About a year ago my friend Bhawna Parmar published a piece in The Caravan called “Off the Books: Schoolgirls in Odisha tune into right-wing YouTube.” Bhawna spent months reporting in Khordha, a district in Odisha, my home state, and followed Roza, a fourteen-year-old who gets two hours a day on a phone. Roza’s school advertises […] Source

They easily found Hand and Knife’s temple. The Child was waiting outside. The other five spoke against the sixth Child demanding that she give aid. Her secrets were hers, no magic be shared. They only wanted a cure. Hand and Knife declared she cared not for woes brought by others to her home. She thought to offer hospitality but now her mind had been changed. She said, “Leave this place! Go back to your homes! Deal with your diseases there.” The Children shouted, “This disease is yours You…

Cold and clear with heavy frost. A small hawk hurtles over the house as crows call in the distance. The western ridge turns brick-red with sunrise.

This classic tune by the legend George Benson brightened up my otherwise wet-and-dreary Monday morning blues:

Been lots of updates in the past few days. I stopped by the Point in Pascagoula over the weekend and saw these greyhounds in the river. (Photo by Chris Eger) Above, we have the future USS Jeremiah Denton (DDG-129) and George M. Neal DDG-131 in the river, with HII’s 70,000-ton capacity Chinese-built drydock uncharacteristically empty, while the planned Sam Nunn (DDG-133) is fixing to transition (which is likely why the drydock is empty). The planned Thad Cochran (DDG-135) is probably the bridge…

Many words can be spelled by stringing together chemical symbols. For example, sarcasm can be written S Ar Ca Sm using the symbols for sulfur, argon, calcium, and samarium. How would you write a program to determine whether a word can be written by stringing together chemical element abbreviations ignoring case? Obviously this isn’t a practical problem, but it illustrates a practical problem. You could solve the problem with a regular expression: (h|he|li|be|b|c|n|o|f|ne|na|mg|al|si| … |og)+…

Well, the historic– the only Great War dreadnought preserved– USS Texas (Battleship No. 35) has been in dry dock and ongoing restoration at Gulf Copper in Galveston for just over 4 years (since August 2022). Thankfully, she is looking great and is sporting much of a new deck. The updates from the museum include: New Home? We’re proud to have finalized an agreement with the Galveston Wharves Board securing Pier 15 as the new home of Battleship Texas. Learn more at…

Marine Corps AH-1Z Vipers of Marine Light Attack Helicopter Squadron (HMLA) 367 “Scarface” execute flight operations aboard USS Canberra (LCS 30), showing off something which a littoral combat ship could excel at—providing a forward lily pad for maritime sea control. A U.S. Marine Corps AH-1Z Viper helicopter, attached to Marine Light Attack Helicopter Squadron (HMLA) 367, is folded on the flight deck of Independence-variant littoral combat ship USS Canberra (LCS 30) as part of Navy-Marine…

Something in this week's listings that I've never seen before: a double-check mark (√√) next to shows that TV Guide says are "Of unusual interest." Anyone else ever seen anything like that? Or was it unique to this North Texas edition? I guess after all these years, we should be happy to have something different to look at. -3- KFDX (WICHITA FALLS) (NBC) Morning 6:30 CONTINENTAL CLASROOM COLOR 7:00 TODAY—Hugh Downs Guest: Elick Moll 9:00 SAY WHEN—Art James 9:25 NEWS—Edwin Newman 9:30 PLAY YOUR…

With last week’s training not going entirely to plan, I’ve come up with less structured approach for this week, hoping that life allows me to follow through with my 30km target. No thresholds factored in this week, simply getting the miles (km/s) in the legs… Current Weight: 214.4lbs (97.25kg) ~22.8% body fat Part of my current goal is to reduce my weight, thereby hopefully decreasing load on my body during runs and also increasing speed. I’m going to include my body weight and body fat…

2026 is another year of short stories. In this weekly series, I track my short story writing, from idea and draft to submission. This is for the week of Oct 12 – Oct 18. Stats for the Year Stories Finished: 3 Submissions Currently Out: 7 Submissions Total: 38 Rejections: 33 Acceptances: 0 Submissions and Responses It was a quiet week. No new submissions or responses. Goals My goals from last week: Revise The Magpie Write Mother Night My kids had some school holidays this week, which seemed as…

TL;DR I’ve wanted Claude Code to compact my conversations in the background for a long time. It now compacts a long session when I walk away from it for about an hour. My Claude went through my session logs: before idle compaction, I spent around 160 minutes over four months waiting on compactions. Since it arrived on my account on 10 October, I haven’t waited on one. Motivation Link to heading My sessions run long. Once a conversation fills the context window, Claude Code stops, summarises…

If you want the short answer to “how should I limit an AI coding agent’s permissions?”, it’s this: give the agent its own identity instead of yours, hand it short-lived credentials scoped to the one task in front of it, make read-only the default, keep production credentials somewhere it physically can’t reach, and require a human to approve anything destructive. That’s least privilege, the same rule we’ve applied to service accounts for twenty years. We just forgot to apply it to the newest…

Some disorganised, cluttered thoughts about the rise of AI in my life.

