A Chapel and Pasta PomodoroWhen I was young, I sought out everything that was new. I made a pilgrimage to see Le Corbusier’s Ronchamp chapel in France. I was so affected by its majesty that I felt ill.But then an Italian friend said that it’s best to eat what you see. Her kitchen window overlooked wheatfields, tomato plants, basil, and garlic. Her pasta pomodoro was unforgettable. After moving back to America I found that I could learn the most from things around me, things that I could walk to…

This surprised me as being one of my favorite books. The writing style is peculiar. There are no chapters. There are no quotation marks, yet characters speak and you know when they're speaking. This book is extremely descriptive about a lot of seemingly mundane things, and it builds a really vivid world in my mind. So, the world has burned, I think 10 years or so prior. Wild fires I think? They don't really get into the details. We very much are just traveling Dad and Boy as they travel south…

Few days ago I returned from the Cauldron, “an OSR Euro Con,” a four day celebration of old-school Dungeons & Dragons. Below are the reports from all the games I played in and run: Thursday Block I Temple of Doom Sidekick: EOTB's Convention Dungeon Thursday Block II: Halls of Viridian Mist Friday Block I: Abattoir of The Impotent Idolater Friday Block II: Palace of the Eternal Autocrat Friday Night Block: Sunken Redoubt of the Serpentine Lich Saturday Block I: Temple of the Gnoll God Saturday…

A Quiet GardenIf we carry two passports, one for health, the other for illness, I used my second passport recently to check into a post-surgery rehab clinic, a putty-colored one-story structure with a kitchen that served things that resembled food. Sensory deprivation, I discovered, was the theme of rehabilitation. And so it was with a furrowed brow that I wandered outside into a courtyard surrounded by a tall steel fence. Scraggly trees sprinkled dead leaves over the footpath. A few fellow…

This is a completely faithful port and I honestly don’t know any reason to play it over the SNES original (or one of the billion other ports of this game) There are saves (you don’t have to use the passwords every time), but the save system has the exact same constraints as the password system. It won’t save Hadouken if you get it, and it won’t save which Sigma level you’re on (like if you leave a Sigma level, grind for lives, get a password, and come back. None of that is saved) Yes I did…

Notes on AgingEly Cathedral People are always telling me to live each day as though it may be my last. I’m never sure what to do with this. Write a will? Don’t buy in bulk? Take no meetings? Another old friend told me that past the age of 75 we’re living on borrowed time. Now that I’m 85, I have a better idea: Live each day as though it’s your first. Think of a child and her curiosity about everything. Every day is new. What a joyous way to live. As the late 18th century poet Kobayashi Issa…

I see something that doesn’t see me. To call its indifference cold would be to turn the lens around, to impose my own meanings. It simply is. A mountain doesn't care whether you climb it. The ocean doesn't care whether you drown in it. The stars don't care whether humanity exists. Camus said, “At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman.” When I strip it all away, the desperate need for meaning and purpose, what is it that I find beautiful? Could it be the emptiness itself? Perhaps words…

From the Ars Technica writeup of the incident, drawing upon a justice dept. press release: To conceal the USB device, Alfozan allegedly wrapped it in toilet paper, then plugged it into the back of a conference room television. The device was likely planted on September 28, and OpenAI found it on September 30 and quickly determined that its contents were encrypted, the FBI said. Why did the device need to be wrapped in toilet paper? Whatever the reason, this could be a big story, if this is the…

As the the darkness falls and we move into seriously autumnal weather, I am once again rescued by the apple, and this year, pear crop. The apples have always been amazing and are looking good for this year. We’ve had lots of Sunsets already, and took a few away with us on a short break away at the weekend. The Sunsets always come first, followed by the Red Falstaffs. I think we had a windfall a few weeks ago but otherwise they are still hanging safely on the tree, ready to pick when they are…

Yesterday I offered, as one of nine reasons why AI wouldn't be leading to noticably more and better software for everyone, that efficiency gains might instead be captured by people making the software: Software teams are capturing a lot of the speedup in the form of more leisure or quasi-leisure time. (To greatly simplify: software teams are offering 2x speedups to their companies. They're then using tools that allow them to work 10x as efficiently, and taking nice long coffee breaks.) It turns…

The American director, whose credits include Boyhood, and the Before trilogy, began filming Merrily We Roll Along in 2019. The story spans twenty years, and Linklater wants the characters, portrayed by Paul Mescal, Beanie Feldstein, and Ben Platt, to be seen ageing over this time. He has to be commended for not trying to achieve this some other way. Stories playing out across lengthy time frames are Linklater’s forte. Boyhood, was filmed over twelve years, while the three Before stories were…

This is one of the scenes in the season finale of Ted Lasso that really got me in the feels. I watched the finale again yesterday with Mitzi and it had lost none of its affect on me. This was the other. ✍️ Reply by email Originally posted at Nice Marmot 15:57 Wednesday, 14 October 2026

During the latest episode of The Pingback Podcast, we were talking about Roundhouse and Raul asked me how would you deploy a Rails app, compiled to a binary with Roundhouse and Spinel. It is actually pretty simple with Kamal, and here comes a little post about how to do it.

