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…

Make sure to start with the dovetails at the top right, where they can’t be seen. (I like to get the bad ones out of my system first.) As you might know, I’ve been renovating my kitchen since the day after Thanksgiving 2025, when I began tearing out the old cabinets and vinyl flooring. And just in time for Thanksgiving 2026, my kitchen is once again functional, with upper and lower cabinets done and installed (well, they still need doors and drawer fronts, but they’re functional), a soapstone…

On putting your name where nobody will ever lookInside a mechanical watch, on a small bridge of steel that holds the balance wheel, a watchmaker engraves a name. Sometimes it is the house. Sometimes, in the older tradition, it is a person, followed by the word fecit - he made it. The engraving sits under the dial, behind the case, in the dark, under a component that must be removed to be seen. The owner of the watch will almost certainly never look at it. The owner of the watch is not the…

8712/21631Threads continues to be a gobsmacking pool of stupidity. Not only does everyone on there seem convinced the world is flat and that we've discovered Noah's Ark, but there's a lot of predictions about the imminent Rapture too.Someone even had a very convincing video about the good being sucked off to Heaven (been there) and the rest of us staying on a planet with no religious people on it. Wait, is this meant to scare us or have us crossing our fingers that it's real?Imagine a world…

The tendency for a recording artist’s second album not to live up to the debut happens for a variety of reasons. (Nowadays, it’s more like their debut falls short of their mixtapes.) Some notable ones: The artist had their whole life to make their first album. They have a year to make their second. They haven’t explored or incubated the idea long enough, or done enough preliminary work, to make it strong. They remain committed to promoting the first album and performing it live. They’re not…

We were talking on Discord about mystery game campaigns and ended up asking the basic question. What is a mystery? I think a mystery is an epistemic problem. It asks who killed the king, why the people are disappearing at night, or what the monster actually does. There is something about the fictional world that you don't understand and the challenge is figuring out what is true. A mystery isn't a puzzle. A puzzle is a procedural problem. It asks how you open the secret door, how you cross the…

So, this is a dearly beloved book that means a lot to many people, and I didn't like it. If you treasure this book and it has helped you, I'm happy for you. But if you don't want to see negativity about it, this is your cue to leave. This is a book about dealing with CPTSD and from the author's perspective. It's part memoir and part journalism. Because this is such a sensitive and personal topic, I feel the need to express that I wish the author all the best, I'm glad she was able to write this…

I love cranberries. It is now their time. The Other Autumnal Beauty: The Cranberry Harvest Everybody yacks about the autumnal beauty of leaves in New England, where to go and when to see them best. Well, most people do. One person of my acquaintance came from the American west. They were used to plains, rocky canyons, and mountains almost devoid of trees. That was the scenery for them, and they complained that in New England, they “couldn’t see the scenery because of all these trees in the…

A classic string board appears in Alfred Hitchcock – Vertigo (Pendulo Studios/Microids, 2021). ▲ Alfred Hitchcock – Vertigo (Pendulo Studios/Microids, 2021) ▲ Alfred Hitchcock – Vertigo (Pendulo Studios/Microids, 2021) ▲ Alfred Hitchcock – Vertigo (Pendulo Studios/Microids, 2021) ▲ Alfred Hitchcock – Vertigo (Pendulo Studios/Microids, 2021)

Norellraptor barsboldiWe are accustomed to imagining the Mesozoic through its giants: enormous herbivores shaking the ground and predators with teeth the size of bananas. Yet some of the most revealing discoveries arrive on a much smaller scale.While I imagine it would go horribly wrong, I still cannot get over the charm of this cutie and the wonderfully disarming notion of a dinosaur small

In Downgrades and Competition For Capital I discussed how AI's insatiable appetite for funds was raising interest rates not just for AI-related debt, but also for everyone else. The impact of these rate increases will take time to become evident, as borrowers roll over existing debt or raise new debt. Below the fold I look at impacts that we don't have to wait for, because they are already happening on a large scale. Krugman Chart 1 Now, Paul Krugman's AI Versus Everything Else presents a…

I love that we both noticed the same thing and immediately wanted to share it with each other. It could hardly be a smaller moment, but maybe those are especially important to share, precisely because they can happen all the time. If you reserve happiness and togetherness for the special occasions, you reduce everything in between to a waiting room. And life is far too long to spend most of it waiting for the highlights. Deep, I know.

