tag(s): #politics #random-thoughts Over an email exchange with a friend, he brought up a conversation he had with a colleague (what follows is an edited quote): A colleague scolded me after I confronted him for paying Anthropic. He proceeded to lecture me on Apple's child labour abuse and the proprietary OS. His conclusion was that if you care about these things you shouldn't be in IT. Getting into those conversations is an interesting exercise in frustration. The colleague's reply strikes me…

The roof decking is all on and they're finishing the membrane this morning. Patio pour has been moved to tomorrow. If the gable windows arrive today, they may try to install those. Septic tank went in, passed inspection and is covered. Most of the earth-moving is done until Spring. We have one pile of what is, essentially, topsoil that is going over the berm, and a remaining pile of dirt and shale that will be used as fill. Ken's not going to have to haul anything away, but we will be bringing…

It is kind of a huge deal. OpenAI dumped a broad range of huge new mathematical results produced by an internal frontier model. They just put it all on GitHub. This included 90 of the top 500 open problems in all of math, as per Proof of Atlas. In total there were 722 manuscripts (now 719 after three withdraws from the cluster that did not have Lean proofs) organized into 372 families. This was the result of a single model, presumably the same one that produced the Navier-Stokes proof (as per…

It’s a cool morning today but we’re being told that tomorrow will be the absolutely final last gasp of summer with temperatures almost 80° before crashing into the 40s and 50s for the next week. It seems like the right time to take the rose bushes down in the garden. This week will be a pretty relaxed one sports wise. My Ohio State Buckeyes get Maryland at home in what should be a warm up for their big game against Indiana next week. The Mighty Spiders visit a scuffling Fordham to continue…

This is the third of the three Shin KPop Demon Hunter cups from South Korea, featuring Zoey and hamburger flavor. Alright, let’s try it. Nongshim Zoey Shin Ramyun Hamburger – South Korea Detail of the side panels (click to enlarge). Unsure but probably contains beef. To prepare, add in sachet contents and fill to line with boiling water. Cover 3 minutes. Finally, stir and enjoy! Detail of the lid (click to enlarge). An instant noodle block. A sachet of soup base powder seasoning. Loose bits and…

🤖 This post includes some LLM-derived content 🤖 A few years ago, Ryan wrote about how Bridgy, a service I use a lot, exposes log as the end user UI. This is a post that's stuck with me over the years, especially as someone whose work has generally comprised of building tools for others. I think about this post every so often with how in Renovate, our logs are the interface that users, operators, and support teams get into understanding what's going on under the hood. More generally, I think…

Stop So my previously announced plan to write a book about ‘hopeful hiring’ has been scrapped. I’ve been poking at it over the last few weeks while I’ve been off work but unfortunately I just don’t think it has legs (and neither does the publisher I was talking to!). I suspect I have just about enough useful thoughts to pull together a ‘playbook’ of some kind but – there is always a but – it does all feel a little bit ‘Old Man Yells at Cloud’ already so I can’t even imagine what it would like…

Some of the little flowers are still hanging in there, including a dahlia. Heres a a few of what I found the other day. Alas, their time is coming. Snow is starting to show up in the forecast. Linda is a whirling dervish getting the garden put to bed for the winter, and getting bulbs for next year planted. We've had vole traps out much of the summer and have caught many of them. We're hoping they are wintering elsewhere. 1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8. I don't quite know what I did here, but I really like the…

Went to Science night at Saltfire. It was asu faculty and students bringing the know on Alzheimer’s. What anti amaloid research is happening right now? High ldl, inactivity, tobacco and alcohol. Low social life: reduces cognitive reserves. Glp-1. Modifiable risk factors;; diet exercise Living longer = more degenerative diseases Amaloid starts outside and goes in and starts before Tau proteins kick in. Tau starts inside and goes out Mtr214. Is a blood marker. Ant+ Amaloid Tau Nerodegeneration…

Jamie Probin is a British-born mathematician currently living in Charleston, South Carolina, where he teaches mathematics at Charleston Southern University and writes detective novels and short stories featuring his mathematician-detective, Dr. Samuel Harris – who's something of a locked room specialist. I should have gotten to this series before now, but it got loss in the mass of reprints, translations and neo-Golden Age mysteries. That's until Jim Noy, of The Invisible Event, reviewed…

