Renovate MR breaks your build? A practical triage workflow for failed Renovate pipelines on self-hosted GitLab, plus config that keeps the red ones manageable.
No, grandmother: to know the future absolutely is to be trapped into that future absolutely. It collapses time. Present becomes future. I require more freedom than that.
It's 1949, John von Neumann stood in front of a room at the University of Illinois and described a machine that could build a working copy of itself. No example of it existed yet, it was only theoretically possible. He called it a theory of automata. What he'd actually sketched was the first genome for a species that hadn't been born yet. It's 1983. There's a floppy disk with a few kilobytes of code sitting dormant until someone runs the program that carries it. It then starts to copy itself…
People with parallel careers simultaneously hold two different jobs not because they have to but because they want to.
After two recent albums that felt like pale imitations, Muse have returned to their space rock roots with something raw, coherent, and genuinely emotional. A track-by-track review from a long-haul flight. | Read full post >>
It’s that time of year again: the season for enjoying a long(-ish) novel in the company of an unknown number of like-minded fellow readers. Friends, if you prefer—only friends you’ve maybe not met. Many of you know the story, but just in case you don’t, it goes like this: back in 2014 it took a small posse of folks to get me over the finish line of David Foster Wallace’s gargantuan novel Infinite Jest (1996). Since then, I’ve led a total of ten (10) read-alongs (reads along?) of long novels by…
June 28 - July 5 a week full of work... Exercising ran twice this week, not the best scenario but I tried... Reading I finished Mistborn: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson. Overall I think it's okay and I started the second book The Well of Ascension, but I am not super intrigued by it so far. Went to a bookshop this weekend and saw a row of Sanderson books. I started a new book The Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor. It is quite different than the kingdom themed fantasy out there,…
I returned from Hampi early Monday morning and was in office the next hour. So much for a soul healing trip :P. JK, I could have decided to stay home, but was too restless to get back to work. Well, work didn't end up well, read on. Work This has been a super duper focused work week, I am doing something extremely boring: setting up monorepo for everything related to database engine team. All the work of submodules are in correct place, all paths are pointing to the shared locations, why are…
Himalayan Balsam flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license
Wrote a blog post about my new AV Club project
Some of you might know that Clojurists Together are supporting my work on nREPL, CIDER and friends this year. Normally I send them a bi-monthly progress report, but I saw some other people who got funding for their OSS work publish those reports as blog posts for the broader public and I thought to try this for a change. The past two months were super productive. I had a lot of inspiration during this period and I managed to tackle a lot of long-standing ideas and issues across the entire…
Hi, welcome to this write-up of Exercise #024 by Sofia Santos on Gralhix. Here you can see what steps I took (and the thought processes behind them) to get to the answers, but of course there are many different ways of reaching the same results. The taskWe've been given three pictures with individuals associated with organizations that are internationally recognized as terrorist. We've been asked to identify the three different organizations that appear in these images. Picture oneThe first…
High up in the Ethiopian mountains lives the Gelada. It lives nowhere else and, isolated in these remote Ethiopian Highlands, the primate has developed a way of life all of its own. To begin with there is that patch of red skin; one might guess something with which to attract the opposite sex, but why there? Moreover the gelada exhibits behavior that has led scientists to believe that deceit, crime and punishment are not simply human traits after all. The Ark in Space has a photo-filled feature…
Have a guess which of the two people above is a robot. It’s probably not too difficult to work out which is which – but the UBTech Robotics model on the right is, I must admit, incredibly humanlike. The company’s new life-sized companion robots were unveiled in late June 2026 and they all appear… young, beautiful and generally quite remarkable to look at. The range is collectively called the U1 Robot – and for anyone who has ever seen a slice of science-fiction where a robot is placed within a…
ALTAll of the participants of IndieWebCamp Nürnberg, lined up in three rows, one row behind the other. I am in the middle of the back row, wearing my green and grey microformats t-shirt. Last weekend I attended IndieWebCamp in Nürnberg, Germany, hosted at the wonderful Tollwerk offices. The two-day event was part of the larger Nürnberg Digital Festival happening across the city. The IndieWebCamp was held primarily in English. Over 23 people attended, many from Germany and some from further…
Every day a new thing gets released, a new AI model, new car, new service, new phone, new laptop, new headphones, new power bank, new, new, new… and our compulsion is to ask: how does it perform vs what came before? Completely natural way of seeing thing, completely pointless way to measure that, because that question is a proxy for: Does this make my life better? And that is a complicated question with a sample of one that no one but you can answer (and maybe not even you!). We have…
When it comes to burning discs, most people who knew anything about burn quality generally had an ingrained phobia of high speed. Common recommendations included burning at “half the speed your media/burner is rated at”, while others would stick to more strict schools of thought such as “only burn at 4x”. Contravening these rules of thumb were only done with the best of media-and-drive combinations, or where time was absolutely of the essence – never mind a wasted disc or the fact the burn…
It is July! Domink Schwind recently wrote "Too Personal", mainly in response to how a friend told him "that week notes aren’t for him as they are too personal." This got me thinking about my own writing on this blog as well. I have always stated that the blog is largely written for me so naturally it can be a bit personal, but I do admit that sometimes I write a bit too much about personal/family/medical matters and when that happens it's because I feel an urge to have more "meat" in the…
Corner of Deansgate Market Street Piccadilly Gardens Piccadilly Railway Station Manchester city centre is always an interesting place to visit, and on Saturdays is always a busy place too. I guess everybody has their favourite spots, and I almost always find something on Market Street, just like so many other Market Streets.I like railway stations too for photographs, and I should make more of an effort to visit my local stations - watch this space.
