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.

In a dearth of successful new writing this year, there’s finally a brand new voice to get excited about actor turned playwright Danny Lee Wynter whose debut piece Ilford Boy arrives at the Donmar Warehouse in a bundle of energy and with a searing purpose. A coming-of-age story with a clear autobiographical shape, the work […]

SwiftUI performance problems often come down to views that redraw too often or take too long to run their body. Before you can fix them, you need to find out which views are responsible and what triggers their updates. Xcode Instruments can show you exactly that, as long as you know where to look. In … → The post SwiftUI Performance: Find Redraws in Xcode Instruments appeared first on SwiftLee.

Ben Nadel demonstrates how to use a ColdFusion closure with Java's Matcher replaceAll() function in ColdFusion 2025....

I’m emerging from a few months of doing things, art workshops, childcare, days out and other such activities that are easier done than documented. It seems odd to write about this as the leaves outside are already orange and yellow and the cold weather forces me to wrap myself up thoroughly in a cardigan, but here we are. It’s been a mild Autumn so far, so summer is not that far of a distant memory. Everyone and their cat made cyanotypes this summer. I was part of everyone (somehow still not a…

Last spring, Democrats were set to gain two seats in the Senate, leaving the Republicans with a one-seat majority. With some luck, Democrats might have taken three seats and split control of the Senate, leaving Vice-President Vance to tie-break split votes. Now Democrats not only have an excellent shot at gaining four seats for a one-seat majority, they also have a surprisingly good shot at gaining as many as seven seats for as much as a four-seat majority. That shift took only five months.…

Recipe Sewing, Part 2 Library Updates Next I couldn’t find a holiday for today, but today does mark the 179th anniversary of the release of Jane Eyre: An Autobiography, Charlotte Brontë’s revolutionary novel under the pseudonym Currer Bell with its first-person not-quite-reliable-but-close-enough narrative. And with that, on to the week’s projects. Recipe As suggested last week, I did try turning my attempt at oat milk into yogurt. Combining the rice cooker yogurt instructions with the yogurt…

If you are at all familiar with my blog, you know that I delight in sharing moral tales that provide both spiritual uplift and valuable practical advice at navigating this thing called Life. For instance, if you are going to fake a pregnancy in order to gain a claim to your husband’s inheritance, make sure you have all your paperwork in order. Acquiring bogus heirs is not a job for amateurs.Read on.In 1902, Joseph Boyer, the owner of a machine shop in St. Louis, Missouri, took over as company…

He, She, and It by Marge Piercy (Ballantine, 1991) Both Shira and her husband Josh are owned by the Y-S corporation, so it is the corporation that decides to award sole custody of their son, Ari, to Josh when they split. Josh and Ari are soon shipped offworld to Pacifica, leaving Shira with no way to see her son. Heartbroken, she leaves the domed corporate enclave and travels to the free town of Tikva, in what used to be New England, where she grew up and where her grandmother still lives. But…

Joseph MohrOld School Role PlayingOSRICLevels 2-3 […] Fostrid has suggested that the adventurers meet him in an alley outside of the Gray Goblin. The Goblin is a tavern of ill repute near the Thieves Quarter. If the adventures meet him there perhaps they can negotiate a better price or learn more information from Fostrid. Many of the greatest citizens in the Free City made their fortunes plundering the cairns in the hills north of the city. Perhaps the adventurers can do likewise…..or perhaps…

Before we begin, I’m thrilled to share that Astrolab is continuing to be a sponsor of my Moon Monday blog+newsletter for the third year in a row!California-based Astrolab is developing large multi-purpose rovers called FLIP and FLEX for advanced exploration of our Moon this decade and next. The first FLIP rover is slated to fly on Astrobotic’s upcoming Griffin lunar lander. And NASA has selected a FLEX rover as one of its two Artemis crew-capable Lunar Terrain Vehicles, which will be more…

No sooner has the new weeknotes season started and then there is a week off for the international break, let’s say. It’s entirely down to me (Chris), but I’m sure I read something, somewhere, about everything being the boss’s fault… Over on the Museum in a Box blog we’ve talked quite a bit about an ongoing project at The British Library that has involved boxes in libraries across the country. Their next exhibition is all about Agatha Christie and new content is currently being deployed. As new…

Another week, another round of good progress towards Hanami 3.1 readiness. Lots of little improvements, plus a couple of nice highlights. The main thrust of my work was finishing our post to Dry CLI 2.0. I merged the main work last week. This week was all about tidy-ups, such as cleaning up argument passing and error handling, as well as updating our extension gems to use the latest features.As a little treat, I also took a pass at gussying up our hanami new output to use our new coloured text…

