Like anglers, beekeepers often obsess about the weather.They both need something to blame when things go less well than they had hoped. How many times have you heard “too little rain, no nectar” or “too hot, they weren't biting” ?Or, to give them the benefit of the doubt, this compulsion healthy concern simply reflects the influence of the weather on their hobby.I was reminded of this at 7 am today when I listened to the weather forecast … there's another 'heatwave' on the way, but overnight…
It’s a meme at this point. When Deep Blue beat Kasparov, Go players could say that their game, unlike Chess, was too complex to fall to a computer program. Then AlphaGo showed they were wrong. It just took a better approach. When AlphaFold leaped ahead of human experts in predicting how proteins fold, it was due to a mountain of carefully labeled protein structure data. Other scientists and mathematicians could argue that nothing like that existed in their field, so a similar success was…
Some philosophy professors, on top of all the work they do for the universities at which they’re employed, write public philosophy, and sometimes such writing is on the Substack platform, with some or all of what they write available only to paid subscribers. Is there anything wrong with this? Walter Veit (Reading) thinks there is something wrong with it, and makes his case here. Richard Chappell (Miami) responds here, arguing that we shouldn’t criticize philosophers for paywalling their…
My compulsive response to the deadest Blog Days of Summer ever, exponentially deader than the deadest ever before (I'd like to take credit for here's decline but it's deader and getting deader everywhere), is of course to post an exceptionally self-indulgent autoblogographical bleggalgaze on a Friday, the deadest day of the week every week, and as many angry apocalyptic doomlinks I could collect since the last grid before pushing PUBLISH I used to burn off my extra-manic impulses by pruning the…
We have to remember that our bosses are also human beings. [T]here are days that they could be a certain way. Maybe not the most positive examples of being a boss, but it is what it is. You know, and this is where we give and take just like how we ourselves are not optimally performing every single day, right? — Gerald Lim, Work It (podcast)
The post about the dark mode toggle reminded me of two similar things rattling in my brain. On the positive side, here’s a delightful interaction from macOS. I can easily maximize the window to take up half the screen, but the moment I start dragging it, it recalls and nicely restores itself to its original size: macOS designers correctly figured out that the window being maximized or half-maximized is a state – but it has to be a state dressed up as a size. The button entry point is the…
A little over a year ago, my marital status officially became “Divorced.” Prior to that, for fifteen years, my divorce case was before the courts. Lots of people have been incredulous that a divorce could be so long and complicated (and expensive), but in telling others of my case, I learned that myths about divorce and related matters are common, even among people who got divorced (but didn’t go to court). I also saw flaws in the justice system. Wrongful convictions for serious crimes…
Something new and purdy just arrived! 😃 I’m stoked! I know what I’m doing tonight after everyone goes to bed. 😂
VS Code is a good editor, but its defaults no longer feel quiet to me. The editor has accumulated tabs, sidebars, breadcrumbs, minimaps, notifications, source-control indicators, language services, AI controls, chat panels, inline suggestions, and dozens of small visual prompts. Each feature is defensible on its own. Together, they make the tool feel as if it is constantly asking for attention. I wanted the opposite: a fast window for opening files, moving through text, and writing. Nothing…
It’s been fifty years since information architecture’s coming out party in Philadelphia. Alas, the discipline is still widely misunderstood. The main obstacle? The very thing that brought it to many people’s attention: the World Wide Web. I’d venture most people who’ve heard the phrase ‘information architecture’ have done so in the context of designing website navigation systems. That’s understandable: The web is a huge deal and IA was exactly what it needed early in its development. But IA has…
On this page I was watching a video from Tasting History where Max said: I wanted to let you know about the second channel I recently started. Its in conjunction with YouTube. Essentially, it's marathons of old Tasting History videos. It's a way to give old dead videos a second life. If you go to the channel, you will see that the videos are all around 2 hours long. The channel setup and video naming doesn't feel like something Max did himself. Yet I can understand why Max would agree to this.…
I subscribe to more podcasts than I have the time to actually listen to, and so I’ve got a large backlog going back several years. Currently, I’m working through mid-2021. Hush. I know I have a problem. You don’t need to point it out. Anyway, what I’m finding both simultaneously charming and soul crushing is how so many people are referring to Trump’s presidency in the past tense: how glad they are that he’s gone, how it was such an insane time, how we’re lucky to have survived it at all. Hello…
I don’t have a clear idea about how Austen and Dickens handled their social media platforms, but I suspect the videos of them unboxing their author’s copies were quite popular. I decided to join in the tradition and open “the … Continue reading →
Walking in to the room was an overwhelming experience. The triage nurses in the lobby of the Accident and Emergency unit took a few brief details then asked us to check in using the iPads on the wall just around the corner. As we turned the corner, it hit us that the waiting room was absolutely full. All the seats were taken, and people leaned against the walls and in the passageways, so that they had to shift every time someone went past. It was around 23:30 on a Tuesday. At this point, we had…
