Every few months someone tells me WebAssembly is “sandboxed and memory-safe,” usually as a reason they don’t need to worry about the C library they just compiled to it. Half of that sentence is true. The other half gets people owned, and the gap between the two halves is where I want to spend this post. I’m going to make the argument with code you can run, not adjectives. Everything below is compiled with clang’s wasm32 target and run in Node, and I’ll give you the exact commands so you can…

There’s no need to give a long answer if a short one will do.

A friend of mine was complaining this week that a school's website didn't work for her. It had an over-engineered anti-copying feature which prevented her from (legitimately) copy-pasting the school's postal address. She couldn't select the text, couldn't copy the text, and the content would blur itself right in front of her eyes. "I can understand the need for this," she said, "but it’s just like annoying as am visiting the school for work." Counterpoint: I can't understand the need for this.…

Donny posted a good reponse to my luxury localism thing.

Finished reading: Tuesdays with Morrie : an old man, a young man, and life’s greatest lesson by Mitch Albom 📚 I enjoyed Tuesdays with Morrie. It felt like a healthy dose of memento mori. I hope to be as graceful as the subject, Morrie, when I encounter challenging circumstances in my life. I didn’t have a lot of notes, or even quotes, from this book, but one thing that stood out to me was how Morrie responded when asked by the author what he would do if he had one full, healthy day. By this…

Thanks to Reader M for sending us this meditation on “doing nothing.” It’s significant because it was written by David Allen, someone who has devoted a career to encouraging productivity in others. He’s the guy behind Getting Things Done or GTD: All this fuss and bother about personal organization and information management and knowledge work and AI and the increasing stress levels of our culture. It’s enough to… what? How about pruning my Japanese maple this afternoon, with a fabulous bottle…

I see in your resume that your previous job was with the army… and then there is this twenty-eight year gap. Can you explain that? Oh, I took a walk. ~ Link: ‘Some Things Are Worth Dying For’: Karl Bushby’s Incredible 28-Year Walk Home, Through Deserts, Kidnappers and Polar Bears, by Simon Hattenstone, The Guardian

Later this month I will be taking part in a group exhibition called Formations at Regency Town House on Brunswick Square, Hove from Weds 21 Oct to Sun 25 October as part of the Photo Fringe festival. The other artists included are Lucy Carr-McClave, Brian McClave, Jemma Treweek and Tom Wichelow. I will be showing a selection of medium format photographs from an ongoing series shot along the cliffs between Brighton and Newhaven. Some of the images appeared in the EDGELAND zine. On the Saturday…

There is a particular kind of software announcement I normally scroll past: somebody has rebuilt a large, mature application with AI, the screenshots look convincing, and apparently an entire industry is now over. Somewhere below the announcement, a user discovers that Save does not save. ArtCraft’s Crafting Apps initially looked like they might belong in that category. The project describes attempts to rebuild the workflows of Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, Acrobat, After…

The thing about Romeo and Juliet is that it is a true story. It isn't literally true, but it is literary true. We see the same motif repeated throughout all cultures and all times. Caroline Lea (writing as Caroline Finch) asks an important question - what if every pair of star-cross'd lovers were reincarnations of the original Verona duo? The essence of tragedy is that the end is unavoidable. You've probably watched Romeo sup poison a hundred times. It is inevitable that Juliet will take her…

In episode 2.011 of Twin Peaks, Lana Budding and Dougie Milford tie the knot during a small ceremony held at The Great Northern Hotel. The newlyweds then held a reception complete with dancing and cake. When filming took place in late October 1990, Unit Publicist Paula K. Shimatsu-u was on hand to capture some shots of... The post Twin Peaks Publicity – Milford Wedding Reception by Paula K. Shimatsu-u appeared first on TWIN PEAKS BLOG.

As promised in my last post, I’m here to talk about the 1790 Keonehelelei eruption of Kilauea. “The falling sands.” This is an article that has been developing for quite some time now. The 1790 eruption is, after all, a lot of things at the same time. The most obvious and no less important is…

From chinese period of my life (a visit to China pt.1) by Spencer Chang:I can’t imagine giving up my frictionful everyday human encounters. The inconvenience is the cost we pay to encounter each other, to stumble onto a new discovery, to expand our ways of seeing. These kinds of things can’t be engineered.The post is about the lack of friction in everyday China, but it could equally as well be about the lack of friction when we us AI to answer all our everyday questions.

Another day another troubling story of AI spending and debt. What's notable about this post from Jared Bernstein and Ryan Cummings is how remarkably close expert opinions are when it comes to the size of the hole.In an analysis released last month, we estimated that the big-spending hyperscalers need $13-$18 trillion in revenues over the next 10 years to justify their AI-infrastructure investments.This is, by definition, speculative work, requiring judgment calls on technical aspects of the…

featuring and produced by Sufjan Stevens. No big deal.

