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…

Thursday, October 15, 2026 - 12:00 The Lesbian Historic Motif Project This book and the previous one I blogged could hardly be more different in approach, given that they both revolve generally around intersexuality. While DeVun focused on philosophy and symbolism in medieval Europe generally, while also addressing the practical consequences for people with ambiguous bodies, Linton narrows in on the specific concerns of 19th century France and the interaction of medical and literary discources.…

Roll a d20, rounding down for repeats if the catch is no longer available.1. Nothing bites2. Trout3. Mackerel4. Carp5. Old branch6. Salmon7. Old boot8. Giant Catfish. Take 1d6 damage or get pulled into the water. If you hold strong, take another 1d6 damage to drag it onto the bank.9. Doppelschwimmer. Seems like a prize bass, but then goes pale, grows legs, and attacks. Stats as doppelganger, but can only do aquatic forms.10. Electric eel! Has a deadly shock that can show your skeleton11.…

Choosing not to intervene in suffering preserves autonomy. Withholding assistance respects the dignity of self-determination. "I'm not ignoring you. I'm honoring your independence." Of all the principles in the New Morality™ framework, this is the one that practitioners most often encounter with skepticism moreso than hostility. The framework rarely produces hostility but a kind of hesitation may arise. It is a feeling that something is being asked of them that runs against the grain. The…

Observing color. 👉 View one more image

Inspired by Khem's email to me which riffed on my post, online and offline. Heya, Imperfect Hi Khem, Your post was super interesting to me. Because it's sort of a concept I haven't been able to dutifully explore and map out very well. Thanks for your reply! Well, you're in luck, because your reply inspired my very own below. Hope that it's a map that you and other readers enjoy exploring. There's been a pull with people looking to limit their online use, my friends talk about it constantly.…

I've just spent an hour re-singing four of the songs because I could hear the difference between vocal edits through headphones. The sound in the kitchen has changed because there are tiles there now instead of linoleum, and I've got no idea if the new vocals are any better than what's there or not. I'll listen tomorrow. I just thought it would be good to sing them in the spirit of Sunday, because Sunday was good- and spirited.Arfur was barking wildly when I started, but I think his owners have…

In one controlled Copilot SDK/CLI session, SQL task rows stayed readable after compaction and a graceful runtime restart.

“He was a titan, a giant. He could have been as famous as any songwriter in the world, but chose not to be.” – Barbara Dickson From Substack, Paul Rees brings us the story of a musician who I’d not thought about in a couple of decades whose career could have gone very differently. I’m listening to Stealin’ Time in the background as I draft this.

From the Fall of the Berlin Wall until about a decade ago my animating intellectual question was pretty much, ‘how did a small number of natural sciences become qualitatively more impressive than the social sciences?’ Because I met the late George Smith relatively early in my thinking about this (as an undergraduate), I often formulated this question in terms of evidence; he liked his version of my question as ‘how to turn data into high-quality evidence?’ And his striking answer was (to…

Now it's time for the reactions I got when I made my point about the story. Context After raising concerns about how migration is represented in the textbook, I wrote to the publisher. You can find the whole email here: Hamid's Story and the Politics of Gratitude in a German Language Coursebook. Below is the reply from the publisher, with my reflections right after each part. In the emails below, the parts in bold are what I changed from the originals (anonymisation, removed passages). Email…

I've been enjoying the hex-crawl, and, especially for Songs Unsung, wanted a procedure for generating a suitable adventuring region. Notably, the process is best if it starts with a strong idea, a palette, and then grows from that palette using procedural tools, random table results, and a healthy dose of sleight of hand. I.e. use the tables and tools here to inspire you and fill in blanks, but do not feel beholden to them. 1. Gather the PaletteBrainstorm six thematic words that describe key…

The honey locust tree some blocks from here is dropping pods:Years ago, in Vienna, I saw carob pods sold as "Johannisbrot", evidently from a tradition that these were the "locusts" John the Baptist ate in the desert. The OED gives as its fourth definition of locust "a. The fruit of the carob tree; a locust-bean. b. A cassia-pod, the fruit of Cassia fistula.", going on to say(The Gr. name ἀκρίς, properly denoting the insect, is applied in the Levant to the carob-pod, from some resemblance in…

I love this bench. I've taken quite a lot of pictures of it.54 words · 2 images

Episode 3 of the Indie Game Talk Club drops next week, but if you’re eager for more great indie gaming talk before then, my guest appearance on Luke Crane, Christopher Badell and Sam Roberts’ podcast Ludological Alchemy just dropped. I had such a good time recording with this rogues’ gallery of big gaming brains, but also? What an intimidating cast to try and keep up with. Luke is the mad genius behind The Burning Wheel and currently a games professor at NYU, Christopher Badell‘s claim to fame…

Yes yes I skipped another week. I've been busy! Jukka "J." Karjalainen is a legend of Finnish rock history and one of the country's most beloved singer/songwriters. He's been churning out albums since the start of the 1980s and has somehow managed to hold onto his cultural relevance every decade: there have been brief fallow periods, but it doesn't take long for him to suddenly release a song that completely takes over the nation, re-introduces his name to a brand new generation and which…

Where does the soul go when the body perishes? In Jonathan Maberry’s new novel, they get implanted into robot mechs to fight in an alien war. Is this the best option? Or is heading into the light the better option? Soldiers in Ghosts of the Void have to decide whether or not to make the ultimate sacrifice, the one beyond even death. JONATHON MABERRY: I grew up weird. I was poor, lived in a terrible neighborhood, and had monsters as parents. My escape was to use books as doorways to worlds where…

From where I sit, figuring out what to build, building it, and shipping it are all part of the art of making software. Many disciplines have emerged through the years to facilitate this work: product, design, engineering, devops, etc. We need all these disciplines to make great, dependable software (granted, in different doses). Each brings different values and judgments; each sees things the others don’t. And including all might mean going a bit slower. Human collaboration may seem less…

My old friend Stephen has started a blog, Sout.ca, using the very simple (and inexpensive) Pika platform.From his first post:Anything except the fact, for me, that social media is heartbreaking. And sickening. So to some degree, this is a replacement for social media for me. And that means that I hope to hear from people. I will tell my funny little stories and in response many people will finger paint. I might finger paint myself.Stephen is decamping from Facebook, where he’s been writing for…