image by AI; my own somewhat hyperbolic prompt Reconnaissance The ravens come to feast upon the deer. Their talons are too dull to tear like claws. They smartly team with wolves, as hunting peers And point the way to road kill with their caws. These creatures love to play, nurse others’ chicks, Do barrel-rolls and bathe collectively, Use rocks for self-defence and play with sticks And flying upside down proclaim they’re free. But still, to man, an animal can’t feel — We daren’t believe they…
It’s been a hectic but active week. As usual, I continued with my two P.T sessions. I played a game of Pickleball on Thursday. I also ran twice. This week has been my most active week in quite some time. I took some time to write a blog post about return to running. My trail run training is progressing okay. It’s not spectacular, but I am on it, which is what I think matters. I am nervously excited about it. I am inspired by Soham’s posts about his trail runs. Hopefully, I get to run and…
I am on the record being open to machine learning tools. I'm not one of those people who oppose AI simply because it's trendy.Look, there are many excellent reasons to be pissed off. The GenAI slop factories – in particular OpenAI, Anthropic, Microslop, Meta, Midjourney and the thousands of trashy fly-by-night whitelabelers – position their products as a way for companies to dispose of people. There are innumerable instances where the slop factories have chosen profits over people. That's…
Prompt from Ava, via Cattasticks. Fitting for Blaugust! I've seen this survey floating around the discovery feed and it's time I finally filled it out. Why did you make the blog in the first place? I was searching for a creative outlet and missed documenting/sharing my life in a meaningful way. Creating and editing videos took too long and I quickly burnt out. I started blogging on Substack but it didn't feel right at all. Why did you choose Bearblog? My friend told me about this platform on…
Phew! I made it. Though I’m a bit light on links for ya today, there’s a lot goin’ on at the moment - I’m swamped busy, just the way I like it. Jorijn Schrijvershof, the guy behind toot.community, announced on July 28th that the server “will close permanently on 28 October 2026.” Though I’ll miss toot.community (Jorijn did an excellent job running the server) and appreciated the 3-month notice, I decided to move on a few days thereafter to get going with the transition as it pertains to my…
Read the full post at - 5 Reasons You Should Use Mozilla Firefox for Your Browser I’ve been watching the browser wars play out for over 20 years now. I watched Firefox beat Internet Explorer. I watched Chrome rise to dominance. And I’ve watched a parade of “Chrome alternatives” come and go – Brave, Vivaldi, DuckDuckGo, Opera, – all promising to be the privacy-focused, big-tech-free alternative we’ve been waiting for.* *also, there is Safari, which has its own set of issues. Here’s the thing:…
Michael Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti posted a quote from Patrick Kurp to highlight the erroneous Aristotle reference (“Perhaps he meant Poetics instead of Politics”), but I was struck by the word rhupunts. I’m pretty sure I’ve never run into it before; Britannica says: rhupunt, one of the 24 metres of the Welsh bardic tradition. A rhupunt is a verse composed of three, four, or five four-syllable sections linked by cynghanedd (an intricate system of accentuation, alliteration, and…
‘I started writing because no one had yet given me the words I needed. So I wrote them myself.’ https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/127936-000-A/ingeborg-bachmann-rebel-poet/?utm_source=ios&utm_medium=share&utm_campaign=127936-000-A
Next week I'm running a session with our product and engineering leadership on how AI is changing the product management role. To prepare, I read the people who've shaped how product managers think about the job (Marty Cagan, Melissa Perri, Teresa Torres, Rich Mironov, John Cutler, the Reforge team), alongside product leaders doing the work right now at Anthropic, OpenAI, Netflix, Instagram, and Whatnot. Then I went through all available 2025-2026 survey and study data. Most of what I found…
OverviewThis week was a tour of the systems organizations trust to do work at scale. Attackers hit RMM, AI workflow, package, identity, browser, network, and logistics infrastructure, while vendors shipped high-impact fixes for the platforms sitting above ordinary endpoints. The common problem was not obscure code. It was leverage: one trusted service, controller, developer workflow, or login path reaching far beyond itself.Reality check: If a system provisions devices, distributes code,…
An exhibition at the David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford University, You Are Here: Transit Cartography and Spatial Identity, explores the evolving design language of transit maps and the relationship of that design language with… More
Keep it coming: the video store resurrection continues. The Video Store Minneapolis kicks off its physical store fundraiser and clinches the base goal in two days Joshua M. Greenberg ponders video stores as a lost third place I recall the iconic Video Update logo adorning my old local spot (’90s)
Content warning: this post includes offensive imagery. One of my tasks for the next two weeks is to put together my syllabus for NYU’s new music history class on 20th century American popular music. To start the semester off, I wanted to find a song that spans many styles and eras, and that lays the thematic foundation for what comes after. I decided on “Old Folks At Home” by Stephen Foster, also known as “Swanee River.” This song was written in 1852, but it had a significant presence in the…