The other day I opened my terminal and noticed I was mike@Clearpeak. Considering this was my work computer (and Liquid Light is nothing like Clearpeak) alarm bells started ringing. Before I engaged code-red protocol and suspected a hack, I thought I would check as to where it was coming from. FINDING THE SOURCE My first port-of-call was to ask Claude how I can check where it was coming from. It gave me 4 commands to verify the identity scutil --get HostName scutil --get LocalHostName scutil…

In this episode I talk to about his mathematical concept of sophistication and how that relates to meaning outside of math. We discuss his book Judaism Straight Up and the potential benefits that religion provides to communities. Next we cover his work on algorithmic authorship detection in a different texts, including the Bible. Finally we discuss modern AI and how people can find meaning when their work is no longer economically needed. Listen or Watch on YouTube or Spotify. TranscriptBelow…

I started in week 40 with writing a list of five good things for each week, inspired by the #3goodthings I post almost every day (I want every day, but sometimes I forget hehehe) Then I jumped in to write this post just now, and wrote joyful instead of good, and thought to myself: that’s pretty on-brand for me, as I write about joy a LOT. So from now on this weekly series is called five joyful things. My fingers willed it so! Anyway! Let’s head into the list. These are five joyful things about…

David Tibet the creative force behind Current 93 is hosting what he's rather fabulously called a "Gnostic cartoon PickNick', 'HALLUCINATE, CHILDREN' at the DOX Gallery in Prague from 23 Oct 2026 – 4 Apr 2027.Through music, word and image David has long been one of our great esoteric, visionary artists and this show looks to pull together all those threads of a creative life that has included collaborations with, amongst many others, Steven Stapleton (of Nurse With Wound), Jhonn Balance & Peter…

As basically every studio working on shooting games was back in 1985, Toaplan’s first shoot ‘em up, Tiger-Heli, drew significant inspiration from Xevious. It had plenty of its own contributions to add to the lineage of the genre — screen-clearing bombs were the invention of Toaplan, first utilized in Tiger-Heli — but the speed the game moved at and the way enemies fired at you was still very reminiscent of Namco’s massive hit, only in a realistic military setting rather than a sci-fi one. That…

I have a doctor's appointment Wednesday in which she will decide if I am ready to go back to work and of course the anxiety is starting to ramp up. 😰

What is this?A weekly note on what I've been up to. Last week's is here.Tuesday: Just a normal guy definitely enjoying the taste of GuinnesstldrPast 1,000km for the year. Doorframes nearly bare. Beth Orton was wonderful. Wrote up where the NHS England work got to. Town dire.Health and runningFour runs, 30.2km. The most in a week since mid-July, the week the TFL went. Tuesday's took the year past 1,000km. Year to date: 1,026.8km. 1,200km looks doable.New gym block from Friday, mostly upper body,…

It’s no secret that the Hollywood Comet loves musicals. In 2010, I revealed I had seen 400 movie musicals over the course of eight years. Now that number is over 800. To celebrate and share this musical love, here is … Continue reading →

The week of 12 to 18 October on social.omgmog.net had a pile of retro software running in odd places, from the first iPhone in a browser tab to PS2 games on WebGPU. There’s also some Nintendo history, a typeface and a virtual guitar.

This a writeup of my talk at the Python Summit on October 19th, 2026. See the talk recording here. Do LLMs have preferences regarding programming languages? Why would they have any, and how would you notice it? Online, you might occasionally have come across the statement that LLMs are better with Python, or that they really prefer to use Python even when they shouldn't. Many of us are very skeptical about this: LLMs shouldn't have preferences regarding programming languages. Or do they? It…

Announcement, slides, and recording. You can also find my writeup of the talk here. All resources can also be found in my archive. At the Python Summit I dug into a little known research area: LLM's biases for programming languages. Is it true that your LLM will choose Python no matter the task you give it, or that it's more proficient at coding in Python than in any other language? Should you be concerned about this issue, or is it just a harmless preference? And where did this "problem" come…

I made a photo of a lady playing music to a horse in Mexico in 2023 and it was published in a magazine recently. Never give up on your dreams of making a photo of a horse going to a concert in Baja California Sur.

Welcome back to the Gridiron Deep Dive everybody, where today, we’re going to be doing something new.If you’re new here, please consider subscribing! I write about all kinks of nooks and crannies in NFL history,This is His Day, an offshoot of my His Year series, designed to showcase players who were never able to play at a top level for an entire season, but for one day, played like an all-time great.Today, we’re here to talk about Kelly Holcomb, and his infamous 0.569 EPA/Play performance in…

Tesla turns to 50-year-old stunt as it tries to Roadster again arstechnica.com/cars/2026/10...[image or embed]— Lora Kolodny (@lorak.bsky.social) October 16, 2026 at 5:06 PM Let's get the obvious out of the way. To the extent that a car is defined as a vehicle for personal transportation, what we saw demonstrated last week was a flying car-shaped object (possibly with scare quotes around "flying"). The cold-gas thrusters that kept the "car" aloft for a few seconds didn't have anyone in it,…

Last page (no spoilers here) of a very interesting book. Hat tip Mark Kissler.