Digger (2026) • View trailerFour stars (out of five); rated R, for relentless profanityAvailable via: Movie theatersBy Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.11.26This film is for folks who felt that 2021’s Don’t Look Up was insufficiently cynical and depressing. Director Alejnadro G. Iñárritu’s dark-dark-dark comedy is highlighted by a bravura performance by Tom Cruise, successfully operating leagues out of his usual wheelhouse. Despite his best reasoned, well-researched…

Habronattus pyrrithrix (Betsy Mason) Tomorrow is international jumping spider day, so I’m taking this as an excuse to tell you about one my favorite jumping spiders, Habronattus pyrrhithrix. I was introduced to the species while writing a story about the perceptual world of jumping spiders for Science News. I interviewed visual ecologist Nate Morehouse at the University of Cincinnati. He had discovered that that Habronattus spiders can see the color red using a specialized filter, making them…

This post is a part of a series of posts called Scrambling Mind. The world's leading technology companies are spending unprecedented amount of resources on developing intelligent computers. The debate rages around what the future holds if—or when—superintelligent machines emerge. Superintelligence is a level of intelligence exceeding that of humanity's brightest, leaving no doubt of who will be able to dominate the other. The grimmest predictions say that superintelligent AI will one day take…

Creative Work Writers went on strike to get protections against “AI”. Thousands of artists have signed open letters in protest of “AI”. There are so many copyright lawsuits from creative industry groups against AI that there’s a whole dedicated website for it. Popular YouTubers absolutely hate it. If they’re also musicians, they REALLY hate it. Across all creative industries, there is a concerted push to reject this technology. Yet, almost unique among creative fields, many experienced…

The news this week that OpenAI had released a document listing hundreds of big problems which its robot claims to have solved (including the Boone–Higman conjecture and the Unique Games Conjecture) was the main topic of conversation over coffee. I strongly suspect that AI will replace the weather as a conversational gambit, at least among mathematicians; this has happened in St Andrews. It raises some important issues for mathematicians, which I hope to discuss in a later post. But it put me in…

Desert Brat 2026-10-09

Power Cat 2026-10-09

Today I learned that you can hide languages that show up on the side on GitHub repositories and other hosted Git services like GitLab. You can do this by adding a .gitattributes file to your repository. For example, I have a bunch of fake PHP files to mess with bots and script kiddies, such as: https://nelson.cloud/wp-login.php. As a result, GitHub was showing that most of my language usage for this repository was “Hack”: Hack is not representative of what I actually use to build this static…

Ich war eingeladen als Experte zum “Fachgespräch: Sicherheit von KI im Zeitalter von KI-Agenten” beim Ausschuss Forschung, Technologie, Raumfahrt und Technikfolgenabschätzung des Bundestags. Man darf diese Situationen meist mit einem Eingangsstatement einleiten, ich habe in meinen 3 Minuten das folgende gesagt: Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren, vielen Dank für die Einladung zu diesem Ausschuss. Die letzten Monate waren geprägt von Nachrichtenmeldungen darüber, dass irgendwelche Softwareagenten der…

Hello! After a minor glitch in the release schedule, my new chip-break EP "lol physics" is out! This was a super fun one to work on, combining chiptune sounds, breakbeats, and hand crafted algorithms into a frenetic four track nugget. I wrote this EP during Weekly Beats which is an annual accountability community where artists write one song per week for a whole year. Participating in weekly beats was an artistic challenge and an absolute game changer in terms of getting a ton of music written.…

If every sentence you write ends with an exclamation point, the mark loses all meaning! Please stop! This isn’t a good way to write! It is almost as bad as SHOUTING IN YOUR TEXT MESSAGES FOR NO REASON!!!!! I have two big pet peeves when it comes to writing these days, whether it’s professional or just random people blogging on the internet: excessive use of exclamation points and the word chuckle. One is just burn out from over use, the other is because NOBODY KNOWS WHAT A FUCKING CHUCKLE…

Not a bad sort of a day. Cleaned moped and cut all the grass. Gang gone to Bangor races with Lou and Les. Paid my Oddfellows. Went to pub.

Regular readers might recall that a year and a half ago, Halifax sent a letter about my credit card addressed to other people at my address (instead of to me). This was the letter I received 18 months ago, sharing (a) the fact that I have a Halifax credit card, (b) its credit limit, and (c) the last four digits of its number with Ruth and JTA, neither of whom are associated with my credit card. After I wrote to them, they (eventually) phoned me to tell me that the problem had been fixed. It was…

Report #250012-22-N9 Subject: Carbon based intelligence form from Terra The Subject has been involved in the ancient software engineering for at least 20 Sol cycles. Attached is the observations log starting from the time T of the first contact. Phase 0. The Subject encounters early Conversational Silicon Intelligence and classifies it as a toy. The Subject takes comfort in cataloging its mistakes. Phase 1. The Subject starts using primitive tools that predict the lines of code the Subject is…

October 9, 2026 Our heroine, the professional listener, is overwhelmed by how many clients she has right now… Calmness is in short supply! So let’s draw our own personal relaxed mindset from the muted colors and soft focus of this beautiful painting: At the end of September, our heroine’s 40-piece was this: And this was her accessory collection. There’s something particularly wonderful about brown shoes – I can’t come up with the right word! Our heroine didn’t have a clear idea about what she…

