“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…

I just set up an encrypted ZFS volume on my NetBSD install. This is my journal on how I did it. I’m using a zpool on top of NetBSD’s cgd Cryptographic Disk layer (similar to LUKS on linux), because NetBSD’s ZFS does not have ZFS’s native encryption available. Most of this post is about setting up cgd. So before I get into things: I haven’t yet done an install with a ZFS rootfs. I also haven’t done an install with an encrypted rootfs. I certainly haven’t done both together. It is possible, but…

I know it's a storm now, and not an unfortunately-named meteorologist.20 words · 1 image

Assez vu. La vision s’est rencontrée à tous les airs. Assez eu. Rumeurs des villes, le soir, et au soleil, et toujours. Assez connu. Les arrêts de la vie. – O Rumeurs et Visions! Départ dans l’affection et le bruit neufs! — Arthur Rimbaud, “Departure,” Illuminations, translated by John Ashbery Vision. Possession. Knowledge. The human endeavor in sum, indifference upon its completion. The melancholy of retrospection, the paradoxical pain of pleasant memory. And still, the movement never stops.…

I wrote about the video-game, "Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor," back in--lemme check my notes here--ah, yes, early 2015. Yes, over a decade ago we were introduced to a good game with an amazing concept. I am referring to the Nemesis System. You could run around a chunk of Middle Earth, fighting baddies who would remember you. You'd beat them up and they'd perhaps run away, only to return with some scars and a thirst for vengeance. Maybe you'd lose a fight, but instead of getting struck down…

The server now speaks the current MCP protocol revision (2026-07-28), tells your client which tools can delete things, and asks self-hosters for one fewer secret. Older MCP clients keep working through the compatibility lane. Breaking changes If you use the manual login flow and your client passed the session as an Mcp-Session-Id header, that header is no longer read. Connect with the ?session_id= query parameter instead, which is what the login page has always handed out. What's new The server…

Upon my death, I agree and consent to these actions being taken: Scatter my ashes on the wind. If you are able to: Break into all my devices. Make my existing, finished artworks public if they aren’t already. Give them to the public domain. [Read more...]

I've heard from a couple people that building an audience today is exceptionally hard on Mastodon - Boost more cool shit But is the point to build an audience? Maybe we should move past everything being about the number of followers and "building a business". Is the building an audience angle just the wrong way to look at Mastodon and social media in general?

To celebrate the publication of my latest book, The Golden Age of Classic Crime Quiz Book, I am sharing an exclusive round on my blog, available only to my Patreon supporters. As the title of my blog post suggests, this particular quiz round is on detectives and stamps. All images used come courtesy of the Trussel website, which I recommend you check out if you wish to see more examples of fictional sleuths on stamps.

The internet archive’s Wayback Machine library is a planetary treasure. It preserves the archive of the web. Don’t let publishers take it down. Why the Internet Needs a MemoryPDOOM is a great music video slopcore with a very SILO like ending. These are getting so good. Astra Blue AI – P Doom (Official Music Video)

I was interviewed for People of GraphQL about Relay, Grats, semantic nullability and why GraphQL’s complexity has to pay off

Everyone likes to talk about light versus dark theme while no one is addressing the real need for our users - a proper unicorn theme. I mean, take a look at this beauty: This is Uninote, a desktop note taking application that - well - takes notes. You create notebooks, write notes, and that's it. No AI features. Nothing complex, just a note taking app. I've had a love/hate relationship with these apps for years. I was a huge Evernote fan until it went to poo. I currently use OneNote and... it's…

The backend of this runs on Railway, and yesterday there was a large outage due to secrets being leaked. So, I rotated keys to redeployed today. This post is a test of the setup. It is frustrating how much we depend on these services.

