviews – 5 highlights a day from articles, books, PDFs, tweets, etc. that I've saved to my Readwise Highlights and/or have read through Readwise Reader. Readwise is a great company making great products, with their most recent being Readwise Books. If I had a smartphone, I would begin using that product immediately. Instead, I will wait until the desktop…

Every year I like to find great pictures of Halloween decorations. This year I thought I had one single photo, but I ended up finding more. As always, our neighbours never disappoint with their homemade dioramas. An upside-down jack-o-lantern with a scarecrow body sitting on a front lawn surrounded by leaves. A group of ghouls from the movie A Nightmare Before Christmas. Oogie Boogie is featured prominently posed next to a tree. There are little chidlren ghouls on either side. A small skeleton…

Chickens are homely animals and they don’t really need much out of life – but when their cosy coop is in danger, they will fight for their territory tooth and nail. So, these chickens do just that when the nearby nuclear reactor goes badly, badly wrong and contaminates the local area with its radiation. You can probably see what is coming from the title, so sit back and enjoy this animated romp. Atomic Chicken was created by a number of students at Ecole des Nouvelles Images in France, namely…

This post continues my series on agent readability by looking at chunking. When docs are ingested into an MCP server or other retrieval system, a chunker splits each page into passages, and the agent often sees only those passages rather than the whole page. I walk through how ingestion works, how one chunker (Google's Agent Search) sizes chunks in tokens, and how headings, section length, long tables, long code samples, images, procedures, and tabs hold up when a page gets chunked.

The United States is in no way a Christian nation. The religion of the United States is capitalism and its deity is itself. Money is the idol.

I’ve made Halloween lanterns from lots of fruit and veg over the years: pumpkins, turnips, squashes, oranges, apples, potatoes and tomatoes. This year you will be unsurprised to discover that I have added pears to that list: Alongside a bought pumpkin and a giant Howgate Wonder apple. One year I’ll grow my own pumpkin. Off to make pumpkin, apple, pear and tomato soup. I didn’t have a big enough tomato for a lantern but there a few left still for soup. We make our own traditions. This is mine.

I measured the public GitHub Copilot coding-agent trace by idle time. At 4 to 5 minutes, 64% of the next prompt is cached. At 5 to 6 minutes, 26%. A long tool run costs the cache as much as a coffee break.

Source “Sometime around 2029, 2030 it’s going to go off a cliff,” he said, “and it’s going to be ugly.” Striped bass fishing could face collapse. I heard things were not good but I didn’t know it was this bad. I fished them while in Massachusetts and the last gasp of the year was to go to Montauk and fish with friends from the UK. I did the wetsuit thing in MA but not Montauk. I didn’t know the water enough to trust getting too deep. Spent last three weeks in Portugal and took a few books off…

There are lots of reasons to be worried or excited about the upcoming US midterms, but as a transit advocate, I’m most worried about the San Francisco Bay Area’s Measure RTM, which would raise the sales tax by half a cent (a full cent in San Francisco) for 14 years to prevent catastrophic cuts to the Bay Area’s busiest transit services. This measure will have consequences nationwide. Its failure, which polls suggest is possible, would intimidate any other US metro area that is thinking of…

7:1 It’s been exactly seven days since I got to experience a little miracle, and I’m writing about it only today because I simply didn’t had time this week ;) All SVWW fans were hoping that the new coach, Jochen Seitz, would get the team back on track and that the new signings would fit in well within the squad. But what they all conjured up on the pitch last Saturday not only makes us forget the poor start to the season, but also has us dreaming once again of promotion to the 2nd Bundesliga……

Truman enjoys watching the scenes out under the gazebo. I suspect he’s seeing things I don’t spot. Occasionally he shares this spot with the dogs. Family harmony.

(It’s the last day of Halloween Week on Unsung, where we’re sharing scary, spooky, and creepy stories.) Blowing onto a cartridge before inserting it into a game console has been a longstanding source of debate. It’s an image so iconic it could be juxtaposed with a pencil next to a cassette tape, or holding the TV aerial for better reception – yet modern understanding of the issue is that it actually makes things worse, as bits of your saliva on contacts make them corrode over time. But what if…

I’ve been so busy over the past few weeks. Constantly chasing experiences and opportunities. I just felt I needed a day of rest. I went into the village and got my hair cut. I watched the sun set over the rooftops staining the sky a light pink. I read my book club book. On my phone, from my seat in London, I saw some incredibly beautiful and encouraging stories from around the world. A young man from rural China was getting married. He was poor and looked down on. He had only a few people he…

Happy Halloween everyone! I hope you’re having a great time on this spookiest of days and staying safe 🎃 My newsletters are always free and you can follow them here: RSS | Mailing List | Patreon Want to see archived newsletters? Read them on my blog or my Patreon! Click here to reveal the rest Latest Public Arts All Friday public art is crossposted to tumblr, mastodon, bluesky, and jpawlik.com/blog and TWO months early for $1 and up Patrons, which also include sketches and thumbs with almost…

We can’t have nice things in the United States because there will always be somebody who exploits them for their own gain. Spam has ruined email, phone calls (telemarketing) and now text messaging. The number of political text messages I am receiving is exhausting, so I have created a new mode on my Pixel 10 so that only messages and calls from my starred contacts come through.

