Below Deck Mediterranean Captain Sandy Yawn revealed that she's in contact with Nathan Gallagher. WTF?!

Unless we find new ways to drive adaptation besides mass death and fragmentation, our civilizations may keep falling and rising indefinitely. I see 3 new ways: let capitalism run most all life areas, run small groups by speculative market estimates of future group adaptive success, or run big groups by such price estimates of achieving big goals in conflict with civilization collapse. All three ways rely on strong selection among market traders creating information that lets groups stay…

Part of the reason AI is so appealing is that it increases productivity. Lots of developers do not realise that they can increase their productivity significantly without AI!

A month ago, I wondered idly whether translation gadgets (for quick word lookup) exist, and while everybody said “just use your phone, dumbo”, that’s just too sensible for me. And way too inefficient. So while I pondered what to do about it, I bought some keyboards to see whether that could be the solution. Small keyboards (and the one above is as small as they come) is such a cursed category. Either the keys are just too horrible or the range is awful, or a combination of the two. So I wasn’t…

This week, AWS have announced Lambda Web Functions, which, after fighting with Amplify for the last few years, made me drop what I was doing and have a play.

by Alex Friedmann, Trevor Reese, Lucretia Stone, Cesar Hernandez, Jeshua Noel, Patrick Irving, Erin Kuhn-Brown and Kory McClary, Prison Journalism Project October 15, 2026 The failed execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee last month has thrust the death penalty, and the various flawed methods of enacting it, into the national spotlight. The number of people … Continue reading "After Christa Pike’s Botched Execution, People in Prison Have Something to Say"

I just read a powerful article about AI in mathematics, “The Enshittification of Mathematics”, by Fenner Tanswell, from the Mathematical Intelligencer. You can find it here. This is why we need philosophers of mathematics!

A new press release from the Simons Foundation, calling for workshops and other initiatives centered on mathematics in the era of AI.

BIKER SCOUT STAR WARS: THE LEGACY COLLECTION (HASBRO) Oh, we are just rolling through different Star Wars lines around here, aren’t we? Well, next week I’m settling into a theme that should run for a bit, but before I do that, let’s take another stab into the proverbial dark with a one-off from a line I didn’t really collect, The Legacy Collection. But, it had a Biker Scout, and I sure do like a Biker Scout action figure, so I sure did get one of those. So, let’s look at that Biker Scout…

1. Distract YourselfDoug did just about anything he could to avoid thinking about the giant interdimensional hole in his living room. He tried mediation, pottery, weight lifting, even tai chi. His therapist told him the hole didn’t exist. Doug generally agreed, but found that position harder to maintain when an interdimensional tentacle reached through his wall and accidentally slapped him while groping for fodder to feed one of its dozen mouths. But better a tentacle than the bug-eyed gaze of…

Reading on the goSome thoughts on reading while on different forms of transportation Airplane 3/5 - In theory this is a great setting but falls flat the moment you're on the plane. The seats are tiny and uncomfortable and there's the horrible airplane sound to contend with I'm sure the experience in first class is better but that ain't my tax bracket so Eurostar 4/5 - Smooth with fairly smooth with minimal interruptions. Loses a point since there's a non-zero chance you end up next to a crying…

One of my favourite things in the Python standard library is the ThreadPoolExecutor. It is a very simple way to run a bunch of tasks in parallel, such as converting or repacking a whole bunch of image files from one format to another. You write a pure function that takes two arguments, the input and output file names, and does the conversion. Then you submit a bunch of tasks (basically function and argument pairs) and the executor runs them with maximal parallelism.I decided to implement this…

Lots of my neighbors are super into holiday decoration, and I’m here for it.

You've been handed a new AI tool at work. It drafts the reports now. Your job is to read every one, catch what it gets wrong, and put your name at the bottom. The volume has tripled. The deadline hasn't moved. Somewhere along the way you stopped doing the work and started supervising a machine that does it badly.Cory Doctorow has a name for you. A Reverse Centaur. The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI skips the usual extremes of effortless abundance and mass obsolescence. He looks at…

Happily, I don’t spend a lot of time in waiting rooms, but when I do, I tend to look around rather than at my phone. These carpet tiles at my optometrist caught my eye. They might have been designed to warm me up for my upcoming exam!

Table of Contents Table of Contents The Machine Today Graphics and the Desktop Wi-Fi: What “5 GHz Works” Means Video Decoding: I Checked the Decoder Bluetooth Audio to the MUVO The Webcam: One Zoom Call, No Drama Power: About 3 W at Idle ZFS, PF and a Private VM Network Chezmoi: Familiar Dotfiles, FreeBSD-Specific Behavior A Rust OpenPGP Card Stack for SSH and Git Agents on the Laptop If You Are Setting Up Your Own T480 I wrote about power tuning my ThinkPad T480 on FreeBSD last year. That was…

In the OpenAI Math Drop some papers have Lean proofs, others don't, including L = RL = BPL. Why is it hard to formalize results on complexity classes? Let's consider an example, Lautemann's proof that BPP is in \(\Sigma^p_2\). It's a beautiful proof because it comes down to a single formula. I gave the full proof in a 2025 post, but to remind you, here is the setup. Let \(B\) be in BPP, accepted by a probabilistic polynomial-time Turing machine \(M\) with error bounded by \(2^{-n}\). Let…

