Daily Drawing 1022

📷 I’ve taken a few days out to walk the coast. It was… well, you can see for yourself what it was. This might explain why my writing here has been even slower than usual. But now I’m back, and normal service will resume shortly.

291/365 Frost flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license Today’s TDC says Take a moment to observe nature and write a haiku inspired by your experience. Here’s mine Frost on the garden Like icing on a cupcake Shining in the sun

These are some things I’ve wandered across on the web this week. 🔖 Energy Efficiency of Programming Languages The project continues to be a convenient source of tiny-tiny programs written in various programming languages. Independent researchers take the programs and do their independent research no-questions-asked. Let’s ask questions. energy programming sustainability 🔖 You Can See Everything Thirty-four days before she’s sent to prison, notorious Silicon Valley founder Elizabeth Holmes…

In Matt Bell’s excellent book on writing, Refuse to be Done, there’s a quote by Karen Russell, author of the excellent novels Swamplandia. and The Antidote. She says, 💬 “Writing a novel is kind of like scaling Mt. Everest and passing by your own bones on the way”. Respect is due, but I can’t help feeling it might not be quite that hard. #writing #climbing #writinglife

Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve; they will be squeezed to death. – Heinz von Foerster This week’s video is a British PSA from 1973 (narrated by a voice you should recognize) which was called to my attention a couple of months ago by T. Greg Doucette; I decided to save it until it was seasonally appropriate. The links above it were provided by Kevin Wilson, Nun Ya, Anarres Ansible, IncarcerNation (x3), and Shiv Ramdas, in that order. R,I.P. Margaret Hamilton. Cops have many ways to…

In 2018 I ran the New York City Marathon in 3:04:18. My coach at the time was a New Yorker, and his pep talk before the race was worth more than any course map.Since then, three friends have asked me how to run New York. Three times I passed on the same tips, and three times they came back and said the tips had saved their race. Then I came across a rule: the third time you use an idea in conversation, you have to write about it. By that count, this post is overdue.Things you cannot…

Providing instructions is one of the best ways of helping others on the web. In my life, I have been helped by many over the web just because I've found and read their instructions. It may be to make a better dish of scrambled eggs, or to work around some bugs on some software program, or even to solve a puzzle in a video game so that I can get on to the next level. Too bad all these are probably going to end. ~ Link: Apple's HomeView is Just the Latest Threat to Online Recipe Writers, by…

If you are planning on doing some India travel as a tourist then the likelihood is that at some point during your stay you will find yourself at the Taj Mahal. This glorious white marble mausoleum located in Agra, Uttar Pradesh remains one of the country’s sites that simply should not be missed. Yet in this vast subcontinent there are hundreds of other places that could crown a visit for one reason or another. They may be less well known than the mausoleum built by Shah Jahan but they linger in…

We’re off on our first airplane trip in ten-ish years, so of course this is a perfect moment to make lists. I call myself a chronic listmaker, because I have to be honest with myself. I have lists in Keep for my husband and me (he’s an Android guy and hates every other app I showed him), in Obsidian for my blog and writing, and in Coteditor, the app I use for coding, for website ideas, colour codes, tips and tricks etc. And I have lists in my Filofax, mostly so I have the most important things…

I may have unlocked promotional god mode. Since I started posting on instagram more regularly just a handful of days ago (especially with the reels), orders for THE SOLAR GRID hardback(at a conversion rate of about 10%) have been pouring in and my follower count made a 5% jump (And so many applicants for the producer job). The danger of course is getting too swept up by social media sinkholes. We are after all, only human, and it is exactly the seductive lure of social media sinkholes that…

8717/21636It's Catie's birthday this week and so to celebrate that and because we thought it would be fun for the family we went to the Petit Chef interactive restaurant experience in London.It's a neat idea which involves your table and plates being projector screens and a tiny French chef (maybe the little cook from Big Cook, Little Cook who hasn't been on TV for a while) who runs around the table and tells you the history of the tomato.

What do you do when you have no big material desires left? When you already have a monetary safety net that will serve you in case of an emergency? Your bank balance will grow, but most of it will only go towards your retirement plan. Retirement and emergencies are both future possibilities. You will save your money for a possibility. This will definitely ease your mind. A minimum amount of security and safety is essential in order to not feel anxious about the future. So let's say you have…

I finally read an article that I have in an open Tab since a couple of weeks. I procrastinated, because it was rather long (> 5500 words) and I didn’t just want to rush through it. The article is “An epochal shift The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical.” […]

Eisenhower in War and Peace by Jean Edward Smith A good single volume biography. Lots of details on his early life and his Military career. A bit less as president. Recommended 4/5 How Apollo Flew to the Moon by W. David Woods Amazingly detailed book covering systems and operations for every step of a mission. Read this after the popular Apollo books and fill in all your gaps. Highly Recommend 5/5 My Audiobook Scoring System 5/5 = Brilliant, top 5 book of the year 4/5 = Above average, strongly…

Women Of Music 38Linda Carr on cover Beverly Taylor - It's Old History.mp3Celia Cruz - Hava Nageela.mp3Dori Malloy - Where Do You Go.mp3Fran Harris With The Four Friends - Naughty Baby.mp3Ida James - Shake Your Can.mp3Jeanie Lee -Tic-Toc-A-Boogie.mp3Linda Carr - Da Doo Run Run (Live).mp3linda carr.jpgLinda Lloyd - Heartache High School U S A.mp3Lizzie Miles - Salty Dog.mp3Marguerite Sanders - Second Fiddle To An Old Guitar.mp3Melody Cristea (& Liliac Band) - Wildthing.mp3Venita Marie - A Girl…

