Up The Vote is a free short "clicker" / idle / incremental game about increasing young voter enrollment in Aotearoa New Zealand for the upcoming 2026 election. It takes about 0-10 minutes to play on your phone or computer.Note that the game gets more difficult as the real-life October 25th NZ voter enrollment deadline approaches. You'll start with less time, or even fail instantly if you play after the deadline. Just like in the real-life game known as democracy.This post details my…

Last weekend, we held our big annual conference, The Curve. For the second year running, we’re publishing a guest post by Eli Pariser, sharing his observations and reflections. Eli does a terrific job of capturing the experience of this unique event. Much of the talk this year was about the risks and challenges that lie ahead – I came away sobered by how much work there is to be done, but heartened by a widespread readiness to meet the moment.Eli is author of The Filter Bubble and Co-Director…

What the fuck are you doing?

There is apparently increasingly appetite for exploring, how we might use LLMs for research on human behavior, where we would have otherwise interacted with humans instead. Researchers in the behavioral sciences have proposed that in some cases, human participants can be replaced by AI surrogates in the form of large language models (LLMs). The cost savings are potentially enormous. One study reported that using AI surrogates for exploratory research cost a mere $2,125, compared to an estimated…

Acorn 8.7 is out, and it’s got some fun new features, many of which have been requested for years. Two new brush types: Repair and “Synth Fill”, which let you brush away unwanted objects in your photos. The Repair tool uses Metal kernels to quickly look around the area that needs to be touched up, and fills in using similar pixels to what it finds. Repair is kind of like a super clone tool. The Synth Fill tool uses ML to do a deeper dive into the image to figure out what it can synthetically…

!NEWEST!Kirkus Review review just in:A hymn to a musical heyday.In his introduction, Reynolds writes that this book is about “the last great phase of analogue music culture before the internet, filesharing, YouTube and, eventually, streaming and social media changed the way things worked”—in other words, before things went to crap for rock music. Reynolds, an English-born, stateside

Last ten years life has been pretty busy. Packed daily schedules with activities planned from the wake of dawn till the crack of the night sky. I have produced great results and achieved very cool things but also it feels like life has just flown by. It feels like my youth years are already up and another few years and I will be looking at old age. I guess there is nothing wrong with life in the fast lane, I definitely prefer this over a boring life where I have no purpose and nothing to do.…

Its the Ballon D’or 2026 week and the fresh news is that an English Player is the 2026 Mens Ballon D’or Winner. Harry Kane did it! Whoever watches football knows that Harry’s journey to this day has been one of the most extra ordinary stories in football. From being rejected from the Arsenal academy to then joining the Tottenham Academy. Then being loaned to several other clubs before finally being a mainstay in the Tottenham first team. Which finally culminated in a blockbuster move to Bayern…

I watch you and see no warning an explosion out of the blue did I cause it I must have I must have, unknowingly you give no answers I'm left in the dark I close the door sit in the dark and you don't follow

A few people have asked how I’m coding with AI at the moment, so here’s a quick rundown of my setup, with links to everything in case you want to copy it. The short version is that I run Windows on the outside because I like to play games after work, and Linux on the inside because Claude Code is much happier there. Everything I work on lives in one projects folder. Step 1: WSL 2 (Linux inside Windows) WSL 2 lets you run a proper Linux kernel inside Windows, so there’s no dual booting and your…

View from Cariboo Dam, pre-run: Back to calm, but also cool. I knew the trail would be busier because of the Thanksgiving holiday and sunny weather, but at one point I was jogging in place because the trail had become so clogged with people in both directions that I couldn’t even pass. It was a little annoying. There was also someone with a bike–but he was actually walking it! Both weird and nice. As for the run, when I wasn’t dodging half a dozen people on one of the boardwalks, it went pretty…

I thought that since I'd already done a Fokker Dr1 triplane, converting it into a Fokker D-VI wouldn't be all that much trouble.And for once I was right.The D-VI was a transitional type between the Dr1 and the D-VII, and essentially consisted of a Dr1 fuselage married to a smaller D-VII-type wing structure.It went into limited service in April–September 1918, but its Oberursel rotary engine was no longer up to the task of competing with newer Entente aircraft, and lack of castor oil and the…

Jonathon Green takes justifiable pride in his accomplishments: Green’s Dictionary of Slang (GDoS) was launched online on 12 October 2016. I cannot say that this made much of a splash beyond a minuscule and immediate few.¹ The print edition had been published six years earlier, and had I not called in every figurative debt I could find so as to obtain its reviews (and why not thank once more those who conjured up so many kind words in its favour), would have slipped on stage virtually unseen. As…

📵 Doh that Apple MacBook’s Voice Isolation actually removed the drum sticks! For future vlogs I’ll actually use the Tula mic.. which I rebought for recording new podcast I’m seeking tech critic guests for, as you’ll see in my latest Article

22:20 - This is addicting. Onto the second coaster. I wanna do my own projects now!

