I listened to a recent episode of Cal Newport's "Deep Questions" podcast, where he interviews Emile P. Torres. Cal says that if you want to understand what is happening in AI, you have to understand the futurist ideologies that shape the people running the frontier labs. Torres is a researcher who studies eschatological and utopian movements. They spent a decade inside this movement as a true believer, published in it, worked as a research assistant to Ray Kurzweil, did a stint at Cambridge's…

San Francisco, City in Crisis: Somebody lost their yo-yo on top of Fnnch's Solar Arch art installation. #SFHellscape

In 1826, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce used a camera obscura to produce what is widely viewed as the first photograph, an incredibly hazy view of some houses. This fact would make the medium of photography 200 years old, which is why Nathalie Herschdorfer, a Swiss curator and director of Photo Elysée, produced This Is Photography: The First 200 Years. The problem with photography is that it was invented the wrong way around, which makes the writing of histories more complicated than it should be. By…

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been writing about philosophy. This led to the single most dramatic drop in the number of subscribers to this blog, but no matter: I’m doing this in part to repent. In my younger years, I bought into the techno-rationalist dogma of the SF Bay Area; with time, I’ve come to realize that the ideology has fueled many toxic behaviors in our industry. Now, I just want get the word out that philosophy is interesting and goes beyond what’s peddled on LessWrong and…

The second book in the Wayfarers series by Becky Chambers picks up where the first one left off, but not quite. It follows side characters from the first book and two storylines whose connection doesn’t become obvious until the third act.I almost didn’t finish this one, I started it shortly after finishing the first book in August last year, but life happened and other books caught my attention. While I hesitate to attribute my inherent distraction to the glacial pace of the book’s first act, I…

Unknown location (probably inside)

So, I recently entered my first game jam and got second place. A couple of weeks ago molegato announced on Bluesky he’d be hosting a game jam for Halloween. I’ve always been reluctant to enter game jams; I’d say to myself I didn’t have the time or that I already had enough deadlines as-is, but the timing on this one was unusually good so I decided I’d make something simple for the fun of it. My entry was called “Theodore’s Great Hunt”. If you want to play it, please let me know what you think…

Red, ribbed, and russeted: Scruffy's blush, and dull-yellow unblushed peel, peers out from behind fractal-edged russet that seems to be spreading from pole to pole. ¶ It is hefty and sprinkled with russeted lenticel dots (and less-obvious "clean" ones). The example in my photo is especially lopsided.

The first pass at my rolling stock was into three major categories. This image shows the result of sorting those categories into further divisions. Some of these tubs and boxes near the top contain structures. Believe me, people, this is progress!The categories as of this post, 10/23/2026:Turn of the Century1920s (pre-depression)1950s (pre-1959 VGN-N&W merger, "transition" era)1980s (right around the N&W-SOU merger into Norfolk Southern)"Heritage" fleet (private road names of varying eras built…

Well done phishing campaign just landed in my inbox. This one gave me a pause and smartly goes after a “fear” motive. Did someone just compromise my account? That anxiety could lead to a quick login attempt and complete takeover. The info@rumpunch.io from address was easy to spot though. The other mistake was the “New York” with a Norway flag. Also seems their link was taken down with a 404. jamie ~ % curl --head 'https://track.pstmrk.it/3s/securemai.custredir91224.com%2F[…]' HTTP/2 404 server:…

This update covers Friday 10-16-26 through Saturday 10-24-26 (icon Glossary, if needed). Summary of the week that was 📚 New beginnings for L., and getting many of my proverbial ducks in a row. 📰 Last weekend’s vacation was just the break we both needed to start afresh. Accomplishments from last week 🎨 First and foremost, the WIR format has changed to what should be a more streamlined format. The Icon Glossary linked above has been updated as a result. On Wed 10-21, I posted a recap of the…

Real Photo Postcard of a daredevil plummeting to the ground. I imagine not seen is the water landing spot. RPPC of a daredevil c. 1930 Collection Jim Linderman / Dull Tool Dim Bulb

Liken opening the eyes for the first time, actually seeing the world. New layer come online, actually felt. As if they dropped into existence, between what was already there. Space grow more nuanced, more colored, but not larger.

by Cora Buhlert Two months ago, I wrote that the shooting of Baader-Meinhof gang Red Army Fraction member Petra Schelm could easily make the remaining members of the gang even more trigger-happy and might lead to more violence and death. Sadly, this prediction proved to be accurate, because the Baader-Meinhof gang Red Army Fraction just … Continue reading [October 24, 1971] The Escalating Spiral of Violence: The Shooting of Police Officer Norbert Schmid → The post [October 24, 1971] The…

A Rock Pigeon walks past fallen petals from an Orchid Tree.

