Technically, I took this one on Saturday, but it was one minute past midnight so I'm counting it.157 words · 3 images

In the last few years I've seen people struggling to offer some value through the use of AI Agents. Across examples I noticed a common shape in them, and I now know how to articulate my problem with it. By far the worst way to use Agents is to come up with your own custom text box in your website that runs an internal LLM using tools that are opaque to you. You are telling me that I have to give up the convenience of my own setup in ChatGPT/Claude and use your custom harness? The best example…

A practical engineering write-up on moving Pinkary from Laravel Forge to Laravel Cloud. It walks through the real migration issues they hit, including SQLite to MySQL differences, query rewrites, and storage assumptions in the codebase. Read more

What caught my eye this week. Weekend Reading – featuring the week’s best money and investing articles from around the web – can be read by any logged-in Monevator member. Alternatively please subscribe to our free email newsletter to get future editions direct to your inbox. The post Weekend reading: Who wants to see a billionaire? appeared first on Monevator.

Oregon’s Multnomah Falls plunges 190 meters (620 feet) into the Columbia River Gorge. The post At Multnomah Falls appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

Today’s TDC says Celebrate the season wherever you live (Autumn in the northern Hemisphere, Spring in the southern) by getting out in the streets today and photographing the beauty that is the moment. If you’re housebound, turn your camera to the window. Compose your shot. Make it beautiful. It’s very changeable weather here today – one minute bule sky, the next drizzly rain. Here’s my favourite orner of our garden, with Fair Flora (needing repainting!) in front of our ‘orchard corner’. The wee…

It’s Saturday again, so it’s time for another update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published a further eight papers, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 237 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 685. I continue to include the posts made on our Mastodon account (on Fediscience); these announcements also contain a clickable form of the DOI for each paper. Our Mastodon account has regular updates and other announcements from OJAp too,…

On Wednesday, 7 October 2026, I received an email invitation to attend an online interview about Wikidata.In preparation for the interview, I decided to explore Wikidata and get a better grasp of its current state, both in terms of the system itself and the data it contains. Lately, I have been experimenting with building my own Wikibase clone, so I rarely interact with Wikidata.org anymore.First, I visited the homepage.I noticed a nice new addition: the “Related to current events” section. I…

Done!!I finished my first ever knitted object! Mistakes and all, but I think it looks pretty cool :)Here it is pretty much right after I finished it, with a bit of a pointy crown. Quick sidebar, the tippy top of the crown was so so tricky to work on, I didn't really look up how to switch to and rotate double pointed needles, so kinda made it up. There was a point where the opening was so small, that it was impossible to pick up the next stitch. And that is where I gave up and just closed the…

Also available in English as "You're going to die". This is a Dutch graphic novel-style memoir about growing up being the target of Munchausen syndrome by proxy (factitious disorder imposed on another/FDIA). Nina's mother forced her to be sick and took away any chance of a regular childhood by keeping her out of school and constantly pressuring health care professionals to perform invasive medical tests on her. Honestly, both her parents were very abusive and terrifying to read about. This book…

Have you ever tried to explain lobbying to a European? Neither have I. But George Hotz just did the opposite: he explained it to everyone who is not American. Read it. It is short, funny, and devastating. His version goes like this. Corporations and rich people give money to politicians. Not directly, of course: to their campaigns. The politicians then listen to the people who paid them, and pass the laws those people want. It is not a bribe, because a bribe would be illegal. It is a “Super…

Mass surveillance violates fundamental rights, even when it is laundered through fragmented systems, private companies, and regional task forces. – Cris van Pelt To Molest and Rape They usually try to make this sound like the rapist was doing his victims a favor: A [typical and representative] Raleigh [North Carolina cop named]…Tremale Cogdell…[was] charged [last October]…with [several status offenses due to his repeatedly stopping] fe[male motorists and threatening them with criminal charges…

Dublin, Ireland This is a small, local chain of cafes. Butler’s is a brand of Irish chocolates. The wife wanted a hot chocolate so we stopped in to try it. She ordered the dark hot chocolate, I ordered a mocha. You get a free chocolate from their case with each drink too, which was a nice surprise. The mocha was delicious, but the espresso does get lost in the sweet chocolate. We did like it so much we visited a Butler’s almost every other day of the trip.

Pot of gold at the local shops!

