“But every once in a while, you find a magical afternoon where you’re both free, and you find yourselves sitting at a bar, or across each other at a picnic table, or sharing a meal, or a pinball machine, and it all comes flooding back. The easy chats, the light-hearted arguments about which band sold out when, the rekindling of old memories, and more recently an “in memorium” of friends who’ve passed.” buttondown.com/monteiro/…
Nau maiYesterday we had a Thursday off, enjoying a stop in the jewel of the midwest, Cleveland, Ohio. There are three main parts of Cleveland: Downtown, which is right on Lake Erie, Midtown, which is inland and to the east, and Birdtown which is to the west past the Cuyahoga River. We spent our day parked outside a trendy hotel in midtown, resting and making the most of the hotel facilities which included Foosball, Giant Jenga, rattan egg chairs, and a patio with a fire pit. Tristan and Annie…
The Washington Post reported that the US government will decide who can use state-of-the-art LLMs. After the ban of Fable and the limitations coming to ChatGPT 5.6, what's next? My bet is Chinese models. For all of Anthropic's doomsaying and propping up of their secret model Mythos, several open-weight models have proven capable of similar feats, and at a fraction of the cost. DeepSeek rocked the AI world in December 2024 with their initial release, nearly sending shockwaves through American…
I missed publishing notes from the last two weeks. I didn’t do much reading during those weeks. How to recover a dropped stash in Git? Though I’m a long-time-novice Git user. At times, I do discard file changes after a git stash pop. I know, I should be doing git stash apply instead of git stash pop. Then safely clear the stash. Being an average human writing code, I do my fair share of mistakes. Anyways, two answers from this Stack Overflow question are really helpful for recovering lost…
Womp womp. Bookmakers suffer as the New York Knicks defy the odds. The City Reporter:→ The City Reporter
An idea for indie folks working together. Assumed audience: Folks who work independently—or have in the past, or might like to in the future. Epistemic status: Ideating! Collectives are an organizational structure for bringing together people to share the legal and financial challenges of going it alone professionally, without embracing the mechanisms of the corporation. I propose collaboratives: an organizational structure for bringing people together to share the social challenge of going it…
US Open Architecture – Flushing, New York The US Open is held in New York City, in the borough of Queens, in a neighborhood called Flushing, which was once a separate town before being consolidated into NYC in 1896. In August 1978, this facility, originally called the USTA National Tennis Center, opened, replacing the old facility in Forest Hills. In 2006, it was renamed the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center. Today, the complex occupies 46.5 acres in Flushing Meadows, which once…
I saw a fun post on Hacker News about creating wigglegrams, and decided to try it for myself. Since I live in the Google ecosystem, I had Claude rewrite the code for Google Photos support. However, because of some limitations to the Google API: Since 2025, Google's readonly scope only returns media your own app created unless your project has the legacy grant, so a personal library may list empty. Oh well, I could still use the script with local files. I created a Google Takeout request for my…
This is my great-grandfather, born Dominusz Andor in Szeged, Hungary in 1886. In the picture he is in Brooklyn, New York, probably sometime in the early 1950's. By 1911 Andor had moved from Hungary to Vienna and had changed the spelling of his name to “Dominus” to save confusion. He worked as a goldsmith, and owned his own jewelry shop, so he must have been doing OK. There's a family legend about why Andor left Vienna for the USA, and I was never sure whether I believed it. But thanks to the…
My favorite bite today was eating salmon nigiri with a bit of grated wasabi and the fish dipped in soy sauce 🍣😋
I know the walks between terminals at SLC are long, but this is kind of ridiculous.
"Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me yuri" - Himedanshi Julius Caesar
Back on my bullshit. This guava soda is good, maybe too sweet? But these “New” (new to Japan) Flamin’ Hot Cheetos? Guys, these are not “Flamin’ Hot.” They are barely spicy. Also, they’re not even red! So I guess that is “New.”