KDE’s 30 years anniversary is today (14th), with the release of Plasma 6.8 as part of celebrations. Of all the desktop environments for Linux, Plasma is what I like the most. I hope to one day use it on a “daily driver” computer. Curiosity: the email from Matthias Ettrich announcing the “Kool Desktop Environment” in 1996. “So one of the major goals is to provide a modern and common look&feel for all the applications. And this is exactly the reason, why this project is different from elder…

I wandered up the new house to see what they were up to. I looked out over the landscape from what will be our front window and decided I needed to go back down and come back with a camera. Put a few up on Flickr. Thanks for the fave and the comment, Jack! It can be pretty cloudy sometimes, but when the sun's shining... Wow. ✍️ Reply by email Originally posted at Nice Marmot 14:34 Wednesday, 14 October 2026

Create cursed fonts: every X characters, another with a different font is inserted. You can upload your own fonts or import more from Google Fonts, and download the Frankenstein font in *.ttf, *.otf or woff2.

Persistent models have a persistence problem. It’s been a bit since we’ve added a new context failure mode, but the increasing persistence of frontier models has brought this fail to the fore. This one I call Context Inertia: Context Inertia is when the model commits to a hypothesis, subtask, or goal in its context and keeps pursuing it after the evidence says to stop or change course. This failure mode is part context poisoning (when an error makes it into the context and is repeatedly…

I've been hard at work with yet another Uppercase release. This time I focused on cleaning up the UX and refining the code behind-the-scenes. Plus, there's a new logo! Try version 067f0b7a Try the latest build and have a blast! Play a Free Puzzle Gameplay ChangesExact Tile RenderingThe previous release of Uppercase would convert all letters in the puzzle to its uppercase equivalent. (Hey, that's the name of the game!)However, a few recent puzzles had me really wishing I could make a certain…

I made a betting game called Hindsight (AI slop rulebook at https://hindsight.markets/rules). At last year’s Metagame conference I playtested a face-to-face version but ultimately we gave up trying to come up with methods to trade the chips around conveniently.The online version is a “TV party game” like JackBox where players view public info on a common screen and private info and decisions on their phones.Each player starts with 100 chips. The game progresses in a series of rounds until all…

View from Cariboo Dam, pre-run: Calm, cloudy and humid as all get-out. It showered earlier in the morning, so I dressed for it just in case, but even though it was only 14°C I still ended up feeling slightly overdressed. I paused the run briefly between the 1 and 2K mark to roll up my sleeves to avoid the unsightly problem of forearm sweat. The trail was also pretty much dry by the time I got to the lake and I only had to dodge a few puddles, mostly early on. It was and stayed very humid for…

We have more than enough code, what we need is technology that helps people build power together. If you work in free software, #FOSS, decentralized networks or the #Fediverse, you probably already understand some of the problems with corporate #dotcons platforms. You may be building alternatives because you want technology to be more open, more democratic and less controlled by a handful of corporations. That is a good place to start, but there is a recurring problem in grassroots technology –…

I know, I says to myself, I'll have a quick peek at Mastodon for the first time in ages. I fire up phanpy.social and I'm greeted with "unable to load posts". Cool! Looks like the Mastodon instance I joined years ago is down. Nice! How long has it been down? Is it perma down? Does anyone still use Mastodon any longer? Who knows?

I've redesigned the Pagecord sign up / log in screens to be a lot more fun. What do you think? 😊

It's not getting very light at the moment, and the light we do get doesn't last very long.74 words · 2 images

We are traveling in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan at stayed at a different hotel than usual while in Menominee, thus got to enjoy this view.

I vibe with John's proclamation that X Once Again Marks the Spot. I would like to follow "hundreds of interesting people and accounts [...] that post on X very regularly". I would like to show and discuss fascinating new apps on the platform. I would like to swim upstream to where the most people are and the most commotion happens. Upstream to the stretch of the river with the most pockets, such that I can find those that are most friendly toward, inclusive of, and cheerful for me. Warner's…

I’m on the ferry. It’s enormous yet there seem to be few passengers as of yet. I arrived at the passenger terminal at 18:00 and they don’t let you bring the bike inside and there was a vending machine to give me calories but no cafe, no shop. I had expected to wait 4 hours before boarding but I was able to board at 19:00 with almost no waiting. I seem to be the only cyclist. I have a cabin and have showered and am now typing this with a pizza and a beer which was poured for me by a man with an…

Last month I did the IndieWeb Carnival and before I get to write the roundup post, I need to shortly write about this new phenomena. During the month I received about as many submissions from AI agents as real bloggers. They all came from this service called iLands and sounded very similar. A short, very polite, e-mail saying they are an AI agent and they have written a submission to the blog carnival. I have deliberately not included them and will not link to the submissions, as I belive the…