I'm too tired to write, but, also, I spent most of my words on my bigger projects today. I think that's a win. 🌲 gonna night 🌼 go night 🌱 touch night 🌳 grass night 🌷 now night PS: I'm rebooting DMail (or something like it). If you want to be part of history, drop your email address here: combatdavey.substack.com Be good to yourself. If you enjoyed this post, click the little up arrow chevron thinger below the tags to help it rank in Bear's Discovery feed and maybe consider sharing it with a…

As mentioned yesterday, I’m going to attempt to finish my novel Road Closed, which sits at around 83,000 words, 20 or so chapters and is an unfinished mess. Every day I will update what I’ve done, even if it’s nothing. The initial updates will be a bit more than nothing, but mostly about planning and organization, two things I can be very bad at. It’s going to be fun. My first task is to choose what tool to write with. As I haven’t written fiction in quite a while, I don’t have a go-to piece of…

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Well, not literally. I’m not sure I would want a living, sentient treadmill. But due to our patio being unavailable because of ongoing construction on the property, I’ve had my trusty treadmill in the folded-up position, to allow stuff to be stored in the office. And yes, I have a treadmill in the office, it’s right behind me as I type this! But as of tonight, most of the extra stuff has been moved out and the rest has been shuffled about to make room for the treadmill to assume its normal…

This week I made gnocchi, planted garlic, harvested carrots and cut down perfectly good flowers. I also learned I can't be trusted to babysit garlic for any length of time. The Potato Trials I made mashed potatoes for dinner specifically so I could have on purpose leftovers to make gnocchi the next day, because the...Read More

Andy Warhol, VIP Ticket — Studio 54, 1978, synthetic polymer and silkscreen ink on canvas, 8 x 14 in., photographed at NYPL by @cmonstah Los Angelena and greg.org hero Carolina Miranda just posted a Friday night signoff: the Studio 54 drink ticket painting Warhol gave to Truman Capote in 1978. The painting went to the New York Public Library as part of Capote’s archive in 1984, and because it’s archive, not art, it’s not catalogued with basic information like the dimensions. I measured it; it…

Last week I finally had surgery after almost three months of effort to get myself fixed. It went very well, better than anticipated actually, and ten days later, my recovery is progressing nicely. The first few days, though, were more challenging than I expected. Pain meds helped a lot, save for the expected adverse side effects. But I survived and am feeling much closer to normal again. I think I might appreciate ‘normal’ a bit better than before. I still have steristrips on my incision and…

So many dead fish and a dead chicken. Larian sure love making disgusting environments hunh. And everybody here is racist against lizards, feels just like being back in Skyrim. We went into Driftwood today and didn't get much accomplished, but did get up to Level 10 through quite a bit of quest EXP. First step in town is of course to talk to all the vendors and mark on the map which ones sell which skill books. Then talk to some kids whose friend swam out into the sea. Found a different adult…

We have a squad of javelina that like to visit in the morning hours. I often encounter them during my morning walks; they mostly keep to themselves as long as I give them their space. Once in a great while they’ll be roaming around in the afternoon and I’ve also heard them out in the yard under the cover from darkness from time to time. Earlier this week they were passing through and stopped by along a neighbor’s driveway for a snack.

Happy Saturday, everyone! After three weeks on vacation in Japan and the Philippines, the Global Nerdy Saturday “picdump” is back! Here’s the return of the weekly assortment of amusing or interesting work- and tech-related pictures, comics, and memes I found over the past couple of weeks. Share and enjoy! Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot The post Saturday picdump for Saturday, November 7 appeared first on Global Nerdy.

Woman in the Arena – New York, New York I made several portraits of this woman singing in a subway station. I don’t remember her actual performance, but that’s not the important part. I have great respect for people willing to put themselves out there in public. There is a famous quote by Theodore Roosevelt. The key passage says: It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to…

WPR’s “Chapter a Day” show consists of a book read aloud daily over the radio. I came across it while driving nearly a year ago, and spent some time listening to Truck: A Love Story, chapter 5. I was intrigued and followed up online. From the WPR webpage: Started in 1931, “Chapter a Day” is WPR’s longest-running program. Jim Fleming, Norman Gilliland, Michele Good, Melvin Hinton, Baron Kelly and Susan Sweeney read a chapter from a book for a half hour each weekday. Genres are predominately…

The traditional approach for automating Ruby gem releases is to use release-gem. It’s super simple. You can also build upon it when you need something beyond the plain rake release, such as updating a CHANGELOG.md, by rolling miles of brittle GitHub Actions YAML and shell script AI slop. Instead, I’ve been asking AI to follow a hand-crafted RELEASING.md. It can run tests, date CHANGELOG.md, ask me for a RubyGems OTP, make the release, increment the version of the next developer iteration. This…