Project Aces (Bandai Namco ACES)/Bandai Namco EntertainmentPC, PlayStation, Xbox$70US/$93.50CDNBuy a discounted Steam key from Fanatical or Green Man GamingIntroductionI picked up Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies for the PS2 on a whim back in the day because I didn't have anything else to play at the time (remember when that was a thing?) and I'd read a couple of reviews that said it struck a unique balance, being not as arcadey as something like After Burner but not remotely a sim either. It…

Reddit is killing RSS support. On November 13, they are going to remove the ability to subscribe to subreddits via RSS, and their stated reason is weak, at best. RSS – Really Simple Syndication – has existed since the early days of the Internet and is still supported by many websites. It's a hallmark of the open web – which is quickly disappearing. This feature allows you to use an RSS reader to receive new content from supported websites all in one place. Many RSS readers have extensive…

Learn how to use the unpacking operator inside list comprehensions. Starting with Python 3.15, you can use the asterisk * to unpack inside list comprehensions: nested = [[0, 1, 2], [3, 4], [], [5, 6, 7]] flattened = [*sublist for sublist in nested] print(flattened) # [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] This new unpacking feature also works with set comprehensions, dictionary comprehensions, and generator expressions. This article explains the syntax, the alternatives in Python 3.14 or earlier, and shows…

One of the imaginary barriers that get in the way of my writing is to express everything. It seems like the more time that passes in the day—the more I experience, talk, and think—the more I want to express. That’s part of why writing as early as possible in the morning feels easier to me. Nothing has happened yet, so I can really tune in to what I want to say. Writing every day helps remind me that it’s really not that important to say everything, or even to sound smart. It’s more useful to…

We played the twenty-fifth session of our Dungeon Module B1: In Search of Unknown AD&D 2e game last night. You can read past play reports here.The roster for this session was as follows:Llombaerth, CG elf thief 4 (Adam)Mirkle, N human fighter 3 (Maya)Rhonodel, NG elf cleric 1 (Jack)Rory the Small, LN human fighter 2 (David)Zommernar, CN elf fighter 3 (Nael)Egbert, human necromancer 1 (NPC)Brazile, halfling hound master, his dog, Ripper, and the party's three war dogs, Huey, Dewey, and Phooey…

Have you ever found yourself working on a mini, and there’s something about it that just… isn’t right? Some aspect of the sculpt that just feels wrong? Last fall I had 2 minis that I felt that way about, both from Reaper’s Brinewind box. The first was the squeezebox player. Something about the head felt off. The forehead was too far back, or the face protruded too far out. It reminded me of a howler monkey. It looked better once the mini was painted, but as I was working on it, it bugged me the…

From Japan, 1941: Countdown to Infamy, by Eri Hotta (Vintage, 2013), pp. 385-387: On the night of June 18, 1942, the Gripsholm of the Swedish American Line set sail from New York with a group of Japanese nationals aboard who had been detained in various makeshift camps, including one on Ellis Island. The Japanese government, in return, had dispatched the Asama Maru from the port of Yokohama, and later the Italian ship Conte Verde from Shanghai, carrying North and South American nationals home.…

A classic investigation board appears in Limetown s01e01 (Facebook Watch, 2019). ▲ Limetown s01e01 (Facebook Watch, 2019) From contributor Colin Beineke.

There’s this funny little dynamic between my father and me where we try to gauge whether the other person actually needs to go to the bathroom or is just trying to sneak off and pay for the meal. This time, I managed to beat him to it. The waiter told me it’s the same with him and his father, and that he likes it because he sees it as a sign of love. That was cute. Then he came back to the table with me to say goodbye to everyone and told us that he’ll soon be leaving Germany because he’s…

Laying dark fiberStealth Communications CC-BY-SA Wikipedia's Dark Fibre article starts: Dark fibre originally referred to the potential network capacity of telecommunication infrastructure. Because the marginal cost of installing additional fibre optic cables is very low once a trench has been dug or conduit laid, a great excess of fibre was installed in the US during the telecom boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s. This excess capacity was later referred to as dark fibre following the…

On the left, the Aura Estelle I’ve been using all year. On the right, a great system with the Owl Paper Co and Lauren Phelps A6 notebook that just didn’t work for me. Only two weeks into my October Planner Set-Up where I changed everything, I realized it was a mistake. Not that the planner was bad but that I had a system in place. When I say system, I mean I had a personal process that I used in how often, when and where I used the planner. So I want to start by saying, the issue was NOT the…

Last year I founded the Gem Fellowship with $100,000 in funding. Myself and the gem.coop team judged applications from 40+ projects and funded eight with awards between $2500 and $20,000. This year I’m providing $100,000 again but we want to do more! Would you and your company like to join me in supporting Ruby OSS maintainers? More details on sponsorship here. Ruby open source tooling and its community are fundamental to Sidekiq and its success. I believe in committing both time and money to…

The 4K release of Aliens is a spectacular transfer. The amount of detail is an astounding demonstration of the format, and the film still stands at the pinnacle of action-meets-horror. Hard to believe it’s had 40 years of impact on the genre aesthetics, costume design, and sets. (With restraint!)