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…

Arrived in Porto, Portugal! 🇵🇹

ScreenshotThe post Kindertrauma Funhouse first appeared on kindertrauma.

A friend on facebook says that Hamnet contains a pretty serious error — naming the Costwolds the Chilterns (or, pretty much equivalently, mislocating the Chilterns between Stratford and Oxford). I’m not sure that would ruin the book for me, but I definitely would find it annoying (knowing both areas very well makes it worse, but even if I didn’t know them!). My, recent, error/irritation, was in the film Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer meets Jean Tatlock at a cocktail party and one of them (I forget…

Calculus professors with no experience in numerical computing will tell students that computers calculate trig functions with power series. They don’t. I worked on the implementation of trig functions in hardware, and I can assure you we didn’t just use power series. Power series are an excellent way calculate functions near the center of the series, such as computing sine for small angles. But the further you get from the center, the less useful power series are. Let’s suppose you want to…

“Ain’t no man can avoid being born average, but there ain’t no man got to be common,” goes a quote from Satchel Paige. It’s useful and energizing not only because of Satchel’s incredible story, but also because it reminds us that being common is a choice. Questlove writes in Creative Quest, “Once you start making things, once you take that leap, you have the same status as any other artist. I’m not saying that you’re as good. I’m not saying that you’re as important. But all of a sudden it’s a…

After a week of ghosting round the house by myself, my wife and children and back. Let me share some emotional slop (as opposed to AI slop) about what a privilege it is to have them around. This morning I got woken up early (6:15am) and headed downstairs with the one-year-old to wait for the onslaught. An onslaught that arrived at 7am on the dot with the four-year-old making her way downstairs, closely followed by her big brother. A one-year-old is chaotic. All three of them together is…

Our only aim now is to get home, and it seems that we have a Eurostar ticket that allows us to change it up to an hour before the train departs. Consequently around 7am I walk to Gare du Nord to try and change our tickets. The station is already crowded. I discover that it will cost 50 Euros each to change our tickets, and, although tempted, I decline. I walk back and find a place for tea. I ask for “un tasse du the, s’il vous plait.” The woman behind the counter looks blank. “Tea,” I say, and…

Ian Dunt captures a predicament I often find myself facing:Things in the past only take shape and assume their current form once they are over. Things in the present can therefore never live up to them. They can never provide the same degree of certainty, because they are still happening. So we live with this constant defect where we over-emphasise the innocence of what has gone and we underestimate the quality of what is happening.

Hey two quick reminders if you're new here or have mainly been reading this blog for the blog (no shade) Hello hi, I'm MSD: in addition to the photographer, artist and blogger I am here, I am also the frontperson of this chiptune/orchestral indie music band collective thing called Curious Quail (hence the blog's name) and incredibly bad at promoting our music as time goes on so I'm gonna frontload. If you don't want to buy music I totally get it, you can skip down to the first cat photo - but…

The masses are often overruled. How often do they act against the interests of the people they represent? Clear majorities want a decent minimum wage of $17/hour. Majorities support a host of other downright leftist policies. Most americans say government should run a universal healthcare program. These majorities often hold up across political parties and the urban/rural divide. But even with our broad support, we haven't achieved these goals yet. Why not? Our achievements, from the civil…

Two classic string boards are connected by red string in Mind Thief (dir. Matt Steinauer, 2022). ▲ Mind Thief (dir. Matt Steinauer, 2022) ▲ Mind Thief (dir. Matt Steinauer, 2022) ▲ Mind Thief (dir. Matt Steinauer, 2022) ▲ Mind Thief (dir. Matt Steinauer, 2022)

Tomorrow is International Cat Day. If you know me, everyday is Cat Day so let’s celebrate our favorite feline couch potatoes. Trying to narrow down our combined love for stationery and cats was such a challenge. Van Dieman’s has a 15-color ink collection called Feline with fabulous illustrations on the bottles including Persian Princess which looks 100% like Princess Donut (IYKYK). Midori D-Clips Nano Clips – Cat – Box of 16 ($8.50) “Everyday is Caturday” Cat Rainbow Washi Tape ($4) Uni…

It is of course impossible to predict the effects of new AI technologies on total economic growth in a precise way, but there are strong reasons to believe that the effect will be modest for a decade or two, anyway. Charles Jones Jones explores some of the reasons in “AI and Our Economic Future,” in the most recent Journal of Economic Perspectives (Summer 2026). His arguments readily accept that AI capabilities both have grown very rapidly and will continue to grow very rapidly: indeed, Jones…

A worker at a US government lab got bitten by a monkey carrying a deadly virus, and it turned out nobody knew what to do about it. Around the same time, someone from the same lab tried to smuggle outbreak samples into the country. All of this while everyone's worried about AI making bioweapons. Let's take a look.

A week of Blaugust, a honkaku mystery, some music for Bandcamp Friday, Traitors NZ, and more Zelda. We are a week into Blaugust and I have managed a post a day so far. However next Monday I'm back to work for a full seven days so will probably not continue that pace. Probably another link post on Monday or Tuesday and a digest on Friday at least. I also need to spend some more time job hunting. I am only really employed at my current job until the end of September. Which isn't that far away.…

I saw this Spotted Eagle Ray last weekend and it might be the biggest one I’ve ever seen. The head was huge. Compare it with a photo I posted last month (below) of a juvenile Eagle Ray.

Pega Um! mini music player widget (2026/08/07) As I'm working on the site for the local fanzine project Pega Um!, I want to welcome with music the people who pick up the zine and find it interesting enough to visit the site. The playlist is made up of songs by local artists they won't hear on the radio, and is an homage to old alternative events called Junta Tribo (Tribal Gathering) that would have rock, hip-hop, punk, reggae, metal and ska groups all in the same line-up. Check it out here.