If you’re in the USA chances are you’ve heard of AAA – the American Automobile Association. It’s a $60 or so yearly membership and includes some travel discounts, trip-tiks/maps, and other things the internet pretty much have made obsolete. It also includes towing and roadside assistance, which is the only reason I still had it. TL;DR – just a story you have all the info you need in the title of Yesterday was Father’s Day in the US. A day that pretty much means you get a card and maybe go out…

Last week, Cuba’s Prime Minister Manuel Marrero announced a package of free market reforms, including the legalization of private businesses in agriculture and tourism, that “significantly expand the private sector six decades after Cuba’s communist leaders forbade all private business—even frita stands—and adopted a centrally planned economy model that ended up ruining the country and dragging Cubans into a severe humanitarian crisis.” Source: Nora Gámez Torres, Miami Herald (19 June 2026),…

I do enjoy doing a good quiz, so here's my results for my blogging archetype: You are a Explorer To you, the web feels like a library that's open all hours and has everything you could ever imagine! You love reading others blogs, and know how important readers are to the whole of the indie web community! You are also a Author You love writing and have a growing backlog of posts on your website! Words are your best friend and you're always thinking about what to write next. Other archetypes…

I've been socking away money (mostly through credit card reward points) in the hopes of upgrading my iPhone 14 Pro whenever the new ones come out this year. My current phone works pretty well most of the time, but I've been noticing a drop in performance and battery life over the last few months (even with a replaced battery) and it's been overheating a lot more. Apple saying they're going to be raising prices on all their stuff which is making me a little nervous but for something I use daily…

At this point, you basically know what you’re getting from Japanese post-rock heroes MONO. Unlike some of their peers, they haven’t executed any dramatic reinventions (relative within the parameters of the genre, at least) but instead just grown and evolved naturally, their records and music reflecting who they are at the point in their lives […] The post MONO – “Gerbera” appeared first on Space Echo.

We have long “known” that kids from homes which contain more books tend to be better at reading — but we couldn’t be sure that that wasn’t because of encouragement from parents, who by buying books, might appear to have valued reading more than parents who didn’t and might therefore be assumed to encourage it in their offspring. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) reports on a five-year controlled experiment involving 30 schools at which pupils were given books, with 30…

Michael H. Keller, Eli Murray, Danielle Ivory, and Irineo Cabreros, New York Times (gift link): The surge in pedestrian deaths has baffled researchers. Most other wealthy countries haven’t seen similar increases, suggesting that possible culprits like smartphones don’t tell the whole story. Other likely causes of deadly crashes, such as drunken and distracted driving, have attracted immense attention from the public and policymakers. But the trend toward ever-larger vehicles has received much…

Yesterday was music day in France. If you're not from this part of the world and don't know what music day is, basically it's a national event where anyone is allowed to play music in the streets. It's supposed to celebrate amateur musicians and on paper, I'm all for this.1 In practice though, I tend not to go. In big cities such as where I live, it tends to draw huge crowds, and the older I get the less I tolerate being cramped with a mass of people, no matter the occasion. It's not phobic or…

It’s 10 years tonight that this station recorded over 60mm of rain in 24 hours. It remains the largest daily fall at this station since records began in 1960. Rainfall rates touched over 60mm/hr during the early hours of June 23rd. The closest station at the waterworks at Redbridge Roundabout recorded a similar amount. The next closest official station, St James’s Park, recorded only 46mm, illustrating how varied rainfall can be over a small area. The rainfall during the event was around three…

Since I’m a good mood today—at a beautiful science camp with my kids, high in the mountains near Big Bear Lake in California—I thought I’d blog about something positive. Last week, five authors posted a major paper to the Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity, which shows (or anyway, credibly claims to show) that the Bipartite Matching problem is in the complexity class NC. Assuming this stands, it resolves a central problem in parallel algorithms and derandomization that’s been…

Consistency serves a purpose in visual design, but it seems to have become the purpose of a lot of visual design. Look no further than these evolutions of macOS icons (image courtesy of BasicAppleGuy): The Creator Studio icons are undeniably consistent visually: rounded rectangles, controlled gradients, simplified forms, restrained depth, etc. In contrast (and by modern standards) the originals seem heretically inconsistent. They lack coherence in visual details like shape, material, and…

LocateAnything Explained: Parallel Box Decoding and the Next Generation of Vision-Language Grounding Paper Code Project Demo Modern detection-and-grounding VLMs treat a bounding box as text: each box becomes a short string of coordinate tokens, decoded one at a time, left to right. This means a model predicts box coordinates one token at a time, despite all coordinates belonging to the same geometric object. The approach inherits the limitations of language modeling rather than exploiting the…

I’ve known about file local variables for a long time. I also knew about the eval keyword, which can be used as a file variable, but instead of binding the given value to the (non-existent) variable eval, Emacs evaluates it. This is often useful, but the usefulness is diminished by the fact that Emacs nags the user whether it is safe to evaluate a form provided that way. (Of course, it is reasonable security-wise, and that’s why I didn’t set enable-local-variables to :all – I still prefer the…

Here ya go, folks — check it out here. Thanks to the aforementioned RAM and memory apocalypse happening due to so much of the current pipeline of RAM and storage being pre-purchased for AI data centers, the pricing is a tough pill to swallow. You’ve got the base Steam Machine, 512GB of storage, no controller, for $1,049. If you want to add the Steam Controller (normally $99), that combo is $1,128. Want 2TB of storage? $1,349. Want that one with a controller? $1,428. But at least the 2TB models…

