Ennis, Ireland Our bus tour to Cliffs of Moher and Limerick stopped here for lunch. I needed a pick-me-up and found this coffee shop open. It’s a nice space with plenty of seating, good branding, and just down the road from a 13th century friary. I ordered a mocha and it was too hot to drink. It first tasted like steamed milk only. I attempted to stir it up a bit as we walked around the town but it still wasn’t great. I threw it away after only a few sips.

Various parties concerned about the risks that artificial intelligence (AI) pose to humanity have called for a pause in its development. But such a call faces a difficult collective action problem. Can it be solved? I have been skeptical (and suggested an alternate type of approach to AI safety here). But a new report argues that a pause is indeed possible. Drafted by the Working Group on AI Pause Feasibility, an interdisciplinary group led by statistician William Fithian and philosopher Wesley…

im the type of person to quite enjoy forumsyes i know shocking the guy who pays for a domain for his silly site likes forumsand one thing i keep running into that i find so interesting is how tricky image hosting actually istext is incredibly easy to store and retrieve, but images can be millions of times denser for a single pngthe naive solution of just letting users upload opens the door to losing all of your storageand the number one security rule of Dont let people upload arbritrary files…

I have been pondering the Audio Intelligence Live Rewind feature that Apple announced in the last keynote, and even though I know I am very late to this entire discussion, I still want to go on the record about it. In short: The feature is stupid, and was demoed poorly (you can usually just ask people to repeat what they said, and the idea that anyone would prefer using the watch is bonkers) Rather than adding value to the watch, it makes it a target (companies and specific locations are likely…

UnicodeChecker – Explore and convert Unicode (macOS) Mac application to explore Unicode. Analyse and convert Unicode strings for HTML or programming. [ 📌xcession ] Museum of Numbers Open the cabinet of oddly specific numbers Every number here gets treated like a small exhibit label. Some come from mathematics, some from physics, some from the strange edges of computing, and a surprising number come from history, money, or pure coincidence. [ 📌fileformat ]

Rosalind Franklin knew exactly what she had. James Watson’s claim that he’d recognised what Franklin had failed to see in her famous photograph of DNA’s helical structure was taken at face value in part because she’d left no notes about the image. Researchers have now shown that it’s because it was a second photo, taken to correct the centering and contrast of a first—which Franklin had made extensive notes about, and had used “to calculate, for the first time, the length of each turn in the…

Don’t stop the feeling! updated: 12 Oct 2026 created: 24 Aug 2020 Sony MP3 NWZ-B183F Portable Walkman 4GB USB MP3 Player 1 pics pixabay.com/illustrations/hot-tub-high-rise-upper-class-5349481/ pixabay.com/vectors/music-player-mp3-player-walkman-5453006/ ✓ 5 minutes ago ago

Leaf cutter ants with leaves (photo from Wikimedia) 12 October 2026 Next to humans, leaf cutter ants form some of the largest and most complex animal societies on Earth. — Wikipedia Last week on the WINGS birding tour in Veracruz, Mexico we encountered a long line leaf cutter ants carrying leaves to their nest. It is always fascinating to see how they cooperate. Leaf cutter ants near Laguna de Miradores, Ver. MX, 5 Oct 2026 (video by Kate St. John) Rather than eat the leaves, leaf cutter ants…

Carved Birds mounted on a whirligig “thing” and a bizarre handmade birdhouse Folk Art snapshot early 20th century collection Jim Linderman / Dull Tool Dim Bulb

Today is Darcy’s first day at a full time job! She’ll be working at a place that does behavior therapy for autistic children.

Welcome back to the Gridiron Deep Dive everybody, where today, I’m going to be trying something different.I know many of you have been dying for me to make my stuff shorter, because while it takes time to tell a good story, I understand that to read such a long article (it’s not unheard of for a piece of mine to exceed 10000 words) can become very time consuming. Some of you for literal years have been asking for some shorter stuff to read, and today, I’m going to oblige.For those who have been…

Mini-Server, Part 36 Haiku Ironclad Recipe Sewing Entropy Arbitrage, the Code Mastodon Tool Trunk Library Updates Next Today, due in no small part to Suw Charman-Anderson’s organizing that I actually remember, we celebrate Ada Lovelace Day, in turn celebrating one of history’s great weirdos Ada Lovelace. Lord Byron’s only legitimate daughter trained in math from an early age in hopes of staving off her father’s wacky behavior—probably supporting the working classes—Ada grew up fantasizing about…

Today's Daily Cartoon, by Paul Noth.[image or embed]— The New Yorker (@newyorker.com) October 9, 2026 at 2:00 PM Having long been aware of those tech bros who read my work as utopian porn, where they’ve taken that doesn’t exactly surprise me.— William Gibson (@greatdismal.bsky.social) October 8, 2026 at 4:26 PM On a related note, I've recently seen AI believers complain about mechanomorphic thinking.Over a year ago I met an Anthropic employee at a conference and at one point she mentioned that…

The line will break; the line will break, and you will need to answer why. Can you answer why? I came upon an answer once, and it was too true; so I stopped with all the line breaking because it frightened me too much. You should know why the line breaks; you should be able to say why.If you don't know why, then you should face each day, not the page, but the break.

