Hawkman by Rags Morales (Inks by Michael Bair)When you list the greatest Hawkman and Hawkgirl artists of all time, there is one name that no one can leave off the list: Rags Morales. For over 25 years, Morales has created many pieces of amazing art, and his Hawkman and Hawkgirl are instantly recognizable. One of my goals as a Hawkman fan was to own a Hawkman piece by Rags Morales, and I was able to acquire the piece posted above a few years ago. I've collected Morales' Hawk art posted on the…

New to the ongoing blog series called STQK "Would you like to know more?" Disclaimer: Episodes 11-15 will be using an oracle system I am developing for solo players; you can see it in action here. Once I am happy with the way the oracle plays it will be available for the community. Hello there, We continue with the next episode in the Dragon Quest SPI System. (Content Warning: Violence, Death, Traumatic Events) Scene 11 Minutes after calming down the android zombie and getting ready to walk out…

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Sharlene from Real Life Reading that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link it using the Mr. Linky any time during the week. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries. The Year I Lay My Head in Water by Laura Hall – When Hall, an Englishwoman living…

For a software developer position, there isn't a trick to finding the best candidate. Your criteria do not determine how solid the candidates will be. Everyone is submitting 500 applications a month now, and those who automate the process submit thousands. So how do you hire a great candidate? Pick a few from the lot, ask them if they can write a function, have them do a live FizzBuzz test, then ask them to deploy a service from localhost to an actual public server. That's it. Hire them after…

Cheesus wept.

Despite rapid advances in math and coding, AI still struggles to produce prose that doesn’t “read” like AI. I have noticed that a giveaway of AI-generated prose is wordiness. Having evaluated leading models (e.g. Opus and Astra) for writing, none of them have impressed me. The prose is wordy and bad. It lacks the effortless, unforced flow of quality human writing. It’s not so much that quality human writing is simple or terse, but that each word serves a function, irrespective of length. Even…

I’ve just bought the entire catalog of the independent Swedish publisher Li’l Factory. I can’t wait for the books to arrive!

I might miss the train to the shiny AI generated future. Oh well. So much is being gushed over because it looks so good, it feels right, it has all the appeal of truthiness. Yet I have these encounters, which may be edge cases or that Mike Caulfield if he ever would speak to me again (I get it, you don’t want non flattering comments, Mike) could pick apart. But still, I see some cracks in the assumptions built upon mega systems relying solely on statistical conclusions, ingoring lived…

From thisRemember Cozy? Bad nerds have been arguing over cozy things again.To review, the cozy story is a story of comfort, without alarming, disturbing or controversial elements. The game Ryuutama is supposed to be cozy. There's a lot of meal breaks, I hear. If art is suppose to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, it supposedly does the first thing.That is all well and good. They heyday of cozy games was in the early days of the pandemic when Animal Crossing was like the…

It was about time to upgrade K3s nodes from Ubuntu 24.04 to Ubuntu 26.04. I’ve also wanted to test out using Debian 13 as K3s nodes for some time. Using Ansible to automate provisioning of cloud-init VM templates in Proxmox might still be one of the best investments I’ve made. This is the only change required in the role to have Ubuntu 26.04 and Debian 13 available: iso_images_to_download: ... - filename: debian-13-generic-amd64.qcow2 url:…

My white whale, at last! Anyone who's followed this blog for long enough knows I adore Skywalk, a local Vancouver fusion jazz band. I've been hunting for their last album for a few years now, and I've finally found a copy of the CD. And what an album it is! Their previous album had them going further into smooth jazz, and there is a lot of that here, but it's an overall more diverse sound that makes this a much stronger album overall. Even a little bit of twang in track 7 that reminds me a lot…

The technology used to transform human communication has evolved far beyond basic grammatical correction. Artificial intelligence (AI) can now alter a message’s argument, tone, and intent, raising a question that goes beyond whether AI saves time or effort. What is the receiver of the communicatio…

Theory doesn’t need to be put into practical scenarios for it to be valuable. Theory can, and often does, remain very much impractical until a context arises permitting practical application. Case in point, Luhmann's theory of communication. Without an IRL context to frame it, Luhmann's theory has for decades been considered controversial, even implausible.1 Its acceptance of non-human interlocutors puzzles those wanting to apply it to everyday conversations, chit-chats, and discourse.…

“Is Pete Hegseth’s Bold Pledge to ‘Kill Everyone’ by 2028 an Unrealistic Pipe Dream?” The Onion youtu.be/pu3Cr6qjb… #satire

In fall of 1985 when I started graduate school, my advisor Michael Sipser asked me to read an early handwritten manuscript by Johan Håstad of his switching lemma. I spent many hours decoding the notation and working through the messy conditional probabilities until I felt I had checked every step of the proof. When I started presenting this to Sipser, he stopped me and said he didn't want the details but instead the intuition of the proof. I had nothing. I'm reminded of this story as I hear the…

Not every ranges improvement is a shiny new view adaptor. Some of the most impactful C++26 changes are infrastructure: making containers work better with lazy ranges, bringing random number generation into the ranges world, and removing a long-standing ergonomic paper cut from algorithms. This post covers all three. approximately_sized_range and reserve_hint Here’s a scenario that should bo...