Just when I think I’ve finally caught up on sleep from the 2026 San Francisco Pen Show, it’s time for another show - this time, it was the 2026 Dallas Pen Show. Dallas has traditionally been a reliable show from year-to-year with few things changing, see last year’s recap as an example. This year though, the Dallas Show decided to REALLY change things up. Other than being at the same hotel on the last weekend of September, the show had a couple of very big changes - (1) going from 2 day to 4…

Session 332 was played on 8/16/26Morgana, wizard 10 (Rob)Borumar, Triton Thief 11 (Josh)Blotto, Goblin Fighter 8 (Lanse)Nick, Fighter 8 (Me)Koltic, Cleric 9 (Cindy)Aroon, Fighter 8 (NPC)Jameth, Fighter 8 (NPC)Lor’Koth, Dwarf 8 (NPC)The crystal chamber seems to require the doubling of something, but Morgana’s understanding of the runes is iffy at best, and so Morgana and a couple of the meatsticks head back up to talk to Rocky, leaving the rest of the party within the Crucible to keep the doors…

You know those cringe-inducing pregnancy photos where the mom-to-be's mostly naked and the shirtless dad is standing behind her caressing her belly, and all you can think is how you don't even like going to the pool in a bikini, but here they are, all up in yo' Facebook feed, smirking the smirk of the freshly procreated?Well, doesn't that sight make you, like, totally hungry? NEEDS MOAR HANDS. If you'll excuse me, Katie A., I'll just be over here screaming forever. (And they're saying my…

2026-10-09Hello!After making the wrong measurements for the rug, I put my focus on smaller items in my room. This was cheap, and so I couldn't pass it up.I still haven't returned the rug, by the way. I keep meaning to, but I've forgotten every time I have the opportunity.I also can't believe how much dust accumulates after just a few days of moving stuff around. Also, my hands have a weird rust smell on them, so I should probably be using gloves now.Finally, a blogger's look into why the New…

I was surprised to find AI has plundered my piece about a freebie tracing book published by Heinz a few blocks from where Andy Warhol grew up at the same time. The little book was designed to have children trace the Heinz products so as to brand theIr innocent minds. It worked. The booklet was published a year before Andy was born. I surmised that the roots of his pop art works of Heinz and Campbell’s products could be “traced” to this little booklet which he certainly would have had access to.…

Recent additions to the Heap of Links… The most bizarre plagiarism-related story ever — featuring: a death, an investigator, a dissertation, a mysterious red book, and more New data on earnings by major and university — though not all universities “AI poses two different existential threats to [our] valuing practices” — Jordan MacKenzie offers an account of why negative judgments about AI taking over our creative and caring activities are justified “Submission” is a humorous clicker-style game…

I’ve enjoyed John Grisham books in the past, but he’s mainly known for legal thrillers. However, in the NY Times review of his latest book, I saw this:Grisham has written dozens of books since his first, “A Time to Kill,” in 1989, but this is the only one that can be called an espionage novel.Say less. I was reading it on my Kindle two minutes later.…however, I missed the fact that this is book one of the “French Illusion Series.” I wish I had known that going in, because I was waiting for a…

[You’re not my real dad, Amazon!] In the past few days, I’ve seen an inordinate number of articles related to Amazon’s “Prime Big Deal Days”, which is apparently a separate event from Amazon’s “Prime Day 2026”. Despite the singular “day” in the name, “Prime Day” ran from June 23 to 26, while “Big Deal Days” is an October sale. I’m not much for prompted shopping, but these excessively hyped sales can be a good time to buy something I regularly purchase anyway, like vitamins or mouthwash. Alas,…

Is it any wonder that in such a brutish time–a martial time–the lords of the world are trying to reach Mars? War is a god and it’s calling all our names.