The last Korean review I did involved a spicy and sweet noodle served hot I kind of think might have been better cold. Well, here’s a cold noodle. Sounds good – let’s check it out! Woobool Restaurant Cold Buckwheat Noodles – South Korea A distributor / import sticker (click to enlarge). Detail of the packaging (click to enlarge). Contains fish. To prepare, boil noodles in 500ml water for 2 minutes. Rinse with cold water. Take sachets and add to 180ml cold water and stir. Finally, combine and…

Cosmic Summer No. 13, paper collage, 2026 I love retro-spacey beach art. For that reason, whenever I find vintage beach imagery, whether in magazines or on postcards, it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that I am going to pair it with a spacey sky. Indeed, I have a rather sizable collection of retro-futuristic summer-themed collages […]

When we examine what types of films were trendy in the silent film days, we’ll find the era well-stocked with Civil War films, WWI propagandistic adventures, tales from the pioneer days, and of course an abundance of Westerns. But what … Continue reading →

AI disclosure – I used AI to write this blog post. I figure having an AI blog post is better than not writing it at all. I will always disclose though if I use AI to heavily write any content on this blog. (I use it for minor copy editing all the time.) For the tech details, I used gemini flash 3.5 with medium reasoning in the Antigravity IDE, using the same advice I said in this blog post. (Minor preference to Claude Code for writing blog posts for those who care.) It is the outline of the…

This is a short aside in our virtual memory series. We have talked extensively about the size of a virtual address and the virtual address space, but we haven’t yet looked at the size of a physical address.As you might expect, physical addresses on x86-64 are smaller than 64 bits. But they are also not necessarily the same size as virtual addresses. In this video, we look at how big physical addresses are, how you can check this on your own machine, and why different processors may expose…

This one took a long time to get out, but it is finally out. #100 was recorded and will come out next week 🤞 .We chat about how developer experience affects delivery speed, happiness and morale. We also chat about how a lot of problems with team dynamics are self-inflicted. At the end of the day it's all a wire act where balance is crucial, but the more skilful people you have, the easier it is to maintain that balance.

🐑🐑🐑🐑 4/5 Real Animals - I got a lot out of re-reading this! The post Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick appeared first on The Wallflower Digest.

Biked in Zuid-Kennemerland National Park with a distance of 31.34 kilometres. Zuid-Kennemerland National Park sits on the North Sea coast in the province of North Holland, between Haarlem, Bloemendaal, and IJmuiden. Its dunes, woodland, and open grassland are grazed by European bison and Highland cattle, and a web of cycling paths threads through it within easy reach of Amsterdam. Ride report Map Details DataValue Distance31.34 km Duration2h 09m Speed14.4 km/h Max speed29 km/h Elevation gain208…

In 2023, I ordered a cheap piece of crap USB to HDMI adapter. From time to time, I dabble with computers, but I don’t always have a convenient display at hand. Capture cards aren’t anything new, but the good ones a bit expensive for a hobbyist like myself. The adapter sucks, and somehow it’s been one of the most useful tools that I own. The way that it works is also brilliant: the adapter acts like a webcam on your machine. This means that you can open any app that can show webcam output, such…

A history of the Jewish Labor Bund, Here Where We Live Is Our Country plots the arc of the organization from the tsarist Pale of Settlement, to interwar Poland, into war-torn Warsaw and somehow, barely, out again. Crabapple writes in her own voice and interweaves family history with the wider historical scene. The book’s chapters have no citations or footnotes — they’re all relegated to endnotes indexed on page numbers and short phrases — which helps the book read more like a novel while…

The polder model is a method of consensus decision-making, based on the Dutch version of consensus-based economic and social policymaking in the 1980s and 1990s. It gets its name from the Dutch word (polder) for tracts of land enclosed by dikes. The polder model has been described as “a pragmatic recognition of pluriformity” and “cooperation despite differences”.

I have been reflecting today on making mistakes. The following quotation is attributed to United States President Theodore Roosevelt: “The only man who never makes a mistake is the man who never does anything.”Theodore roosevelt I’d quickly like to say that I believe this to be true of both men and women, so today we might substitute the word ‘person’ for the word ‘man’. To be human is to do things – and make things – and we will inevitably make some mistakes as we go. I had lessons in…

Walking through Brockley in South East London this morning, my eyes were drawn to the rubbish that was collecting - but not being collected - near the station. However, this wasn’t what grabbed my attention – it was the street art (graffiti, vandalism – what you will) that adorned the remnants of a piece of shelving that had been unceremoniously bound and dumped by the bins. It must have looked so forlorn that a would-be Banksy took (no more than a few seconds, in my judgement) the time to…

A Swedish word meaning ‘just the right amount’ or ’not too much, not too little’. The word can be variously translated as ‘in moderation’, ‘in balance’, ‘perfect-simple’, ‘just enough’, ‘ideal’ and ‘suitable’ (in matter of amounts). Whereas words like sufficient and average suggest some degree of abstinence, scarcity, or failure, lagom carries the connotation of appropriateness, although not necessarily perfection. The archetypical Swedish proverb “Lagom är bäst”, literally ‘The right amount is…

I’m pretty sure the best answer to every problem can be encapsulated in one simple dictum. You can use this dictum to meet all your problems, regardless of what they are, and create the best possible outcomes. You’re not going to like it. It has different forms, but here’s one: Do what has to be done, when it has to be done, and do it that way every time. This is truly infuriating advice. The mind sputters and objects. Objection 1: This doesn’t tell me anything! How do I know what has to be…

Cat portraits that are set up in low trees are destined to be the next big thing this summer, just as a challenge to novice photographers everywhere.Fake BBC news via tightly controlled social media sources: Every breakfast is of course a freakfest in this backwards freakin' country where some people actually buy and then drink tea out of cups with the image of a so-called king on it. Please grown up and out of doing these dumb things whoever you are. The markets don't need this. I know it's a…