I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved various analyses of strings. (Note that this ends today.)
For six months I’ve been trying to hedge my (and my family’s) access to intelligence. Open models, local inference, a box on my desk that runs a decent model without asking anyone’s permission, you know, the kind of things you’ve seen me write about in previous posts. Last week, I finally did the math on what realistic local local inference would require, and while it helped me make a better sense of the current state of affairs, it made me realise that there’s a limit on what local inference…
1-01 The Harry South Orchestra– The Sweeney (Main Theme)1-02 Rose Royce– Car Wash1-03 Tom Scott– Gotcha1-04 Marvin Gaye– Trouble Man (Main Theme)1-05 Henry Mancini– The Return Of The Pink Panther1-06 Isaac Hayes– Theme From Shaft1-07 Morton Stevens– Hawaii 5-0 (Main Theme)1-08 J.J. Johnson– Willie Chase1-09 The Four Tops – Are You Man Enough1-10 Al Green– Let's Stay Together1-11 Earth, Wind & Fire– Sweet Sweetback's Theme1-12 Charles Earland– The Snake1-13 Curtis Mayfield– Superfly1-14 Ron…
Last post I showed off the chainsaw I built myself — my build-autonomous loop, the padded room, the whole rig — and cut down a little tree with it: a Go CLI to boss around a smart plug. It was well worth building! I also think you should probably stop building your own. Yes, including me. Especially me.
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Duncan Rawlinson photographed this small, unnamed island in the Thousand Islands region of Ontario, Canada. The rocky outcrop rises from calm blue water, crowned with birch and cedar trees that cling to the granite. Late afternoon sun brings out the warm tones in the stone and the fresh greens of summer foliage. A single flat rock rests in the foreground water, adding scale and depth. The composition isolates the island against the surrounding water, showing the undeveloped character of this…
When I served as a superintendent, I fired a teacher for giving an A to every student he taught. George D. was a high school social studies teacher in Arlington (VA) when I led the district (1974-1981). In the Fall of 1976, one of our high school principals called me and said that he had received complaints from many parents that George D. had given an A to every single student. Both Black and white parents were outraged because they believed that there was a bell-shaped curve of performance…
Personal notes for week 27 of 2026
Dutch travelog, part 8. Read part 7 here. Our trip was finally nearing the end.Wednesday morning was spent getting ready and packing up, making sure I didn't leave anything behind this time. We left after 10:00. Mozzarella gave us a big hug and even kissed Daniel on the cheek twice, which took him by surprise. The bus ride to the station was embarrassing. I got confused by the stops (turns out the screen wasn't moving), so I panicked and made us get up from our seats. At one point, the bus…
Graph of y = (x + 1) / x, as rendered by KmPlot Inf% When I type the first few words of any article, something incredible happens. Wanna see? Here's this article before I wrote any words: Here's this article again, after I've written the first word: When Do you see it? cue intensive squinting 👀 The ratio of new words to old words is 1:0! This article has expanded its wordcount by a factor of infinity! An infinity% increase! If this rate is sustained for the next.. idk, hour, I will have an…
