The idea of finite geometries sounds like an oxymoron the first time you hear of it, something like dry water or cold fire, but the axioms of some kinds of geometry can indeed be satisfied by finite models. The axioms of projective plane geometry are as follows. Any two distinct points lie on exactly one line. Any two distinct lines meet in exactly one point. There exist four points, no three of which are collinear. The most famous example of a finite projective plane is the Fano plane. It…

Wow, that was quite a ride! Without knowing much about this series I had taken book 1 at “face value” and seen it is a complex and powerful story with the romance between Feyre and Tamlin at its heart and their eventual union as the happy ending everyone deserved. So to come to this second book and have everything that we thought was true turned on its head was really something, especially as we can see the hints that were planted in the first book. I’d be fascinated to know how far in advance…

Dinner in progress. Listening to Cream…

I’m an unabashed Steely Dan fan, and I don’t deny it. Pitchfork has been doing a weekend series where they commission reviews of older albums, featuring an eclectic mix of genres, artists, and selections. This weekend they covered Donald Fagen’s The Nightfly, a solo album released right after Steely Dan released Gaucho and broke up. It’s a great review, and adds a lot of color to the album I wasn’t aware of. There are several classics on this album: IGY, New Frontier, and the title track are…

last updated 5 minutes ago hey there! it's weeknotes time!!! main thing that's been happening on my blog is my writing month challenge, one post a day all of november! yet to miss a day so far but the month is young! been spending a lot of time browsing bubbles, the link aggregator, this weekend. it's interesting to see what piques the people's interest. rapid fire "in my humble opinion" answer mode to some of the posts i found there and elsewhere: does money buy happiness? what's happiness?…

Near the Kawasaki City Office, is Matsunoki, a tiny restaurant serving Szechuan food since 2000We got there just before they opened and were the 4th party in lineOn the weekend the lunch menu is not available and only items from their dinner menu are available.Satoshi ordered the mabo tofu...this was apparently the "not authentic" version but still made us cough and made Satoshi perspire...1250

Plus how to learn when you’ve started to believe the lie that you can’t Autism and AI There’s a new acronym floating around, based on “tl:dr” (too long, didn’t read). It’s “ai:dr”. Clever, sure, but also problematic. Maybe you are pretty good at sniffing out AI-written content, but I bet you don’t get it right 100% of the time. Chris Trottier talks about the accessibility advantages of artificial intelligence for the autistic community, and how defending human intelligence can stray into dodgy…

still in time remains expropriated moment negatives I hold ◉

Well, the tenuous structure that has been holding my life together is falling apart, which means I’m supposed to be taking actionable steps1. Instead, I’m inert, paralyzed with fear. This is perhaps very relatable, but it’s simultaneously harrowing to witness from the outside. “Do something! Do anything!” Due to a series of very unfortunate events, I don’t have cell service right now—a weird threepeat that I’m trying to accept is perhaps not the emergency it feels like it is. I’m supposed to be…

I made a bet with myself (nowhere near any online betting site!) on publishers' overreaching in the Anthropic settlement. I predicted that a major publisher would make a public statement — or at least a general statement within the claims process — attempting to intimidate authors into relinquishing authors' rightful shares of settlement proceeds before the extended "due date" for updating claims

Having learned to distrust AI output, the author of the following essay came to draw productive parallels to alchemy. We are now in the pre-chemistry era of AI. We know how these models work, because we crafted their code ourselves, and yet in most cases we cannot say why: why this word and not another, why this particular path through the machine. The crucible is closed, and like the alchemists we are not going to stop using it. The alchemists were the ones in history who had to pull real…

Hello from Canada, American friends! Here’s a meme of encouragement for you. As I write this, I’m in Toronto to catch up with friends for my high school reunion and will fly back to Tampa tomorrow morning. The post A message for my American friends appeared first on The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

I check the error logs on my server regularly, mostly to check for mis-configurations or check for bugs in code I've written. But lately, I've come across an interesting “security scan” (only in quotes because I think it's checking my security for its benefit) where this error from Apache (my webserver) is now coming up: AH02032: Hostname boston.conman.org provided via SNI and hostname qa.conman.org provided via HTTP have no compatible SSL setup And it's not just one or two hosts, but several…

