Cross-posted. This post was first published on the Bonsai blog. I’ve been playing with this idea in my head that we can get better results if we blind our agent to certain things. You know the drill. You already have something and you want a fresh take on it, so you paste the old one in and write “don’t base it on this”. But to disregard the existing result, the agent needs to know about the existing result, which defeats the purpose of the ask. It’s the old pink elephant problem: tell someone…

Flirtatious people in movies often get a bad rap, but sometimes these folks can right social wrongs. Look at Three Little Girls in Blue (1946), a musical about three sisters stuck on a chicken farm. These gals remain perfectly coiffed despite the eggs, feathers, and muck of the poulty biz, but never mind. They do their best with the inheritance … Continue reading →

In recent years quickly churned-out parody musicals based on the latest pop culture hit have become increasingly common and I've largely avoided them as likely to be cheap and easy cash-ins. In the case of Horny Hockey Show there's been multiple competing parodies at the same time, but with actual established musical theatre actor Zheng Xi Yong playing Shane Hollander I figured Dylan MarcAurele's (book, music and lyrics) Heated Rivalry Colon The Unauthorized Musical Parody seemed the most…

. Arts in the Margins, Mardi Spaghetti and PME-ART presents the record release show for The Air Contains Honey Sings Quotes with an opening reading by Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch Monday, November 9, 2026 Sala Rossa Doors 7:30 show 8:00 $20 advance, $20 at the door NOTAFLOF On November 9, 2026 at Sala Rossa, the very first album by The Air Contains Honey will be launched in style. The Air Contains Honey performs only once a year to make every show a special event. Taking an unconventional…

The following is my artist statement for onemillionedits.art I keep coming back to what it means to be part of something other people can change. I mostly think of this in relation to communities and social interactions, but a shared canvas becomes an interesting way to explore that. You can claim a space, put something of yourself into it, and feel attached to what you’ve made there. It can feel like home. Someone else might relate to that and want to build on it, or see it as a place for…

This post convinced me to go a step further with the videos I saved! Laura is right, the internet (especially anything Google has it's hands on) isn't forever. I liked keeping them in Anytype1 for tagging and notetaking, but this is the perfect opportunity for making more use out of my pocket notebooks. It's easy to forget that funny, thought-provoking, carefully edited and well-researched YouTube videos are actually works of art when they're served up to you on an unassuming (shitty lol)…

“It was wonderful luck for me that I should have worked with Yvor Winters. at this particular stage of my life, rather than earlier, when I would have been more impressionable, or later, when I would have been less ready to learn. So he came at just the right time for me.” Good teachers are exceedingly rare, which we’re not supposed to admit, but the same goes for students. It’s a matter of temperament and, as Thom Gunn suggests above, timing. By my count I had five excellent teachers in the…

Our review of The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War, by Fred Kaplan, first published in January 2020. The Bomb is a page-turner. It’s interesting on several levels: as an account of nuclear strategy, as a case study in bureaucratic politics, and as an exploration of game theory applied in real-world scenarios. I have no particular interest in military history, but this didn‘t stop me enjoying it a lot. ★★★★☆ This book was a birthday present from site contributor…

I can hardly remember first experiencing ChatGPT. Its become so infused into my professional life, that going back to that first moment, or moments, is difficult. Instead a blur of a few moments. At some point, I realized it was a better Google. It was very similar to when Stackoverflow took off, and how Google search results for coding topics went from being useless to useful. Absence of results indicating a “you are holding it wrong” moment.

Classic Chet. Classic Chet. These five Chet albums on Prestige were among the first vintage originals that I acquired way back in 2010 or so. My first taste of some 1st pressings. From there it snowballed into buying original Lee Morgan titles on Blue Note etc.Chet was one of my absolute favorites in my early days of exploring jazz. He still is special to me. These five albums he did for Prestige were recorded during three days in August of 1965. Chet plays the flugelhorn exclusively on all the…

I make a potion sweet and strong add herb and spice and stir it twice chant tender words a forceful rhyme through adder's skull I pour a cup for us to drink our hearts are full

Sometimes you see a figure that makes you uncertain whether to laugh or cry, so you do a little of both. The Global Linkages Lab at Brown University–specifically, Şebnem Kalemli-Özcan, Can Soylu, and Muhammed A. Yildirim–have sought to track down “every occasion on which the President attached a number to a US tariff, whatever the channel: speeches, interviews and press gaggles, Truth Social posts, executive orders and proclamations, and White House fact sheets and statements.” Some…

After 3 months of work, today was the day to test a brand-new invoicing module for a hardware shop. We’re building a Blazor app to charge companies based on active users and license fees. By “we” means a team of contractors I’m part of. At the beginning of every month, the CEO creates invoices and charges cards manually. Zero automation. One by one. It takes him two or three days of work. Yes, in the 21st century. Today, the CEO decided to compare his manual process to the new module. On the…

The first three AudioRouter posts talked about how the project got built and what it does. This one is about the part I get asked about the most when I show it to other developers: the backend. How a UI, a command line, an AI assistant, and an optional REST adapter all end up calling the exact same…

Epic just announced the upcoming version 2 of their Linux implementation of Easy Anti-Cheat. It’s based on using the Linux eBPF security module to monitor what’s happening, and then a bunch of extra infrastructure to make sure this can’t be bypassed. The core part of this is requiring secure boot be enabled (ensuring that modified kernels can’t be used), using measured boot to verify that secure boot is enabled and which keys are used (to prevent you from just signing your own modified kernel),…

