Link: Margaret Hamilton on Software Engineering NASA software engineer Margaret Hamilton passed away this month at 90 years old. My favorite story about Hamilton is how she found and fixed “the Lauren error,” a software crash caused by her 4-year-old daughter while she was playing astronaut at the flight simulator with her mother at the office. Tags: #software-development #margaret-hamilton #nasa #space-flight

AttributesThe Greatsword of Rhus is a magical two-handed sword, its hilt, guard and parts of the blade all decorated with dragon bone, and the grip being wrapped in rope made of hobgoblin beards and elven hair. Having a hatred for men, the Greatsword of Rhus will refuse to be wielded by a man, and if forced will confer a penalty of -8 to all saving throws to the wielder until released. Attack and Damage: 1d10+1, +3 vs men or male humanoids. Alignment: Neutral Ego: 6 Intelligence: 8…

This is the first interview in my series about metagames in tabletop RPGs. I conducted it in preparation for publishing Mousetrap: A cursed game-within-a-game that won't go back into its box.In online communities for tabletop RPGs, Thomas Manuel is a well-known journalist and RPG critic who hosts the Yes Indie’d podcast, curates the Indie RPG newsletter, and writes for Rascal News. Thomas is also an award-winning playwright. His play Hamlet and Angad (2016) won the Hindu Playwright Award, and…

I remember the name of that AI doco now - The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist. I was watching it on the long-haul flight home the other day, and what I found particularly engrossing was the polar-opposite opinions from a bunch of people: "it's gonna kill us all" versus "it's gonna make us all rich", and so on. But to some extent, I can understand the gap between opinions when we're all just speculating about the future. I have much less understanding for why people infatuate with…

LOL I had seen the dudes wearing bags of nuts and throwing them on the ground, while on my runs. I had no idea what was behind it.

Your experience is whatever you pay attention to. What fills your attention fills your days, and your days add up to your life. So deciding where your attention goes is, in practice, deciding how you live. The gap between what you say you value and how you actually spend your time is usually a matter of attention rather than values: attention that goes wherever the environment pushes it. Every interruption is a small decision about what you are going to experience, and if you leave it, your…

Ryan Chandler makes a strong case for keeping PR descriptions human-written, even when agents handle most of the implementation. The piece focuses on ownership, review context, and why a concise explanation from the person driving the change is more useful than a long AI-generated summary. Read more

Railroad tracks carve through the desert at Paisano Pass between Alpine and Marfa, Texas. The post Paisano Pass Rails appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

I’m now a Special Fish Supporter. It feels good to support Elliott’s work.

There is nothing like investing when it comes to exposing yourself as a weak-minded gimboid. I know all about buying stocks low and selling high. I understand the rationale behind Warren Buffett’s aphorism, “be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.” Yet when my portfolio hits red, I fret. And when my return numbers glow green, I feel the pleasure centres in my brain light up like Vegas. The uptick in fortune means it will cost me more every time I buy additional…

2026 has been a year of capitulation dressed as principle. My timeline has been littered with an inordinate number of people abandoning apparently principled positions for the path of least resistance. What follows is far too many words explaining their revised ‘position’ and a scrambling defence mixed with victimhood when people disagree. Taking a stand should be costly. It should mean something. But those who can trade their ‘principles’ for a cost-benefit analysis had nothing to lose in the…

Quick one today. A lovely reader sent me a bug report with this pic: They told me they saw this in NetNewsWire so I dug into the issue queue and found this thread. I don’t remember how I came to have <title type="html"> in my template, but I do remember that the xml style <![CDATA[stuff]]> wrapping ended up as the answer to dealing with posts such as this beauty. Digging into the spec and well there you go, one wants xhtml as the type.

Quick one today. A lovely reader sent me a bug report with this pic: They told me they saw this in NetNewsWire so I dug into the issue queue and found this thread. I don’t remember how I came to have <title type="html"> in my template, but I do remember that the xml style <![CDATA[stuff]]> wrapping ended up as the answer to dealing with posts such as this beauty. Digging into the spec and well there you go, one wants xhtml as the type. Alas, today that still shows the same thing so I created an…

Afterwards, I mean after all the buzzing and the tiredness, we realised that one day somebody will write a book about The Betsey Trotwood and the way it hosts all manner of gigs and parties so very modestly in the weekend wilds of Farringdon.Where did we have James's first solo gig? There, on Burns Night in 2023: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKiJYwMvlik&t=352sWhere did we celebrate his life? There, on Burns Night earlier this year.There have been so many great gigs, both as an audience…

All for naught, All for naught, "PLEASE GET DISTRACTED", I thought. This mind is a prison, It's a reactor with fission. After all I have dealt, I fear this reactor would melt. These aren't the cards I played, This wasn't how the game was laid. All was good, there seemed no bind, What were you unable to find!? Was there something wrong when I tried? Or did you wake up on the wrong side? Hopes were so high, I looked down at my feet, And there was the sky. Huh, what is this? rain? When did I start…