A few nights ago, I was in the edifice that I still insist on calling the National Film Theatre, where I picked up a leaflet claiming to be The Insiders’ Guide to the BFI London Film Festival. It’s produced by Puck, which is apparently “a news brand focused on the inside stories in entertainment, media, finance, politics, politics, artificial intelligence, the businesses of fashion and sports, and the art world”, which is nice. Included in the slim volume is a piece by one Matt Belloni, a…

A large and growing body of research and industry data points to an inevitable conclusion: reliable long-horizon autonomous coding agent operation is highly improbable. And yet, pretty much on a daily basis, I see people claiming online to have achieved it. They let their agents run for hours or even days, generating complex software without – if they’re to be believed – any human intervention. No doubt some of them are just plain lying to impress their friends (or their boss, or a potential…

Andrew Kemp’s post itself has loads of interesting tidbits. ↬ ∙ Tagged in Books.

Via Kottke: Your 10-minute radius matters more than almost anything else about where you live: Think about what you can get to in ten minutes without making it a whole thing. ↬ ∙ Tagged in Advice.

Each year, Nonomiya Shrine hosts a reenactment of the departure of the Saigu, an unmarried imperial princess sent to serve as high priestess at the Grand Shrine of Ise (Ise Jingu). The tradition dates to the Heian era. Here, the Saigu has stepped down from her palanquin and is making her way to the river for purification rituals. More about this historical reenactment... 野宮神社では毎年、平安時代に皇女（内親王）が斎宮として選ばれ、伊勢神宮へ旅立った様子を再現しています。この写真では、斎宮が輿から降り、川での禊の儀式に向かうところです。 この歴史再現イベントの詳細については……

Oliver Burkeman: To return to information overload: this means treating your “to read” pile like a river (a stream that flows past you, and from which you pluck a few choice items, here and there) instead of a bucket (which demands that you empty it). Makes me feel better as I look over my overflowing queues of books/articles/media/etc… ↬ ∙ Tagged in Knowledge Management.

RSPB Lochwinnoch flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license

On Friday, I wrote a post and somehow it vanished. I think I accidentally restarted my laptop before I had saved the post. Anyway, it was a gaggle of little quick hits and varia and it seems better late than never: Corinth Canal Bridges. Open Access: Valeria Vitale and Gabriel Bodard eds.,Open Data in Ancient and Byzantine Studies (2026) AI Makes a Mathematician sad. Manuscripts The hidden lives of manuscripts Mythwashing and the Two Meanings of Mystery in Manuscript Discovery Stories From the…

There are a few bardcore groups around, but I think the most successful is Courseval. Their cheeky medieval twists on modern(ish) pop songs have continued to grow in popularity over the last few years. Here, they give Abba’s Gimme, Gimme, Gimme their own signature treatment, resulting in a toe-tapping number which only goes to show that Benny and Bjorn’s songwriting talents do indeed transcend the time in which they were written. I do wonder what future historians might say about this – will…

At 33 seconds into the above video of BBC Two continuity from the 29th October 1999, we get a trailer for something rather interesting: the first late-night showing of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, airing at 11.10pm on Sunday, which was a repeat of the episode premiered the day before at 6.45pm (season 2, episode 6 "Halloween", original US TX almost exactly two years beforehand on 27/10/97).The early-evening showings had been subject to heavy censorship, whereas obviously these post-watershed…

I’ve had a longer than expected gap between gigs combined with a brush with Covid (for the nth time) so like every other product person on the planet I’ve been experimenting a little with “AI”. I mentioned in an earlier post I was going to see if I could work with ‘Claude’ to build a Bluesky bot that would randomly post a random daily graffiti/street-art pic from my extensive archives to a new account at a @graffiti.photos (a domain I own but have never used.) Matthew pointed me at Russs’s…

some months ago, someone said, “crypto is a solution in search of a problem” saying “crypto” when i’m talking about bitcoin tells me you don’t know the person’s service gets more expensive every year, partly because of inflation bitcoin is a good solution to inflation, and i know that you probably don’t know

This is post 2 of a 3-part series on decision models. Part 1 introduced what they are, and part 3 will cover how they are built and trained.One of the things that I hated the most about evaluating agents with LLM-as-a-judge is that it can be expensive and slow, forcing me in many cases to run those evals out-of-band instead of baking them into CI. So you can imagine that when I first read about decision models and all this idea of “Jev-as-a-judge”, I thought that this could be the perfect…

Princeton 101(November 1958) G-346 High School Blues (Mascari-Mac-Wenzlaff, Bob Cor Music Inc. BM)1st copyright reg. : w & m Mac Vickory, Eddie Mascari, & Erwin Wenzlaff © Eddie Mascari, 28 oct 19582nd copyright reg. : w & m Charles Vic , pseud . , arr . Eddie Mascari (Edward C. Mascari) & Erwin Wenzlaff . © Charles L. Shean ; 17Nov58 G-347 We’re Not Engaged Anymoresame credits on label and copyright as above Princeton 102(November 1958) G-310 The Wild One (Ricky Ricardo-Fred Petti, Copy Music…