I snapped this one with my phone, but took many more with my camera. I’ll share those soonish.

In the future, we will use AI to cure diseases. But right now, [we’re using it] mostly [for] murder, surveillance, and surge pricing for the McRib.Jon Stewart, John Wilson (The Daily Show, S31E111) [h/t Jim Nielsen] I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that it’s been a weird year for ‘AI’ (or, more specifically, LLMs). Two years ago, LLMs struggled with basic maths problems; last month, a model solved one of the Millennium Prize Problems (winning $1m, for a purported cost of $15m, and…

A well-known company recently dropped a proof of the ‘quasi-Riemann hypothesis’ as part of their theorem dump. Maksym Radziwiłł of New York University said the implications are “staggering”, continuing: In a sense, the vast majority of consequences of RH already follow from quasi-RH. But what is the quasi-Riemann hypothesis, and what are some of these consequences? Since 1897, we’ve known all the nontrivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function lie in this strip in the complex plane: 0 < Re(z) < 1…

coincide coincidence 🤯

Who would have thought I would capture the unicorniest of all unicorns in EKSN of all places? Spoiler: not me. And yet that's exactly what happened last weekend. Here's the story of how this came to be.

All maps are wrong, in some way, because maps are two-dimensional, and "a sphere cannot be mapped onto a flat plane." Some maps are better than others, depending on your motives. ~ Link: The Mathematical Impossibility of Making a Perfect World Map, by Manon Bischoff, Scientific American

They bragged publicly about violating a law that they themselves had worked really hard to get passed. – Molly Duane Elephant in the Parlor (#1493) That Gaetz’s downfall was due to paying for sex rather than his openly-espoused evil is a symptom of America’s cultural sickness: Two women have filed a federal…lawsuit accusing…Florida [politician] Matt Gaetz and two others of…[“]sex trafficking[” because they were both legal adults with]…no stable income when…Gaetz…paid [them for] sex…[did] drugs…

Coding agents are good at DuckDB, as long as the DuckDB they need is the one from their training data. A freshly released extension is a different story: the agent has never seen its functions, so it guesses, and the guesses look convincing. The new Agent Skill for duckdb-differential closes that gap. Two days ago I wrote about duckdb-differential 1.0: versioned DuckDB databases with snapshots, branches and time travel, replicated through S3 with followers, WAL shipping, failover and shared…

Yesterday afternoon, I went to downtown Spartanburg, to the business office of Hub City publishers, a group which also runs the charming, downtown bookstore. We had the last meeting with a student who is doing a Capstone project. We agreed that it's been a success.It was neat to be in the office space of a small business, with stacks of books and packages waiting to be mailed. It was good to remember that small businesses are still doing what they do, and even better that it's a business that…

What if a DuckDB database could have a history, writable branches and read replicas on other machines, all from SQL, with nothing but an S3 bucket in between? No database server, no catalog service, no lock manager. That’s what the differential extension for DuckDB in v1.0 does. A week ago I wrote about differential storage for DuckDB and the local workflows it enables: validating imports on branches, reproducing reports, testing migrations on clones. Version 1.0 is built for DuckDB 2.0 and…

The paperwork has been signed, the deposit has been paid, the contracts have been exchanged. Unless an act of god blows the building over or some part of the machinations of bureaucracy goes wrong, I’m going to be a homeowner. …Of a house 250 miles away from where I currently live. Ah. So I’m moving to Manchester, England’s definitive second city (suck it, Birmingham). For those not privy to the beeps lore, Manchester and its surrounds are where I lived and grew up before I moved to Bristol in…

For 17 years, a carved but unfinished basswood duck sat in John Blank’s basement workshop. Every time he walked into the room, he saw it. The blank had been cut out years earlier, and John always meant to get back to it. He just got interested in other things: Deer. Sheep. Elk. Bison. Commissions. Painting. […]

Matcha Mountain is ever so slightly bonkers. My suggestion is don’t try and use logic (Boolean or otherwise) in an attempt to explain this, just sit back and enjoy the experience. Anything else may well result in the (hopefully) temporary loss of your liberty as nice men in white coats take you away for some special treatment. Back to the animation – and it’s great to see an elderly protagonist for once! Granny lives alone on Matcha Mountain, which is, as it suggests, a mountain made out of…

ADHD is a complex and common mental disorder which changes how the person processes information, behaves, and functions in society. Common recommendations for “ADHD-friendly design” include reducing clutter, avoiding distractions, and simplifying information architecture. I argue that these suggestions do not constitute “ADHD-friendly design”, and that the real solution is more sophisticated and challenging, if not impossible, to implement.This article was first published on my Medium. You can…

