Like many avid record collectors my first awareness of Michael Tilson Thomas were the Deutsche Grammophon recordings which arrived in the wake of his appointment as assistant conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra at the age of just 24. As recipient of the Koussevitsky Prize in 1969 it was almost a foregone conclusion. The word ‘auspicious’ didn’t even begin to cover it. One of those DG discs – a sensational pairing of Ives, Ruggles, and Piston (start as you mean to go on) – was tantamount…
Justin Jackson on how connecting with people face-to-face can be so much more powerful than anything text-based: I’m convinced that many of society’s problems come from how we communicate online. Social media is a big part of this, but so are the text-based chat tools we use with friends, family, and coworkers. We have a Communication Problem A simmering series of arguments were getting bad, but then: We flew to Mexico. On the first day, we went to a cafe, sat across from each other, and…
A few friends of mine operate their own business. Whenever I can, I will support their establishment. All the time, I insist on paying the full ticket price. I do not demand any discounted price or deals. My philosophy is to support my friend's business; therefore, I pay full price and don't bargain. Most of the time, I ended up with deals better than market value. To support a friend's business, we should pay the full ticket price and not ask for the best deals. They already getting squeezed…
Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. Eric Brandwine, VP and distinguished engineer at Amazon Security, told The Register something this week — picked up by The Next Web — that should be obvious and somehow still isn't, in most boardrooms: humans are bad at watching things. Not bad at judgment. Bad at the specific, narrow task of staring at a stream of low-variance events for hours and reliably catching the one that matters. He calls it "normalization of deviance" — a term he's…
The most honest economic indicator in Britain right now isn't the FTSE or the bond market. It's the number of duvets that haven't been folded since March.Somewhere in a semi-detached in Stoke, a nineteen-year-old is finishing his fourth consecutive episode of a YouTube essay about a video game he doesn't play, made by a man he doesn't trust, while his mum knocks on the door to ask if he's applied for that apprenticeship. He has not applied for that apprenticeship. He has, however, developed…
Hugely impressed by Ava Bahari here. She is truly a storyteller. There is untold generosity and cleanness to the playing and the best way I can express what sets apart her reading of this oft-performed piece is the value with which she imbues every note, be it part of a singing phrase or a driving rush of pyrotechnics. Nothing is ‘incidental’, every note has a purpose. And it’s generous too, expansive in the best sense with natural sounding rubatos. Her partner in this endeavour – Santtu-Matias…
Wednesday 29 July 2026 6.30pm Crazy Coqs, Brasserie Zedel Comparing Notes brings stars of the West End and Broadway to Crazy Coqs, Live at Zedel. In a lively and informal mix of performance and conversation host Edward Seckerson will be getting up close and personal with these musical theatre luminaries and emerging stars, exploring the stories behind the songs and the personalities behind the artistry. Fresh from winning the 2025 Tony Award for Best featured Actor in a Musical, Merseyside-born…
I have always been fascinated by the TCAS (Traffic Collision Avoidance System) on commercial and other aircraft. This video explains how it works and the simple code running the system.
Walking away from people is also important. It becomes a necessity. To stop the hurt. To prevent the future from becoming destructive. To resist the pull of staying. To let the better odds play out. When staying causes more harm than good, walking away is the only sensible step left. The sign of love is in its preservation. Love teaches you to conserve. To nurture. To let it grow into something beautiful. Even if it comes at a personal cost. Even if it ruins you. In love, "you" don't matter.…
hey machineyour masters killed all the joy in technology and everything is so unrecognizable and me who grew up yearning for modernist computing finds themselves drowning in code nobody cared to writehey machinewhen are we getting metamodern computinghey machineyou're just some nvidia gpu in some data center so why am i speaking to youis it that you can simulate caringthat's probably itbecause it feels like nobody doesi rant about ikea and hand-made furniturei send off an agent to make some…
Two mythical birds – the one immortalised by Villa-Lobos – Uirapuru – an endangered species in our musical universe. All kudos to Dudamel for realising the songful connections with it and Stravinsky’s Firebird and rejoicing in them so wholeheartedly. They were written within a decade of each other and you might even say that in the rarely heard Villa-Lobos ballet Stravinsky’s immortal bird was reborn in the Brazilian rain forest. Its ear-wormy chant, heard across flute and soprano saxophone, is…
I thought my 2019 iMac was a dust gathering paperweight. Turns out, with the price of RAM, it’s 32 GB RAM upgrade might actually be my retirement nest egg.
I’ll open the post on the OpenBind initiative with photos from my visit last year to Korea which was timed to coincide with the cherry blossoms (this meant that the customary April Fools post was from Seoul). Things did not start well on the day that I took these photos (having lined up the first shot for the day it became abundantly clear that the camera’s battery was still being charged at the hotel) and I wondered whether Great Leader’s grandson might have labelled me as a dotard.…
Main Street USD, also known as msUSD, lost its dollar peg and crashed to around $0.25. At points, the token dipped as low as around $0.06. The asset, issued by Main Street Finance, is supposed to be redeemable 1:1 with Circle's USDC stablecoin. It's used as part of a yield strategy that is marketed as "democratizing the options box spread strategy through a stablecoin". Prior to the depeg, there was about $80 million msUSD in circulation.On June 20, the verification provider Accountable…
1832 map of Ipswich, MassachusettsThis is the 11th Revolutionary War ancestor I have written about in this series. My 5th great grandfather Amos Burnham was born on 13 July 1735 in Ipswich, Massachusetts, the son of David Burnham and Elizabeth Marshall. On 27 January 1757 he married Sarah Giddings in Ipswich. She was the daughter of Thomas Giddings and Martha Smith, born in 1737. Sarah and Amos had eleven children born in Essex and Ipswich between 1758 and 1782. On 26 January 1782, Sarah died,…
It's been a while since I last posted, but I've been a busy little bee, working on a few different projects... An update to Cache Out is imminent, which includes support for the Vivaldi, Arc, and Dia browsers, as well as several other tweaks both above and below the hood. The popularity of the app is slowly growing -- which is nice given that barely even marketed it so far. Progress on Yasu is moving along nicely. It's radically different than the original was, but the new version is also more…
What if your components could be contracts for runtime implementations, instead of concrete materialized components ?
