Our series of Halloween one-shots over at the Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque Discord server continued with a session of my own AG3NTS OF CRVCIBLE game--an rpg about playing mystified secret agents who infiltrate dreams. Although these Halloween Month games are one-shots, the players realized that there were connections in this one to the prior week's Call of Cthulhu game.CharactersAgent Hammer, a slab of a woman with a broken noseAgent Darling, a dapper older gentleman with…

The early 1990s brought a new look to Russian streets as the country emerged from decades of Soviet rule and entered an uncertain new era. For young women, fashion became a visible expression of changing times, blending familiar Soviet-era clothing with Western styles that were suddenly becoming more accessible. Denim jackets, leather coats, colorful blouses, […]

Yesterday, I wrote a diary entry on Dreamwidth cataloguing the computers I own after my 2015 MacBook Pro died due to a swollen battery I couldn't afford to repair. While this was meant to be a simple inventory, writing it made me pause and realize that I really have so much, and that I've been under-utilizing both my time and what I own. And I think most of us underestimate what we can do, starting right now, with the things we already have. We tell ourselves that we need the better tool, the…

One dang time, we played For The Queen! THIS dang time, we invited Amy! ENOUGH PREAMBLE. Phase I: Constitutional Monarchy We’re offered three options for Queens by choose-a-number draw, and because Amy is the newest player and she uh, has a type, we have chosen the BATTLE QUEEN (Q19): Phase II: The Reading Of The Rules Phase III: FOR THE FRIGGIN’ QUEEN (Nota bene: for ease of reading, the answer to each question is recorded in the first person perspective of the person who drew the card) Amy:…

This Refurb Weekend is a sequel in two ways. Six years ago I fixed the power supply and case fan in my 68EC030-based Alpha Microsystems Eagle 300, a more modernized and substantially faster Alpha Micro running AMOS, their unique DEC-inspired multiuser operating system. These blue-collar boxes were very common in many vertical markets due to their tightly integrated business-specific software packages, and are especially unusual for running their big-endian 68000-series processors little-endian…

Writing this weeks post on the flight home from Melbourne! I had an insane week meeting with so many cool people and eating soooo much yummy food! We stayed in Brunswick in a bnb that was honestly kinda mediocre, but it was nice stying like ... in a residential area and getting the vibe of the area. I definitely fuck with area hard, incl the surroundings & I defs wanna move there now. Honestly was telling most of the oomfs we met with that this time next year I'd like to be living in Melb. If…

Rhonda and I drove up to New Brunswick yesterday to visit Aaron. The plan was to stop at Stokelan Estates Winery on the ride up, then Dinner with Aaron,, after which we’d retire to a nearby Marriot. Sunday would be some shopping with Aaron before heading back home. I am taking a vacation day tomorrow to take the Sunday Scaries out of robbing some joy from the occasion. Our attempt at sharing a bottle and a flatbread at Stokelan was foiled by other people with the same idea. We stopped there,…

When I posted a piece on the latest failure of the US Navy a while back, I predicted that I wouldn’t be changing any minds. That was one of my safer predictions, confirmed almost immediately by Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns and Money,Farley declined to respond, saying “whatever his other virtues, Dr. Quiggin is not a serious voice on naval questions” . I wasn’t surprised by this. Farley is the epitome of the navalist view that serious expertise on the technology of naval warfare is a crucial…

Mark Gurman, writing two day before Apple’s event this week: The centerpiece is a new smart home hub called the HomeView. Equipped with a display and an A18 chip, the product essentially serves as the Siri command center for an Apple-powered household… The HomeView comes in two versions: a countertop model with a metal speaker base and a wall-mounted version with a flat, square base that sits against the wall beneath the display. The countertop offering will come in four colors: space gray,…

I am running even more behind on prompts, but I will catch up! Here’s Prompt #7, Panic. It’s the trolley problem but with two changes: One of the potential victims is wearing a hat Instead of having a switch control, the man facing the problem has 7 switch controls. Who knows which one, if any, is the right one!

Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please. I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here.

Discover the corrupted land of Sanctuary as it falls into a new era of darkness. Lilith, daughter of Mephisto, Lord of Hatred, has been freed from exile and now her hateful influence threatens to consume the world. Only you and your fellow adventurers stand between Lilith and Sanctuary’s ruin. I’ve written a bit about Diablo II and Diablo III before, but I waited for a while before jumping into the fourth instalment of demon-bashing, because they didn’t bother to release a MacOC version, so I…

Does it look any different? See this post here for the "before" images. Beneath the layout where the two white boxes are sitting is where the "staging cabinet" is going to live. That's a project for this Fall, and one I'm really looking forward to.Decluttering is a skill that, when learned well and practiced regularly, is able to rewrite the brain. The greatest takeaway from this reorganization has been the realization that I deferred way too many decisions. That's the essence of clutter -…

Bryan Caplan recently asked ChatGPT to do a sentiment analysis of his writing alongside Tyler Cowen’s, Robin Hanson’s, and Paul Krugman’s. As I discussed in my guest post on Bryan’s Substack, AI’s agentic modes (such as Claude Cowork and ChatGPT Work) allow for very extensive research - they can gather data, write scripts, and systematically go through sources. While Claude merged Claude Cowork and Chat mode, ChatGPT for now still has separate chat and work modes,.I figured I could redo the…

Welcome to Whole Foods

TLDR: I trained an LLM reasoning agent to play chess, with model sizes 0.8B, 3B and 9B. The agent calls tools which help it keep track of the board state, which enables good performance with a relatively small number of parameters. The demo code is available on Github. Your browser does not support the video tag. Background I became excited about the power of RLVR after the Deepseek R1 paper came out. They demonstrated that through the use of “thinking” tokens, an LLM could solve verifiable…