I walked out of the community center finance office holding the keys to my seven-year-old’s fall soccer season, and the terms were fantastic. Zero down, zero percent financing for the first thirty-six months, with payments deferred until the spring tournament bracket.A few years ago you paid forty bucks to the parks department, someone handed your kid a mesh pinnie that smelled like basement mildew, and an accountant named Dave stood on the sideline yelling about spacing.The local league was…

A Personal Note from Joanne A quick note to my wonderful Savvy readers. I’ve been in the hospital for the past two days and am still here as I put together this week’s issue. Please forgive any missing links, formatting glitches or other little oversights. I wanted to keep our weekly Savvy Updates coming your way, even if this edition isn’t quite as polished as usual! Thank you for your understanding, your friendship and your continued support.

Qualtrics is the leading platform for web-based studies in the social sciences, but it was not built with social scientists in mind. As one important example, within Qualtrics it is quite hard to create a readable document showing what a Qualtrics study actually involved, including what was shown to participants, how randomization was implemented, etc....

When I started my research into old skyscrapers, I faced a chicken-and-egg problem. What is a skyscraper? is one of the questions that I was attempting to answer with data about the physical structure of actual buildings, but I didn’t have that data when I started, as that was the point of the research. The only way to deal with a knot like that is to make a decision and later go back and fix it (meaning redoing research as needed) if the early decision turned out to be wrong. My decision was…

Yabadabadoo is an experimental Sega Saturn emulator developed by WillHasStyles, built upon Yabause and extensively modified and optimized to run on the Miyoo Mini family of handhelds. The Miyoo Mini+ is a lovely little machine, with an almost toy-like charm that makes revisiting older games a pleasure. Sega Saturn emulation, however, is not something I'd ordinarily associate with it. Yet here we are, with games like Sakura Wars, Guardian Heroes and even Sega Rally Championship running on…

Beware: spoilers for a couple of minor plot holes, a twist that annoyed me, and potential queerbaiting. Since I first saw the trailer below 1, I wanted this movie to do really, really well. Women! Working together! Pulling off a complicated, high class heist! What on Earth is there not to like? I have watched this movie multiple times–in fact, I own it in DVD–and every time I watch it, I get angry again that we never got a second one–despite getting decent enough reviews, as good or better than…

The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and the University of Toronto have launched new initiatives to support and focus philosophical research on various aspects of artificial intelligence (AI). Eduardo Paolozzi, “Perception through Impressions” from The Conditional Probability Machine The Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at LSE has received a $5.3 million donation to launch a new research group—The Global Priorities Research Group (GPRG)—dedicated to…

Aadarsh Padiyath defended his dissertation in March, 2026. Aadarsh is well-known to readers of this blog. Aadarsh had a guest post in 2024 exploring the techno-determinism he sees in a lot of the work in computing education research related to Generative AI (see here). I wrote last year (see post) about his work on creating and validating an instrument to measure Critical Reflection and Agency in Computing. He’s a human-centered AI researcher who works on “reliance boundaries.” The last study…

Yesterday I made use of the new exit from Kings Cross underground station that runs underneath Euston Road and pops up within the monstrosity they have seen fit to name Belgrove House after destroying the original Belgrove House.If you recall, this pedestrian underpass used to be a simple, straight tunnel accessible via a set of steps within the pavement which was open to the elements until approx 2005 when it was covered with an ugly grey block. The new exit/entrance we have today has been…

Another gig this week: I saw Arab Strap at Heaven with Andy. They played much of their new album, which is really very good, and as dark and witty as ever. Glamour Magick is a new favourite. It was exactly 30 years since their much-loved first single, The First Big Weekend, was released and with which they ended. It felt fitting that Aidan needed the printed lyrics and his glasses. I dragged myself out to London a couple of times this week, and twice did my swimming-sauna-steam health routine…

People who care about privacy are giving AI access to their email, files, and computers. I'm uncomfortable with how easily we trust these tools.

The Govardhan Hillton is a long story. A generous donor sponsored the renovation of my ashram. My assistant, an engineering genius, supervised the work, and the donor gave him carte blanche to make it first class and highly functional. It is. I was so impressed when I returned that I jokingly called the place the Govardhan Hillton. Unfortunately, the name is sticking.[1] This week David, our devotee friend from the Samuel Platzer Co. diamond family in New York, is staying at the Govardhan…

I've been wanting to get back into bread baking again, but haven't had much time for it since I would make it all by hand. The recipe I've used before was for a sifted white flour, which kneading by hand isn't so bad, but it can still be time consuming. Today I'm interested in making whole wheat bread, which includes everything of the wheat berry. I attempted this once before about five years ago and ended up with a dense loaf of bread that wasn't good for much, but this was because I didn't…