Caught up with Edgar Wright’s remake of THE RUNNING MAN. It was OK. The film’s satiric bent, such as it was, seemed to be channeling the future-vulgarity of the original ROBOCOP with a healthy (?) dose of IDIOCRACY. As to WHAT was being satirised, it was slightly unclear, the film working equally well probably for […]

The rising sun appears through new holes in the forest understory just after it tops the ridge. Crows and jays are in an uproar over a young peregrine falcon, who hangs around for a couple of hours, periodically giving chase to its most obnoxious persecutors until they all find better things to do elsewhere.

Not gonna lie: I’m jealous of Kurt’s new stereo system.

Alongside generally approved backpedals and tweaks to Liquid Glass, the ‘27 cycle of OS releases from Apple brought about some newer, more curious appearances of the material. Glass has never been this liquid, they say.I want to examine some of these new forms and see if they achieve what Liquid Glass purportedly set out to do, or at least achieve their own intended design. Figure 1: Siri conversations grid In the new Siri app, if a past conversation contained some key image, it’s features in…

We now know enough about the brain to realize that its mystery will always remain. Like a work of art, we exceed our materials. ~Johan LehrerWhen our daughter was a preschooler, authority figures informed parents that the human brain was fully formed by around five-years-old. After that, there would be no new brain cells, which was why, they told us, the early years were so important. These were the scientific facts. Just a few days ago, a parent of a preschooler told me that the director of…

The camera makers weren’t ready for smartphones (again). That’s right, the smart folk in Tokyo have once again not been ready for something that was extremely predictable in the phone market. What did they miss this time? The inevitable sales plateau for phones, particularly given the cost increases for the latest models as the smartphone makers try to cram several kitchen sinks into their camera slabs. Depending upon whose surveys you believe, smartphone unit volume is anywhere from flat (0%…

After reading one of H. Bedford-Jones‘s series dealing with a Denis Burke in a volume from Steeger Books titled Invitation to a Crime, I read a series dealing with another Denis Burke: Buccaneer Blood. Unlike the first one, this one is set around 1702 and deals mainly with buccaneers (or pirates) in the Caribbean. Oh, […]

You know how it is. You want to run NIGHT SHIFT. Your players want to play Dungeons & Dragons. Well, my last Jackson, IL adventure shows you can do both!Hey Look, A Dungeons & Dragons Ride!This adventure idea began innocently enough back in September. It was September 17, and I noticed that it was the anniversary of the Dungeons & Dragons animated series. I didn't watch it a lot back then; I had a job on Saturdays, but when my kids were growing up, I rediscovered it. We picked up the DVD set…

We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions. Puzzle fiends will recognize this puzzle website as another implementation of Japanese puzzle magazine Nikoli’s Tentai Show, also playable as part of Simon Tathan’s Puzzle Collection. It’s a very cool implementation though, and all of its puzzles are handmade while the Collection’s puzzles are procedurally-generated. Galaxies implementation by Luke Steuber Refer to…

Continuing the tour of our rental Noovo Plus van, this is the last of four posts:The exterior (Monday).The interior (Tuesday).Exterior details (yesterday).Electrical & plumbing (this post).Control panels above the door; Victron electrical on top, Rixen heating system bottom left, awning bottom right, and a button for the gray tank heater:Starlink modem and power supply tucked away in a cupboard:Smoke detector:Carbon monoxide alarm:Max air ceiling fan:Water filters under the sink:Electrical AC…

Link: 2025 Academic Convocation Keynote Speaker Astro Teller “The fool loves side quests and often goes looking for them. Push down your focus and see how high you can turn up your curiosity. Yes, you have to file your taxes on time. But don’t let that become an excuse to get stuck in largely focused, goal-chasing mode. You will get more in life and you will have more fun getting it if you are open to side quests.” Tags: #astro-teller #creative-practice #foolish

44 Beets

The entire marketing message of the leading US based LLM companies seems to be that they will be the first to achieve actual artificial intelligence aka what these dweebs call “artificial general intelligence” or AGM. Furthermore that once a LLM achieves this, it will recursively improve itself, becoming a super-sentient god-like being. Both of these […]

This is a follow-up to a previous post, In My Misanthropy Era. In 2025, after getting my intellectual rocks off largely at hardcore rationality meetups for the entirety of the 2020s, I went to a casual philosophy meetup and it ~turned me evil. I wrote a post about this experience, because I thought it was interesting how a thoughtfully facilitated, pleasantly intellectual night out for most well-adjusted people was somehow my own personal hell. Also, that was objectively kind of a funny thing…

The heraldry section now has a complete transcription of Gerard Legh’s Accedence of Armorie, the 1597 edition, from the title page to the colophon. All 308 of its woodcut coats of arms are reproduced alongside the text. It is the longest single primary source on the site, and it took a good deal longer than I expected to get it there. The title page of the 1597 edition, set within an allegorical border. What the book is The Accedence of Armorie is Gerard Legh’s only work, and by J. P. Cooper’s…

