A return to form from Vinay Prasad with two short and sweet articles on AI in oncology: Terrence Tao does not understand cancer medicine Can AI ‘hack’ a cancer clinical trial If mathematicians want to complain that computers are replacing them, they should seek the comfort of chess Masters complaining that they have been bested. But they should not look for comfort from doctors. We would do anything to help our patients. We would do anything to extend survival. We already do things on a wish…

Seeing as it’s the start of Spooky Season, I’ve been casting around for seasonally appropriate

Hugh Trevor-Roper (1914-2003), The Wartime Journals (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012), pp. 165-166 (June 1943): 'And books', I asked myself as I stood in Blackwell’s shop in Oxford one day, surrounded by fat volumes on Soviet Russia and the Virgin Birth, and thin volumes on Education and Democracy, earnest pamphlets, flimsy novels, yellow manuals, reprints, Americana and all. There seemed no end of them. And what is in them all? Learned sawdust — vapour trash. And there were historical works too,…

Tiki is an attitude – a way of engaging with the world – that I think is important for understanding early DnD. And that attitude is seriously unserious – it takes elements that it knows are ridiculous and accepts them as authentic; true-in-the-moment. It holds consequences lightly and laughs at its own pratfalls. It’s touristic in the sense that tourists are always playing a role – the interested outsider, there but not fully committed; the lost ingenue; the troublemaker. Tiki&D 1: Gary’s…

Most young children go through a stage in which they ask, "Why?" No matter what you answer, be it thoughtfully, jokingly, or through clenched teeth, they reply, once more, with "Why?" When our daughter Josephine was in this phase, she encountered another girl who was likewise in it. After going down the "Why?" rabbit whole for several rounds, Josephine finally, in exasperation, said, "Stop asking that question!""Why?" is endless. Even when we attempt to shut things down by finally replying,…

I read both Gordon's 6 Months of Bubbles and then Hakkerman's response, How to Support Small Bubblers, and thought I would weigh in. Gordon's blog post is basically about how to keep Bubbles a place for genuine discovery rather than another popularity-driven platform that repeatedly promotes the same voices. According to him, those same voices are largely responsible for the domination of popular tech posts. He mentions that Ben, Bubbles' creator, agrees with the underlying concern but believes…

The approaches to Centrale stretch back for block after block, so much so they've had to carve a tunnel underneath them so one side of the city centre isn't cut off from the other. I left the station through one of its side exits, past the armoured vehicle with its idling soldiers that was intended to reassure us, and past the extremely tightly packed trousers of a couple of members of the Polizia. I'm not sure why the Italian defence forces feel the need to wear pants that are clearly a size…

The vibePretty worn out, honestly. I have wanted to keep things moving, but I have been tired enough that it is hard to ignore. Getting away from the desk for a while helped.Highlights🤝 I found Buildside at the start of the month, and I have spent more time there as I get used to being a solo builder. I am still figuring out how to get my apps in front of people, so it helps to see how other builders talk about their work and what they are trying. I have met people working on their own projects…

At Reason, Veronique de Rugy warns us that we should be terrified of price caps.Regulars here will already know that this is an immoral and impractical idea that would distort markets and lead to shortages if put into practice.Same regulars might not know how popular this stupid idea is, though:A new Wall Street Journal poll finds remarkable bipartisan support for government limits on prices, with 93 percent of Democrats and 83 percent of Republicans supporting capping prescription drug prices.…

P. Oxy. XV 1796 (2nd century AD), lines 9-11 (tr. D.L. Page): This is an immemorial law, surviving still from our lords of old:— to set those trees side by side upon hills, to bind the watery mound and ward famine off. ὠγύγιος̣ νόμος οὗτος ἀπ’ ἀρχαίων ἔτ’ ἀνάκτων θέσθαι δένδρεα κεῖνα παρ’ ἀλλήλοισι κολώναις, χώματος εὐύδροιο πέδην ἀλκ̣τῆρά τε λιμοῦ.

Learn how to use the sentinel built-in from Python 3.15 for placeholder values. Python 3.15 introduced the new sentinel built-in. The sentinel built-in can be used to create placeholder values: NOTHING = sentinel("NOTHING") A placeholder created by sentinel is the more idiomatic way to provide default arguments or return values where None wouldn't be usable. 15 days of Python 3.15 To celebrate the release of Python 3.15, over the next 15 business days I'll be writing about a new 3.15 feature…

Postcards that summon medieval grotesques and brightly coloured folk art, but also feel distinctly modern.

See more in In Situ.

A couple of years ago I noticed that one of the local ravens was perching on the town’s church steeple and serenading the surrounding area with the song of their people. The photos have ended up being one of my favourite sequences of images.

Danny Lloyd as Danny “Doc” Torrance in The Shining (1980) Vitals Danny Lloyd as Danny “Doc” Torrance, young boy with supernatural senses Silver Creek, Colorado, Winter 1979 Film: The Shining Release Date: May 23, 1980 Director: Stanley Kubrick Costume Designer: Milena Canonero WARNING! Spoilers ahead! Background Aside from the occasional student style, most of my BAMF Style posts over the 14 years of this blog’s existence have centered on adult characters. Whether it’s the onset of spooky…

The Timex Expedition Pioneer is a case study in not letting hope create expectation. In the aggregate, it is a good watch. The challenge is managing my own enthusiasm for… The post Timex Expedition Pioneer appeared first on The Time Bum.