I really enjoy thinking about whatever comes into my head. Sometimes that is one or two things; more often it is 10 things. My attention ping pongs around the 10 things being thought about in parallel. Think of a man spinning plates or juggling. That is kind of like me. When the thoughts are stressful it sucks but when the thoughts are new and nuanced and interesting (even challenging but not so much to the point of distress) it is really fun. I like thinking about things, I think it is…

It´s halloween my favorite time of the year, which means indulging in my favorite horror media. Here´s what I´ve been playing this season.

Stewart, his life complete

Soon after I posted my One Hundred Famous Views of Edo Map, Keir Clarke posted about another map of Japanese woodblock prints on his Maps Mania blog, well worth a read if you want to learn a bit about Japanese landscape art in the 19th C. It turns out that there are a lot more than Hiroshige’s One Hundred (which are actually 119) and someone had made a map of 297 of these prints across 5 series which had lost its base map and had a couple of other glitches. Keir threw down a challenge “Perhaps…

I’ve been casually watching for road signs with mathematical significance for over two decades. The first version of Road Sign Math in 2005 was run on a blog and then a wiki. Forty different people submitted 251 signs in the Web 1.0 era. I let the site go in 2016 when I purged a number of projects. In 2021 the site came back with some spurring from Tammy actually. The new version embraced “keep it simple stupid” and was a simple micro.blog website. It has sat there for a while. No version of…

Many people in my circles are writing about the death of Patrick Stewart right now. I hate to just go along, but I must write about this. I knew this day would come, and I've thought of it occasionally. That must sound weird but I can explain. Historically, when a celebrity would pass away, there was a huge outpouring of grief, but I've never felt it the way others seem to. I wasn't that fazed when Michael Jackson died, for example. I was sad for his friends and family, and I knew it was…

I happened to catch this graphic on Facebook yesterday, advertising the opening of a new taco place just a few blocks down the street:Of course I insisted that we get takeout for supper, and I walked down in the rain just after they opened to pick it up. The menu, as promised, is taco-focused:I ordered us a couple of chicken tacos, a couple of longaniza tacos, and a carlota for dessert.While I was waiting, my server brought me a (tasty) sample of their esquites to enjoy:Twenty minutes later I…

Recently I’ve discovered some videos on archive.org that I’d like to watch. The problem is that they are VP8/VP9 plus Vorbis/Opus in WebMKV container which NihAV did not support. So I essentially had three options: re-encode it, use a third-party player, or implement support for it. Of course I went the fourth way—implement minimum support for the larger parts and re-encode the audio. First thing was to determine what has to be done. Since avconv can’t put VP9 into MP4, I had to implement…

During my early research into the production of Twin Peaks: The Return, I quickly learned the crew occasionally used stock video assets for various establishing shots. This is best seen with Diane Evans’ apartment exterior or the FBI Jet flying to Buckhorn. They also used stock photo to create things like the Rancho Rosa Estates... The post Twin Peaks Set Decoration – The Congressman’s Dilemma Swimsuit Photo from Part 3 of The Return appeared first on TWIN PEAKS BLOG.

Building things takes a lot of energy. Building them right, even more.

It was Friday night at 11pm, I was tired, I went to YouTube to watch something and realized that I was looking at an enshittified wall of slop. Insanely exaggerated thumbnails, dumb recommendations of the same tired topics, truly terrible idiocracy-grade content. I'm sure this algorithm works well for the median person on the internet, but it definitely does not work for me. So this morning (Saturday) I took a hold of my Opus 5.5 and gave it the task: Let's write our own YouTube clone based on…

This month’s musical experience was an embarrassment of riches. Grab a snack; you’re going to be here a while. DABDA – Dear Hope (Live) Math Rock / Dream Pop / Shoegaze / Alternative I love running across a new band and not only liking the music but immediately feeling their good energy. This South Korean group call themselves “pastel psychedelic”, moving between angular alternative, fret-blazing math rock, dream pop, and noisy shoegaze to make some really dynamic compositions. I’ve played…

First, a quick congratulations to Ben Meer on How to Be Good at Life becoming an instant #1 New York Times bestseller.I wasn’t going to write about it, but after mentioning Vanessa Van Edwards’s new book Conversation in September singlehandedly drove it to the top of the bestseller list, I decided I owe it to Ben to get him on the list for a second week. (As the old saying goes, correlation equals causation.)Ben’s book draws on years spent researching, developing, and writing about systems. He…