Randal Brandt of the Bancroft Library popped in the image above — he’s at the podium giving a talk for Cal’s Homecoming events on Saturday October 10. On the screen behind him you’ll see the cover of the 1982 edition of the Dashiell Hammett Tour book. “My Homecoming talk (the space was HUGE!) went well. Here’s a shot from the event, with the slide from the Origin Story section.” As I say in an intro to the essay “Collecting San Francisco Mysteries” as featured in Death Lit: Near the end of the…

The first three posts in this series introduced Frml, then explained how it checks simplar scalar code and contracts between functions. This post shows how Frml handles while loops with invariants and termination measures. What It Does Here’s a minimal program with a loop: fn main() -> Int { let i: Int = 0; while i < 3 invariant 0 <= i invariant i <= 3 decreases 3 - i { i = i + 1; } return i; } The loop type checker adds one visitor to the existing code called visit_StmtWhile, and the loop…

There are times that you're away from your machine - or you've got so many terminal sessions you've not seen a notification - to say that your agent is waiting for input. Although there are ways to get first-class support for this - for instance Claude Code's Remote Control (which only works if using a Claude Code subscription, i.e. Bedrock users don't get access to it) - I wanted to write a tiny bit of Go code today, and thought I'd hand-roll some notifications. Given the Notification hook,…

We gathered in the print shop today with niece A. and sister-in-law K. to make some pink paper. The pulp is simply recycled paper shredder tailings, mixed with water, coloured with acrylic paint in a household blender. The hanging-on-J-cloth method was Lisa’s idea.

In the early 2000s, a bunch of young professionals, including myself, found an Elks Lodge in the middle of Austin. And I mean right in the middle. We overran it as the future, and probably in a tale as old as time, everyone was excited to have us until they weren’t. The most important part about this lodge is that it had a bar. And it was self-serve. Probably overpaid, looking back, but pouring yourself your own pitcher and then sitting down was really delightful. We met a lot of colorful…

Ben Nadel demonstrates how to use "findAll" to disable multiple form buttons during the submission process in HTMX 4....

I had last week off from work because I needed some downtime. My other half was in Georgia (the country) with friends, and I decided that I would take the time off too. Not to go anywhere, but to spend time relaxing around the house. Maybe go visit some things. Sunday As I mentioned in my last blog, I had purchased a 3D printer; specifically a Creality SPARKX i7. For a while I have wanted to make giant candy canes for the garden over Christmas, and this year we are going ‘gingerbread house’…

Prepping for tile. So much prep…

A quick recap of the forecast vs real-world evolution of El Niño 2026 thus far An El Niño event officially developed in the tropical Pacific Ocean earlier this summer, and it has strengthened almost continually since that point. In fact, as of mid-October, the 2026 El Niño event has already become the strongest on record […] The post El Niño, already near/at record intensity, will further strengthen to historic level and likely bring major California & SW U.S. winter impacts first appeared on…

DerbyCon · Louisville, KY · 2017 · 20 min Player blocked? Watch it on YouTube. Burp is the tool most of us live in for web testing, but a lot of people never touch the Extender tab. This talk was my pitch for changing that: if you keep doing the same check by hand, Burp will let you write it once and have the scanner do it for you. What I covered Where extensions come from. The BApp Store, what the Pro-only flag means, and how to load your own JAR or script through Extender (and where its…

CircleCityCon · Indianapolis, IN · 2015 · 17 min Player blocked? Watch it on YouTube. The tagline on the first slide was “It’s not just for Python,” and that was the whole point. Python gets all the attention in security tooling, but a lot of the tools we use every day are written in Ruby, and the language is a good fit for the work. Why Ruby works for security It reads easily. empty?, times, each: you can hand a Ruby script to someone who doesn’t write Ruby and they’ll follow it. Batteries…

Canadian poet and writer Anne Carson has been awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature. I’m not the biggest fan of poetry, but poets, particularly Evelyn Araluen, have been doing well in some of the literary awards in recent years, which is certainly a boost for the craft.

We went on a short holiday this week to Hafan y Mor in North Wales. It always feels like a special place to us whenever we visit and we have a great time whatever the weather. This weekend we were super lucky and the rain stayed away for most of it (but not all!). We spent our time swimming, walking, and playing games together. All in all, it was a fanastic break from work. To top it off, on the way home we stopped at Pistyll Rhaeadr for a mooch about to break up the drive. You may recognise…

At the start of the month, developers at Capcom—the team behind one of my favorite video game engines—gave a talk about RE Engine's future. News began to swirl about slides, statements, and translations revolving around AI. Satoshi Ishida laid the foundation for what this new "RE neXt ENGINE," aka REX, is setting out to address. Here is Eurogamer's reporting on the talk, which was in Japanese and originally reported on gamebiz.jp: "Ishida pointed to three challenges driving the REX Project –…