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…

From 1908, “Lower Manhattan from Governors Island – The City of Skyscrapers – Made possible by the development of the Otis Elevator.” I wonder who could possibly have paid for this card to be printed? Obviously, yes, safe elevators were necessary for the development of tall buildings, but I feel safe in saying that if Elisha Otis had not invented and popularized a safety elevator someone else would have. The state of tall buildings in lower Manhattan is well illustrated: the land here is pretty…

upsilon The Greek alphabet grid series continues with upsilon. You don't really see this letter used much, and I could see how it would get confused for epsilon. But every letter in the alphabet has its place, popularity aside. Give this puzzle a solve, and enjoy!

Virgin Media O2 has announced that it is transferring the ongoing management of its consumer email service to Junara, a dedicated email provider owned by Atmail. The announcement comes via Alan Stott, Chief Operating Officer at Virgin Media O2, who framed the change as a way for the company to focus on its core business (broadband, mobile, landline, and TV) rather than continuing to run a consumer email platform it stopped offering to new customers back in 2022.What's ChangingAffected customers…

I’m off to Calgary today to attend PodSummit, which runs Friday and Saturday. I’m staying over Sunday to do some writing, explore the parts of the city I haven’t seen yet, and have dinner with some writer friends. I return Monday evening.I have no idea why I am going. Is it about networking, or meeting people? I’m absolutely horrible at this. Learning some new technique, or getting a sense of the ecosystem? Not technique, for sure. It’s a large spend without much strategy behind it. I’m sure I…

DIGGER is absolutely phenomenal. Groundbreaking on multiple levels and may just be the best thing I've seen in the last decade. The first retail order for THE SOLAR GRID hardback edition came in from the fine people at Partners and Son. Orders overall have passed the 100 mark. This is actually a very good metric given that I only posted about it 4 days ago. Compared to the Kickstarter campaign I ran way back when, which ran for two whole months and only managed to attract interest from around…

For fellow link lovers/explorers, I’ve created 2 public collections of bookmarks from my account at Raindrop.io: Related: Raindrop bulltown collection (RSS) Raindrop i.webthings hub collection (RSS) i.webthings@Pinboard (RSS) Enjoy!

I rarely ever promote a partner sponsored article, but this one does touch on important aspects around data sovereignty which I wished government design-makers better understood. There are numerous risks to data being hosted (held?) in an external data centre, especially if that data centre is foreign owned. Why I posted this, is because I also want to mention what was not said in the article. Access and leaking of the data is one thing, as is the holding of your own encryption keys, but like…

I felt like writing a fun post and then I was storing away my pens and I had the idea, also perfect because I have this on both my blog post list and on my slashpages list :) This is the contents of my pencil case, satisfyingly knolled. I have these things with me at all times for two purposes: paper planning and creavity. Right now I use a Filofax Personal for both purposes. More on that one here. First, the pens. On top is a mini BIC four colour pen, because sometimes I need to write with…

I thought I could relax. My next book, The Demon's Peace, releases on 27 October. Then I showed the cover to people, and they hated it. They hought it looked like a romance novel, when it’s anything but. Here's the old one: I commissioned a new cover with a dark fantasy focus. Darkness, I emphasized. People must be able to look at it and immediately know it’s a dark fantasy book! And here it is below.... What do you think? And what's it about? I've been pitching it as Ride or Die, with demons,…

On a Minecraft kick again, feels good

Daily Drawing 1019

Usually I blog about new additions to the GNOME wallpapers after a release, to give some behind the scenes look on how they were produced. This time I'm asking for some feedback beforehand. Pixels has shipped as a wallpaper before. The wallpaper landed back in 2021 and keeps getting refreshed as new Circle apps join the lineup, and 47 added LCD and LCD-rainbow, revealing the curator's pixelart kink. The raw material is a side project years in the making — app icons redrawn as chunky pixels…