My computed probability of the risk that Chomp will eat me, or in statistical terms, P(CHOMP), is approximately 95%. This has been a tough realization for me, because I consider Chomp a close friend, and I insist that no harm or regulation should come to him. However, if he should succeed in making me his first human sacrifice, it gives me no joy to inform you that there is nothing to stop him from eating us all. I know what you’re thinking, because I’ve heard it all before: Aren’t you just…

I came across the above bar chart on my Twitter feed. It features 10 acquisitions considered "best of all time" by considering the purchase price and the "absolute dollar return" of the purchase.Simply said, these acquisitions were well worth the price tag.From the Trifecta Checkup's perspective, the Question of the chart is clear.Moving on to the Visual corner of the Trifecta, we immediately stumble upon a vexing problem. The bar heights are not scaled properly. The total height for…

IntroductionHere’s a question for you: do you need to use a frontend framework to build a modern UK government service?As readers of my blog will know, I’m a massive fan of the ⁠GOV.UK Design System and the team who work on and maintain it. Having worked with the team for several years, it’s fantastic to see people so dedicated to their craft and who understand the gigantic impact their work has on inclusive design across government.At the heart of the Design System is ⁠GOV.UK Frontend, the…

This is one of a three-part mini series about how I’m using modern C as of late 2026. Before C23, I was taken in by How I Program C for years and years, and would even feel guilty for choosing C99 instead of -ansi -pedantic. But holy crap man I’m done being a doomsday prepper! These days I maintain a large-enough project with enough users where I could stand less foot-shooting.

A messenger came to Lady of Rain on behalf of the Children. The Wasting Slumber also affected all other Children’s People. The messenger asked for Lady of Rain to gather some of her folk. Then they should travel from whence they first came down from the Only Mountain. At the First Meal’s site they would all gather and share a meal once again. All Children must come except Hand and Knife, the villain they must discuss. Lady of Rain took some people with her. They journeyed to the mountain. She…

★★★☆: Loved the premise, enjoyed the execution. Fight scenes felt long and too beholden to the rhythm of attack-rebuttal-etc. But it moved along nicely and certainly kept the audience on their toes. First half was stronger than the second. FYI: My reviews are scored out of 4. Also, thanks for subscribing to my RSS feed and supporting the indie web!

This week's Rockonteurs podcast was great. Adam and the Ants were a huge part of my musical journey as a kid. Prince Charming was the first proper album I ever owned, on cassette! I could listen to Marco Pirroni talk about those years all day long and I'm looking forward to reading his book. Here is that seminal first appearance on Top of the Pops in 1980 they discuss in the episode.

There’s several YouTube channels of photographers asking beautiful strangers on the streets to take their portraits. Staged or not, I find them entertaining. I recently saw this one where the photographer asks this woman, “I don’t know if you’ve noticed this beautiful backdrop here?” which, indeed, it is. Having said that, it’s hilarious that the entirety of his photos were shot like this:

As the cost of generating words drops, the world fills with more of them. I want to see whether AI can make communication clearer and more considered without doing the thinking for me. For 30 days, I’ll note what works and what doesn’t. The plan I write to think. I’ll keep the first draft mine, then use AI to sharpen the idea. I am curious how this is going to turn out.

I was involved with Glock’s single-stack micro-compact guns (officially called their “Slimline” series) since the day they launched the .380 G42 at SHOT Show 2014. The thing is, all the gun writers there had one thing in common when talking about it: why wasn’t it in 9mm? Glock listened, and just 16 months later, debuted the 9mm G43 at the NRA Show in Nashville in April 2015. They couldn’t even wait til the next SHOT Show to fix their mistake! Man, the G43 was something at the time. And still…

13:57 - My latest post has 3 upvotes, even though I've disabled upvotes and you can't even view upvote counts on Bear Blog discovery anymore. So either 3 people went out of their way to stealthily upvote my post or it's the work of bots. I'd rather it be humans.

It's no secret that I'm a big fan of Magic Pages — Ghost hosting run by the amazing Jannis Fedoruk-Betschki. I moved my site there a few years ago and have been thrilled ever sense.Last week I had the privilege to sit down with Jannis to talk about em, among other things. It was a lot of fun and we covered a lot in our hour together. If you want an insight into why and how I built em and more of my views on writing online, give it a listen!Listen to Magic Pages PodcastIf you're looking for…

Things didn't go merrily, merrily down the lane today. Spent the AM at the DMV getting my license renewed. The clerks there must attend 6 months learning how to be arrogant and exasperating all the while smiling smugly. IMO the forms are confusing, and the instructions when available make it even more confusing to fill out. After filling the pie hole I drew up a new battle plan for replacing the belt.my absolute best goofy looksCleaning up the two pulleys was a royal PITA. Holding a flashlight…