Years ago, I wrote a post asking whether wine could be sexy. I considered alcohol and wine as an aphrodisiac. Wine as a romantic symbol. I even considered the convenient fact that a bottle of wine, unlike a whisky bottle, is just the right amount for two people. But the argument eventually wandered somewhere more interesting. What wine shares with erotic experience has to do with the kind of attention we pay in each case. Desire makes us notice things we would otherwise miss. A glance held for…

This morning I woke up feeling a bit tired. It didn’t help meters that I woke up not too long after 3 o’clock. Even being tired though I felt pretty okay. I was eager to get to my bench press later in the morning. While I was drinking my coffee I started working on setting up a light color scheme for this website too so set it up with both prefers-color-scheme and light-dark() in the style sheets to let the browsers choose people’s preference. With my vision I prefer dark, but I know a lot of…

Paul Abbott joins Tim Worthington for a chat about Peggy Carter mumbling behind a glass door only this time it's in 'InfinityVision' in Avengers: Endgame Encore.

I loved reading this book. Wendell Berry puts words to many of the opinions that I’ve held for a long time but have often struggled to articulate: the importance of local community and the issues with scale; the ugliness of an economy based on competition; the silliness of expecting the free market to fix our society’s ills; the questionable value of supposed technological progress; the appeal of a home economy; the necessity of living one’s own values. Berry’s view of the world is solidly…

from First Essay on Interest Not usury, but interest. The cup slowed in mid-raise,the short whistle, hum, the little forwards shiftmark out intake of that non-physical breath which the lungs mimic sharply, to cancel the gap in pressureleft by our self vanishing into its own alert –A blink returns us to self, that intimate demeanor self-repairing as a bow-wave…. by Les Murray. The poem is from his 1983 collection The People’s Otherworld.This book contains a great many treasures, like Bent Water…

“What do we lose if LLMs kill the journal system? Nothing but some heavy ass chains, and a few weak heuristics for assessing CVs quickly that were never worth the outrageous amounts of time and labour the journal system wasted anyway.” . That’s Jonathan Weisberg (Toronto), who knows a little bit more than the average philosopher about the journal system, having co-founded Ergo. With AI and “a little human guidance,” he says, you can crank out the kind of papers that make up 95% of what we…

I underestimated the amount of colds my kid starting high school would bring home.

Things are getting worse for me with my breathing issues. Leaving the shop and coming up stairs is exhausting for me. It now takes me about 15 minutes before I fully catch my breath and stop coughing. I'm learning to work around it by moving as slow as a glacier. That helps because if I do my normal balls to the wall walk I cough for a bazillion hours and get short of breath. So I've been carefully planning before I go to the shop (going down is problem free still). I try to stay as long as I…

From “Listen Lord: A Prayer” by James Weldon Johnson. The book in its entirety is online here And now, O Lord – When I’ve done drunk my last cup of sorrow – When I’ve been called everything but a child of God – When I’m done travelling up the rough side of the mountain – O – Mary’s Baby – When I start down the steep and slippery steps of death – When this old world begins to rock beneath my feet – Lower me to my dusty grave in peace To wait for that great gittin' up morning – Amen.

Ben Nadel demonstrates how to return a struct literal from a one-line closure in ColdFusion without confusing the CFML parser....

Been off for a few days. Went to a birthday party at the weekend, at a pub I haven’t set foot in for almost forty years. Partway down the Little Wakering Road. Go allll the way down that road and you’re into Barling Magna, where I lived with a girl for a year. We used to go to this pub for lunch at the weekends. ACCESSIONS: Ordered a bunch of magazines from the excellent MagCulture that arrived yesterday. I do appreciate a thoughtful bit of packaging. MONOCLE is there because I haven’t read an…

Canning Bridge2026 October 13 (Tuesday), 7:04PM ← Previous My main RSS news feed: https://samwilson.id.au/news.rss(or Wikimedia.rss, Fremantle.rss, OpenStreetMap.rss, etc. for topic feeds). Email me at sam@samwilson.id.au or leave a comment below…

This series ends here – neither with a bang nor a whimper – at the end of the sequence of construction photos. As of the last post, construction at the St. Regis Hotel, temporarily called “the Astor Building,” had proceeded at the end of March 1902 as far as the topping out of the structure and enclosure of the main facades, up to the bottom of the mansard roof. April 10, 1902: The facade below the mansard roof looks done, except for the boarded-up windows. There’s a fine collection of small…

Smithfield, Virginia. (click to enlarge)It’s that time of the year. A ‘gourdzilla’ porch!Join me over at my website, www.dennismook.com . Thanks for looking. Enjoy! Dennis A. Mook All content on this blog is © 2013-2026 Dennis A. Mook. All Rights Reserved. Feel free to point to this blog from your website with full attribution. Permission may be granted for commercial use. Please contact Mr. Mook to discuss permission to reproduce the blog posts and/or images.

Sci-Fi Entertainment From 1998 to 1999, the Sci-Fi Channel aired Sci-Fi Entertainment, basically the Entertainment Tonight of science fiction. Hosted by Chase Masterson (everybody's favorite Dabo girl from Deep Space Nine) alongside Scott Mantz moviemantz.com, it was a pretty neat show and the kind I'd definitely watch today. It featured interviews and segments with various sci-fi celebrities, plus the standard publicity junket clips for upcoming movies and TV shows. This particular episode…