What if a DuckDB database could have a history, writable branches and read replicas on other machines, all from SQL, with nothing but an S3 bucket in between? No database server, no catalog service, no lock manager. That’s what duckdb-differential 1.0 does. A week ago I wrote about differential storage for DuckDB and the local workflows it enables: validating imports on branches, reproducing reports, testing migrations on clones. Version 1.0 is built for DuckDB 2.0 and adds what was missing to…

Please welcome me, Windrush people, I am joining you (and I trust that you will be more welcoming than some British people were to you). I salute you and I am honoured to be (in some way) one of you. After three months of bureaucracy and stress, I am back precisely to where I was before: a person with indefinite leave to remain in the UK, thanks to the Windrush scheme. I qualify to be a Windrush person. I meet the official requirements: I arrived in Britain from a Commonwealth country before…

It’s Wednesday again and this week we start of big and end with a collection of odds and sods. We start with an impressive looking Mars station from Marcus W. Staying with large buildings and Kim has some more progress on some buildings for Guards of Traitor’s Toll. And with the market stall Kim has also painted lots of trade goods. Moving on and Andy has been working his way through all those little bits we like to have for games. First up some directional signs. And some other signs, a couple…

Broad Ripple BrewpubOlympus OM-2n, 40mm f/2 Zuiko Auto-SKodak T-Max 400Bellini Ecofilm 1+12026 Here it is, the first brewpub in Indianapolis. I don’t know for sure when it opened but I think it’s been operating longer than I have lived in Indianapolis, and I got here in 1994. Brewpubs are a dime a dozen now, and frankly in most of them the beer is only so-so. I’ve yet to have a brew here that I didn’t think was solidly made and delicious. Get more of my photography in your inbox or reader!…

You can bargain with Death, but their schedule is immutable.

Every good adventure ends the same way: you start fantasizing about your own pillow. I’ve noticed it after backpacking trips, camping trips, road trips, and international trips, solo, with friends, and with family. You don’t feel cheated. You didn’t “see everything,” and the world carried on without your review. You’re simply ready for your own bed and your own routine. This trip was no different. My wife tapped out a couple of days before we landed. I held out until the day before. Our…

10:57 - Today's steamed eggs weren't as pretty. Better luck tomorrow.

I am suddenly very relieved that this site no longer runs on PHP.

Gwen John, St Thérèse of Liseux and her Sister. Photograph from Wikimedia. Following an essay on the MusikFest Berlin performance of Ligeti’s opera Le Grand Macabre, a report-essay on the world premiere of Yvonne Loriod’s oratorio Le Saint Face, touching on: Jean-Claude Touche, killed on the day of the Liberation of Paris, St Thérèse of Lisieux, Simone Weil, Olivier Messiaen, Gwen John. A preview below: the full piece is available to paying subscribers on the ambient evil of the Substack…

The epigraph at the very beginning of Caroline Clark’s new collection of essays, What Lies Ahead, reads simply: Can I be with youwhile you read this?Don’t look up orsay anything. And, as you read the pieces that follow you will be aware of the author’s presence—not as an eerie feeling of someone looking over your … Continue reading "Poetry as a journey: What Lies Ahead by Caroline Clark"

Love the Sein. ↬ ∙ Tagged in Media.

1989 Virgin Mastertronic Platforms: ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC (potentially Commodore 64 too) Springclean is an intriguing unreleased title from PAL Developments that was due to be published by Virgin Mastertronic around 1989. This one was actually completed, with master disks produced for both the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC versions. The game was developed by Rich Stevenson, who very kindly got in touch with GTW to reveal that the source and master disks still survive within his personal…

I was thinking of maybe having themes for each week, but decided against it since it would add complication and would make it even harder to do things in time (I don’t have a backlog for this yet). So this week it’s random again. I. Body Hand It’s only recently that I’ve realised that my hands were starting to look old. Even if you ignore the cat scratch marks. The skin is more textured than it was, you can see the tendons more. It’s weird to see your body age in front of you when you don’t…

We’ve had several inquiries about our plans to drive the iconic Route 66 that we’d planned. So what happened? Hmmm… our plans changed is the short answer.After completing the Kingman, AZ to Santa Monica Pier segment a couple of months ago, we had every intention of driving to Chicago in September and driving the route in its entirety to celebrate the Mother Road’s 100th anniversary. I’d done lots and lots of research about our route. In fact, I filled a 1” binder with sights to see and iconic…

🎵 Mumford & Sons - Snake Eyes Filed under scraps with tags: Jam Reply by email Add an emoji reaction: 🥕 🚲 🐾 💜

A dull cool day. No sunshine. Put a lot of old troughs in the incin. place. Did B1 car. Cleared two loads from silage lab. Dot, Jane home. Poor Jack Oxton died.