In February this year I went to the AAA108 conference in Vienna. This was the 108th meeting of the Arbeitstagung Allgemeine Algebra. I was obviously going to talk about graphs on groups, but I thought I should take the time to see how the ideas would transfer to arbitrary algebras (in the sense of universal algebra). Some constructions obviously don’t; for example, the commuting graph is only available if the algebra has a distinguished binary operation. But a surprising amount of stuff works…

I hate to damage this mint sketchbook by scanning, so i was careful. A 1946 incription is from Lieutenant Fulton in memory of Gladys 1946. Someone this skilled at that particular time probably had to make lots of gifts like this gorgeous booklet. The circumstances are unknown here and I wasn't born then, of course, but the horror and agony of war strikes me. i hope anyone seeing this bows their head and realizes the complete futility of war, something we seem to forget every ten years or so.…

I see this topic bouncing around the blogosphere here, here and here. I don't use passkeys. I find their usage and day-to-day workflow confusing. I'm sure that's because I use a 3rd-party password manager instead of whatever thing is built into Google. Like, if I just stopped resisting and let Google take that part over, I'm sure it would be easier, but then what do I do when I need to authenticate with my passkey on my Linux computer? What sort of weird, convoluted export process will I need…

I have been establishing baselines for a project at the prime intellect residency and we were using swe-multimodal v2 for performing ablations. I found out that gpt 6 Luna xhigh performed on the benchmark similarly whether I used normal images or OCR or no images at all. This was bit baffling at first but based on some further slop-investigation, I concluded that most of the information required to solve the tasks was provided in the text part of the tasks or was derivable from code. In other…

an interesting read throughout

A couple of recent stories for those following the AI boom. Frank Landymore writing for Futurism.On Tuesday, Character.AI filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy, marking the beginning of an ignominious end for a once-buzzy startup valued at a billion dollars. Its bankruptcy filings, which were picked through by 404 Media, encapsulate the critiques of the AI industry’s model. It gained a huge user base with a highly engaging product, but racked up exorbitant compute bills while failing to monetize all…

“Why can humans not use their millions of words to simply tell one another what they desire?” | Marcellus the Octopus, Remarkably Bright Creatures Marcellus has a collection of beautiful observations about humans in this well-told story. This was one of my favorites.

TrellisWM nests your real Mac windows inside each other, as deep as you like. Zoom out to see everything. Zoom into whatever you need. I’m not happy with any of the window managers I use. Keen to try this out. ↬ ∙ Tagged in Productivity, Software.

I’ve previously written about publishing your blog to standard.site and I created annot.at, a service for publishing static blog content to the protocol. I’m a huge fan of the lexicon and the community around it, it’s incredibly cool that it opens the door to sites that make that content discoverable like Standard Reader, and it has the potential to replace RSS feeds for subscribing to blog posts. It’s a great initiative and I’m very happy it exists. I finally listened to the OffProtocol…

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!

About a week ago, I found myself falling into the old habit of turning on a TV show for ten minutes, getting bored, spending forty-five minutes looking for something else, watching that for ten minutes, and repeating this process over and over. I set a new rule for myself a while back. When I catch myself in one of these loops, I either boot up a video game, open a book, do some writing, or work out. Basically, I find something else to entertain me so that I don't waste an entire Friday evening…

This is a place to share silent film news. So, um, here is some news about a silent film, that is really a sound film, or several sound films, or no film at all. But I think you want to hear about it. Between 1930 and 1932, Sergei Eisenstein shot film, more than 30 hours … Continue reading Sergei Eisenstein in Mexico: coming soon to Blu-ray →

Paint the whole world with the story of ITV's long-running lunchtime show, Rainbow!

I often talk about wanting to be somewhere else — to travel, to see places other than my house and garage. I’ve planned out what it would take to live elsewhere for a couple of months in the winter. I have all these dreams about visiting and living in different places before, you know, the end. But when I get the chance, like this morning, I don’t want to leave. I just want to sit in the comfort of my office and type on my keyboard. To simply embrace the familiar.

“Actually, I changed my mind,” she said, cradling her mug with both hands. “Actually, no, I really mean it. I was listening to a wellness podcast about cognitive bandwidth and I realized I’ve been causing myself a lot of decision fatigue. Worse than that, I’ve been blocking you from your chance to really step in as a leader in this home. I want more balance. So starting right now, I am releasing the reins. Total autonomy. You make all the family choices.”She gave an encouraging nod and slid her…

The name SeedlessDS is wonderfully literal. SapphireRhodonite already has WatermelonDS, his longer-term Nintendo DS emulator built around melonDS, so when he began working on a smaller, lighter alternative, the joke more or less wrote itself. Take the watermelon, remove the seeds, and you have SeedlessDS!The joke stuck, but the reason for the emulator existing is considerably more practical. Android retro handhelds have become faster at an astonishing pace, but not every interesting device is…