From the desk of Benji Welner in Austin, TX. How to Rule the World by Theo Baker. Finished on June 06, 2026. Rating: ★★★☆☆ I vaguely know Theo Baker, and heard from a mutual friend that he had published a book. But I only realized that I would have to read it when it appeared in a Robber Barons sketch comedy show to boos from the audience. If How to Rule the World was to become a central cultural artifact on campus, I figured I should know what it actually says. Now I do. How to Rule the World…
I have a question. We have a groundhog. That is my question. At first we found it charming and cute. Groundhogs ARE so cute. They’re so fat and sleek and waddley! And our yard has foxes and raccoons and songbirds and squirrels and chipmunks and hawks, and sometimes deer and skunks and turkeys and owls, and on one memorable occasion bears—so why not groundhogs? Well. Because this groundhog can’t be reasonable. Two burrow entrances, three, FOUR—we still found it charming: we’re not prissy about…
When you need to execute a coordinated change on a tight timeline, a mandate might be the best and most honest way to fund it. Crossposted from here. I’ve been writing a series of pieces on lessons learned from our AI journey at Honeycomb. I’ve written about the tension between enthusiasts and skeptics, the need for engineering rigor, and the ethics of using tools with externalities and a seedy backstory. Today I want to send you off to a long July 4th weekend with a short but passionate…
Camping and hiking at the edge of the San Juan mountains. Read More ... Continue reading Edge of the San Juans at PMags.com.
I was thinking about my trip last year to the Boundary Waters and I remembered that I had done a small sketch of Fourtown Lake from our final campsite. It's a small thumbnail, but I think it's become one of my favorite in my sketchbook.
I’ve been writing a series of pieces on lessons learned from our AI journey at Honeycomb. I’ve written about the tension between enthusiasts and skeptics, the need for engineering rigor, and the ethics of using tools with externalities and a seedy backstory.Today I want to send you off to a long July 4th weekend with a short but passionate defense of that most despised of management tools, the technology mandate.Nobody likes mandatesI have read many a tweet or post from engineers exploding with…
Ancient Egypt in 50 Discoveriesby Stephanie Boonstra, Campbell PriceGenres: History, Non-fiction Pages: 236 Rating: Synopsis: This book presents the unique history of ancient Egypt through 50 artefacts discovered during excavations of the EES since its founding in 1882. They are brought together in this beautifully illustrated volume from global museums: from major collections as well as those that are a little less known. Readers will travel through three millennia of Egypt’s history from the…
If a trivia quiz asks you to name the best-selling pinball machine of all time, they are probably asking you to name The Addams Family (1992). It's most likely actually the 4th-best-selling machine of all time, after Ballyhoo (Bally, 1932), Baffle Ball (Gottlieb, 1931), and Godzilla (Stern, 2021). But if you don't count all of those for various reasons, the Addamses are next in line. The Addams Family is a tour de force of gameplay and theme integration, and it's the pinball game I remember…
In expectation of a 360° wind shift, we moved to the NE corner of the atoll. We motored the 5NM towards north and found a bommie-free spot in 6 meters deep after a bit of searching. Now we can explore the close by motus and enjoy a new scenery. Distance today: 5.3NM Breakfast: rye bread with cheese Engine hours: 1.7
You read, you write, day after day. It either entertains you or not. You can read every fact that exists about food and human biology. All of it. You will order your pizza anyway. You can see all the data that random corporation extracts from you. You will open Gmail anyway. You have stances, ideals, and all that shit. On the surface. In words. You cry about the semantic web presented over 27 JavaScript files and broken HTML. You write about a book you read yesterday and one you will read…
It's a relief to realize I don't need to constantly improve my blog; sometimes, just writing is enough.
An unstoppable killer android has decided it doesn't really want to do all that murdering any more and has decided to strike out on its own, with a personal mission to stay low and watch as much TV as possible. But the self-styled "Murderbot" is drawn into a survey mission on a planet that goes wrong, and discovers that keeping its identity a secret is going to be very difficult.Murderbot is an Apple TV+ adaptation of Martha Wells's award-festooned Murderbot Diaries series of novellas and short…
After an MS diagnosis and one too many "I'll start tomorrow"s, I got moving. Calorie counting, Couch to 5K, and logging it all on my own terms.
Power Cat 2026-07-02 Whale watching
Apologies for any recent downtime — the repairman had to turn off the power for a bit and my server-laptop’s been a bit finnicky as always in trying to get back up.