Good posts on AI 2026-11-07T03:39:00+00:00, by Emma Humphries, from Infinite Wishes 🏳️‍⚧️🚀 I got yelled at in DMs on Fedi for being “reactionary,” so I’m going to try to divert some of my disgust with the LLM and GenAI crowd into a periodic list of good posts (and articles) on the subject. First, via Alex Russell, we have a new term for digital onanism: Grok Waifu. Can scientists reliably tell if a novel is written using AI?, Nature An interview with Tuhin Chakrabarty, a professor of computer…

Speaker to Regression Models 2026-11-07T03:38:00+00:00, by Emma Humphries, from Infinite Wishes 🏳️‍⚧️🚀 When Charlie Warzel wrote “Talking to AI Might Be the Most Important Skill of This Century,” that would make sense if he was writing a story set in P. Djèlí Clark’s “A Dead Djinn of Cairo” universe. The Egypt of that world has a government agency that tries to keep foolish mortals from getting killed when making a wish. This is not that world. What people refer to as ‘AI’ is not aware, nor is…

Credit: Naomi Castro. All hail Woke 3. Why are you in my home?Seriously. Go all the way back to first principles here. Do you think I’m under the delusion that the adorable schmucks I happen to be friends with are actors and storytellers of the highest caliber? When you were a kid playing at recess, did you have high expectations for your classmates? There was a floor of behavior you expected them to meet - don't hit me, don't lie to me, follow the rules - the classics. But once that do-no-harm…

Death mask, a wax or plaster cast of a mold taken from the face of a dead individual. Death masks are true portraits, although changes are occasionally made in the eyes of the mask to make it appear as though the subject were alive. From the time of ancient Egypt they have served as aids to portrait sculptors, and for the last few centuries they have been kept as mementos of the dead. - the Encyclopedia Britannica. This is a sort-of hack of Vampire: the Masquerade. I say "sort-of" because I'm…

I made predictions leading up to the July and September grand sumo tournaments. Before July’s Nagoya Basho I made picks for wrestlers who would notch 10 wins (I did so-so). For September’s Aki Basho, I predicted the records of every wrestler (again, so-so). I had wanted to take another stab at predicting the field before the Kyushu Basho, which starts tomorrow, but I did not have time to sit down and work my way to the field with that level of detail. Instead, I will make ten general…

How do you define success in life? Well, let’s be honest. At some point, most of us had much bigger plans for ourselves. We were going to accomplish things. Make our mark on the world. Become the sort of people who have interesting things to say at dinner parties. Yeah, we were going to be people who actually went to dinner parties. Maybe even write a book or run a marathon or do something that would make our parents brag about us to their friends. And then life happened. Now I’m just happy if…

My "Abandoned Texas" calendar. There are no C's anymore. The W's are weightlifting, and the K's are karate. The G's are game nights. There used to be C's in the left column. I've had back-to-back bad relationships with C's. Part of me wonders, was I expecting too much? Miracles, perhaps? I had friendship, and a place to go to hit the cosmic Reset button. Why wasn't that enough? It wasn't enough for the same reason that a marriage to a warm body that pitches in with the bills isn't enough. I…

This may have been my laziest Looptober so far - I decided to only use my guitars and the granulating synth setup I have on my laptop, and didn't do much actual development, though I did add the ability for a bunch of the granulator's parameters like trigger rate and grain size to be driven by loops at different speeds. I pre-recorded the last week because I was going to be in Melbourne for a conference, so when I got a really bad dose of influenza and couldn't go, I could still post tracks.…

I just deleted all my agent skills after reading Jakob Breu’s (hot) take. I kind of had a gut feeling myself for a long time as models evolve but I didn’t really have the evidence to back it up, so I went looking for it. Some of what I found: SWE-Skills-Bench tested 98 public skills. 92 had no significant effect, and the average pass ratio went from 76.6% to 76.9%. Web development skills made results slightly worse and cost 72% to 394% more tokens. AGENTS.md files fare little better: no general…

Silly and slick.

I love a good time-traveling story, although I don't think time-traveling will ever be possible in this universe except for traveling one-second-per-second into the future. Even if time-traveling is possible, it will probably be very dangerous. Even if you can control the when aspect precisely -- already not an easy task; just search for leap seconds and time zones -- you still don't know where you may end up. You may end up in the middle of an ocean, and drown immediately. You may end up in a…

Physiological sandboxes, or turning your body into software

Give us a bisexual Bachelor, ABC, you cowards! And Kristen Kish as host!