This new work from Gold Panda sounds like he spent the winter with Daphni and came out convinced of the power of the bop and the beat and the bass. I love this to start my summer. Some of it gets a bit repetitive - he hasn’t fully fleshed out a range of melodies to pull from - but the grooves are there and I love the mid-album piano riff tune that reminds you of Gold Panda’s gentler roots.
Lighthouse is one of the most successful developer tools we’ve ever shipped, and I say that as someone who is genuinely proud of the work the team has done on it. But something has gnawed at me for a while. Our ability to help the developer ecosystem with it is ultimately capped by the number of tests we can physically create. Every audit is a hand-written piece of JavaScript. Someone has to sit down, understand a best practice, encode it as a deterministic check, ship it, and maintain it as…
The first three days were like an exhaleAfter months of cocooningAll the moths in my chestBut each day after thatFelt like swallowing and vomiting sandThat came with briny tearsI lay on this shore numb as the cool water takesIts share of my mind and bodyI still wait for it to take my painI don’t know who I amBut I want to find outI also know I wanted youAnd yet here we areAnd yet here we aren’t.
In philosophy of mind, people sometimes say things like the following: If functionalism is true about consciousness, then digital computers could be conscious; all it requires is that they instantiate the right programs. And yes, most functionalists about consciousness do think that. But the claim about digital computer programs does not straightforwardly follow from functionalism alone. Today I want to clarify the issue by distinguishing three forms of functionalism: bare functionalism,…
When a sector goes too fast, it loses support Without a doubt, the pace of the AI ecosystem is dizzying. Just processing it all is difficult enough. Scaffolding it, finding themes, and understanding the shape of it is nearly impossible. Recently, Mike Migurski introduced me to Stewart Brand’s Pace Layers, a framework for organizing fields and categories by how fast they change. Brand writes: Consider the differently paced components to be layers. Each layer is functionally different from the…
Now, I'm sure the knee-jerk reaction to this will be "oh but you're OLD, no one cares about such things these days" but hear me out. It seems that if there is any way to "discover" events happening anywhere these days is to either follow a bunch of pages on Facebook, sign up to a pile of e-mail lists or download one or more of the predatory ticketing apps like Ticketmaster or Eventbrite. Let me be 100% clear to venue owners and promoters, I know you have to cater to these, but all of these…
Suppose that one has a set of points in the plane, which we will think of as the complex plane . Let denote the number of unit distances determined by these points, i.e., pairs of points whose displacement obeys the equation (For this discussion it will not be important whether we count the pair separately from .) The Erdös unit distance problem asks, for a given large number , what is the largest possible value of amongst all sets of cardinality ? For instance, if one takes to be equally…
This week, after a little under two years of having adopted the practice, Buttondown has minted its 200th decision log. This is a practice very similar to RFCs or ADRs, but I prefer the term decision because it's both A, used for a variety of non-engineering purposes, and B, sounds a little less lame. The practice itself is extremely simple and there is no catch. It goes something like the following: Decisions are any non-trivial choice made for a specific reason. The context behind a decision…
Hello, loves! We improve some code, reduce overall size and breadth of interfaces, make things better. CW: Brief LLM-“AI” remarks. I’m beginning with a review of the code around the new Connection idea, to see what can be removed and what needs improvement. I’ll show you what I spot, but spare you as many big code dumps as I can. In Cell’s # movement section, I find this nice little method: class Cell: def attempt_move(self, cell): connection = self.get_connection(cell) return connection.move()…
Imperial Watch Company entered the microbrand arena in 2022 with the release of the Royal Guard 200. In my review, I praised its retro charm and declared it to be… The post Imperial Watch Co. Rangefinder appeared first on The Time Bum.
We have collectively been recovering from a physically and emotionally draining two weeks of marching band. We all were caught napping at some point throughout the early days of this week! It’s been nice to have activities wind down this week, and we’ll have a bit of relaxation for a few weeks going forward. It’s been raining a lot around here. No flooding in our area, but I think there’s been some within an hour or two of us. We’re hoping our annual July 4th festivities are not washed out this…
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Personal websites. I have some thoughts...
