Maxwell Tani, Semafor: The globally-minded tech news startup Rest of World is scrambling to find a new home — or faces the prospect of shutting down. The six-year-old digital publication has seen the social and web search traffic on which it depends evaporate. This sharp decline has prompted the organization’s founder and primary financial backer, Sophie Schmidt, to explore other options for its future. This is disappointing. Rest of World is one of my favourite publications with a scope unlike…

How do you do security engineering when the code is being changed in real time by a swarm of coding agents? We went all in and did the same. At Synthesia we strive to move fast and be efficient. We recently released Syren, taking it from internal proof-of-concept to external release in a very short timeframe, turning a prototype into a product-grade system that meets all our quality and compliance requirements. The product was being built the way a lot of software is built now: by engineers…

I firmly believe that we still need to read some of the code.1 It’s suboptimal to read all of the code, but I consider it irresponsible to read none of it. I won’t explain why now because that would fill several more articles. I just want to share this upfront because it clarifies where I’m coming from. But I am trying to be smart about it2, and I’ve found the quote in the title very useful: “...

Willis Alan Ramsey - Kerrville Folk Festival, Kerrville, Texas, May 23, 1980A couple months back I mentioned that I had seen Willis Alan Ramsey play a terrific show in Boulder. And in a nice coincidence, a couple weeks later, the Antarctica Starts Here label announced that they were releasing the first-ever vinyl reissue of Ramsey’s classic debut. That’s called good timing. So! I hopped on the phone with Willis for a chat about that LP, as well as his 55-years-in-the-making follow-up. “I always…

While on vacation in Oregon, I did what everyone does on vacation, start thinking about what needs improvement on my web site. And when I came home, I actually worked on those improvements rather than sticking them back in the “maybe someday” todo list.There are a few small updates here on the site:First, it really annoyed me that the way Squarespace handles blogs older posts essentially disappear and are hard to find. I spent some time with Claude exploring ways to find those older posts and…

Virtual signalling is often used as an insult, but it’s good to signal your virtues, actually. A few months back, I read a story on Bluesky from a hispanic woman who’s immigrant mother got lost in the city. Her phone ran of battery, she didn’t speak much English, and she had no idea how to get home. She approached a young woman with bright blue hair who was able to use her phone’s translation app to get the mother’s address and help her get home. When the daughter asked how she knew she could…

A realidade da habitação em Portugal é completamente fora deste mundo. A minha geração e a mais nova não consegue pagar o custo que a habitação tem sido nas grandes cidades, nem no Algarve. O Ivo Bernardo fez uma análise da situação da habitação em Portugal, baseado em números públicos de uma variedade de fontes. Public housing: this is where the data sides most with the protesters. Social rental housing is 1.1% of dwellings in Portugal, against an EU average of 8%. At €150,000 per home, 3%…

Cheers to Herman and his latest approach to upvotes on Bear Blog. I started this blog on Bear, and I still think it’s a wonderful service. I appreciate Herman’s thoughtful, principled approach to building and evolving it. I struggled with the upvotes, though. I don’t love upvoting in general and have written about that a few times. Herman’s new approach is to allow upvoting but hide the upvote numbers on Bear’s Discovery page. From his post: I made this change for two reasons. The first is that…

I was keen to dive into this new anthology, which came out earlier this month, and it is in fact the first story collection by Celia Fremlin that I have reviewed. This surprised me a little as she is an author whose work I invariably enjoy. Some of the stories in this book were originally published for Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and Woman, whilst others were printed within other short story anthologies edited by Julian Symons and John Creasey.

Most of a surgical resident's day is not surgery. Why hospitals are the hardest market for AI, and what it will take for clinical agents to succeed

You after reading this, probably Howdy, Farmhands! The blog bandwagon is about advice for players. But a beautiful woman told me I should be posting shorter blogs so. Uh. 1. Ask what the buy-in for the game is and where the fun is (are we theatre kids-ing this or is this a resource management game?) then choose to take actions within those bounds. 2. Spotlight share with other players when you realize you’ve been talking a lot. Throw their character questions about what your character should…

Inspired by Ethan Marcotte's meme collection a long time ago, I too created a directory and threw my memes in it. It was also just an Apache directory listing. And then, one day, my hosting provider decided that I couldn't have fun and disabled Apache directory listings. Was I deterred? NO! I half-assedly built a site in Hugo to host all my memes, and there it sat, half done and unloved for many years until I got inspired by something we did at work where we did an experiment to see how quickly…

After the first attempt at making a very side-effectful circuit simulator, and then an ambitious attempt at making it pure, I was reminded of a middle ground, using a pattern common in production Haskell code. It is called MTL-style effects, and it is a specific type of final tagless encoding. The idea is that we first find a set of operations that our circuit simulator needs to support. Drawing this boundary well requires some experience and taste. Then we encode that limited set of operations…

i wrote a prayer in 2023. i’m still saying it, and tonight i’m adding a few more lines. let me stay gentle and tender-hearted despite my hardships and failings, let me always be unapologetically true to myself with no fear of prejudice and judgment, let me have the strength and courage to actively quell my insecurities and anxiety let me trust that being behind is not the same as being lost, let me stop measuring my life against timelines that were never mine, let me meet the days I’m unsure of…

