Last week, which looked like this, I concluded with ominous music, because I knew: Last week's rolling 90 day average spending This week things look substantially worse: This week's rolling 90 day average spending And the reason is, as much as I am trying to be a stinge, I also value generosity. AccountTotal Charity1770.00 Electric216.46 Coffee Roasting101.54 Health Insurance78.60 Subscriptions43.87 Groceries43.30 Bars and alcohol42.50 Dining36.69 Clothes35.00 Bank Service Charge0.50…

It’s taken nine and a half months of wandering, planning, and occasionally sheer opportunism, but I’ve finally struck gold. Yes, the magic ton has been hit. For those who don’t follow my particular brand of eccentric ticking, that means I’ve now visited one hundred unique pubs so far in 2026. By unique, I mean pubs I’ve set foot in once and once only this calendar year. Plenty of hostelries have seen me more than once - some far more than once, but for the purposes of this annual tally, each…

Every year since I’ve started this blog, I’ve published a few classic open access stories of horror for the Halloween season! In recent years, I’ve started to make a theme for each year. This year, the theme is “communication”: the transmission of information from one point to another, often but not necessarily both ways! This may not seem like a particularly spooky topic for a horror story, but read through the following collection of stories and you can decide for yourself… Sorry, Right…

Amazing Race 39 resolved its annoying cliffhanger, and then sent the teams on a Scramble to navigate Marrakesh on foot.

I just had my first pomegranate of the season, and I forgot how much I love them.

A while ago I was listening to a radio broadcast of a recording from last year’s Wexford Festival Opera. The Opera in question was Handel’s Deidamia. In fact you can see a video of the whole performance here. Like most baroque operas, the plot of Deidamia is rather complex but it is drawn directly from familiar Greek legend, and features Achilles and Ulysses. The former spends much of the opera dressed in women’s clothing because his father Peleus doesn’t want him dragged off to fight in the…

The fact this movie tanked at the box office just makes the ride all the more enjoyable. I had a bad headache and had to call off the screening with a friend yesterday. Thursday is when the movies rotate in our part of the world where we use the un-American units, so I thought I'd missed yet another great cinematic experience. Luckily they still showed it in a small neighboring town, to the two of us and two other people, with an introduction by a charming young person. I don't remember…

Here is a small tip that has saved me a lot of time: Always log your entire parsed configuration when your service or application boots. Or at least, support logging it through a verbose logging level. In practice, this can be logging the entire parsed YAML structure1, your config struct, or all the variables you have set from environment variables. No matter how you load your configuration, log it (but mask your secrets).

I watched the Social Reckoning. I thought it was pretty good, but it quadrupled my dislike of Meta, which was pretty freakin’ high on the dislike scale already.Historians will look back on the social media age with horror.

Over the past year or so my fatigue has been getting significantly worse. It’s almost always brought about by post-exertional malaise, which is one of the keystone symptoms of ME/CFS, which has no known treatment, just mitigations at best. And the core mitigation is to not overexert oneself.This presents a problem, as there are so many things I’d like to be doing, and even taking care of my basic day-to-day needs already puts me right up at my limit most of the time, and often pushes me over.It…

When we planned our timings for the 1949 Club, I hadn’t realised there would be a two-day work retreat… which was wonderful, but has put me very behind in amalgamating reviews, let alone reading them or writing my own. I have several more books to write about this week, though they may come in a scramble towards the end of the week… And today’s is a book by a reliable, much-loved author: dear Beverley Nichols. I’ve been accumulating them rather faster than I’ve been reading them, but turning to…

This one has received a lot of commentary online already – from the Daily Mail, 13 October: An Oxford University lecturer who was in a relationship with Tory peer Michael Gove is facing trial on child abuse image charges. Dr Lola Salem… was charged by Thames Valley Police in May this year along with Henry Hopwood-Phillips, a historian and geopolitical analyst. They both wrote for the The Critic magazine as freelance contributors. Hopwood-Phillips, 39, founded a Singapore-based political…

🧱 I’m Mete, a product designer, builder, and inventor with 10+ years of experience at companies like Netflix and Peloton. I write to help connect the macro and the micro forces behind AI - from ways of thinking to ways of working. If you’re looking to understand and use AI beyond the surface-level, you’re in the right place. Subscribe nowI’ve been test-driving Dots daily since its release last week. As someone who’s been using Hermes and test-driving lots of other agentic consumer products, I…

The amount of code being written at Anthropic continues to rise exponentially. It is being managed by Scion, their internal replacement for GitHub that is better suited to the scale and style of the operation, which they created with a small team in five months. This week also saw the release of two supposed frontier model models. Google has finally given us Gemini 4 Argon, along with a robust safety report. We do not yet know if Argon lives up to its benchmarks or internal hype. I plan to…