This is the second time I intentioanlly came to Jim Thorpe, PA. when it was raining. I love the rain, I love that it puts us “all in the same boat.” Some people hate it, but as you can see, I dig it. Running is easy, but running in heavy rain, through flooded trails, on a cold and windy day, well.. that’s hard. But I made it downtown, got a glazed donut and coffee, and ran back to my car. Seven miles total. Was I wet? Totally. Was it uncomfortable? Sure, it’d feel nicer to stay home and watch…

In den letzten paar Jahren haben wir in der öffentlichen Diskussion oft von exponentiellem Wachstum geredet. Bei Covid, beim Startup auf dem Weg zum Weltkonzern, beim Wechsel vom Verbrenner zum Elektroauto, und bei noch vielen anderen Gelegenheiten. In den meisten Fällen ist das aber gar kein exponentielles Wachstum, denn die Welt ist in der Regel endlich und setzt einem solchem exponentiellen Wachstum Grenzen: Menschen, Nahrung, Energie, Rohstoffe, Kunden und deren Geld sorgen dafür, daß eine…

Hello!!! It’s truly fall…… temperature hovering around the mid-60s all week, time to pull out all of my sweaters and layers!! Saw She’s Green (with Smush and Witches Exist opening), sooooo good, love their new album and they played a great variety of stuff (basically playing their new EP in order with 1-2 older songs in between each one) Went to pinball both Wednesday and Thursday, did exactly average at both of them. Finals are up in Maine this season, and even though I didn’t get close to…

Another glimpse into the life of a high-functioning amateur musician. I had some serious jams in the home office this weekend with some old stuff that I love. Just three units, all kind of working together, with the SP-404 as the brain. Hugely gratifying. I played a lot of bass. And with two rehearsals this week and a bass gig, I feel like I’m already pretty well on my way prep-wise. I ended the week with net zero stuff. I always try to unload a few things, but I sold a guitar and bought a…

Yesterday I volunteered at the Rainbow Ridge 20k & 50k Trail Run which took place up the McKenzie River about a two hour drive from home. The runners endured the beautiful trails and worked so hard at this . . . it was impressive. Photos below: I stopped at a boat launch to use a forest service restroom and took this photo. In the distance is remnants of the wildfire from 2020 known as the Holiday Farm Fire. It was huge and caused a lot of damage. Six years on, though, and nature is returning.…

It's been a few months since I last fired up Dragon's Dogma 2. It's always been a game I can come back to. The action is fun, the world is pretty, and while many of the characters and side-stories are vapid, there's some aspects of the world building and story philosophy that are oddly compelling. I returned this weekend for a special occasion: the release of the Dark Arisen DLC. After a few years of silence, Capcom quietly announced the Dark Arisen DLC and, fortunately for me, it released just…

Though three weeks ago I outlined a story of the long-term history of changes to moral authority, I decided to study this in a bit more detail. So I collected this list of 20 candidate sources of moral authority: Activist/interest group, Hereditary elite, Artist/musician/storyteller, Business-leader/employer, Famous, Civic-frat/clubs/assoc, Doctor/therapist, Family/elder, Peer/Community, Govt leader/org, Heart/Conscience, Law, Market prices, News/Media, Public intellectual,…

“Rumah yang gada cicaknya”. ucap wanita yang telah tinggal bersamaku hampir 5 tahun lamanya, saatku bertanya rumah yang menarik untuknya yang modelnya seperti apa. Ya, hewan yang sangat ditakuti olehnya mungkin lebih tepatnya “geli”. Hewan yang selalu membuat kejutan yang muncul ditempat tak terduga, saat membuka pintu kamar mandi dan muncul dari balik engsel pintu yang berkarat.

it's like you're too tired and you have to keep reminding, yourself physically percussive maintenance keep yourself awake it's all pulling you down and even as you write this your eyes droop closed and your breathing slows imagine cold water on my face force my eyes open move my body keep me going other things said dowling Yesterday :: Sunday, 11th October 2026

Between steeper trails, shorter cranks, and an older body I've been looking for bigger single speed cogs. With 160mm cranks I'm already at a 30-22 gear. I wouldn't mind running bigger rings and cogs on both ends to get less tension on the chain and therefore a longer life and better efficiency. Many moons ago I lasercut some 64 BCD spiders that fit an obsolete Shimano spider pattern so you could run tiny 1X setups on wider chainlines than the usual granny position. I don't use them any more…

I upgraded Ubuntu this week. Looking back at my previous operating system upgrades, I see these notes: 2014: Ubuntu 14.04 and grub: I had to get a boot-repair disk image and do emergency repair work with sudo boot-repair to recover from a system that wouldn’t boot. But I was philosophical: “When upgrading a system we must be prepared for possible problems. We cannot expect it to always go smoothly. Even in the face of such technical problems we must try to remain tranquil.” 2018: Ubuntu upgrade…

I’ve noticed this interesting way I use inks recently. When a bottle is full or full ish I use the ink mostly in vacuum and piston fillers. But as it empties out and filling them becomes more difficult, because how where they draw in ink relative to how much ink is left I change to only use it in pens I fill with a syringe.

Who? Oh, just the U.S. Navy's legendary Blue Angels squadron... [ in progress... ]

Would you use AI to change 1 line of code? The other day, I reviewed a PR that solved a bug in a Blazor app. It had only 1 line of code to change a framework setting. Nothing from another world. Until I noticed the commit authors in GitHub: Claude was in there too. I felt like Really?! and closed the browser tab. That explained the property formatted comment on top of the 1-line change. Comment I’d trust even less. If we’re only redirecting anything to a LLM, agent, chat, or whatever, anyone…