Where: Terra Nova Rural Park, Richmond Nature House (Richmond), Piper Spit, Burnaby Lake (Burnaby)Weather: Sunny, 15–17°C We’re in the second half of October and still wearing shorts! Also: So many squirrels, a group of which can be known as a scurry. :themoreyouknow: Terra Nova View looking toward the North Shore mountains. We started at Terra Nova and I quickly made my airplane shot quota, then took a few more. Some distant clouds, mountains, and good light actually made a few of the shots…

How open source enables effective use of AI agents in government

In this blog post, we will explore the economics of decision models like Jev, and discusses the formalization of decision hierarchies using Chow's reject rule.

I didn’t know until recently that Marco Polo’s travels through China during the 13th Century weren’t in fact written down by him. They were dictated to Rustichello de Pisa, whom Polo shared a prison cell with in Genoa. It’s important here to remember that despite Rome being a hugely important empire, after its fall, Italy was not a singular place until the 19th century. Even though Pisa, Genoa, and Venice seem basically neighbors today, that was not the case for most of their respective…

I’m dating again. Not with great gusto so far, and my most promising dating opportunities are ones that sit outside the swipe-focused stuff anyway. But I am having a go with a few different dating apps to see if there are any that don’t make me want to chuck my phone in the Thames. This […] The post 4 reasons I will instantly swipe left appeared first on Girl on the Net.

A weekly recap of the articles and posts I’ve read that I think are worth your time. The Only Winning Move Is Not To Play: The Pattern Of Thinking That Justifies Cruelty – ideatrash — “There are ways that the world is cruel that we cannot change; entropy exists, life feeds on life. But there is a giant difference between those things we cannot change and needlessly increasing suffering in the universe.” * Lost & found in Tokyo: a first-timer’s adventure — Lottery win = travelling. * An Open…

Spent half the week battling with an intensifying cold virus, but luckily it didn't develop in to anything more severe. Frustrated as it meant I didn't feel well enough to attend the A11y Together/Champions of Accessibility gathering on Wednesday, and there won't be another until next February. Recovered in time to watch the new film, Prima Facie, at the Royal Festival Hall. Brilliant acting by Cynthia Erivo in a deeply unsettling story that highlights the law's failures in dealing with sexual…

Karen and I are unusually in sync with our club reads this time. Not only did we both visit Beverley Nichols’ All I Could Never Be earlier in the week, we are both finishing with Emma Smith’s The Far Cry. (Here are Karen’s thoughts.) Apparently I bought my copy in February 2012, so it is good to finally get it off the shelf – and it was nothing like I expected. This isn’t my first dance with Emma Smith. Years ago, I loved her childhood memoir and another memoir about working on the Grand Union…

↬www.autostraddle.com/what-flavor-of-halloween-gay-are-you/?results=d9d2751f Very accurate, as usual.

A new-to-me favorite TV series of mine… My Life Is Murder New Zealand murder solver retired yet contracted by the copscatches the culpritevery single timeof what use are the police?

After a two-week holiday, I returned to work. It surprised me when several colleagues asked if I was doing okay. Apparently, I was so quiet that it sparked their concern. This is a big contrast to how I was before the self-care holiday, when I carried a lot of internal tension and easily got triggered - signs that I was heading towards a burn-out? I guess the self-care did wonders for me; I am a much more zen person now, protecting my peace.I have visited the spa quite frequently lately, yet I…

Another tough topic. I talked about birds in my Gangly entry, and I’m even more convinced that Inktober would be a great challenge for bird photographers. I’m writing this while sitting on the toilet, as one does. I’m facing the small wall of art in my toilets. There is a flightless raven on this wall, as it turns out, a photo of a curious bird stepping closer to the large camera it wants to inspect. (Buy the book!) The flightless bird (and more). Now I want to give you a tour of my toilet art…

📷 274/365 - Bubblegum factory

A sequel to Join me in just prepping what's fun I have a Stonetop game coming up in a couple hours. I feel like I should prep, but I don't want to. Why? Is it because what I say won't be interesting enough? Stonetop itself says one of the reasons to prep is to "shore up your weaknesses" (Book 1, p. 204); this implies your GMing has weaknesses! In addition, you can't (definitionally) know what prep is needed in advance. That's impossible, assuming you allow your players to make decisions and…

I wanted to share a quick thought from the Gospel reading and homily in last night's Catholic Mass. The Pharisees once asked Jesus if it was lawful to pay taxes to Caesar (Matthew 22:15-21). Jesus responded by asking them whose image was on the Roman coin used to pay the taxes. They replied that the image was Caesar's. And Jesus said: “Then repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.” The Roman coin had the image of Caesar stamped upon it. Therefore, it belonged to…

General not much to say in terms of surgery recovery, at this point there's only some discomfort left in certain positions and range of movement is approaching what it was before back to work and immediately finding praise for slop in my inbox 😒 first session of face stabbing since surgery, keeping up making progress somehow one of my earrings got infected xd temporarily taking the stud out to thoroughly clean the entire area with antibacterial soap and disinfecting the stud with alcohol before…

