Hyde and Kev wrote about their dislike for summarize-option provided by LLM agents in almost all popular software and search engines. I completely agree with them. Although, their focus is on online writing and privacy, I see the same problem when reading a scientific article. This morning, I was attending a scientific talk where the presenter was showing his article in Adobe Reader, and Adobe, annoyingly, kept showing a pop-up at bottom to summarize the article. What the heck. I don't…
Link: Texas anti-ICE protesters convicted of terrorism charges sentenced to at least 50 years in prison, by Sam Levine in The GuardianThis is an outrageous litmus test for the freedom to protest in America:“A group of Texas protesters convicted of terrorism charges received unusually harsh sentences of at least 50 years in prison on Tuesday in a closely watched case that was widely seen as a test case of the Trump administration’s efforts to crack down on dissent.”Let’s be clear: a few of the…
I fear that I might like being a mentor a bit too much. Can I make this a full time job? Being a coach for young professionals in tech?
Let me explain — and to start with, no, I'm not thrilled it's starting at $1,049. But I'm also not surprised, and the discourse around it is missing the actual story so badly it's almost impressive.When Valve announced the Steam Machine back in November 2025, the internal target was reportedly around $749. That was the goal. Then RAMageddon happened.DDR5 that was sitting at $80-120 for a 32GB kit at mid-2025 lows is now $300-500. DDR4 — the supposed "cheaper" fallback — went from $55-70 to…
Power Cat 2026-06-23 listening and learning
I'm going to start off by saying I'm aware this will probably be one of my most divisive, controversial posts. I originally was writing it for the Calgary Vegan Society, but they decided it had too much geopolitics and graphic imagery, so take that as a content warning. I am writing this open letter to a specific kind of person, not everyone. I'm writing this to those who consider themselves compassionate, left-leaning, and have a strong distaste for genAI. So if you're reading this, I'm going…
David at Forking Mad asks an intriguing question: If you could be transported back in history to a period of time, when would it be and why? David chose 1850s to 1900s, a time of rapid technological process. Which is extremely fair and very tempting to me also. The recipient of this question, Elena, chose university in the mid 1990s to see the birth of the internet and live without mobile phones. A great answer, how exciting would that be. Elena raises the point that anything pre-1970s would…
Film Sets — Brigitte Lacombe brigittelacombe.combrigittelacombe.com https://www.brigittelacombe.com/film-sets
I’ve been attending IndieWebClub community meets in Bangalore for about nine months now. In every session, there are several fascinating links mentioned. Here are some of them I didn’t know about:aprilcools.clubpainscience.comweb.badges.worldlinks.net, which was apparently the first blog on the Internettogetherletters.comI encourage other members of the community to share web places they discovered during IndieWebClub meets on their blogs. - Jatan on Journal J ☕️ Contact Support Space Thanks…
So keep his fires burning through the night Beacons and gateways for the child of light. Now, with the summer solstice, we have come to midsummer and the traditional Church festival for this beautiful, long-lit solstice season is the Feast of St. John the Baptist, which falls on June 24th, which was midsummer day in the old Roman Calender. Luke tells us that John the Baptist was born about 6 months before Jesus, so this feast falls half way through the year, 6 months before Christmas! The…
I’ve recently seen a small flood of my personal and work emails (and group aliases) getting responses from many other companies’ support emails, as though someone were opening support tickets using my addresses. Is this some weird variant of push bombing? Or maybe someone getting me to train my spam filters to reject support emails so that Ill miss an important one (like “we’ve received your request to transfer your domain name; reply to cancel”) or such?
The old Games Unlimited in Pittsburgh was the game store of our childhood. It’s where we went to buy RPGs, modules, dice, and a whole pile of miniatures. We rummaged through the shelves in the far back and then greedily carried our treasures home on the bus. But now, decades later, they have a new space up the hill, which I got to check out on a quick trip through town. And I have to say, I am jealous. If you live in Pittsburgh, you are lucky to have such a fantastic resource at your…
Toe twins 🐾🦶
Here's Byrne Hobart at The Diff, writing about the existence of a trillionaire: It was inevitable that this would happen. 2% real GDP growth, 3% inflation, a 5% or so equity risk premium, some dispersion among equities, and—critically—being a species with five rather than six or seven fingers on each hand meant that some time this decade or next we'd cross the threshold where a single person is, on a mark-to-market basis, worth a trillion dollars. There's been a lot of discussion about this,…
John Gruber, writing about Apple’s pending price increases: I won a steak dinner from my Dithering cohost Ben Thompson, betting that Apple would not raise the prices on RAM when they introduced the M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pros in March, largely on the basis that Apple considers the pricing part of the product’s brand. For the same reason, I also do not think they’re going to raise the prices of existing products mid-cycle. I think Cook’s warning is about the fall, starting with the iPhones 18…
I had an idea last night to clean up the Muv activities screen a bit more.My goal has been not simply to rehash a list of activities you can easily find in the Fitness app (and others).The second image is the updated summary view of every way you moved today.