Do consultants not sleep? I passed out around 12:30 and awoke to nearly a dozen Teams messages. The sender is in my timezone. Poor bastard. A lot of them seem to chug the corporate Kool-Aid. In a matter of minutes yesterday, my carefree, do-nothing job turned into hour-by-hour babysitting of grown people. Dress rehearsal for a major technology transformation project, and it’s not looking good for the real deal. I dread these Teams calls. Pretending to care, the ridiculous pseudo-business lingo:…

Updated October 2026 After cooking every recipe in the book, I can confidently say it is also one of Ina’s most consistently successful collections. When someone asks me which Ina book to start with, I almost always say Barefoot Contessa at Home – with Back to Basics as a close second. I wondered why this book is always my instinctive answer, and as I flipped through it again trying to pick my favorites, I realized it’s because nearly every recipe lands somewhere between really good and…

Critical Defiance: Rivers of BloodOut 25th September on Dying Victims Productions 2024 was the year Critical Defiance suddenly caught the attention of a broader international audience with ‘The Search Won’t Fall…’, a finely crafted treat of frenetic thrash fair alongside some well integrated oddball moments. The Chilean death and thrash metal scene has pulled well ahead of the pack in the last ten years, and with this latest release, Critical Defiance cement their place at the head of the…

After way too long I decided it was time to run a new campaign. The thought first came to me while cooking up a variant for better handling a calendar and faction turns. I wanted to try it out before foolishly blasting it out to the world like a cocky blogger. Most of my non theory posts spring directly from things I actually tried in my games anyway. So I started a one hour lunchbreak game in Dolmenwood. Then enough people were interested that it turned into two groups, playing on different…

A Friday Hodgepodge I'm in the mood for some laughs this morning, how about you? 1. It can do many things, but can AI create inspirational posters? My favorite -- at least that holds up best without its background image -- from this collection is:Glorious is the father who owns his quotes, for he also rejoices over his hut.You be the judge. (HT: Paul Hsieh) 2. One of the more benevolent communities on the internet is the Bald reddit, which helps folks to "lose your hair, not your head." People…

The Hebrew root חסל is familiar today primarily from the verb חִסֵּל, “to eliminate, destroy, finish off.” But its meaning has changed over time.The verb appears only once in Tanakh, in Devarim 28:38:זֶרַע רַב תּוֹצִיא הַשָּׂדֶה וּמְעַט תֶּאֱסֹף כִּי יַחְסְלֶנּוּ הָאַרְבֶּה“You will take much seed out to the field, but gather little, for the locust will consume it.”The meaning of יַחְסְלֶנּוּ is clear: the locust will consume or finish off the crop. BDB defines the verb as “finish off, consume”…

Vote for me and I pledge to bring back city-states and then go find something better to do than politicking.

Anthropic now says it will ban users for sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior toward Claude. The internet has … ‘opinions’. Most of them are about whether Claude has feelings. To me, that is the least interesting question here. Every corporate action we see has hundreds of different threads, interactions, and competing factors behind it. Ergo, we never know the full story behind a story like this. That said, let me lay out three things that could be going on and give you my take on…

“They listen to us,” a character observes late in Alan Ayckbourn’s 92nd play, The Trial of Romeo Oscar. “They” are androids, and “we” are humans, and the character’s point is that while we’ve stopped listening to each other and to our heritage, androids are still learning us up. Which is all why – SPOILER ALERT! – when the search is on for an actor who can play Juliet the humans auditioning are all terrible and the only decent actress to be found is android Hermione Quinque (Olivia Woodhouse)…

Every piece of content you make has a cost, the time or money to produce it, and a value that can then stay, grow or shrink, just like physical assets. That value axis is the real choice you make with each piece, more than the format or the platform. Fleeting content, such as a Reel or a post, is valuable the moment it goes out, but that value disappears almost immediately, unless you use it to attract a new audience. Lasting content, such as a course or an email sequence that keeps converting,…

Act 3: Scene: One and doneJuly, 1991I went back after being aheadAnd what I mean is I lost my way and went back to being lost instead of finding my way home.I lost it all And you look back and you think and you wonderYou wish and you dream and you have ideas of what you could have said.I wish I said more.I wish I did more.I wished I was better.I wish I was bigger and bolder.But I was only me. I wished I didn’t have to wish so much but life is life and the past is this forever unchangeable…