Starting today and going for the next three weeks or so, 22 of my books are up on Humble Bundle, and this time my selected charity is World Central Kitchen, which, true to the name, goes around the world, feeding people in disaster areas and war zones. They deserve the money! You deserve the books! The titles in the bundle are mostly novels (including Starter Villain, appearing in a bundle for the first time), but there are a few shorter pieces as well. The bundle is for sure available in the…
It’s hard not to feel glum as I write this post on the 250th anniversary of my country. I remember celebrating the 200th as a teenager. As I recall it, it felt like the country was ready forward to better times. The Vietnam War and Watergate were over. Americans celebrated the 200th with exuberance. Today, the stagnant, possibly toxic state of the Reflecting Pool, along with Trump’s hijacking of Congress’s America250 funds for his personal Freedom250 group to create an empty and lifeless Great…
UPDATE – When I originally posted this, it was review #2023. I thought it a fitting throwback for today. Happy 4th of July – the 250th anniversary of the country, aka the semiquincentennial I saw this at the local supermarket the other day and just couldn’t pass it up. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an instant noodle showing such patriotism before! Also, before anyone starts sending me comments saying ‘how dare they use our flag – that’s made in South Korea,’ I have news for you. Nongshim America…
A very strange Pi issue sent me down a rabbit hole over the last two days. The short version is that newer Claude models sometimes call Pi’s edit tool with extra, invented fields in the nested edits[] array. And not Haiku or some small model: Opus 4.8. The edit itself is usually correct but the arguments do not match the schema as the model invents made-up keys and Pi thus rejects the tool call and asks to try again. That alone is not too surprising as models emit malformed tool calls…
I'll write more about listnr, a fediverse bridge for my statically generated blog. Yes, it's AI-coded, if you have some, deep ideological objection, don't bother; I like my AI-coding tools, and I couldn't have built this in two days without them. Help me test by commenting/liking/sharing on Fediverse. Link bellow.
In early 2025 I predicted that AI will create many, many more programmers, and that new programming jobs would look different. In March I checked in and found startups substituting compute for labor at record rates, with the wave of new jobs nowhere in sight. This post is the next check-in, and I have good news and bad news. The bad news: AI has torched the market for junior programmers. The good news: the long tail of new programmers I predicted has materialized, but with a big twist: they…
Aura farming
Tags: #photos #moods · *duration:24hSomewhere above San Josec/o AcmeHoping this works for catching the fireworks tonight. The wind should be light; I hope my bag doesn’t blow away. I should have weighted it with something, at least the battery pack.
A short story. It's been a while, but I wrote a short story. Written during a creative writing workshop in Dutch. Based on a visual card prompt. I tried my best at writing the English version, though the Dutch felt like it had more flow, it would have taken me ages to edit considering I am not by any means master of the language. But I loved the atmosphere of it, so I wanted to share it. Link here. #story #writingThank you for following my feed! ♥ Leave a reply here.
Occasionally, sites that publish web feeds change the URL of a post that has just been published. This can be for several reasons. For example, I sometimes change post permalinks immediately after publishing because I notice a typo, or because the CMS I use calculated a default permalink that I don’t want to use and I forgot to change it.Until now, Artemis, the calm web reader I maintain, has done nothing if a post has changed its permalink. Importantly, Artemis considers the post URL as a…
I have been thinking why UBI and single-payer healthcare is totally unworkable in America. With fears of AI leading to mass-unemployment constantly in the news, the idea of a UBI is often touted as a solution. Democrats similarly have pushed for wealth taxes and universal healthcare, and neither have made much ground. A California wealth tax has been “just around the corner” or “put to a vote” for what seems like forever now. Democrats have threatened one for years, yet it always amounts to…
Terence Eden recently published a post titled This blog is written in en-GB. Before I even read the post, I knew what it was going to be about, and that I had to make that change myself too, for the same reasons as I'd guessed he was going to explain. Terence expresses those reasons very well, so I won't try to reproduce them here. I'm in strong agreement with him and those reasons resonate with me. This is my blog, I string all the words together, in my own style, on the topics I choose, with…
I’ve been lining up banner photos for the remaining months of the year, all of which are from last year (like almost all of the others so far); this month’s is from Sanna in Ardnamurchan, which I’ll be seeing again in a couple of weeks. I’m two camping trips behind on my Ardnamurchan photos, and have got way too many other photos from the past few years of travel around the UK (and one trip beyond it) that I still haven’t posted here. Before getting to those, I’ve been dealing with some old…
Sure, that's what happens in the book, but that's not really what it's about. By the time I got to high school, Fahrenheit 451 and the other dystopian classics weren't a meaningful part of the curriculum anymore. This fact really seems to accentuate the entire point of the book. The main character is a fireman, yes. In this mildly sci-fi future, the traditional firemen we think of today are obsolete, because buildings are now generally fireproof. Now, instead of putting out fires, the firemen…