Those of us working in tech are charting the frontier of automation day by day. The better we become at using our new tools, the fewer people a company requires to wield them. This doesn’t apply equally to all industries and workflows, but so far the trend line only goes in the one direction. Humans are expensive and business is unsentimental, so we’ve ended up in a situation where everyone involved knows that we’re putting each other out of work. The more you see it happening, the harder it is…

In addition to reminding me of a Seinfeld episode, a question at Miss Manners also helped me appreciate personal growth in an area that used to cause me unnecessary worry.The writer is a nail salon customer who can't seem to shake the feeling that she is being talked about in the native language of the staff, and asks what to do. The nut of Judith Martin's reply is:[Y]ou could simply acknowledge that people can talk among themselves, without eavesdroppers assuming ill will.And even if they were…

NASA Hubble Hubble image of the El Gordo supercluster with the estimated dark matter highlighted in blue. Seven billion light-years from Earth, there is an unexpected cluster of galaxies. It has two regions in the process of colliding with each other with a combined mass of more than two quadrillion solar masses. Given its mass, the distant cluster has been nicknamed El Gordo, the Fat One. What makes it unusual is that it’s extraordinarily large for that period of the Universe. How did such a…

youtube • video ID: rUd2diUWDyIclick image to load player Ты меня обворожила, Погулять с собою предложила. Я бы взял копилку и разбил, И тебя в парк отдыха сводил. I was charmed by you, You offered me to go on a date with you. I would have smashed my money jar, And would have taken you to a recreation park. This article was originally published at: https://andrei.xyz/quickies/leprikonsy-hali-gali/

# Introduction For the last seven months, I spent a good part of my (small amount of) free time rebuilding my self-hosting infrastructure at home. I wanted something secure, fully automated, that updates itself and that I can rebuild from scratch if something goes wrong. Most of the ideas come from my work on infrastructures following SecNumCloud (a French security standard for cloud providers) and, to a lesser extent, ISO 27001, I wanted to see how far I could apply the same principles at…

It is autumn now –the winds are not the same as they were a short time ago. But I am fine.I am not sure how the transition came or went or how the sun began to sink much faster now. But like the Good Preacher says after his sermon, “as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever,” to which I say, “amen.” My side of the world is cooling down and the four seasons are always looking to prove themselves to us in the Northeast.We are moving away from the sun, incrimentally, and yes. I know…

I'm quite sure I will not reach the summit, but I toil on the slope. Sailing. Shop skills. Engineering skills. The view is improving every year. As for understanding people and cultures, I'm not far above the canyon, but at least I know that.

I recently took part in a Pokémon Draft League with some friends and was able to take the title home, so I wanted to write a bit about the drafting process and prep that I did. For the uninitiated, a draft league involves drafting (wow, big shock) the ten Pokémon we want for our team in snake fashion, and then playing a match a week against each other — we played in the Regulation M-B VGC format (that's doubles). We had two pools of eight (I was placed in Pool B) with the top 4 from each pool…

I remember hearing about this Māori gothic horror movie when it came out, so I

For the Balkinization symposium on Diego Zambrano, How Americans Enforce the Law (Stanford University Press, 2026).Nick Bagley and David SchleicherWhy do Americans love private rights of action? Because we really, really love them, as Diego Zambrano shows in his compelling new book, How Americans Enforce the Law. Today, more than 10,000 statutory private rights of action allow Americans to sue over things as serious as wage theft and as trivial as pet leases. They have an ancient pedigree,…

Built to endure the tests of time, the pyramids of Giza stand as some of the oldest and last remaining wonders of the ancient world. Rising from the desert sands of Egypt’s Giza Plateau, these monuments were constructed from a masterful blend of limestone, granite, basalt, gypsum mortar, and baked mud bricks—materials quarried both locally and from distant sites along the Nile, including the

One of the unfortunate things about moving a music library between macbooks is that for some reason, album artwork gets lost. I think there is a file somewhere that contains this information, but obviously I neglected to transfer it (or else, the new macbook is looking for the file in a different place). This results in the unpleasant experience of seeing the ugly generic music note in place of pleasing album cover art. Apple Music does a decent enough job of finding album artwork, but it is…

🗞️ I’m all for supporting good and free press, but it’s not actually cheap. My free trial of our newspaper ran out and if I continue I’m paying 372€ per year, for only the digital version. How are prices elsewhere?

Do you remember your dreams when you wake up? I usually do, and I enjoy thinking about and building upon them throughout the morning, as I often dream crazy stuff with elaborate plot and incredible scenery. I also go through periods of nightmares, and that's less fun. I love a horror book just like the next witch, but seeing horror stuff? No thanks! The other thing I like a lot is trying to figure out what does dreams mean, even if they do not always correlate with what's happening in my waking…

My step-father was a USCF-rated chess master. One day, we were talking about what makes the elite of the game so good at the game – grand masters like Bobby Fischer and Anatoly Karpov – than everyone else. Him: “Well, those guys can see every possible move and every possible counter move for the whole game. So, from the very first move and every move after they can game out all the ways it can go until mate in their heads.” Me: “Wait, if they can both see the whole game and every possible move…