Tor and Onion addresses are one of those things that I feel like I have known about since forever. Still, I never really understood how the Tor Project worked, both organisationally and technically. It is thanks to Avoiding the Internet Achilles’ heel: locking the web open with Onion Services at the Internet Archive Europe that I met some of the main maintainers of Tor software and I had a deeper understanding. I casually chatted with Silvio and Gus after the presentation, and I discovered that…

I need to publish 26 more blog posts before November 11th to reach my goal of 100 posts in one year. This is my second time doing the 100 Days To Offload challenge. I've had some long dry spells in writing over the past year, but it the challenge has definitely helped motivate me to write more than I probably would have. A few people have even reached out to me via email about various posts and I've had some good conversations. I'll do a full recap in November. Here's hoping I can be consistent…

Who needs modern dating gameshows when you could be a lowly peasant girl enrolled in looking for love at the behest of your king? Author Madame McCoy is here today with her debut novel, Henriette, which is only book one in her brand new series, The King’s Daughters. MADAME McCOY: Whatever readers! Shamelessly, Madame has induced Monsieur Scalzi to bend a Big Idea guideline! Madame is an independent author. Now, Madame’s alter ego, Nancy Werlin, is a traditionally published writer who has…

We had a painter/decorator in our house for a few weeks and he’s just about finished the first tranche of rooms - the family room, piano room, and living room are done. They look great. However, what I’m struck by is the fact that the rooms aren’t really transformed…they’re nice, but they still look fundamentally the same. My wife has posited (and I’m inclined to agree with her) that it’s because our furniture is the same. I don’t know about everybody else’s furniture, but ours is a real…

I saw this tweet going viral: Replaced by AI. https://t.co/bQ0paORIyC — Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) October 12, 2026 There is a recurring theme of people predicting and hoping “such-and-such professions” will be replaced or obsoleted by AI. Common examples include: –White-collar jobs –Mathematicians –Writers –elite degrees/higher-ed Each of these were addressed in earlier posts, in which so far I have been correct. Some people outright lie to push their “AI obsolescence” narrative. For…

When I started remodeling my office things got a bit out of hand. Since I did not fancy setting up my workstation I simply connected the iPad to one of the Pro Display XDRs, pulled out the travel keyboard and trackpad and used it for a week as primary computing device. So far, so good — I already wrote about my experience using the iPad for software development last year when we got a major revamp of iPadOS. Not much has changed (except that my desk looked like a dumpster during the time of the…

I spend a fair amount of time thinking about the climate crisis and how it’s part of a larger collapse of ecosystems, like how insect populations in Germany have declined by 75% in the last quarter century, how populations of large predatory fish have declined by 90% in the last century, how the Amazon is nearing a tipping point where it may cease to be a jungle, and so on. Did you hear about the UK government report on ecosystem collapse? It was created not only by the environment department…

Introducing @socialspec.org: APIs for social engagement on the World Wide Web (of websites). Built on open standards.

"As soon as you're caught in the room, cryptography won't help you." Most cryptographers are trained on that separation of concerns. If you're locked in a room, someone can coerce you into handing over your keys, so that part is "out of scope". During three weeks at the Community Privacy Residency, I met a journalist from an occupied territory, and his reality threw the whole distinction out. There were daily roadblocks, with military police doing phone inspections. If you didn't unlock your…

"As soon as you're caught in the room, cryptography won't help you." Most cryptographers are trained on that separation of concerns. If you're locked in a room, someone can coerce you into handing over your password and cryptographic keys, so that part is "out of scope". During three weeks at the Community Privacy Residency, I met a journalist from an occupied territory, and his reality threw the whole distinction out. There were daily roadblocks, with military police doing phone inspections.…

I brought my Linux laptop along on this trip because I’m “trying to do my own thing” when it comes to my computing space. The System76 Darter Pro is a nice laptop and the keyboard is amazing. Unfortunately, I have to keep tinkering with the Wi-Fi network connection to do something as simple as writing this blog post. Apparently, Debian 13 Trixie with Sway WM has a challenge when it comes to guest networks that tend to bounce users between hotspot nodes. The lesson has been learned. One of the…

Read about it in Inside the Box, but of course I’ve known of this idea from before. Like, when I wrote somewhere that, unimaginable is usually imaginable, truly unimaginable things are impossible to imagine. I read about a similar idea in Abundance, where they talked about who gets funded for new research - it’s not truly new research, it’s familiar research. Though the story was different there. This basically means throwing a rope to the reader (for example) when you’re doing truly unique…

BLACK ADAM SUPER POWERS (McFARLANE) “One of the world’s foremost wielders of magic, Black Adam has been both hero and villain over a life that’s spanned thousands of years.” The hierarchy of Super Powers in the DC Universe has changed? No, wait, that’s not quite right. I mean, you know, I guess it was never right, in the context of the whole Black Adam thing, but it’s especially not right here. Right? Right. What am I getting at here? Well, mostly that I don’t really have much to say about…

The hands have been pulled out of all the clocks in the world.⁠—Tristan TzaraGrains et IssuesThe clocks wait, naked. Hands left late last night.Now vacant time can’t name later or now.Your floor is too orderly⁠—black squares, whiteoblongs stare back with evil smiles to spiteloose clocks. You’re naked and your left-hand knightsa random pawn that entered from the rightside of a black bed. It’s time to bowto naked clocks. Their hands escaped this night.Now vacant eyes open late. Open now.—Mark J.…

This week, into the Great British Baking Show tent we go to discuss its Audience Choice week. How does it fit in to the pattern of reality TV shows—from American Idol to Survivor 50—blaming viewers for what are ultimately producers' decisions?