Probably the biggest fear of politicians - thinking citizens. An adaptation of The Thinker by Auguste Rodin. Imagined by me, rendered by ChatGPT
Heatwave 2.0 has been and gone, Prime Minister 9.0 appears to have been (amicably?) decided {{1}}, and the newspapers have instead reverted to saturation coverage of the 'soccer' World Cup. In the hope of also attracting some errant Google search activity I've used a sporting term for the title of the post, though it was primarily chosen to reflect the stage we've reached in the beekeeping season.The June gap has closed again. It wasn't very protracted, and most colonies continued to find bits…
Dept: Office of Patriotic SustenanceTruthiness: 250%Title: Chief Cooking OfficerFineprint: Who needs to eat anyway?Mode: menuOkay team, it falls to us to assemble the greatest menu of American dishes ever comb-bound into a booklet to be sold in every National Park gift shop across these beautiful fifty states. Now, we’re not worrying about writing recipes—we’ve got AI for that—all we need to do is pick the list of dishes that have made America great.We need to be sure these dishes do not… let…
FUNLAND ROBOT SCOOBY DOO (EQUITY MARKETING) It’s Friday once again everybody. Welcome to Friday. Hooray. For my Flashback Friday Figure Addendums, I’m more often than not dealing with Marvel or Star Wars, but today I’m changing that up a bit, and we’re revisiting one of my very few Scooby-Doo reviews, for a second look at the Funland Robot! Scooby Doo where are you? That’s actually a good question to ask when examining my action figure collection. You see, I own exactly 2 figures from Scooby…
Welcome to The Film Noir Files, the noir series here at Shadows and Satin and over at Speakeasy, the blog authored by my pal Kristina, where each month we recommend a film noir feature for you to watch on TCM. We never know what the other has selected until we post, and part of the fun is trying to never pick the same movie! I only discovered Dirk Bogarde within the last few years, and have greatly enjoyed his performances in films like Libel (1959), Victim (1961), and The Servant (1963). But…
This week was Amplitudes, my old subfield’s big yearly conference. This year, it’s at Queen Mary University of London. I’m too busy to attend these days, now that nobody is paying me a salary to do that sort of thing. But it’s still a good chance to keep up with the field, which helps me find stories. And I know I have a few readers who are interested. So I read the slides when I can, and fill you all in. As of writing this, I’ve read through slides from the first few days of talks. I’ll likely…
A speculative theory: Current politics is making people increasingly miserable because at a participatory level it has become for many people, on the margin, a more national, more electoral, and more passive activity. All three of these trends are bad for your political happiness return-on-investment. The first dimension above is scope. All else equal, people get more satisfaction engaging in local politics, where they have more investment in the community, have personal relationships with…
THE GROW YOUR Own Records label releases a new album by Icons of Filth today (3 July 2026).Time of the Signs brings together eighteen tracks by the band – and is available in streaming, limited edition CD and limited edition vinyl versions. The glass-mastered CD is presented in a card slip-cover and comes with a lyric-sheet poster. The vinyl version includes an A2 version of the poster, a postcard and a patch. Icons of Filth. 2026. Time of the Signs. Grow Your Own Records.…
Over the course of building and painting this army, I’ve found myself completely taken by the history of Prince Tancred. Though he technically marched in the shadow of his uncle, Bohemond of Taranto, during the early stages of the First Crusade, Tancred quickly carved out his own legendary reputation through sheer audacity, tactical brilliance, and relentless drive. Centered in the vanguard is Tancred, mounted on his striking warhorse. Flanking the prince are his two invaluable companions.…
Yesterday at work, a customer spotted a typo in our UI: “you can use the use the Tailscale CLI”. After the typo was fixed, I wanted to find other cases of accidentally repeated words or phrases. I used two regular expressions to search every codebase for unnecessary repetition. The first regex finds repeated words: \b([A-Za-z]+) \1\b Backfill product data from from Stripe Learn more about about inviting users Argument must be be one of host name, IP set name, IP prefix, or IP There’s a…
(photo from U. Berkeley, with the caption: “New study reveals the brain mechanism that makes rats feel empathy for other rats, yet refrain from helping rats they deem to be ‘outsiders’. Photo by Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal”) Chris Hedges is a busy guy. In addition to being one of the most relentless public critics of the US/Western Empire (no matter who is in power), the award-winning journalist and former war correspondent also frequently interviews a wide variety of people with unique insights on…
This article tells part of the story of Maxis Software. I’m still to this day just blown away by continental drift and things like that, stuff that most people think sounds pretty boring. — Will Wright Gamers are both extremely dedicated to and really good at preserving the history of their hobby. Seldom has a month gone by in the fifteen years that I’ve been writing for this site that I haven’t had cause to feel grateful for their efforts. During the early years, I was most thankful for their…
With Keir Starmer recently losing a Defence Secretary and then leaving a budgetary timebomb for his successor as PM, Andy Burnham, I thought it might be interesting to see how we rank on defence spending and who are the world’s largest exporters and importers of arms. I started out by trying to find some data on arm sales and Claude sent me to SIPRI where you can download very granular data on almost every transaction but after playing with the data I decided to take a simpler approach and map…
I’ve been arguing with people online. Maybe I should do less of that and ride my bike more. But I’ve also been trying to call out ableist behavior, which I think is important. People have also given me grief because I ride an ebike. Here’s my question to those people… First, imagine you like to ride a bike. Now imagine you get older, you get injured, or your body just doesn’t do what you want it to do without pain. Do you give up riding a bike, or do you figure out a way to keep riding a bike?…
This year's shincha is an unusual one. Harvested in April, this niche tea cultivar is called benitachiwase (ベニタチワセ), and it's commonly processed into black tea, but this is a shincha - a first flush green tea, you could say - so I have no idea what to expect. Let's dive in. The tea came in an unlabeled, vacuum-sealed package, so sadly I don't know which specific tea farm produced it. I was only able to narrow it down to the Shibushi area in Kagoshima Prefecture, Kyushu. Right out of the bag,…
Hey there. Before this week’s links, a quick update: After a couple of rounds of editing, I recruited a couple of friends as beta readers for Street-Smart Coding Manifesto. It’s not the first time someone’s read these ideas, but I like honest feedback before launching—to quiet the inner critic. As usual, here are 4 links I thought were worth sharing this week: #1. Keeping a blog showed me a corner of the web outside the big platforms. But I didn’t know about the smolweb and its protocols…
My first week on NHSE's record a vaccination service. Joining NHS England I joined the RAVS (record a vaccination service) team at NHS England (NHSE) this week. Working on a contract via TPX Impact. Shout out to Frankie and others for helping me to settle in. It's great to be joining a team with some familiar faces! I'm excited to be working with NHSE, both my parents work in healthcare, one is a pharmacist and the other is a health visitor (previously a midwife). Both roles are close to…
