Steven Levy, Wired, interviewed John Ternus, the new CEO of Apple: “Everyone has an opinion—I really like where we’re at,” he said. “I would hope people recognize that the work we do is building incredible products that make their lives better. We’re absolutely going to leverage AI to do that. We don't want to ship AI for AI's sake. When we're doing it right, people won’t have to think about whether it was AI that made this happen or more traditional software. What matters is, did we build…

Rusty Foster, of the excellent Today in Tabs newsletter you should probably be reading: Neat! There’s a remote-exploitable kernel memory race condition in the Linux IPv4 TCP code. A bunch of other linux kernel vulnerabilities were accidentally posted to a public mailing list before patches were ready for them. The official Claude Code extension for VS Code on Cursor has been dropping “a persistent SSH backdoor across macOS, Linux, and Windows.” The Department of Homeland Security was hacked.…

In the final days of April 1945, as Soviet troops fought their way into central Berlin, Adolf Hitler remained underground in the Führerbunker, a reinforced concrete shelter beneath the garden of the Reich Chancellery. The German capital was collapsing around him, the Nazi leadership was in disarray, and the war in Europe was nearing its […]

Molly White, writing at Citation Needed: A notorious North Korean cybercrime group has stolen around $6.4 billion in cryptoassets from multiple hot wallets belonging to Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, and still controls around $3 billion of it after stablecoin issuers and other protocols froze what they could. These estimates are still in flux as various platforms work to freeze tokens or otherwise thwart the attacker from cashing out, and as both Binance and independent…

Why Writers Should Have Sympathy for Ghosts, by Annie Barrows, Literary Hub The Hill I Will Die On: Dumplings are the Ultimate Proof of Our Common Humanity, by Joseph de Weck, The Guardian How Humans Made the Loch Ness Monster, by Laura Fernández, Literary Hub (Excerpted from There’s a Monster in the Lake: The World as a Fantastical Place) Is Curiosity Good for Us?, by Adam Phillips, London Review of Books

In the morning we woke up to a gloomy grey day. The front had passed us and the wind had turned to be favorable, so we hoisted anchor and left. Inside the atoll we packed the anchor away and set up main in first reef and prepared the staysail on deck. Then it was time to head out of the pass and leave North Minerva Reef behind. Our time in Minerva was magical. With full moon and practically no wind for few days we could enjoy exploring the reef at low tide and participate to the various social…

Happy Halloween 2026! Ever since today's set was leaked this past summer, I knew it was going to be the October 31st review for Trick or Treat Through 31 Days of Toy Terror. While I don't collect LEGO as heavily as I do action figures, I do love them and pick up sets fairly often. Usually I prefer the modular buildings and such but I'm absolutely a sucker for the spooky stuff and today's review, Mayor Manor, is the beginning of a new annual series from LEGO that is essentially a Halloween…

Daughter of SatanJean PlaidyToronto: Harlequin, 1952Must say, she's much more attractive than I would've imagined.Related posts:A Harlequin HalloweenAnother Harlequin HalloweenIt's Harlequin Halloween Time!The Horror! The Harlequin Horror!The Harlequin Horror That Just Won't Die!The Most Horrifying Harlequin Halloween Ever!Night of the Living Harlequin Halloween HorrorHarlequin Halloween Horror ConfusionWill Harlequin Halloween Horror Never End?No, Harlequin Halloween Horror Will Never EndWho…

The lock held. The money left through the side door. On Thursday, someone stole $6.3 billion from Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange. Most of it left in about 20 minutes. It’s the largest crypto theft ever and roughly four times the previous record, the $1.5 billion stolen from Bybit in 2025. The BBC’s cyber correspondent called it probably the biggest single theft of any kind. Ten days before the hack, I published the last chapter of Zero Knowledge, my novel about three founders…

My mom texted me the other day asking if I could stop by to visit and go through yet more boxes of things before her and my dad head to Florida for the winter. I hadn't seen them or been home in quite some time so I decided to make the trek down today. I grew up in a town called Mansfield about an hour south of Boston. Getting there generally takes more than an hour because Massachusetts is just traffic at all times of the day now. I'd describe Mansfield as typical American suburbia that you…

We just got back from a wedding and it was really fun for reasons including but limited to that I got to dress real slutty but, also, at one point, Harry Belafonte’s “Jump in the Line” came on and the edge of the dance floor started to move a bit and then the couple burst onto it out of nowhere —— in costume as Beetlejuice and Lydia Deetz in the red wedding dress. It ruled pretty hard. I like weddings. I remember telling a guy friend that twenty something years ago or something and his reaction…

When I heard the news that Patrick Stewart died, I started thinking about one of my favourite episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Season 5, episode 25: “The Inner Light”. In that episode, Captain Picard is struck unconscious by an energy beam from an alien probe which embroils Picard’s mind into experiencing the complete life of a alien man and his doomed civilization in the span of 25 minutes. The YouTube channel Art of Storytelling provides a fantastic review of this remarkable…

While in Tokyo, I had to make at a stop that I’ve always wanted to visit: Roland Store Tokyo, the flagship store of the venerable Roland, maker of all sorts of electronic music instruments. The store is located in Harajuku, right in the middle of where Tokyo’s various youth subcultures hang out, and where tourists (admittedly including myself) come to check out all the quirky shops, especially those devoted to kawaii. If you’re an electronic musician and in Tokyo, this store is a must-visit… It…

I’ve been fascinated with local LLMs for a couple of years now. The better open weight models, including some that inference on regular, higher-end consumer hardware at tolerable speeds, are now reliable enough to handle simpler programming tasks. This requires a coding harness, but so far this year I’ve been disappointed by all the harness offerings. For inexplicable reasons most are built with web stacks, and consume enormous amounts of memory. At its core a coding harness is essentially curl…