Belfast, Northern IrelandAfter a walking tour of the downtown we needed a warm drink. The wife wanted a hot chocolate and our “go to” Butler’s are only available in Dublin. We spotted a Hotel Chocolate and decided to try it since we’re getting one in Alexandria near us!This is a chocolate shop first with a cafe at the back. The wife got a dark hot chocolate and I got a mocha with the milk chocolate. They were fine, but the mocha was too hot and not mixed well; most of my chocolate was at the…

I had the opportunity to visit @vanportstudio.com last week. Amazing view. Even better people.

In this game, the goal is to guess the translations of a term into other languages. The “hard” difficult is hard, indeed, and the “Insane” I didn’t even try.

Speaking of sci-fi authors, Automattic is hosting Neal Stephenson for a livestream about his new book soon, please tune in! Neal was a big influence on WordPress! I got hip to him from Tantek. In the source code of billions of pages you’ll see this: <link rel="profile" href="https://gmpg.org/xfn/11"> GMPG is the Global Media Protocols Group, “an experiment in Metamemetics.” Inspired, of course, by the Global Multimedia Protocol Group that owned the virtual real estate in Snow Crash’s metaverse.…

Looking across Lake Simcoe this morning through the thunderstorms. I’m in Ontario these two weeks, having just run a short Art of Hosting two-day workshop for the Canadian Labour Congress and heading to Peterborough tomorrow to begin our Reimaginging Education Art of Hosting (still seats available!). And next month in Vancouver our bi-annual Art of Hosting will run November 17-19 (and still seats for that one too!). Each workshop is always different as we continue to explore this body of work,…

I’m a little surprised by this bit of news, and sad that my beloved orange model is gone.

Heavy limbs, autumn fever.Hot takes burn bright.A need for media fasting, and a silent room.Wait for clear sky. Give The Dust a Chance To SettleOn The BlogPhoto 365Terminal AccessDipping the StacksReadingMusicRemember Kids: Give The Dust a Chance To Settle I got my winter/autumn jabs on Saturday and spent most of Sunday and Monday feeling very sorry for myself as the jabs hit me like a lorry at high speed. I’m only just feeling myself again now. After last weeks post, a friend messaged to ask…

On the merit of making use of an old CSS maintainability and performance optimization technique.

Not even the tobacco companies said “this will kill you.” The post This is what every AI company CEO sounds like appeared first on Global Nerdy.

This is a Meta Pixels case on appeal to the Washington Supreme Court. It fails on a highly technical interpretation of the statute. The applicable Washington state statute restricts the interception of communications between two individuals. The Supreme Court says that a corporation isn’t an “individual” for purposes of this statute. Thus, the user’s interaction with the corporate-run website didn’t have sufficient human involvement: no party disputes that SCH is a corporation, and each…

Almost five years ago, I posted a photo of this Milo tree (here). It had been planted as a shade tree and there was a picnic table beside it. However, the tree had grown with a 90° bend, a result of the strong winds that blow here. A few days ago, I went for a walk on the coast there, for the first time in ages, and this is what I saw. I’m assuming the tree was pruned like this in the hope that new growth would be in a more normal direction. I doubt that will happen, though the winds aren’t as…

TL;DR Claude Code sessions on the web can subscribe to their PRs and get GitHub activity pushed in. I wanted the same in my local sessions. I’ve ended up with a Claude Code channel plugin that forwards each watched repo’s webhooks to my machine with gh webhook forward and pushes reviews, comments, CI results, merge conflicts and force pushes into the session that subscribed. I went through three designs. The one I run now is a small local daemon with a thin shim per session. It keeps each…

We had a beautiful panoramic view of Constantinople, cats, and the other café customers.

A Preface is written by the author of the material following in the body of the book: it usually sets out the reasons for undertaking this work. A Foreword is a similar introductory piece in the front matter, before we’re into the book itself, but written by another person, more or less eminent, telling us, the publisher and author hope, how brilliant the material following is. The Chicago Manual of Style does allow for the intermediate life-form of an “Editorial Preface”. But does it really…

The demoscene (a slightly niche, 1980’s/90’s subculture revolving around artistic computer programs) is something I’m more interested in than I have any logical reason to be. It’s also something I randomly encountered while looking through ASCII art tutorials. Since then I’ve collected a lot of links to sites and forums related to it. But then I wondered, if I was starting from scratch, with only the word “demoscene” to go on, what would I find? Part 1: Traditional search engines So I naively…