It’s been a festival of software vulnerabilities and system updates on the Internet this week. Some of my machines were exposed to these vulnerabilities, so I had to do some system updates. Unfortunately, when I did, a bunch of the installed programs broke. The impacted programs are all written in Python. Some of the ones I use are: certbot – TLS certificate issuance and renewal tool ansible – configuration management tool borg – secure, deduplicating backup utility borgmatic – automation…

Looking more and more like Max Schrek: outside the Flying Monkey prior to last night's screening of 'Nosferatu' (1922). Sometimes it all comes together: a score flows seamlessly from one scene into another, the right music falls into place, and you go from one powerful scene to the next.That's what happened, I think, on Thursday, Oct. 22 at the Flying Monkey Moviehouse and Performance Center in Plymouth, N.H., where I accompanied 'Nosferatu' (1922).You'd think this wouldn't be an issue with a…

I listened to an interview with the Swedish DJ and music producer Christian “Bloodshy” Karlsson, who’s worked with artists like Britney Spears, Madonna, and Katy Perry. I had never heard of him, to be honest, but he seemed like a very humble, down-to-earth, and nice guy. When the interviewer said that his favorite Britney track was Unusual You, Christian told him the story behind the song. Halfway through, he paused and said, “How do I say this so it doesn’t come out the wrong way?” He went on…

This is the second half of my HPTS 2026 notes. Day 1 was mostly about AI and the importance of specifications. Day 2 and day 3 cover hardware, object storage, failures, consensus, and lakehouses.Session 5: Hardware will save us all (chair: Natassa Ailamaki)The Fastest Way to be the Fastest (Bobbi Yogatama, NVIDIA)GPUs and databases have a love-hate relationship, and Bobbi listed the three reasons: limited GPU memory capacity, the interconnect bottleneck, and engineering complexity. The first…

Proverbs 27:8 (Revised Standard Version): Like a bird that strays from its nest, is a man who strays from his home. Roland E. Murphy ad loc. What is the nature of the wandering, whether of birds (cf. Isa 16:2) or humans? It hardly refers to occasional leaving and returning; rather it has to do with uprooting, moving away from one's origins and having no permanent dwelling. Sir 29:21-28 serves as appropriate comment on such a mode of existence. Our modern culture does not resonate in the same…

On 1st of November 2026 several canadian provinces will not fall back to standard time from DST. They decided at several different points in time that they will not do so. British Columbia did so in March already whereas Alberta decided so in June, the Northwest Territories in August and Manitoba in September. As is the usual process shortly after the decission was made, there was a new version of the timezone-database released so that the information is available only with a short delay to…

Vibe Coding 的十月 Posted on Oct 24, 2026 從九月底的中秋連假開始一直到整個十月，突然一口氣做了好幾個 Vibe Coding 的專案，想要介紹一下這些專案，也分享一些心得。 Scratch: Agent Canvas 現在很多筆記軟體都有提供「白板」的功能，例如 Heptabase 的 Whiteboard，Obsidian 的 Canvas，抑或是老牌的 Miro，就連 Apple 現在也有內建 Freeform。所以一開始我只是想，假如可以把 coding agent 也放在白板裡，一定很方便。現在的軟體工程師，在公司往往得一次開好幾個 coding agent，同時負責不同的專案任務，agent 一多，要怎麼管理它們就變得很重要，cmux 和 herdr 都是不錯的選擇，我也都使用過一段時間，但它們感覺還是像傳統的終端機，我用一用還是會忍不住想：假如有一個白板，我可以在上面擺上 coding agent，加一些線條描述它們彼此間的關係，或是在 agent 旁邊放個便條紙，快速記個筆記等等，一定會很方便。 就像這樣：…

I always liked stories about eccentric royals doing mad things. Queen Christina of Sweden reportedly had a miniature cannon made for firing tiny cannonballs at fleas in her bedroom. Louis XIV made a proto-reality-show of his daily routines, allowing an audience of courtiers the honor of watching him dress, bathe, and use the toilet. Peter the Great famously returned from a tour of Western Europe, and refused to let men have beards near him. Intent on “modernizing” Russia, he personally shaved…

I didn’t use to have curtains in my living room — the apt. is er south-east facing, so it has sun in the mornings and afternoons when I’m at work. But after I started working more from home, it got to be ridiculous — I had to move around all day to avoid having the sun shining in my face. (Especially in winter when the sun is lower in the sky.) So five years ago I wandered into a curtain store and said “I need some curtains”, and the expeditress said “like, what colour? style? look?”. Never…