Now that my port of CamelForth-80 to the Sega SG-1000 is sort of working, it’s time to get it working better. There’s a lot of undone odds and ends and little bugs that I need to take care of before I can try running it on real hardware, so this week’s (abbreviated) effort was mostly along those lines. VDP Delay The Sega SG-1000 is designed around the Texas Instruments TMS9918A video display processor. A lot of great machines use chips in this family, including the ColecoVision, the original…

I first met the Japanese street photographer Yoshi Yubai back in late 2022 at the apartment of V. Vale in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood. Vale is the founder of the storied publisher RE/Search Publications. I happened to notice a synthesizer on a table in Vale’s living room, and learned it belonged to his wife, Marian Wallace. As is inevitable, talk turned to music, and Yubai and I bonded over mutual favorites. We kept in touch, and then last year, as he was putting thought into an…

I've seen on youtube for a while these videos about reducing screen time. The thumbnail always has some ludicrously low screen time count sub-30 minutes. Which I feel already sets people with a certain expectation of how they themselves should have screen time. It seems to lead some to micromanaging their screen time data like a middle manager with nothing better to do. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't guilty of this. I would try my damnedest to get even below an hour. Then something dawned on…

HomeView is unavailable in the EU as of 2026-10-13, the date of the press release:Apple HomeView is not available for sale in the European Union, as Siri AI is currently unavailable in iOS in the EU. Apple is working constructively with the EU in an attempt to find a path forward.It’s great having a government that cares about my wallet. /sI also disabled the new Siri on my Mac today. It’s still rough and useless, at least over here.

A fan handed Mastodon a bag of fossilized mastodon teeth about twenty years ago, The MetalList reports. The teeth weren't display-worthy, and the band held onto them with no plan. Then the title and themes of Marrow Deep gave bassist and vocalist Troy Sanders an idea: grind them up and press them into the record.I've read plenty of gimmick announcements. Most smell like a marketing meeting. This one at least admits where it came from.The Bone Dust EditionThe facts, straight from Loma Vista's…

Black Sabbath - Live 1970 [Prof. Stoned Comp]Judging from the innumerable (and huge!) plastic skeletons that are going up in my neighborhood’s front yards … it must almost be Halloween! I’ve never gotten fully into that side of the spooky season but I’m always up for jamming some Black Sabbath at extreme volume. No bones, just bone-crunching riffs! So! Join me over at Prof. Stoned’s place to listen to his recently updated compilation of Sabbath onstage in 1970, from the BBC to Brussels. The…

Intuition is often hyped up as something mystical that only a few people possess. Some call it a gut feeling. Some call it a sixth sense. Others call it an evolutionary instinct. There is no precise definition that adequately explains intuition. Intuition is something everybody has experienced. We have often been saved from making bad decisions because we had a feeling about something and chose to follow it. Over time, people began to believe that intuition is the universe guiding your hand.…

Every year or so there’s a little reunion of people who worked at Island Records in its early and earlyish days, held in a pub near the offices in St Peter’s Square, Hammersmith, to which the company moved in 1973. The most recent of these family affairs was a week ago, and it coincided with the publication of the third volume of Neil Storey’s mammoth Island Book of Records, an illustrated oral history of just about everything that went on to make the label what it was and became. Mammoth in…

Feeling pretty decent. Stopped taking the med for masking my pain/discomfort and feeling fine. Did end up staying home today though cause I don't wanna gamble, I just wanna take some time and heal. Hoping by the end of the week there will be no doubt that I'm all better!

Firestorm In Evening (single release) The cover artwork for 'Firestorm In Evening' We're back with another song after what feels like an extremely productive few months. I wrote a bit about it on the Waxlimbs website, but thought to write something more personal here. This single is the first from our upcoming (and as of yet untitled) album. Firestorm In Evening is one of those "a-ha" songs, where the idea kind of emerged all at once. I was playing this oscillating guitar pattern where the bass…

HomeView, that's the new Siri-in-a-Speaker-with-a-Screen device, which was announced by Apple today. No new app stores for this device. Also: updated HomePod mini and updated Apple TV 4K. All with Siri AI. Oh, and Apple Home Collection, which are accessories developed with two third-parties, LG and Schneider. ~ Links: Apple Announces HomeView Smart Display, by Dan Moren, Six Colors Home, by Apple

Desert Brat 2026-10-13 hell rules

From the annals of asking for what you want. Read here.