I posted this to Wordorigins, but I’m still unsatisfied, so I thought I’d see if the Hattery could provide enlightenment: My wife asked me about the phrase “have it in for (someone),” and I realized it is in fact a very weird construction. The OED says: P.1.e. colloquial. to have it in for: to intend revenge on; to be determined to harm or cause trouble for; to feel hostility or strong dislike towards. Cf. in for at in adv. Phrases P.2. First citation: 1825 Didn’t I owe the Major an ould…
A poem by Caitlin Johnstone They’re designing park benchesso that homeless people can’t sleep on themand placing metal spikes beneath overpassesso they can’t be used as shelter. Jerry Seinfeld says Palestine doesn’t existand that sometimes socks go missing in the dryer,wocka wockaha ha hait’s funny because it’s a witty observationabout life’s everyday little goofy goofs. Fast food wrappers blow in the windlike the leaves used to do. Duct-taped gargoyles with garbage bag wingspeer down at the…
Alberto Giacometti, Lacoön, after a statue in the Vatican Museums, 1952, ballpoint pen on paper, 11 1/2 x 8 1/4 in., collection the Giacometti Foundation, via Sotheby’s Sotheby’s is selling a full-scale bronze cast of the Laocoön made in the early 19th century, when the statue had been looted by Napoleon and brought to Paris. But that’s not important now. Because look at this ballpoint pen drawing Alberto Giacometti made of the statue in 1952. “Ever since I first saw reproductions of works of…
The worst way to end any trip is with airport delays. You just want to be home, and there’s nothing you can do but wait. (Posted from a plane that was supposed to land four hours ago.)
yes, yes, it was a lucky escape when this food waste in bag left late with some trick of space left unexpanded and lay in wait til the fearsome lift unfreed by weight - no, no, no bag split and topside lee to tie it freely - it left me to wonder how late really was it after all? other things said balancing Yesterday :: Friday, 26th June 2026
Hello fellow haters of marketing emails that you get signed up for on the way to creating accounts, sometimes as an explicit checkbox (this is not about you companies, you are gorgeous and I love you) but mostly as an implicit acceptance that yes, I have created an account and of course I also want to be sent all your marketing material. Today I had the joy of needing to unsubscribe from the emails of Samsung and was pleasantly taken aback by how human conscious they were. Ensuring multiple…
I'm in bed, I have the windows wide open, and the fan on full blast, and I'm actually starting to feel cold. I'm very glad we're finally reaching the end of this heatwave.
The nth harmonic number is the sum of the reciprocals of the first n positive integers. Hn = 1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4 + … + 1/n The product of all the denominators is n!, so you could write Hn as a fraction Hn = p/q where p = n! Hn is an integer and q = n!. While p/q is a way to write Hn as a fraction, it’s not the most efficient because p and n! will have common factors. If we write Hn as a reduced fraction, the denominator will be the least common multiple of the integers 1 through n. That number…
weather: ☀️ perfect critters: cabbage butterfly, sulfurs, monarchs, big swallowtail bitching about inconsequential annoyances is one of my favorite forms of stress relief w/r/t the absolute state of the climatic and geopolitical realities over which i have no personal control. but there's no reason i can't add something positive afterward to reduce the anxiety-nausea. i mentioned in my new year's post that i want to stop thinking of myself as a monad, and this might be a good exercise to that…
A stone bench beside the reflecting pool at the D. T. Suzuki Museum
A reflecting pool with white concrete walls and willow trees at the D. T. Suzuki Museum
I walked past a castle on my way to this museum and thought, "Is it worth prioritizing this museum over a castle?" I can confidently say it was worth it. The D. T. Suzuki Museum commemorates the life of Buddhist philosopher D. T. Suzuki, who traveled the world teaching. The museum is beautifully designed as a place for contemplation and reflection.
The Wayno / Piraro Bizarro strip of 6/26: (#1) He’s a good man, who’ll give you hot licks on his saxophone while lavishing care on your car during your dinner; enjoy your night in Tunisia, light on the harissa (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page) A complex joke pun on the name of the jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker (Wikipedia entry here), in which the Charlie Brown character from the comic strip Peanuts is presented as a…
“Your favorite punching bag is no more,” someone wrote me earlier today. That’s not quite accurate. Favorite punching bags come and go, of course. At one point the record for most me-punches absorbed was clearly held by Roy Pearson, Jr. the former administrative-law judge who accused a dry cleaner of losing a pair of pants and sued it for 65 million dollars. See, e.g., “The $65-Million-Pants Case: Year 16 (June 10, 2020) (he lost but kept appealing). But a search also turns up a lot of punches…
I am back from Paris. It was very hot. And I need to vent.Before I do so, I want to stress that we had plenty of fun on this trip. When I told my mom I was invited to present at the Critical Theories of Antisemitism conference, she seized the opportunity to organize a whole family vacation around the trip, including my parents and my brother, sister-in-law, and their daughter (who's six months younger than Nathaniel). And as far as that project is concerned, it was great. We saw a lot of neat…
For the fourth volume in the Japan-only ECM Special series, we turn to a selection of tracks devoted to trumpet and saxophone, though the premise soon feels less taxonomic than metaphysical. Across the album, horn and reed serve as emissaries of the instant once melody slips free of intention. “Viddene” opens that passage with a descent into the font of Dis, the legendary duo album between saxophonist Jan Garbarek and guitarist Ralph Towner. Beneath them, a field recording of a wind harp…
null
