It’s not a happy thing to write this post. I always hate to see sites close down, especially ones that have been a home to others in terms of hosting content and fostering connections.

Forgot to mention that the book The Nerd Reich, by Gil Durán, is a great (if depressing) read if you’re curious about the politics behind the big American AI labs. (Thanks to Derek Wessmann for the idea of hand-written posts!)

I wrote this stream of though through a series of posts on my Mastodon account. One of the hardest things about being a Gen X geek is remembering the promise of technology, watching it emerge, but then watching that promise and evolution get kicked aside in the name of profits and subsequent enshittification. We have been trained to believe that stabbing at virtual buttons on a piece of glass is more efficient than using actual buttons. Many have been coerced into believing that bugs are…

00Venice’s Teatro San Cassiano became the world's first public opera house in 1637. Soon, in the C17th & C18th, Central European opera houses had to be financed by rulers, nobles and wealthy people who used patronage of the arts for their own grand reputation. So the Russian Opera House in Odessa must have been a wonderful sight in Russia. Officially it was said to be at the intersection of history because it’s between Tchaikovsky Lane and Langeron St, while facing Richelieu St and de Ribas St.…

During a sunny, crisp and lovely Autumnal day, what better way to spend it than walking around a forest amongst all the spooky goings-on at Dumlanrig Castle. The journey up was a real treat; the trees were a riot of everything from lush green to dark reds. The journey up past Thornhill at this time of year really is lovely. Spectral Salon Drumlanrig is intertwined with the history of the Douglas family, which can trace its heritage back over 600 years. The current building that forms the castle…

The banzuke of the lower divisions does not grab the same headlines as a Day 15 head-to-head Yokozuna match for the championship, or the interviews surrounding recently promoted sekitori. However, each tournament brings another group of hopefuls to one of sumo’s most important milestones: a debut in makushita. The Kyushu 2026 banzuke features a new … Continue reading Kyushu 2026: A New Crop Arrives in Makushita

The wonderful world of AI Disney guidebooks, where the rides are made up and the maps don't matter.

I got an email and text message nearly simultaneously today. Hello JOSEPH CRAWFORD, This is a message from the California Secretary of State on behalf of San Diego Registrar of Voters. Your ballot for the November 3, 2026, General Election was received and will be counted. Thank you for voting! I still love Maria Bamford. There’s a documentary about her that just came out. Paralyzed by Hope: The Maria Bamford Story I enjoyed her book, very, very much. Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult: A Memoir of…

At the root of the mess we face is the worship of the #deathcult, the idea that competition, individualism, control and endless growth are simply human nature, they are not, they are systems we keep reproducing, even when it is making society unlivable. We now have seed funding for the #OpenMediaNetwork projects. That gives us a chance to move beyond endlessly talking about the problems and start building practical tools for a different path. Were next? The #4opens gives us a basic test for the…

I had this thought a few weeks ago. What similarities are there between using the a ouija board to get output and using an ai product to get output? Do we imagine we are summoning someone when “conversing” with a chatbot? I came across this video with Paul Kingsnorth who seems to address this issue. He imagines what would a modern day of the The Screwtape Letters look like (Lewis). How would a devil disrupt a Christian’s life and prevent them from worshiping God: if you were the devil, you…

Orangey sunsetThis sunset is presented as a relaxed view 3d stereograph. Click on the image to embiggify it. A passing weather system brought with it different types of clouds at different levels. This stereogram emphasizes those levels. The high clouds are from the main system. The lower, puffy, clouds are formed by the cold winds of the system passing over warm waters. Noted is a hard to see sundog about one-third of the way in from the right side.

Of all the lessons listed in this article from The Guardian, the one I know I will have the biggest problem with is this: "Don't wait to check off items on your 'bucket list'." Problem number one: I am having a hard time figuring out what should be on my bucket list. Problem number two: I, obviously, do not know how long I will be alive; and if I don't know how long I have left, how do I budget my time and money? There is an initialism that I have encountered very early in my life: OJT.…

Or lighthouse-keeping. Or, in fact, lightship-keeping. I read about MEN OF THE LIGHTSHIP aka MEN OF LIGHTSHIP ’61’ in Dai Vaughan’s amazing Portrait of an Invisible Man — from the GPO Film Unit — soon to be renamed the Crown Film Unit — it’s a British wartime “documentary” which in fact consists entirely of dramatic […]

Bloaty websites have always been a bit of a bugbear of mine. Lots of pointless Javascript and images larger than the 1990s version of Microsoft Excel. The 512KB club exists to showcase performance-based websites from across the web. There are two rules for joining, firstly it must be a proper website (no cheating) and secondly it must be less than 512KB uncompressed. There are even three tiers, green team for sites less than 100KB, orange team for those less than 250KB and blue team for those…

A good article, this. And Bridge of Waves: What music is and how listening to it changes the world, by W.A. Mathieu, is a sound book about how music is possible.

Governments are spending billions on ID apps that put a server between you and the bouncer. The right one is free, open source and run by a foundation, the way Let's Encrypt fixed the web's locks. My ID. My choice.