10 years ago I woke up in a tent in Glastonbury and realised that the utterly unthinkable had happened. We spent the morning, we festival goers, wandering around in a daze. It can be true?! Can’t it? It was. The magical otherworldliness of Glastonbury faded quickly that day as the real world, the horrible hateful reality, crashed over us. You can track back a lot of what is going on now in the UK to that point. The single most stupid, selfish, ill conceived idea for a referendum. There is…
If you looked at collages of photos of the "older brother core" aesthetic, you'd get a pretty close approximation to my lifestyle. Even though I fit really heavily with this, I'm a bit too old to really identify with it. It doesn't really feel like a modern lifestyle more than it does if you gave NostalgiaCore a caffeine addiction. I tried finding something in that realm of "POV: Your Gen X parent is blasting Hair/Heavy Metal in the car while you ride in the back seat" vibe, but for the late…
Dread Delusion is a difficult game to correctly describe. A quick peek at some of the many screenshots in this playthrough log will no doubt trigger happy Morrowind memories because of the otherworld giant shroom foliage. Yet the blockier graphics, including obligatory PS1 texturised distortion effect, give away that the game was part of one of the Haunted PS1 demo discs. Once you start playing it, the min-maxer in you will resent the flimsiness and overall uselessness of the combat. There…
The next entry in my Supernatural Writings of Stuart Palmer series is the first of two (possibly three) stories about Max Brandt, “ghost layer.” A Sleeper Bewitched: Mr. Crane has been asleep for a month. No one knows why; no one can wake him up. And there’s a strange, disembodied hand hovering over his bed. Mrs. Crane calls in Max Brandt, “ghost layer,” to help save her husband. Brandt started out as a ghost debunker, working with his cousin in the real estate business to rehabilitate the…
Making the rounds last week was this magnificent article on the complications of Arabic typesetting, An interactive introduction to the terrific experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt. The author, Saleh, promises: The reply took and the closure of the ticket took half an hour or so. The reasons behind it took five hundred years to pile up, and they involve a twice-mutilated vizier, a Qurʾān that vanished for four centuries, a Beirut newspaperman with a deadline, and an…
It’s been a long time since a ‘regular’ update but life has continued pretty much unabated. I’m fully in the home straight when it comes to my parental leave and have only got two weeks left. Let’s go with one of those big ‘state-of-the-union’ style updates where I keep a track on my big ticket items… Goals I didn’t want to waste my parental leave - to look back and think ‘where did the time go?’ Key things that I wanted to achieve included: Lose weight Keep writing Achieve ‘things’ Let’s take…
This week was wild, one of the most hectic days at work, watching the World Cup at church, getting some late birthday presents for myself, taking pictures, maybe a date? I don’t know what’s going onnn. Alas, here’s some notes on it all, from June 16 to 22, 2026. Let’s go! 👔 Happy Father’s day to the people fulfilling that role in the family. We had a fun time at church, every non-dad prepared some food to eat together at the end, which is always nice to have. There was also a fun photo shoot…
It's a history of emoji. Quickly moves past early pictographic writing on up to little pictures on early Japanese pagers and smartphones. I was kinda famililar with a lot of this history. For a fews years, Unicode emoji changes would make the news; I remember reading about such things at the time. But reading about them all together shows some trends that weren't so obvious year-by-year. Reading the first couple of chapters, I was kinda worried. I read this as an e-book. The first few bits talk…
Why don't I go there? Yes, nobody stays there long enough, as if she cared, maybe she sill thinks about the things I said, the words she said to me were so banal and yet in my memory they glow bright like embers in the darkness of a cave, my mind is a bit like a cave, and I really don't mind the fact that really nobody cares about the afternoons because the mornings and the sunsets are so beautiful but I feel like an afternoon always, always between moments of great beaty and importance, what…
David Richter, a mathematician at the University of Western Michigan, recently found himself with a surfeit of ceramic orthogonal polyhedra and, knowing of my own interest in orthogonal polyhedra, generously offloaded two of them to me. They fit nicely in my office together with the paper and crochet orthogonal polyhedra I already had: The blue one is an orthogonal realization of Boy’s surface, an immersion of the projective plane into three-dimensional space with three-way symmetry and a…
Really this is just notes for myself, but maybe someone else finds it useful.
For quite some time, I had wanted to be more charitable. I would occasionally give money to a begger, or round up my change at Taco Bell or some other establishment. Then about a year ago, I started thinking about the things I typically spend my money on. Video games, eating out, gas (mostly for leisure and fun activities). I don't have a lot of money. I don't pay any bills, except my cell phone, web hosting, and a few domain names. I live with my mom & she pays the bills. I don't have much…
Part of the "FreeBSD on a Laptop" series. The FreeBSD Handbook has an extensive chapter on installing FreeBSD that covers a wide range of scenarios with descriptions of each possible choice. Its an invaluable resource maintained by volunteer contributors. After performing a few installs, these are my personal notes of steps taken and choices made. A "short and sweet" version of the above Handbook. 1. Start Here Acquire an installation image Prepare the USB installation medium 2. Installation…