Back in 2019, I read the book Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith and said: I really enjoyed this evolutionary tale. It’s equal parts biology and philosophy. I will never look at cephalopods quite the same way again. Reading Ray Nayler’s The Mountain In The Sea reminded so much of that book that I couldn’t resist flipping ahead to the acknowledgements at the back. Sure enough, Other Minds gets a big shout-out. But that’s only part of…

[This is a guest post by Rikab Gambhir. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] First, they came for the artists, and I did not speak out, because I was not an artist. Then, they came for the mathematicians, and I did not speak out, because I was not a mathematician. Then, they came for the physicists, and it was actually really cool and they gave me free tokens and promised to solve my entire field for me and now I can finally devote myself…

First aha! My morning reading (Day 3 of no daily morning pages) from Sophie Strand includes: 'A written story becomes fixed, but a spoken question invites a response.' I'm treating the question in this post https://jila.bearblog.dev/i-am-so-afraid-of-starting-small/ in the trending feed as 'spoken' since it spoke to my heart. The question posed was 'why am i so afraid to start small?' It got me thinking about measurement. Second aha? Turning 'randomly' to Rumi to read: 'I am a tambourine. Don't…

Gideon Lewis-Kraus (who has made appearances here before, e.g. in 2014) has a most interesting New Yorker piece “How Test Engineers Decide What Counts as Good Enough” (archived) that starts with bears used as product testers for bear-resistant containers and goes in all sorts of directions. Here’s the passage that brings it to LH: For as long as humans have flown, humans have flown into birds. Wilbur Wright survived the first avian strike; another early pilot, who might have thought it would be…

This post replaces “Transitioning from Laravel Echo Server to Laravel WebSockets”, which I wrote for the Oh Dear blog on 4 December 2018. The full 2018 story is below. I added what happened to both packages since, what Oh Dear runs today, and how I’d set this up in 2026 with Laravel Reverb.

The research and the exact config I used to run the 125B Qwen3.8-Flash-Next on one RTX 3090 Ti with Strata, as an OpenCode coding model. Which quant and why, the install fixes Pop!_OS 22.04 needed, the sampling block Strata does not write for you, calibration results, a one-command switch back to llama.cpp, and a side-by-side speed probe against my old Qwen3.8-27B.

Syncthing is a continuous file synchronization program. Once installed and configured, it will keep designated directories and their contents synced between multiple devices. I’m currently using Syncthing to sync photos and videos taken with my Android phone with my NetBSD 11.0 desktop. Install the package Create the service Create a sync directory Install the package Syncthing is already packaged for NetBSD. Install: doas pkgin install syncthing Syncthing runs under the syncthing user, and…

Researchers recently put together a framework to quantify the price of inconvenience, then tested how different LLMs made decisions that involved tradeoffs affecting the humans involved. Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly proposed as near-autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) agents capable of making everyday decisions on behalf of humans. Although LLMs perform well on many technical tasks, their behaviour in personal decision-making remains less understood. Previous studies have…

Andy Harris, Maryland’s embarrassing right-wing Congressman, did a rare town hall meeting with his Democratic opponent on Tuesday evening. After the debate, he took questions from reporters, and as typical for people who claim First Amendment rights and do who do not like it when they cannot withhold First Amendment rights from other people, his interaction with a young reporter went comically downhill fast: Harris: “This is a two-party (consent) state; I’m not giving you authority to film me.”…

I've said it many times: I am obsessed with cohesive ecology when I do races and monsters. Overtime, I found out that using fewer humanoid races allowed me to do them much more solid, and have nuances amongst them instead of making them one-faceted. Basically I took this (2 years exactly have passed from this entry!) and kept on pushing. In my autism, the world feels now much more tangible while strangely more faithful to the mythic norse roots, but passed through the eyes of a weeaboo beyond…

Brent Lang writing for IndieWire: With only one member of its creative team returning, Sony Pictures shied away from selling it as a sequel, but the studio still sprinkled bits of “The Social Network’s” DNA into promotional materials. The Social Reckoning, directed by Aaron Sorking, a continuation of sorts of 2010’s The Social Network, is poorer, it seems, for the absence of David Fincher, and Jesse Eisenberg. Fincher’s obligations to Netflix kept him away, while Eisenberg, among other things,…

A Sheaffer … that’s interesting? There’s no better standard pen ranking list than Wirecutter’s Best Pens list, we just happen to be months behind mentioning it. We break that down, talk about two new(-ish) pen options in the $150-$250 price bracket, and try to figure out what “Bot Poetry” is. Show Notes & Download Links This episode of The Pen Addict is sponsored by: Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code PENADDICT. Enigma Stationery: Unique items, top…

As I woke up this morning, I found myself assessing where I stand with today's computing / IT industry / whatever you want to call it... I got interested with computers in the early 80s. I didn't see WarGames or any other movie with computers. I didn't go to movies. I discovered computers through the programmable calculators of my secondary school peers, whose mum or dad had given an "old" Sharp or a TI-57, without the user's manual. I got intrigued. The system and combinatory gears of my brain…

Link: Why We’re Banning AI, by Nathan J. Robinson in Current AffairsThe headline here is a bit of a misnomer. Current Affairs stresses that it’s not against technical innovation, but:“[…] we need, first, to ensure that technologies are a tool used by workers to help them, rather than a tool used to replace workers. And, second, we need to make sure that readers aren’t being fed things that look like people’s genuine thoughts and creative expression but are in fact the product of disembodied…