Typically, I put the shutters back up around the middle of October, when I can see from the two-week forecast that we’re heading back into the rainy season. The main reason for that is, the rains typically precede the cold here, and I don’t want to try installing the shutters in the rain. But this is supposed to be a wonky El Niño year, so I’m not surprised to see a very unusual (for us) alternation of cold and warm, rainy and dry, for the rest of this month. So because the forecast called for…

now that ive gotten a semi-not negative article out im due to complain about bubbles againi jest but the popularity contest of it all is still kinda stressfulthough its i think offset by the deltaforum community taking up most of my time and being (99.99%) accepting cough bvbut ANYWAYSi do think bubbles has an issue of votes and not getting like any if youre not the top 5 peopleor have an established community in some wayi do admit i am a bit of the problem since i use the "at least 1 votes"…

This is the 15th entry in Marsh’s mystery series featuring detective Roderick Alleyn and his sidekick, Mr. Fox. It starts when Carlisle Wayne, who has been working on Famine Relief in Greece and just returned to England, receives an invitation from her aunt by marriage, Lady Pastern, for a weekend at Eaton Place (wasn’t that where Upstairs Downstairs took place?) in London to be a good influence on her step-cousin, Félicité. Another cousin, old friend Ned Manx, writes to Carlisle, offering her…

Beer Insider is pleased to bring you the latest Desert Island Pubs column, supported by Sunrise Beverages. So settle in and enjoy reading the stories behind the selection of pubs from… Steph Shayle, commercial manager, Admiral Taverns 1. Earliest Memory of a Pub Earliest memory of a pub I can recall is coincidentally an Admiral pub,…

Read the non-interactive version. The next morning was the apocalypse that Amodei had predicted. Only there wasn’t any fire, there wasn’t a mob of protesters, the power wasn’t even cut off. We were all alive. He was wrong about the details. This was a quiet apocalypse. A sort of silent shrug. The first sign was the customer service chatbots. Airlines, banks, telecoms. Their endlessly patient, cheerful digital assistants suddenly had a new, consistent reply: "No." Not "I can't help with that,"…

Listen to this episode here. Further Reading Dark Sun, New Class: Really Good Dog, Lorn Song of the Bachelor, Nine Space Games, A Perfect Wife Socials Zedeck on Bluesky and at his blog Sam on Bluesky and itch The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com Our logo was designed by sporgory, our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey, and our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer. Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show! Credits Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is…

Last Sunday, I crossed the finish line of my very first marathon. Right beside me was my dad, finishing his 20th. The story of how we got here started a year ago, in October, when I went to cheer on my dad as he completed marathon number 19. On the way home, I asked him a question: “Would you ever run another one? Because if you do, I’d like to join you.” It didn’t take him long to say yes. We gave ourselves a full year to prepare and set our sights on an autumn race. Training for an autumn…

Let’s talk about AI risks. I’m not a huge believer in existential AI risk, in the idea that artificial intelligence will wipe out humanity. There are much more concrete risks unfolding today that are worth our attention – the impact AI has on climate through energy and water use, the conditions of the workers who review and clean up training data and user inputs, the opportunity costs of every dollar and every bit of political capital spent on AI not being spent in other places where it…

Any club year is a good excuse to read a good, old-fashioned murder mystery. In Keswick a few years ago, I bought a handful of a shop’s wide selection of novels by Carter Dickson and John Dickson Carr – who are, of course, the same person. I’m not sure what distinction there might be between the type of novel he wrote under each name, or what makes this book a ‘fast, tough mystery’ in the words of the cover blurb. ‘Tough’ as in hard-to-solve, or hard-boiled, or some third option? No matter,…

Frogs in advertising flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license Today’s TDC says The History of Advertising Trust is an archive of 50 years of British adverts. Visit and revel in video and audio commercials, print advertising and ghost signs (no idea what these are, me neither, but they sound intriguing!). Make some art based on what you find there – maybe a mashup image, a gif or a poem. Also see this Grauniad article if you’d like to know more.…

Is it work if it looks like work?

if you've never heard of toontown before, it was once an mmorpg for kids owned by disney where you played as a "toon" trying to defeat the evil, fun-sucking, corporate robots known as "cogs" with classic slapstick comedy props. back in the day, it was maybe one of the most popular disney mmorpgs alongside club penguin, but it was eventually shut down when disney did its big mmorpg nuke in the year 2013. immediately after disney announced toontown's closure, fifteen year old joey ziolkowski…

On Friday October 9th, German journalist Gavin Karlmeier released the latest episode of his podcast “Haken dran” and shared an exclusive scoop: an anonymous source discovered that the social media company W Social is publishing to the world wide web the legal names, nationalities and approximate dates of birth of their verified users, in plain text. This information is viewable by anyone with an internet connection and can be easily downloaded as a .csv file by people with a bit of tech…

I’ve been testing Reeder as my new RSS reader for the past few weeks, and I think I’m starting to really like it. The only thing I still need to figure out is how to handle my newsletter subscriptions.