On the second day of the week, Apple announces new iMac and 14-inch MacBook Pro, both with M6 chip now. The expectation for tomorrow's announcement is a touch-screen MacBook Pro. ~ Links: Apple Launches New iMac With M6 Chip, N1 Wireless, Faster Ethernet, by Ryan Christoffel, 9to5Mac Apple Announces New 14-Inch MacBook Pro With M6 Chip, by Hartley Charlton, MacRumors

As I've mentioned before, I've been going through my music library in Apple Music and tweaking — deleting songs, fixing album art, tags, etc. — and re-discovered some playlists I made ages ago. Most of the neat ones are "Genius" playlists, which were introduced to iTunes...I'm not sure how long ago. But it's been at least a decade, if not longer. The general idea is that it creates a playlist based around similar songs to the specified track. Unfortunately when I tried to create a new genius…

The AI era seems to be emboldening startups to once again take bold swings and use your data without even bothering to ask so they can build a startup around it.It’s the great truism of the internet: You give an inch, and folks will take a mile.Back when I was running ShortFormBlog in 2009, I remember trying a number of digital startups, all of which promised different ways to help monetize my content through optimization or some clever feature that made my site 5% better. These scripts were…

I was hopeful when I tried the pack version of Budae Ramyun. Formerly known as K-Army Stew, it looks like this is it’s progeny for sure. Is it? Let’s hit the bowl running. Nongshim Budae Ramyun Ramen Noodles With Soup Mix – United States Detail of the side panels (click to enlarge). Contains beef., To prepare, add in sachet contents and fill to line with boiling water. Cover 4 minutes. Finally, stir and enjoy! Detail of the lid (click to enlarge). An instant noodle block. A sachet of soup base…

Cyber Defense teams are suffering a DDoS; vulnerability management is no longer able to keep up with the onslaught of findings, reports, nor hype. The current situation is simply not sustainable.

Anticipating Apple’s now released iPhone Duo I spent a morning earlier this past summer checking out Samsung’s latest folding smartphones. I’d never been interested in the folding form factor before and thought it was time to feel them out for myself. I wrote about that here. Yesterday on a series of errands I convinced my wife to join me in doing some hands-on time with the iPhone Duo in a local Apple Store. Not only did I want to check the device out myself, but my wife is unflinching in her…

I had to make a new “author photo” today and was experimenting with it in ChatGPT and came up with this variant. Not going to be the “official” version but worth keeping! Check out the books here.

With October heading out the door almost as soon as it arrived, I thought now would be as good a time as ever for another roundup of what I’m playing, games I’ve beaten, what’s currently in my backlog, and whatever else I decide to add at the end. Being the chronic “game-not-finisher” that I am, last week I decided to make myself go back to games that I stopped playing halfway through and finish the goddamn things, so expect plenty more of those in next month’s roundup. Weirdly enough, I did…

With October heading out the door almost as soon as it arrived, I thought now would be as good a time as ever for another roundup of what I’m playing, games I’ve beaten, what’s currently in my backlog, and whatever else I decide to add at the end. Being the chronic “game-not-finisher” that I am, last week I decided to make myself go back to games that I stopped playing halfway through and finish the goddamn things, so expect plenty more of those in next month’s roundup. Weirdly enough, I did…

For our third night in the Noovo Plus van, we stayed at Golden Shore RV Resort in Long Beach. So our first night was a Harvest Host (no hookups), our second night was a state park (no hookups), and our third night was a traditional RV park (with full hookups). We did this both to experience different kinds of camping in the van, and to end at a place where we could empty the toilet’s cassette and the gray tank, as required by the rental.Resort map:Our site:Our first time using the electrical…

yesterday i deployed a broken /feed.xml you might see duplicate entries if you fetched my feed yesterday simple solution: mark them as read… depending on the feed reader, removing the feed and adding it again might also get rid of the duplicate entries i told naty that this happens to the best — i guess i was right about that…

Covers sell, whether it’s books or magazines. This was just as important for pulp magazines as it was for men’s adventure magazines. One of the best of the MAM artists is Mort Künstler (1927–2025). The folks behind Men’s Adventure Library — Bob Deis and Wyatt Doyle — have been putting out several collections on various […]

Coming late to adamgryu’s Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival this year, that community experience where you can carve pumpkin models with simple tools then upload them to a display for people to enjoy. The festival is open for a while around Halloween every year then goes offline until the following year, with all the old pumpkins discarded at that time, so enjoy it while it lasts. Just a plain ol’ Jack O’Lantern here, but you’ll find much fancier ones at the festival. I’m sure this is fine. Ghost…

47 Broccoli

This series covers prompt patterns for agents that run in a loop: the agent builds something, measures it, improves it, and repeats the cycle the next day without a person supervising. Across this series I cover: How to grow a long prompt without it contradicting itself How to keep an agent from damaging the machine it runs on How to hand an agent a loop it can run without approvals How to let real usage tune an interface How to get creative output you don’t have to babysit How to make the loop…

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