I posted the above on Threads, and some folks questioned whether this could actually be true. So let me run you through the math. Granted, some of these numbers are best estimates. Undercounting is probably happening on both sides of the argument. But when you see how outlandishly far apart the outcome is, you’ll realize that the statement is absolutely true. Estimates of the number of illegal immigrants in the United States is roughly 14 million, by Pew, in 2023. Or 16 million by CIS in 2025.…

i’ve been a fan of Lydia Morrow ever since i began knitting so it was cool to be invited to speak on Lydia’s new podcast By Hand – listen to it here ‘We recorded this episode in March 2026 with Gabrielle De La Puente. We talk about the surrealism of disability, writing as a desirous act, and academic gatekeeping.’ the idea was to see where the mind wanders as we spoke to each other and knit, but it turned out I couldn’t multitask for shit so it was only Lydia knitting haha While I’m here, you…

For more than a decade the Clojure REPL most people saw in a terminal was REPLy, the one behind lein repl. It served us well, but it’s showing its age, and I kept wishing for a terminal REPL that felt like CIDER, without the Emacs part. So I finally built one. neorepl 0.1 is out today! Why another REPL? There’s no shortage of Clojure REPLs, so it’s fair to ask. Here’s what I was after: nREPL all the way down. neorepl only speaks nREPL, so it works with anything that runs an nREPL server:…

1940 US CensusMy mother's first cousin Eugene Albert Schwartz (1916-1983) married Dorothy Lewis (1919-1989) on Christmas Day, 1940. Constructing a timeline, I was recently tracing Dorothy, two sisters, and their widowed mother Mildred Weinberg Lewis back from Dorothy's marriage and forward from Dorothy's birth on December 12, 1919. For Dorothy, I had:Bronx birth certificate index (digitized original not yet available on New York City Municipal Archives site)1920 US Census1925 New York State…

It's a scary place to be, when everyone tells you how great you're doing and you can't see the benefits. They are all looking at the same person you are and seeing something you can't, and being told about it again doesn't make it appear.You look in the mirror and nothing seems different, you see the same piece of shit that's always been there. You've made no progress when everyone around you says you have, and every well done that comes in gets held up against that mirror and loses.Then you…

RuboCop 1.92 is out! Last time I talked about the long road to 2.0. This time the theme is more down to earth, and probably closer to how a lot of you use RuboCop today - AI coding agents. These days plenty of RuboCop runs aren’t started by a person at all. Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and friends run it after every batch of edits, read whatever it prints and try to fix what it found. That’s a very different user from the one RuboCop was built for. An agent has endless patience, but everything…

Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #126, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. To follow the series, you can subscribe here. A new NordLetter will land in your inbox every Sunday. Not a fan of newsletters? No problem! You can read previous editions here. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed. You can reach out to me by replying to this mail. I am also posting on Mastodon. One of our close friends turned forty this month. To celebrate, she took a trip to Hong…

Keir and Craig once more did a fantastic job in organising and running Craft & Work 2026 in London. A great day with lots of good conversations. I had the pleasure of capturing the atmosphere and vibe during the event and here is my set of photos. Reply via Email

Freight Elevator (2011)This is fun: Triple-A Minesweeper It's my grandson's 3rd birthday. He's so great I can hardly stand it. The complicateder I make things, the oftener things break, and the difficulter they are to fix. ✍️ Reply by email

Implementing my latest idea of “let’s support everything I can” in Quicktake for Apple II came with a new challenge: in order for every program to have as much RAM as each require, the application now ships a lot of binaries, each with its own task. There’s one for configuring the camera model and serial communication, one for the application’s UI, one for viewing and printing images, four different image decoders, and six camera drivers. I already have experience using zx02 to compress assets…

Last June, when I left Indiana after the first TEEM onground intensive that I attended, I thought ahead to our next gathering in October, where I anticipated autumnal shifts with still-warm days.I did not anticipate a hurricane affecting the weather that far inland. But here we are. I've changed travel plans, and instead of leaving on Sunday, I'm leaving in a few hours. There's already a bit of rain here, but nothing like what is expected later this morning.We are supposed to have record…

There's a fun demo of me talking to Grok in my Tesla about my emails. Which, admittedly, is a slightly ridiculous way to introduce an email tool. But the reason I built CloudPost was much less flashy: I wanted ChatGPT to help me make sense of my inbox. I've had my email address for a long time. Over the years, it's accumulated a barrage of spam, newsletters I no longer read, and mailing lists I barely remember joining. In my experience, iCloud's spam filtering is pretty poor, and sorting…

Daily Drawing 1014

Best of the blogs ▷ Bernie Michalik lists ten good reasons to start a blog (or continue the one you already have) even though blogging will probably never make you any real money. It’s not about the money, he reminds us. Read Why you should blog, be it 2006 or 2026 or 2046 ▷ Fancy a dander through the English countryside? M. B. Henry took one not long ago, including a visit to a maze on the ground. Read The Miz Maze: Finding the Right Path Sears KS-2, 135mm f/2.8 Auto Sears MC, Fujifilm…

August saw a family trip to Vienna, but of course, there was time for me to go for a couple of cycle rides while I was there and in this post, I am going to show you Argentinierstraße, a street to the south of the city centre.Argentinierstraße provides a connection between Vienna's Central Station and Karlplatz, which is just outside the city core. The street was named after a donation from the Argentine government after the First World War, but the streets in the area had been around for…