June 21st, 2026 — After my coffee, a thought came to mind: I hope that one day I can see the countryside from a double-decker bus. It’s a small wish. It may never happen but I hold onto the thought any way.I stood at the bus terminal today thinking that it was only a few weeks ago I had wished to go on a double decker bus. Today, it happened: a most delightful surprise.I arrived at the bus early enough that I had my pick of seats. I sat on the top deck in the front seat, where I had almost…
A fun (and funny!) 9-minute video from Linternet User about designing a perfect onscreen lever with the right amount of juice: Love seeing real work in progress like that, plus it ends up in a place I didn’t expect. It was also great to see “delay and snap” action elucidated so clearly. It feels like a variant of rubberbanding (or, elastic scrolling) where you intentionally disconnect an object from the cursor or finger dragging it.#above and beyond #hardware #interface design #youtube
Probably not. I bought one anyway. Figured I’d write some of my memories surrounding it growing up, as well as how I set-up my own. Some memories The Nintendo 3DS was one of those consoles that I mostly admired from a distance. There are a few moments in time, sparsed throughout my youth where I interacted with one, an uncommon endeavor compared to my love for the PSP or even the older Game Boy Advance. When it came out I was too poor to even consider it, it was super expensive when it…
John Gruber has been dropping some bangers this week. On Claude’s awful desktop app (funnily enough, I only deleted it last week after realising it was 800mb, which is stupid): “It’s like wondering why all the screws in a building were hammered into the walls, and then finding out that the guy who oversaw construction founded and co-owns the world’s biggest hammer manufacturer” And my favourite, on Meta (rolls eyes): “Meta has always been a bad company. Now it seems like a bad company that’s…
The sea of World Cup revelers parted for the afternoon on Sunday, offering the opportunity for Dr Funk to hold their quarterly Rum Asylum rum club meeting. The featured rum this time was Worthy Park from Jamaica, one of our favorites. The session included tasting seven of Worthy Park’s expressions, including the recent 12 year bottle that is by no means inexpensive so that was a true treat. We also had a nice presentation from a couple Worthy Park reps and some informative Q&A. Each Rum Asylum…
I don't think I did justice to how pretty the Moon looked that night Personal My health was finally good enough this week to return to the gym, felt nice to be back in the swing of things. Hopefully the weather does not screw me over and I can work up to my old schedule again. Reading I’ve been ramping up my reading so I can hit my self imposed 24 books a year goal. I finished reading the 3rd book of the Chaos Walking trilogy, Monsters of Men. On Amogh’s recommendation, I’ve now started the…
Post last updated 16 minutes ago It's been about two months since I got my first "real" camera, a Fujifilm XT30 III, so I thought it might be a good moment to write my impressions on it. You can click on the photos for the captions. The first few daysAs it happens when doing something for the first time, I was blasted with a ton of information, both about my camera in particular and photography in general. Aperture, focal length, proper exposure, shutter speed, film simulation, film recipes and…
I was happier than usual when I clocked out yesterday afternoon.I suppose it's time to let you off the hook after last week's little cliffhanger.The Kindle survived. Well... it survived by not being bought.Instead of giving my love a conventional birthday present this year, I had one of those impulsive brainwaves that somehow make far more sense once you've already committed to them.So rather than bringing home another gadget, I brought us here.We are, quite literally, in the middle of…
Search for split kb continues
Got up about 9.30. Again wind still cold. The gang came for tea. Gave Jane a swing but too cold to stay out very long. Went for a drink at night.
Picked up a load of wood from the Amish farm today. Ol’ Green struggled a bit under load on the hills between here and Buddha Bypass Road but we made it. The farm was, as I suspected, open despite the holiday. What to the Amish is your Fourth of July? 😉
Opinion | Birthright citizenship overreach by the Supreme Court ends term - The Washington Post: A more modest ruling, relying on those statutes, would have left the constitutional issue for a future court to consider if and when Congress deliberates on the issue and decides to change the rules. I use to pay for a WaPo subscription, but their takeover by rightwing extremists ruined it. Imagine wringing hands because SCOTUS made a ruling based on a plain reading of the Constitution.
I’ll be honest, I was a bit surprised that I knew anyone who would buy a pair of Meta AI glasses. Sure, they are readily available, and presumably heavily advertised, but most of the people with whom I spend time - online or offline - are not the kind of people who would buy them. I’ve got friends who use Facebook. I’ve got friends who use WhatsApp. But the glasses just - to me, anyway - feel rather different. Nevertheless, a friend did buy a pair, and was happy to chat about them. My friend -…
Earlier this year we had a rather unfortunate incident involving our 25-year-old stand-up freezer, in which the condenser failed while the thing was full of frozen things, which quickly became rather disgustingly unfrozen. The clean-up was stinky and terrible and no fun at all. Also, we needed to get a new freezer. Krissy got that new freezer a couple of days ago, and you can see it here, next to the drinks fridge we have in our garage — the drinks fridge being, as the name implies, an extra…
America at 250, America at 50 On July 4, 2026, the United States will celebrate a special Independence Day marking the 250th anniversary of America’s independence on July 4, 1776. While much attention will be on America’s 250th, this article will focus on the 200th anniversary of America’s 50th anniversary of its independence, better known as the American Jubilee or the July 4, 1826 semi-centennial. Of all of America’s full and half-centennials, the American Jubilee was unique in that three of…