Here’s an interesting dilemma for you: do you place stickers onto the back of your laptop? Are you a laptop sticker kind of person or afraid of anything glossy that might leave glue marks? I used to belong to the latter group, but after more than six years of typing on this M1 Air, I was ready to give in. The reason for this is simple. Sebastián sent me a couple of Emacs-related stickers, knowing I couldn’t resist. It’s all his fault. Look at what he did! A not so pristine golden coloured…

The medicine didn't fix the problem yet, and I'm so sad I have to get more. I just want to feel better pleaseeee

It was reading avowedly 'true' ghost stories when young that led me to enjoy their fictional counterpart and then to prefer these, because they require more literary style and can offer more ambiguity and atmosphere. But the Rougham-Bradfield St George case is in many ways a beguiling story, of a kind that is quite often found in supernatural fiction, where such concepts as timeslips,

Here's something I've been meaning to write up for a while. It's kind of late, but I'm going to lean into the whole MCP vs. CLI argument because I have a perspective others might find interesting.What's the actual difference between an MCP server and a regular old CLI program with a `--help` flag? Feels to me like a CLI program written with agents in mind solves the same problems without inventing anything new?https://x.com/adamwathan/status/1968738637358522629Developer tooling companies can be…

This was Tom’s fault. Just look what arrived today. He’s responsible for this. Recently I wrote a post explaining that I was done with the Raspberry Pi. I didn’t elaborate or provide much detail, partly because I don’t need to justify my hobbies, but mostly because I was done and ready to move on. I mentioned how I always liked the idea of having a Raspberry Pi more than its execution, and we were clearly not a good fit. Yes, I’m willing to admit this was at least half a me problem, alongside…

Third Barrel's Dublin pub, The Christchurch, is continuing to do its most important job of bringing us new Third Barrel beers as and when they happen. And they've been happening a bit, recently.The official description for Nothing To See Here is pineapple, but the combination of Galaxy and Idaho 7 tasted more like mango and lychee to me. Still, you get where we're coming from: think tropical. Although a hazy IPA, it's only tokenistically hazy. It shows its 6% ABV in both the texture -- full-on…

[NOTE: seriously, some of the links for those comics are Not Safe for Work. You’ve been warned…quit your job before clicking.] Your pal Mike’s been burning the candle at both ends lately, so I’m going to try to keep it (relatively) short for today’s entry by finishing up some old business. Keef asked this of me a while back: “The more I get into weirdo undergrounds and ‘adult’ comix, the more I want to know about their history and perspective. When I worked at a shop around the turn of the…

Disneyland slides from the 1950s! They're hard to beat. Today's examples are really nice - starting with this great Fantasyland view, filled with the usual riot of colors and patterns. Overhead, Skyway gondolas move to and fro... ... with Holiday Hill (no Matterhorn yet) and the tallest of the Skyway support towers. I kind of love this view of three coatless men posing just outside the entry gates (and near the ticket booths). This is not exactly the typical group of Disneyland visitors, I'd…

Saturday Night Fever (1977)

I hope you’re all as excited as I am about our upcoming week of club reading which this time is from 1949! When I first started looking for titles I soon realised it was a bumper year and the hardest thing for me has been deciding what to read. I’m very much looking forward to hearing about all of the books people have been reading, though I do suspect it will be bad for the wish list and TBR!! Anyway, I thought I would take a quick look back at some previous reads from 1949, and my goodness,…

I splurged, bought a flight, a hotel, and a very expensive concert ticket to see Rush at Ball Arena in Denver, CO, on October 5th, 2026. The last time I had seen Rush was when I was 18, in 1984. Between the cost and the simple fact they (and I) have less time ahead of us than behind, I’m 98% sure this will be the last time I get to see a band that defined my youth. That alone got me thinking about various things related to bands that have been around 40-plus years or significantly more. Three…

Ever wished you could turn your holiday GPS track into one of those slick animated maps you see in travel videos? Map Animator lets you do exactly that - and you don't need any video-editing or mapping skills to get started.This free browser-based tool lets you draw a journey on a map or import a GPX recording and then turn it into an animated video. You can use it for road trips, motorcycle tours, cycling adventures, hikes, sailing trips and pretty much any other journey you can record with a…

Through much of my early and mid thirties, I had this vision of running a marathon... as I got to my late thirties, I decided that I would run a marathon before my fortieth birthday. The day after I turned 39, I ran the Blackpool Marathon. I didn't do it quickly, but on that day I managed to move my legs from the start line to the finish line in in 05:22:10 (5 hours, 22 minutes and 10 seconds). On finishing this race, I decided that I was never going to do that again... ___ We are now 191 days…

Four or five years ago, m'sister was visiting from England and we went to Red Mills for some mmmm good sheep-muesli and a bucket. I was between Lidl-special gumboots, and Sis mocked my cheapskatery until I purchased some top-range Bekina (Belgian) Wellingtons . . . because I was no longer an impoverished student and what else - go faster car [χ] cruise holiday [χ] silk undies] [χ] - was I going to spend my money on?A couple of months later I was trimming back the hedge we planted in the 00s…

Bruno wrote a very good blog post about the kinds of things that can make a person burn out of a job they genuinely like. I resonated with a lot of the stuff here! I've also experienced profound lack of control over my own success at several previous games jobs. The most offensive company communication I ever received was in 2020 or 2021, when my employer tried to make us complete a course about "resilience" during the period when we had, I think, the least control over the circumstances of our…