As mentioned in a previous post, I played a lot of Baseline Drift. I expect lots of other bloggers will be sharing their thoughts (I know Kati is working on something, and Yakamo wrote a retrospective from the referee side), and here are a few more of mine. Like Over/Under before it, Baseline Drift was a wargame with a layer of Live Text Roleplay on top. Most players had very limited interaction with the wargame rules, essentially limited to exchanging currency with each other, spending it on…
Over on James’ Coffee Blog he has a Blogger Archetype quiz. I thought it would be fun and interesting to answer the ten simple questions to analyse my blogging style and character in the community! The results are in: You are a Author You love writing and have a growing backlog of posts on your website! Words are your best friend and you're always thinking about what to write next. You are also a Community gardener You love to help contribute to building the blogging community, either through…
I’m really struggling to find something to write about this week, for, as usual, not much has been happening. Last Monday was a Bank Holiday in Scotland, which left those of us who don’t follow the news scratching our heads as to why the shops were shut. The holiday was to celebrate Scotland’s win in their first match in the World Cup. They haven’t competed in the Cup for 28 years, so it was a big thing. I have not been following the competition. The summer’s sports coverage is underway now –…
Seems like that’s what this horse was trying to say to me!
I’ve always associated videos at the Venice Biennale with boundless frustration. So many videos, so little time to watch them; even less patience for prolonged stays in airless, humid overcrowded dark rooms. Yet, when asked about what not to miss during the Biennale, my number one recommendation is Canicula, an exhibition with 8 new video installations commissioned and produced by Fondazione In Between Art Film. This show plays with light, soundproofing and the extraordinary architecture of a…
(Art by Noah Hush) Exp level Xp required Hd hp per hd Title Saving throws 1 0 ½ HD Kobold As Thief 1 2 2250 1 HD Kobold King As Fighter 1 3 4500 2 HD "Lizard Man" As Fighter 2 4 14000 3 HD Pseudo-Dragon Special 5 28000 3 HPPD Dragon Special 6 224000 4 HPPD Scourge Special 7 448000 5 HPPD High Wyrm Special 8 896000 6 HPPD Calamity Special 9 1.792.000 7 HPPD Great Dragon Special 10 3.584.000 8 HPPD True Dragon Special The Kobold and His KingAll dragons begin as tiny, feeble creatures, which…
This week I received a card from an acquaintance in Brooklyn, artist Shawn Liu. I don’t get post all that often, and seldom is it so exciting. You see, this is no ordinary postcard, but a postcard-sized painting—one of 100 such studies that Shawn’s making as part of his current project. The intention is to send each of the paintings to people around the world; all that the recipient is asked to do is to email Shawn a photo of the painting in its new home. Eventually he’s going to turn all of…
Claude Code records each session to disk. Those logs include “thinking blocks” — the model’s own reasoning as it works. I went to inspect that reasoning this weekend and found a signature (600 characters long) and no text. So I read the docs: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/extended-thinking Some details worth being aware of: Claude encrypts its reasoning into that signature. Anthropic holds the key. Your machine doesn’t receive it. The API hands back a SUMMARY of…
While researching and writing my last article on the history of KV cache compression, it occurred to me while there has been so much implemented research on KV cache efficiency, actual model weights quantisation is still pretty blunt. This makes sense - at large scale with many tens of thousands of GPUs the weights themselves aren't a huge efficiency bottleneck for the most part, and KV cache starts dominating memory usage. But, for us lowly serfs who don't have access to a warehouse full of…
by The New York Times Incredible visual demonstration of how the absurd size of modern SUVs turns them into even deadlier machines. Not only the hood height makes them deadlier in a possible collision, but the vastly increased blind spots make collisions more likely to happen.
The Taiko bridge, which allows assets to be transferred between the Ethereum mainnet and the Taiko Ethereum layer-2 chain, was exploited for at least $1.7 million before the network was halted, limiting losses. An attacker was able to forge withdrawal requests to appear as though they matched real deposits. Crypto security firm BlockSec said that the attacker may have gained access to a signing key that had been exposed on GitHub. Tweet by BlockSec Phalcon
Fascinating article about the limits of traditional talk therapy when dealing with generalized anxiety: People with GAD aren’t just anxious. They’re using worry to avoid something that feels even worse. When researchers ask GAD patients what they’re doing when they worry, they often say they’re trying not to think about “even more emotional things.” They’re using worry (which lives mostly in their heads as verbal, linguistic thought) to distract themselves from deeper, more visceral feelings of…
As if you didn't indulge me every day, today I ask for a little extra indulgence.Our windmill is a former prop that was was regularly set afire in a performance based upon Don Quixote by the now defunct Cirque de Flambe. We've removed the heavy metal vanes and replaced them with swimming noodles.The fire in the performance, I assume, represented the intensity of Alonso Quijano's imagination as he sallies forth into the world, believing himself to be the chivalric hero Don Quixote de la Mancha.…