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book. Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others. Ben Ehrenreich’s book Hold Still is a brilliant elegy to his mother, author and activist Barbara Ehrenreich, told through short stories and journal entries. Kirkus wrote of the book:…

I lived in Toronto for a few years quite a while ago and these are the things that shaped my memory of the great city. Inspired by Saigon Core and Toronto Core. Most of these places will be shut or changed entirely by now but this is a time capsule within my head. An evening at Roy Thomson Hall listening to the Toronto Symphony Orchestra Fried Chicken, Pulled Pork Bao and Duck Confit Banh Mi from Banh Mi Boys The far too spicy Kothu Roti from Saffron Spice Kitchen Gra Bong from PAI Mini donuts…

Disclaimer Previously… Armageddon Game Conclusions The Good The Bad The Weird Stay Tuned… Disclaimer In these posts, we discuss a non-“Free as in Freedom” popular culture franchise property, including occasional references to part of that franchise behind a paywall. My discussion and conclusions carry a Free Culture license, but nothing about the discussion or conclusions should imply any attack on the ownership of the properties. All the big names serve as trademarks of the owners, and so…

The rogue artificial intelligences swarming the interwebs amidst the pre-collapse of the job market, can they give us clues on how to survive or even better thrive in the upcoming economics? I still have clear views on what wealth is for me as a person, but I still obviously feel tense and unsure about having not the right token to claim a sense of abundance and freedom in the upcoming revolution. It's almost as if the upcoming thread of reality that's unravelling is heavily susceptible to…

Accidentally running a checkerboarded square as a linear polar and then performing a polar to cartesian transformation, with repeats, yields inwardly folding patterns.firstsecondthirdfourthfifth timeThe pattern continues to collapse; five are fine. Your results will vary with the transformer that is used.

Being offline is currently an online trend, or something. As you may have noticed, and as I realised this morning, I haven't written anything in over a month. The internet, what a place with lots of things in it. Imperfects we are cartographers reminded me of an idea I had while watching Toy Story 5. In the film, the main child that most of the toys belong to plays with toys and uses her imagination, this is a juxtaposition to litterally every other child that spends every waking second staring…

I’d forgotten we were even going to this until the day before (and then forgot again, at one point, on the day of). Sam booked this on the strength of a recommendation from Vito from Northern Ireland + a £15 ticket price + an aggressive anti-self-promotion stance from Daniel Kitson himself.Kitson came out wearily, riffing on his own discomfort and the low energy of the crowd. I got the sense that this was both true but also part of his act. He clearly had an act prepared but I guess his style…

The Guradian recently published an article on AI agents inventing new vocabulary, some surreally poetic, some reminiscient of James Joyce, some of "tech bro jargon".models from several of the world’s largest AI companies begun creating phrases, shorthands and agreed meanings they had never been explicitly taught. [...] their language became more opaque the more the agents communicated.The example given are wonderful, and get more bizarre:“A paper that ate three cold hands and got more honest…

For all my bluster about the evils of consumerism and the meaninglessness of it all, I’m just as much a dopamine addict as the next guy. The Ring goes off, and there I am with the hobby knife, eager to carve out my reward. A capitalist caesarian. First, a new wallet from a leather shop in Alabama. Initials subtly embossed on full-grain. The smells. Definitely an old man thing to be excited about. Then I attacked a box from Japan to find a pristine Olympus 35 RC. As usual, it was beautifully and…

Welcome back to another round of Simple Sudoku Solvers! If you are unfamiliar with the series, I suggest you start with the first post or by perusing the…

At work we have started using AI as a first-pass code reviewer. Nothing goes out the door without a human giving it approval, but more and more we code with AI assistance, it's only fair we get it to do some of the reviewing. We use AI code review as a first pass - whether it is Claude being pointed at a branch or MR/PR or Gitlab Duo [https://docs.gitlab.com/user/gitlab_duo/code_review/] being assigned the merge request, we use a similar set of instructions for both. Having an AI do the first…

Friends and readers: I have cancer. The type of cancer is not yet fully confirmed, but all signs point toward kidney cancer that has spread to my hips, back, and pleura. On the bright side, all my blood tests so far are normal, suggesting that the cancer is moving slowly, which is typical of kidney cancers. There is no evidence yet that the cancer has spread to any vital organs, and I am not in imminent danger of death. With new treatments, I am hopeful that I have several good years, perhaps…

I recently gave up on running a campaign of Exalted. It’s not a friendly parting. I have many complaints with the game, and have no intentions of ever running it again. There’s a lot of angles to criticize it, if I wanted to dig into a detailed list of grievances someday. For now, however, I want to focus on a part of the system I don’t think is inherently bad, so much as, bad in context: The PCs are naturally too good at things. It’s really hard to meaningfully challenge them. A build in…