Photo of Fontaines D.C. from their Bandcamp account Irish alt-rock band Fontaines D.C. are one of the most exciting and interesting acts making music today, and while they’d been gaining critical acclaim and popularity since the release of their debut album Dogrel in 2019, it was their spectacular fourth album Romance, released in summer 2024, that really put them over the top. I love their intelligent songwriting and arresting sound, as well as charismatic lead vocalist Grian Chatten’s…

#SilentSunday

I returned from Essex on Thursday after four days in a darkened dining room scanning 79 notebooks of my dad’s diary from 1955 to 2013. As regular readers will be sadly aware, being back there is always a mix of emotions. Last week I said I felt like a ghost haunting the house (I kept thinking of Ghost Story) but it’s at least as true to say that the house haunts me. It’s rarely been far from my thoughts for the past 2½ years and I have to struggle to think of other things – because I’m so tired…

The Devils is almost exactly as old as I am, which is something I had to keep reminding myself as I watched the new restoration of the director’s cut, currently running in major theater chains under an NC-17 rating. The restoration is so clean, and the picture quality is so flawless, that it can be easy to treat it like a new release and forget to put yourself in the mindset of someone watching it fifty years ago. Ideally, the movie wouldn’t require that kind of translation. It’d be timeless.…

This month's IndieWeb Carnival is being hosted by Marisabel on Pages. Which is a fantastic prompt. Very provoking for bloggers. Here I am trying a digital palimpsest - hover or click to see the text underneath. I've got no idea how it will look in an RSS reader - probably horrid, sorry. We talk about the blank page. How full of potential it can be. How intimidating. How the potential is intimidating. Parchment and vellum were expensive. So people used to recycle. Scrape or wash the ink off and…

The claim that AI consumes water sounds odd if you picture a server as a box of electronics. The obvious objection is that the cooling water goes round in pipes. It returns to where it started, gets used again, and never goes anywhere. How can a conversation with ChatGPT consume it? The answer is that you can be looking at the wrong pipes. A sealed circuit carries heat away from the processors. A separate circuit can release that heat through a cooling tower, evaporating some of its water in…

Recently, while troubleshooting a PATH issue, I noticed an entry for /pkg/env/global/bin. At first, I worried that something had gone horribly wrong. Turns out, this is part of macOS 27.0… though no one is sure what it’s for yet. First, some background. Since Mac OS X 10.5 in 2007, the OS has included a path_helper utility. This reads entries from /etc/paths as well as from any files in the /etc/paths.d directory. While one could potentially take advantage of this system, I (and I’d guess most…

📚 Finished reading: The End of Everything: A Novel by M. John Harrison. An anti-narrative which resembles the best parts of Harrison’s short story collection You Should Come With Me Now. Similar themes to Sunken Land…, only more comedic than Lovecraftian. And, to my amazement, on the Booker Prize shortlist for this year. Read it if you can.

Something on my mind a lot recently is this scene from the first episode of Westworld: I remember watching this when it came out thinking that it was so unrealistic as to be comedic. I very distinctly remember thinking “Any complicated AI being would no be able to be debugged just by talking to it. That’s so dumb, you would obviously need actual real debugging tools. You’d be writing code, etc. Stupid!” 10 years on, now I’m not so sure. Right now, there are two(-ish) groups of people that use…

A few photos from one summer evening I totally forgot to edit. I hope you enjoy them. By the way, do you see this crater kinda standing out? This effect is called golden handle. Comment via guestbook.

Trying late-season beach for fall break this year

I'm currently in the process of moving my site's media (under media.jvt.me) from Netlify to AWS S3. The underlying infrastructure for my site that writes this media is hosted on Fly.io, so needs a way to write to S3. I really wanted to avoid long-lived AWS credentials, and fortunately Fly supports OpenID Connect which integrates with AWS' OpenID Connect Federation to allow you to use short-lived OpenID Connect tokens to authenticate as a given IAM role, and then perform any necessary AWS…

I’ve done quite a few KVM reviews in the past, and there’s a reason for that: All of the homelab and industrial IoT stuff I test needs some sort of physical access for setup, and even if I do have monitors with multiple inputs, USB video capture dongles, etc., it gets really old to have to constantly re-wire stuff, switch between keyboards, etc. Additionally, most of the newfound range of cheap/compact KVMs that have popped up over the past two years still need an Ethernet connection, and it’s…

Friday night at On The Paper Trail Live in Nashville featured a typewriter demonstration! We explored all the analog technology! SPD: Sad Pen Day (via Pen Addict - Kimberly). If you are every testing out a pen at a pen club, show, or store, please turn the cap first to unscrew. Don’t pull!First Look at Sunlit Steel: Duluth Shop Exclusive (via Dime Novel Raven). I love it when store/shop exclusives have special meaning, especially when they relate to local landmarks.The Gentleman Stationer New…