Composer: Jim Andron System: Philips CD-i Release Date: 1992 (no specific date) Favorite Tracks: Track 0, Track 3 I just discovered the CD-i version of Tetris through this Bluesky post and I'm totally obsessed with its soundtrack. We all know and love the traditional Tetris theme song and how much of a brainworm that song is, but the CD-i game has a very vaporwave-esque soundtrack with tons of bass and synth and it's absolutely amazing. I can't believe no one's talking about this! One of my…

I just discovered the CD-i version of Tetris through this Bluesky post and I'm totally obsessed with its soundtrack. We all know and love the traditional Tetris theme song and how much of a brainworm that song is, but the CD-i game has a very vaporwave-esque soundtrack with tons of bass and synth and it's absolutely amazing. I can't believe no one's talking about this! One of my favorite tracks, Track 3, feels like an 80s power ballad, complete with a very sensual guitar riff and twangy bass.…

One of my favourite holidays for decorating arrived at midnight. I won't be able to fully enjoy it because the evening is routinely interrupted by beggars. Would it be nice if I could just sit back and enjoy the death spiral of creep in my living room? Yes. Will that happen? No. As soon as...Read More

5th Avenue Street Photography – New York, New York We are still on 5th Avenue like we’ve been for the last several posts. However, I’m switching from architecture to street photography. Like I often do for my street photos, I convert to black and white, mainly out of tradition. I’m looking south and captured these two women as I included the surrounding environment. It’s a busy scene like 5th Avenue usually is, but the expressions and positions of the subjects make the picture. I’m not sure if…

I have a soft spot for scary games made for kids. Videogames as a medium are not strangers to horror. The market is full of well-designed, really scary games. Anything from classic games like Resident Evil, Silent Hill or Rule of Rose to more modern gems like Dead Space or Amnesia are fantastic examples with tons of fans across the globe. But there are other kinds of media with “horror” in it that is targeted to a different kind of audience. Book series like Goosebumps or television shows like…

I have been neglecting my phone camera for months, so there were not a lot of pictures this month. That said, October was a mix of things (trans boundaries haze, cousin’s wedding, and stuffs.) My succulents have been growing quite sporadically and overgrowth happens in multiple places. We had a trip to Jakarta for my cousin’s wedding. Some sessions at claw machines (Ari loves claw machines). We also FINALLY got our clear skies here in KL! I also started reading Terry Pratchett’s “The Colour of…

We're reading our way through the 1927 issues of Weird Tales, that aristocrat of the pulps. Today, the June number is under review. Our familiar friends like Edmond Hamilton and Robert E. Howard, August Derleth and E. Hoffmann Price, are not in attendance this time out, so we are digging a little deeper today. Robert Howard does show up in the letters column, praising Ray Cummings' "Explorers into Infinity," which I guess the creator of Conan liked more than I did. And Frank Belknap Long makes…

...to me. I write this on the eve of my birthday. I'll be a year older, once again. Within an hour or so, I'll likely be at a bar with my friends, old and new. Midnight will strike and those who know me more will nudge at the time and tell me it's my birthday, and the news will trickle around the huddle of familiar faces. I might get drinks bought for me. The past few birthdays have been eventful and tumultuous and sometimes peaceful. I've traveled for much of them. This is the first birthday…

[This is a guest post by the organizers of the Summit on Math Research in the Age of AI: Dan Freed (Harvard), Larry Guth (MIT), Bryna Kra (Northwestern), Emily Riehl (Johns Hopkins), and Mohammed Abouzaid (Stanford). This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] Last week we organized an intensive two-day summit Math Research in the Age of AI. It was held at the Harvard Center for Mathematical Sciences and Applications (CMSA). Thirty-two…

I am getting to the end of this, and I am running out of movies for my theme.Witch Story (1989)Witch Story, aka Streghe, is a 1989 Italian horror movie directed by Alessandro Capone, but most of it was shot in Florida. That combination actually fits the movie pretty well because the basic story feels much more European than American. A brother and sister have come into possession of an old farmhouse and with some friends in tow they find that the place is haunted by Helena, a woman put to the…

In 2017, Hiroshi Sugimoto told the Japan Society he has a “stone fetish”; the Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden is proof. Hammered aggregate, Maine granite, Chinese pavers, and The Burghers of Calais in Hiroshi Sugimoto’s redesigned Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden After recently following the photographer, sculptor, antique collector, and Noh aficionado’s concerning statements glorifying civilization’s lost past, I was very concerned for what Sugimoto’s redesign of a Modernist landscape attached to a…

Just finished Inktober 2026. Thought I should post it to my website. (I'm not sure why I don't post more art to my website?) Happy with a fair number of the drawings this month, especially the ones towards the end...

As longtime readers may be aware, the original version of ANGEL AND THE BADMAN (1947) is not just my favorite John Wayne film, it's high on my list of all-time favorite movies.Wayne played gunslinger Quirt Evans, reformed by the love of a Quaker girl, Penny Worth (Gail Russell). Wayne's longtime friend Bruce Cabot played the villain, Laredo Stevens, with Harry Carey Sr. as Marshal McClintock and Lee Dixon as Quirt's friend Randy.In 2009 a TV remake aired on the Hallmark Channel which costarred…

Table of Contents Democracy Voting Representation Participation Corruption Conclusions Democracy Taiwan is currently in the run-up for local elections, the world is holding its breath for the American midterms, there are protests and riots in the French republic, the developments in Albania and Serbia, and Sweden held its parliamentary elections that I myself participated in. It seems to me a good opportunity to discuss what the nature of democracy really is, how to create a democratic society,…

On the Amazing Race 39 episode 6, teams faced the Intersection, and we faced a cliffhanger after an Expedia ad but before they face the Double U-Turn.