One of my favorite things on Taskmaster or Game Changer is when the contestants have to come in a place other than first. A simple example might be, “Pick a number between 1-500, second highest number chosen wins.” Particularly when the contestants are doing so all in the same place and can talk to each other. Suddenly, a very simple game becomes much more complex. Who are the others? What are they likely to choose? It’s not just what they’re saying, but how they’re saying it, and how they’re…

tilting towards action Photo by Ian Robertson, Community Archives of Belleville and Hastings County I spoke about SFO Museum's work to promote the idea of shared vector embeddings, at this year's Museum Computer Network conference, in Seattle. The theme of the talk was the same as the talk I did at the AI4LAM conference, in September. I tried to make it the same, but different because I appear to be constitutionally incapable of doing the same talk twice. This is what I said, including an…

I wrote a short brief with multiple examples to support it and gave it to a couple of AI image generators, and to the illustrator I use for our cover art. I think it’s obvious which was done by a human.I tried to explain the difference to someone yesterday and found it hard. Someone being paid to do something makes choices based on the brief, their talent, and the time they can devote to the piece. They draw on what they have seen and experienced to bring an idea to life. The machine produces…

From Static to Motion: Crafting a Seamless AI Video with MiniMax H3 Max & Shotcut I’ve been spending a lot of time recently exploring the world of AI-generated adult content. While browsing through applications and creating my own content based on specific desires, I found myself gravitating toward a particular aesthetic: confident, intelligent women who are comfortable in their own skin. I decided to focus on a character I’m calling Sophia—a duality of a high-status "Princess by Day" and a…

August Truly & P. Murk – “REIFY” µ-Ziq – “Escorial” World Brain – “Test screen” The post Visual Velcro 64 first appeared on Palms Out Sounds.

Earlier this year, in WN-23/2026, I set a goal of doing at least 3 pull-ups by the end of this year. I did that last week, WN-42/2026. But I didn’t ask my coach to record it. Mostly because I didn’t know I could. This week, I have been repeating it. So I thought I should record it. So here it goes. Also took the rest of the week easy, with 1 PT and a walk. Kana By Coffee Mechanics It’s been a busy week. We have been making great progress at Pucar/Dristi, but there’s still lots to do. We tried…

We are well into fall now. The plants are fading out. The grass is growing more slowly and the flowers are much fewer and farther in-between. Our tomatoes are hanging on still but with much less sun they are growing more slowly. Even the one firefly petunia plant out front still has a bit of green and a few flowers. This evening we headed over to Harvey’s for supper and it was good. When we were walking home along main street bright red caught my attention. The one container had plants with…

– In recent years, the situation at Estee Lauder has been rather opaque. Official sales information tends to be difficult to come by, but according to the more trusted sources out there, and contrary to the received wisdom, the company’s fragrance division has enjoyed a certain amount of success. However, it would seem this is […] The post Estee Lauder Glimmer review (Dominique Ropion, Anne Flipo & Jean-Marc Chaillan; 2026) appeared first on .

“And while I don’t want to sound like a prude, I’m personally not into cannibalism.” My Media Diet is here. About I My Book | Consulting I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Email

Normalisation is an essential part of LLMs. In the GPT-2 code, we use LayerNorm in a bunch of different places -- in each Transformer block, we do it just before we feed our incoming context vectors into the multi-head attention module, and then again before we feed the result through the FFN: ...and we also do one more round just before we project our context vectors into vocab space via the output head. We do that to make the model more trainable; it helps to prevent vanishing or exploding…

Gachapin is a character from Japanese children's TV. Portrayed by someone in a green monster costume, I guess he goes around participating in various sports and activities? That's what I gather from the premise of this game, as well as the gallery contained therein of actual photos of him doing these things. Wikipedia also tells me that he's able to do all this stuff because of seven energy balls on his wrists, that provide him with carbohydrates. Oh. This game has you playing as Gachapin, as…

I don’t know how fully prepared I was for it. I knew Beatrix would be comfortable in New York. After all, she’s probably visited the city a couple of dozen times in her life before now. Since she was born, New York City was “a place we go”. As much as we have visited anywhere else, she’s probably been to New York City even more. But, it is one thing to visit a place regularly with your parents. It is a whole other thing to live in a place full time. Granted, she’s not actually in the heart of…

Estou ansioso para assistir ao documentário canadense-americano Nuisance Bear. Tenho um grande fascínio por ursos há anos, e pelo trailer, parece que esse filme é excepcional (embora eu saiba que todos nós em algum momento já fomos decepcionados por bons trailers e filmes ruins). Vai ser distribuído pelo Mubi no começo de dezembro nos EUA, Canadá e Reino Unido, e não faço ideia quando sai no streaming ou no Brasil. Em uma nota separada, o Mubi como streaming, inclusive, frente ao monte de lixo…

[Say a prayer for them.] Way back in 2013, I joked about an assortment of ’90s bands being a bit passé. That list included post-grunge stars Sponge, who are apparently still rocking even now. Lead singer Vinnie Dombroski may be the only original member left, but he and the other, newer members have continued to put out new music. The band is out on tour right now with fellow ’90s-era act Candlebox, a lineup that could only be more perfect if Silverchair were added to the bill. Alas, it’s not…