The Nahvalur Eclipse was one of the pleasant surprises of my 2025 review queue. The design is admittedly not for everyone, but as a retractable pen, it works well, and is fun to use. I have one Eclipse in the Hepatizon with Silver Trim, with a Fine Steel nib, to give away this week. Read the rules below and enter away! Nahvalur Eclipse Fountain Pen Giveaway

Last time, I reviewed "The Episode of the Nine Monets" (2020) by Jamie Probin, a mathematician, who has written a short series of impossible crime and locked room mysteries about a mathematician-detective, Dr. Samuel Harris – who acts as a special consultant to Scotland Yard and Sûreté. "The Episode of the Nine Monets" and The Thirteenth Apostle (2020) form the "Le Fantôme Saga" with the former being a prequel to the latter.Le Fantôme is the classically-styled, phantom thief who has terrorized…

Were the good ol' days of cake decorating REALLY better?And more importantly, can Jen find an excuse to post some of the rad vintage birthday cakes you guys have been sending in?Let's find out, with...EPIC CAKE BATTLES OF HISTORY!!THEN: I pity the fool who doesn't recognize Hulk Hogan & Mr. T.VSNOW: THEN: VSNOW: THEN: VSNOW: "I stopped listening after 'cabbage'."(Yup, it's cake. Cabbagey, cabbagey cake.) THEN: VSNOW: THEN: VSNOW: Who WON? Who LOST?YOU decide!!And keep sending in those vintage…

2026-10-13Back doing some interior decoration at home...Hello! I'm glad I didn't go out and buy a salt lamp.For starters, there's many plastic imitations of the salt lamp that don't give the same colored glow that a real salt lamp would. If I'm going to lean into the aesthetic of bright rock, I should do it right.But a real salt lamp is expensive and heavy. More than that, it doesn't last long on a shelf, and it's inconvenient to replace the bulb if it ever burns out.The main reason I didn't…

Brütal Legend is a classic*. The brainchild of Double Fine's Tim Schaffer. Oft-maligned as a title that didn't know what it wanted to be, the game is still an unsüng classic. *I know. We'll talk about it. It was released October 13th, 2009 and it's no coincidence that this article was published today.HistoryScreenshot of PsychonautsI've been a Double Fine fan for as long as I can remember. Their first major title Psychonauts released for the original Xbox back in 2005 – simultaneously lauded by…

As we start getting into the activation work of After Capitalism, it will be necessary to make some choices. Over the last decade or so, I’ve used universal basic income a lot, primarily because it’s more well known than its cousin – universal basic services. I don’t know that a choice is necessary – perhaps […] The post Universal Basic _____ … Income or Services? first appeared on Hinesight....for Foresight.

For shelf.cafe I wanted to aggregate interesting conversations about a blog post in one place, so people can chat and learn. As part of this, I wanted to “discover” every time a blog post had been shared somewhere else, like Bluesky, and surface that. This is commonly referred to as a “backlink”. While building this out I tackled some very interesting technical challenges so here’s a little write up that covers looking up existing atproto backlinks, subscribing to the jetstream to monitor for…

In recent months, the cost of running DMV.community has increased. At the same time, donations have been decreasing. To be fully transparent, there have been times where I've considered shutting it down. I've been experimenting with running a GoToSocial instance from my home server, just in case. I've been running more things from my home server in general anyway. I recently started up a BBS/forum at https://bbs.snakepit.us, if anyone is interested in joining. I'm not sure what I'm going to do…

On our journeys north into Germany, we tend to choose a departure time that is, as I would term it in a former life, too early to be alive. My former self who lived in this so-called former life would be shocked to know that in reality, my present self tends to get up quite early, or at least much earlier than the so-called former self did. Many hours earlier. Days, even. Epochs, even. As they say, the early pteranadon snatches the busily scurrying rodent from its so-called orderly life and…

A society grows great when good people plant trees under whose shade they will never sit. ~Hyacinthe Loyson / Greek Proverb 🌰🌱🌳🪾

In my last post on the topic of picking a sketchbook, I was struggling to figure out what to use next, after starting and then abandoning a Bindewerk Linen journal. I eliminated quite a few candidates, and had narrowed my choices down to these: Hahnemuhle Travel Journal HandBook Journal Stillman & Birn Alpha or Epsilon … Continue reading Sketchbook Switch: Here’s What I Chose →

Tracy Durnell recently wrote about what makes her pick up a book to read, which I found interesting both for how similar some of her approaches are and how different others are compared to my own methods. I say ‘methods’ but I have no formalised approach to picking books. Indeed this is not something I have ever given thought to until now. The blurb is what I turn to when I find myself wandering the aisles of my local Waterstones looking for my next read. Authors I have previously read are both…

Capability evaluations aim to surface dangerous model behaviors before deploy- ment, but their reliability depends on the assumption that hidden capabilities can be elicited. We show this assumption does not hold under adversarial conditions by constructing backdoor attacks that embed encrypted neural networks within host model weights, decrypting and executing them only upon receiving a secret trigger. Using digital lockers, these hidden circuits remain provably hard to elicit and interpret…

The way we talk about private valuations doesn't make sense. They don't mean what we think they mean. Observed private valuations exceed the true value of the average startup. They bake in a severe selection bias, since better companies are more likely to fundraise. As a result, we don't have an index of private valuations that accurately reflects the broader ecosystem. We only see a narrow slice of companies (those who fundraise) at a narrow slice of time (when they fundraise). These…