I rather like the front cover design for Japanese Gothic, while the cover image is from Adobe Stock & iStock, the art direction which was done by Alexandra Niit is very good. It was different from the way she’d blushed and felt her heart beat faster around one of the older boys at the samurai academy. Different from when she’d glimpsed on of the more handsome Shimazu sons that her father said she might marry one day, before they’d lost everything. She didn’t want Lee Turner to kiss her, or…

Not terribly resourceful. I just followed the right wall. Ugh. Pagan. Fine. I start in the Pit of Death. Commenters have already alerted me that I'm lost, that I need to head back to the Upper Catacombs and try to find other pathways. I don't feel like it. I just keep looping around this area: A corpse has a stuffed torax on it. Aww.I keep getting killed by gouts of flame, fireballs, and lava. You can't see me because I just fell down the hole in the middle. A corpse behind a grating has a…

Ripper is a game with a unique pedigree. It’s the middle child of Take-Two Interactive’s experiments with FMV, sandwiched between Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller and Black Dahlia. It’s the one of the three that seems to be remembered the most, partly in thanks to early youtube personalities talking about it (particularly Spoony, back when he ...Ripper was first posted on October 24, 2026 at 10:55 am.©2017-2025 "Hardcore Gaming 101". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you…

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 90-92: Vienna could in theory offset Serbian hostility by seeking better relations with Bulgaria. But pursuing this option also entailed difficulties. Since there was still a bitter dispute over the border between Bulgaria and Romania, cosying up to Sofia brought the risk of alienating Bucharest. A hostile Bucharest was extremely undesirable because of the huge Romanian minority in Hungarian…

As I understand it, there has not been a lot of kernels in the pine cones across Siberia this autumn. This has not been great news for the Nutcracker birds that feast on them in that part of the world. So, they have been departing their usual territories in droves and heading into continental Europe in search of the tasty kernels. Hundreds if not thousands have reached Scandinavia, according to the Birdguides website, which has also reported that at least two German migration sites have counted…

Just enough light to see the pointer on my dial thermometer: 37°F. The first white-throated sparrows begin whistling from the edges of the meadow, thin high notes. Sky begins to appear between the ridgetop trees.

I decided to have some fun and I added badges to my Your Version Number: Release Notes project. Some specifics on how they work: Your birthday is a release and every day is a patch, so badges speak release engineering, with tiers from alpha through beta, rc and stable to LTS. Four tracks reward consistency, not perfection: days in a row, steady weeks, total days with notes, and how much of each year of life you cover. Firsts point you at features you might not know about, like replying to the…

My go-to knotsKnots are definitely one of my special interests, and I've definitely been late to many appointments because I had some rope and got distracted trying to tie a new knot I learned. There's something so romantic and special to me about how one line can become so many different things with so many different applications.Aside from the obviously cool and interesting world of knot topology, I do also use knots pretty much constantly in my everyday life as well. So I'm going to list the…

We have talked about wrapping AutoFirma into its own VM to prevent it from modifying the host’s keychain and to keep it properly packaged and configured. I liked the approach and I have recently extended it to a few more things: I now use WhatsApp and Signal in single-app VMs in ChromeOS. Through this setup I’ll be able to access those services as long as I have one of my hardware keys and a recent-enough VM backup. When I started playing around with the idea, I wanted to achieve the equivalent…

I've spent a bit of time refreshing the Feedgrab marketing site as well as the login/signup pages. I liked many of the existing traits, as well as the strapline, so it's mainly an evolution where I've added more fun and playful touches. Feedgrab does pretty much everything I want, so it tends to be at the back of the queue for my attention (Pagecord and my photography get most of it). This is a bit of a shame since it's a pretty good product I think, so I'm going to try and invest a bit more…

French people will complain about immigrants not integrating but then mercilessly otherize us when we try to. Alô mais alô quoi. Like, you wanna let us in or like nah? (The answer is nah.) #france

This October has been an expensive one. First, our hot water heater went out. It was probably about 10 years old. Then, two days after our water heater went out, the refrigerator went out, and it was also about 10 years old. Fixing it would cost more than buying a new one. So off to Home Depot we went, and $1,900 later, we had a nice new refrigerator with a five-year warranty. It's bigger than the old one but more energy-efficient, and it has LED lighting, which is very bright. Ten years for…

This October has been an expensive one. First, our hot water heater went out. It was probably about 10 years old. Then, two days after our water heater went out, the refrigerator went out, and it was also about 10 years old. Fixing it would cost more than buying a new one. So off to Home Depot we went, and $1,900 later, we had a nice new refrigerator with a five-year warranty. It's bigger than the old one but more energy-efficient, and it has LED lighting, which is very bright. Ten years for…

It’s time once again for me to ask my readers to select my reviews for the entire month of December! Do you have a silent film or a movie about silents that you have been wanting me to cover? This is your chance! Just reply with whatever movie or movies you would like me to […]

I liked Santiago because there was no Apple Store. I said this to my new Chilean friends and they insisted there was, but no, there are only licensed resellers. That concrete box of hard white light, that room without shadows, hasn’t been invited to the country yet and I felt smug for being there without it. I liked Santiago because there were goths everywhere. I couldn’t get over it. 8 million people in the capital and half of them looked like they must be sound. They weren’t dramatic in…