The Eye of the Heron by Ursula K. Le Guin (Tor, 1978) On the planet Victoria, the people of Shantih Town live alongside the people of the City. When a group of townspeople scout and find a good place for a new settlement, they tell the City of their plans to send some of their people north. But the councillors of the City—the bosses—refuse to let them go. Luz, a daughter of one of the bosses, gets wind of the council’s plans, and becomes angry: at her father for refusing to see reason, at the…
Images in Hugo can be a bit tricky. Here’s how I’ve added images on my projects page that are resized, linked, and have alts: the figure shortcode. {{< figure src="/images/yiap.png" alt="Yes, It's a Problem" link="https://github.com/jwworth/yes-its-a-problem" width="600" >}}
Daily writing promptHit 5,000 steps today and drop your achievement here — we’re cheering you on!View all responses I have had an Apple Watch for nearly four years. Its movement goals are based on calories burned while being physically active rather than steps. It doesn’t even automatically display your step count. I just checked the Health app on my iPhone and my step count on there is nearly 7,000 at 7:30PM. Because I get most of my physical exercise through walking, I can safely assume that…
Hello, loves! The recent refactoring around Layout and Cell gave me a very appealing idea. Let’s discuss and quite likely try it. “What kind of person wears Louboutins into a dungeon anyway?” In the Procreate app on my iPad, I have, amid all my attempts at drawing, a multi-page file of diagrams and scribbles about the dungeon program. Last night I was thinking, and I scrawled out a couple of pages: In the unlikely event that those entirely professional and crisp pictures don’t tell the complete…
Status: Big CFS crash came last night, finding me fitfully sleeping and then missing my meetup with the neighbour. I probably should have cancelled anyway but wasn’t really in a state to figure that out. Early warning was the fuzziness and brain fog yesterday evening. If I can’t think straight then that’s a clear sign I’m fatigued and will need to recover. Unfortunately I can’t think straight so acting on that required undoing a paradox. Still, I’m feeling better this afternoon. The fog has…
In the opening track “No Man’s Land” on Billy Joel’s last album, River of Dreams, is the line: I've seen the children with their boredom and their vacant stares This immediately brought to mind people staring at their smartphones and scrolling endlessly through social media (which admittedly is a problem not just affecting The Youths, but everyone). The thing is, the album and song came out in 1993, which is 33 years ago as I write this. 1993 effectively predates the internet (as the public…
Some brief notes written in response to a request from the Parliamentary Select Committee on Intergenerational Housing Inequity) Class not cohort The current crisis reflects the interaction between three main forces * Changes in the life course meaning that most major stages of life are reached later than in the past. These include completion of education, entry into the mainstream labour force, family formation, childbirth, retirement and death. * Growing inequality, particularly in relation…
07:26 Busy the last few days. Lots of work, hardly any time for anything personal. 10:13 A lot of focus working is good for me from work perspective. But not so much from interests perspective. I slowly slip into habits that I hate. Reply to this post
The Nailmakers of Halesowen Yo' gets a piece of wire, Yo' puts in in the fire, Yo' teks it out, Yo' giz it a clout, Yo' yods it, Yo' got a nayul. I've mentioned in earlier blogs that whilst I now live in and write about Worcestershire, I grew up over the border in the West Midlands in an area known as the Black Country1 specifically the town of Halesowen. The town itself was once upon-a-time part of the historic county of Worcestershire, but become part of the West Midlands county designation…
This post is by Bob. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about R-hat given that I’m using it for online converging monitoring in our new Walnuts implementation. In that setting, where I use Welford accumulators to update R-hat estimates every iteration, I can’t use split R-hat without way too much buffering. So I’ve been thinking about the effect of splitting, too, and whether we need it. I asked Andrew and he said Kenny Shirley once produced an example where split R-hat diagnosed non-convergence…
In this edition:Customer sentiment deterioratesComCom reports on Satellite impact2300 MHz and 2600 MHz band redistributionJason Paris steps down at One NZConsumers unsatisfied despite world-class networksWriting in the 2025 Telecommunications Monitoring Report, the Commerce Commission says New Zealand has world-class fibre and mobile infrastructure. Network quality has continued to improve in recent years. Yet customer satisfaction remains stubbornly low.The finding is striking because customer…
My concentration was at its highest, and I could not understand why that backup was so slow. The heat would not let me focus, and I was sweating, and the sweat was distracting me. All of a sudden, the sound of the intercom. I jumped in my chair. I looked at the clock: 10. Perfectly on time. "Good". I suspended my task, opened the window and told them to come in, while I put on a pair of shorts and went down to the street. Two lads got out of the white van. One came towards me smiling, holding…