Not going to label this week uneventful like the past couple of week. That doesn't mean it wasn't uneventful, I'm just accepting the normality of it. It was another exhausting week though. I was at the American Express stadium on Sunday, to watch Brighton win 2-0 against Brentford. The red card had a huge impact on the game though. I feel like Brighton would have scored more goals had they not been playing against 10 players. Another screamer from Diego Gomez, who is having his own goal of the…

Coordeering. CC BY-SA 4.0 image via Wikimedia Commons. I’m in the middle of a mean-spirited mood—or rather, a conflicted one that’s struggling to hold together both sympathy for an individual’s work and their commitment to it and the snort I let out upon reading an almost throwaway sentence in said work. I might not even be dwelling on it, were it not for the way I feel about a good portion of contemporary academia. The sentence that gave rise to my ambivalence came courtesy of Meghan Downes.…

I wrote earlier this year that I’d resume monthly challenges having to do with cutting things out. I’d done a few such experiments in past years, but in 2025 most of them had fallen away. Here it is November and I was messaging with Manu today that I’ve completely failed and am no longer happy with where my lack of doing without habits have led me. I pointlessly watch YouTube content at night before bed. I haven’t maintained my reading habit (mostly because I’d read before bed). I’ve reduced…

AI has reached what he calls “work intelligence”: it can do the jobs we invented, but we keep inventing new ones. Salt and ice used to be precious. Now restaurants hand them out for free. What we value changes, and in Trevor’s view, we’re expendable only if we define being human by the tasks we value today. There’s something poetic when you see thoughts put into words that were rattling in your brain. I think Trevor Noah just did that for me. “There is no job that will last forever. There is…

Dastardly villainy is afoot in the west! A cad and bounder harasses the town school-marm and assaults a pair of Native American merchants before being run off by the hero but schemes of revenge are being, well, schemed. Home Media Availability: Stream courtesy of EYE. The Bead Trail Movies were invented during the height of […]

Engaging, thought provoking, and ultimately quite cathartic, new Jewish-Australian musical After The Flood reimagines the story of Noah’s Ark is a modern urban setting. After The Flood is the brain child of Ari Jacob, who is credited as creator, composer, and producer. Jacob’s collaboration with co-writer Josh Gurgiel and arranger Adam Starr has resulted in a tight, cohesive chamber musical for five performers with an economical running time of 110 minutes (including 20-minute interval). While…

I've changed a lot since the beginning of this year. For instance, I never saw myself as a raw fish person. Ever since I tasted the delicacy that is hamachi and salmon toro, I think I have a problem. In other news, I have some salmon sashimi for lunch! Really excited :)

Ask an AI agent in your browser to add three items to a to-do list, and watch what it does. It reads the page, looks for something that resembles an input, types, presses Enter, then checks whether anything happened. That’s how most agents use the web today. There is no manual to follow. WebMCP is a new browser proposal that changes this. Your page tells the agent what it can do, in a format the agent understands, and the agent calls those actions directly. To try it, I took TodoMVC, the to-do…

10-16-26: I love fall. I get to red everywhere. It's SO pretty in nature.

10-11-26: this was my first time making cinnamon rolls from scratch. Verdict: TEN!!!!

Next week, Mrs PBT's and I are off on yet another cruise. That makes three this year, which perhaps sounds a little indulgent, even though the reality is that we're making the most of the opportunity while we can. As I've already mentioned, next year I shall be saying farewell to full-time work, and at the moment that's pencilled in for some time during March. However, whether the final date proves to be the beginning or the end of the month remains to be seen. I've even started doing some of…

09-05-26: A moody and gray close-up of Mount Rainier!

08-23-26: Hi, Luna!

The vibes right now are "toxic nostalgia". Toxic, in this case, means that those things or people are gone from your life for a reason, and this retrograde will test you to make sure YOU know why. This retrograde is in Scorpio. Scorpio represents death (endings, really), power, depth, intensity, and best of all, transformation. Whatever will happen is going to be SO uncomfy, but at the same time, the aftermath will be so delicious. The sign that comes after Scorpio is Sagittarius, which…

I like to understand what’s happening behind the scenes with any technology, especially when a tool or protocol is usually introduced through prebuilt clients. In this tutorial we will use tools commonly found on Linux systems to send MCP requests ourselves, and see how a few of its features work. The focus will be on understanding the protocol, transports, and authentication at a low level, and gaining an insight into how MCP clients and servers communicate under the hood. Setup Start by…