Un peu deçu de mes amis à Nantes. Même un ami prof va pas à l'acte 2 samedi du movement lycéen. On peut pas abandonner les jeunes générations. Les abandonner c'est nous abandonner. Par hasard, si on voit ce toot et on cherche un manif buddy. Hésite pas à me contacter ici, via Signal donthatedontkill.65 ou via matrix @donthatedontkill:matrix.org (De préférence sur Signal) #nantes #paysdelaloire #17octobre #22octobre #24octobre

In news that is not entirely unexpected, but the timing certainly is, Electronic Arts is to shut down BioWare, the legendary RPG studio behind some of the greatest games in history, including Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate II, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect and Dragon Age: Origins, along with their respective sequels. The fifth Mass Effect game, in development at the studio since at least 2020, has been cancelled.BioWare was founded in Edmonton, Canada in 1995 by Ray Muzyka,…

Within three months of urban sketching I've figured out the most lightweight configuration that would keep me happy. With these, I could sketch anywhere without feeling like I'm sacrificing something: a pen with flexible nib that could double as a good writing pen, in blue/sepia/black two brushpens filled with fountain pen inks a white gel/paint pen a pocket sketchbook And that's it! Everything else is secondary. This kit could fit a vest or a jacket, and the only consideration for me to bring…

I’m not watching the game tonight, and I didn’t read what Lisandro Martinez said, but I’m guessing he had a point?

The morning after our walk on Seceda, we left Kranebitterhof, where we’d spent the night in an apartment on a farm, and drove east to the station at Dobbiaco, or Toblach in German. From there the 444 shuttle bus took us up the winding road to Rifugio Auronzo. We arrived shortly before 10am at the foot of the Tre Cime di Lavaredo. The three peaks are probably the most recognisable sight in the Dolomites. Cima Grande, the tallest, stops a single metre short of 3,000. Cima Ovest stands beside it…

I recently came across an annoying issue while revalidating my Claude Desktop login with Safari on a Mac. I was locked out of making new prompts in Claude's Electron-based app, and "Login with Google" was not working at all. We couldn’t verify your browser. Try again, or contact support if it keeps happening. That was the message I was getting repeatedly. As I use Little Snitch to block any outgoing connections from Claude Desktop (I allow several incoming connections), I was almost certain…

[This is a guest post by Tristan Buckmaster. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] This blog post expands on a theme mentioned at the end of my recent talk at the Institute for Advanced Study on October 19. I would like to thank Matei Coiculescu, Jaume de Dios Pont, Nestor Guillen, Bryna Kra, Terence Tao and Rachel Ward for their valuable comments and suggestions. It is often said that mathematics is a young person’s game, and that…

It is a common misperception that the worst possible outcome of a feature launch is the noise of crickets — and that, more than anything else, the success condition of a product announcement is some version of engagement or indulgence. The worst possible thing that can happen with a feature launch is that it strikes fear and doubt into the hearts and minds of your active users. This is because companies exist to both generate and subsequently capture value, and any change in their feature list…

I first learned of the annual Interop initiative a few years ago. In case you’re unfamiliar, Interop “aims to make the web more interoperable in key areas, prioritized by web developer and user needs.” It’s comprised of team members from all of the major browser vendors, including Apple, Bocoup, Google, Igalia, Microsoft, and Mozilla. Apparently it began in 2019.Each year they solicit feedback to decide on the highest priority standards to implement. Those features they focus on generally…

Ovid, Metamorphoses 7.215-216 (tr. Frank Justus Miller): Now I have need of juices by whose aid old age may be renewed and may turn back to the bloom of youth and regain its early years. nunc opus est sucis, per quos renovata senectus in florem redeat primosque recolligat annos.

In quantum circuit design, a common problem is computing too much. You’ll find some clever way to compute a result, only to realize it also computes something else. An unwanted value. A value whose mere existence is splitting your carefully crafted superposition into jagged non-interfering pieces. A value that you...

While rather belated, please enjoy my account of a very special event I got to attend at the end of August–it was truly a once-in-a-lifetime weekend! I’d been looking forward to one particular film anniversary for years: the 100th anniversary … Continue reading →

A link to a Guassian splat to an intriguing room.