It’s no secret that the Hollywood Comet loves musicals. In 2010, I revealed I had seen 400 movie musicals over the course of eight years. Now that number is over 600. To celebrate and share this musical love, here is … Continue reading →

iron-proxy is an egress proxy to manage traffic for untrusted workloads. It works as a MITM proxy, has a DNS server and can apply an allowlist on MCP tool calls. While trying to sandbox an agent with docker, I added iron-proxy as a container to route all the traffic through it. The idea was to have agent and MCP each in their own containers and isolated networks, both communicating through the proxy. The proxy was the only container having outbound internet access. Either all the workloads had…

A child's 19th century scrapbook of dogs and cats cut from sources from the period, then mounted and painted on paper.Collection Jim Linderman / Dull Tool Dim Bulb

The subconscious plays a great part in art, that is to say that in conceiving & realizing a work a great deal happens which cannot be logically explained–the mind jumps from one stage to another much further on without there being traceable steps shown between – sudden solutions which cannot be followed step by step–in a word–inspiration. —Henry Moore I recently joined fellow photographer David Ulrich for a panel discussion on the topic of the creative process, offered to members of The Nook…

This hue shall pass: Color contrast checker.

I, on the other hand, am waiting to try out my new identity. I am waiting to do things that i have all the time for and none of the money to pay for. I am waiting to find out how much of all the time I have left. ~ Link: The Waiting, by Agnes, Nomad Online

Hello, future Neil! You are probably trying to remember how you blurred part of a video. You blurred the bottom left portion of a circus video, using ffmpeg. You used: ffmpeg -i vid.mp4 -filter_complex "[0:v]crop=440:80:0:370,boxblur=2[mask];[0:v][mask]overlay=0:370[v]" -map "[v]" -map 0:a -c:a copy vid-with-blur.mp4 where: crop=440:80: this is the size of the boxblur, 440px wide, 80px high :0:370: this is the position of the boxblur, starting from left top. i.e. 0 pixels from the left, 370…

I'm lucky enough to know a language professor who talks about heritage languages. How the languages that were spoken in your household become a little easier for you to pick up later, even if you yourself never spoke them because there are bits you absorbed even if you didn't fully understand all the grammar reasons. I was visiting family a had a chance to play mahjong. I took to it immediately and eventually showed up at a library mahjong event where I had the great fortune of being picked up…

This was the last week of the spring school holidays, and we spent the last weekend staying in beautiful Narooma on the NSW south coast. We swam in the ocean and hung out with some seals! I also shipped some code. The larger part of my week was in getting some of the final Dry CLI pieces in place. After last week’s introduction of required options, I did some work on their counterparts, and went in the opposite direction, being strict about how how we handle required arguments, since their…

The Rubin ciphertextEighteen-year-old Paul Emanuel Rubin was a sophomore at New York University, where he studied chemistry. We have contradictory reports about his scholastic success: His father Samuel said that Paul was an excellent student, while a police detective later told reporters that the teenager was doing so poorly at the University that he was in danger of flunking out. (This is one of those cases that is full of contradictory details.) On the morning of Monday, January 19, 1953,…

Before Trump’s 2018 midterms, current Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson wrote “7 Core Principles of Conservatism,” summarizing his “central beliefs.” Johnson’s website brags that many “conservative organizations and lawmaking bodies nationwide have adopted this list as their own,” but it is most relevant today as evidence of how the Republican Party has changed under Donald Trump. Beginning with “Individual Freedom,” Johnson believes conservatives should “always aim to maintain and increase…

This week’s theme: Quintessential Quintets. Highlights from some of the quintessential jazz quintets from the 1950s and 1960s. Think Horace Silver, Art Blakey, Clifford Brown/Max Roach and a few others. Interesting insight during the show related to my father. If you’ve never read it, would recommend the article Song for My Father here at JazzCollector.com. Hard to believe I wrote that nearly 20 years ago. Featured artists on this podcast include Art Blakey, Max Roach, Clifford Brown, Sonny…

By ShanklimbSelf PublishedDomenwoodLevels 2-3 A desperate mother, Brala, approaches the PCs – in a tavern, on the road, etc. When she awoke this morning, her infant was gone. Searching the woods around her cottage, she found tracks of hoof-marks, which she can lead you to. Crookhorns stole her baby, Lilith, and you need to find her before she becomes breakfast! This six page adventure uses three pages to describe ten rooms in a small cave lair. Weirdly incomprehensible in places, there’s no…

In the event that you wake upand find your soul separated from sourceand manifest into material form, don’t panic.Your condition is only temporary. You have been selected for the opportunityof human incarnation. This 3D simulation is designedto break up the monotony of eternityby giving you a fully immersive experienceas a distinct ego identity. Your body will serveas your physical avataras you navigate a dense and dramatic reality.There will be many distractionscausing you to forget your true…

💬 “We seek to preserve peace by fighting a war, or to advance freedom by subsidizing dictatorships, or to ‘win the hearts and minds of the people’ by poisoning their crops and burning their villages and confining them in concentration camps; we seek to uphold the ’truth’ of our cause with lies, or to answer conscientious dissent with threats and slurs and intimidations… I can no longer imagine a war that I would believe to be either useful or necessary. I would be against any war.” – Wendell…

It’s that time of year again – time for the annual Center Stage Jackson musical production. This year: The Wizard of Oz. Jaime stars as Aunt Em and Glinda, while my two girls are in the ensemble, playing Munchkins, flying monkeys, and jitterbugs. Much like the last two years, I offered to take some behind-the-scenes […]