What’s the deal with writing? Why do we keep getting scolded that writing should be not executed by a machine but by a human? We’re quite happy to allow counting to be done by a computer connected to the check-out in the supermarket; more than happy to allow percentage calculation to be executed by a calculator; and resigned to our computers suggesting le mot juste, or correcting our spelling. We’re perfectly happy to have machines spit out ideas, televisions to entertain us. I wonder if there…

While I appreciate the time we just spent on the road, I envy an old friend who recently finished a year of traveling abroad with her family. Sophie, her partner, and daughter visited thirty-two countries across six continents. Uf-da, that’s a lot of airline miles.More incredible, she started a blog and posted every day, starting with trip preparation and ending, four hundred-plus days later, on a thoughtful reflection. I applaud her stamina for publishing details from each day with photos.…

The importance of impermanenceThings are always becoming otherwise. When we don’t realize this, or forget it, we find trouble. We imagine and hang onto a durability that is nowhere to be found. Start with the Uppadasutta ‘Arising’ [AN 3.136] Buddhist sutta: This aspect of the world remains the same—this stable truth, this fixed truth: all conditional things are impermanent.This is the first of three marks of existence. The other two: things are unsatisfying; nothing has a fixed self. ‘Marks’…

At work, even though even more people called out sick so honestly I'd have a good excuse if I didn't want to come in. Have been having a better day than yesterday, mostly thanks to a decent nights sleep. One of my coworkers asked how my weekend was, then I asked how theirs was. They said they were sick, but 'that wouldn't stop them from living their life' so they went out to eat and shopping and stuff. I cannot fathom this mentality. You're sick, so you're just going to go out and get everyone…

Well, I've sent off the pilot after editing it today. I found a great site that has free bleeps (I had to bleep out a name), after trying and failing to say 'bleep' loudly enough to use. It was really good fun listening to them to find the right one.Drudge-wise, I thought the central heating was broken, called out The Chap and realised that I hadn't turned on the thermostat! It needs to be serviced anyway, and he's coming back to do that later in the week. My daily dunce moment was…

feeling very grateful because I was running to catch my bus after work today, a guy saw me running, and jumped on the bus just to ask the driver to wait for me. small kindness gestures 😭🥰

At last, Mistral has shipped a model that, judging by the model card, seems to compete with Chinese open-weight models–on paper, at least. It’s available via their API now, with the weights promised for the end of the month. Now they need to demonstrate that the EU can do this consistently. There are scattered labs in Prague and Germany (which never seem to make it to Hacker News, for some reason), but the perception of AI work in Europe is still pretty poor–something I’ve ranted about before,…

Authors note: I wrote this note through the day, as it happened. I wake up earlier than usual, at 6:15 AM. My body feels rested enough so I get out of the bed. Not sure if I am going to regret not sleeping enough later in the day. My smartwatch tells me to rest today and that’s my plan. But today is a work from office day. I hope it is not too hectic. I get ready, eat some carb, and jump in the cab to suffer through the commute. Eggs and coffee later at work. In the cab, I read a bunch of blog…

I wanted to share my open-source solution on Reddit. I created an account, found a community where people post links to their projects, and posted a link to my GitHub project there. The post was immediately deleted, and my account was banned.It turns out you first need to write normal comments and posts without links to make it seem like you’re a regular user who isn’t trying to promote anything. Only then can you post a link.Okay, so I registered a new account from a different IP address and…

IntroMission ControlFrom Last WeekHubertus Bigend Had A PointSong of the WeekReading LogOutro Intro I was hoping to write a Weekstarter last week but spending the week before like an artist on tour while the weather in every city was completely different was more than my body could handle and I got sick while on my way to Ankara. It was something I can manage and I was already feeling better when I got back home on Saturday but then I had to swim through our street on Monday to get back home…

My sister is in a currently-running-on-TV political ad. It’s against the republican chucklefuck Tom Tiffany who was one of those anti-American dingleberries that claimed Biden “stole the election” and thinks Trumps tariff plans are super neato. Kelsey’s journey with healthcare insurance has been pretty rough. She gets denied for medications and treatments all the time, which to me is pure criminal behavior akin to attempted murder. Any politician doing anything other than forcing healthcare…

I have hope that enough people have seen more than they need to vote out congressional and other enablers of the Trump regime. I’m hoping whatever threats or evil magic spell he’s tossed into the ether have dissipated enough to bring out large numbers of voters in the right precincts and districts. I have fears that while I anticipate all sorts of shenanigans, legal and otherwise, prior to and in the immediate aftermath of election day that we’ll have to endure another nightmare political…

Feeling nostalgic, I spent my commute singing along to this Incubus album from 1997. I can’t remember what I had for lunch yesterday, but I can remember the lyrics to almost every song. I pulled up to my corporate gulag with a shit-eating grin on my face. This album is pure fucking brilliance and Brandon Boyd’s voice is nothing short of magic. The first half is quintessential nu-metal. The heavy guitar with syncopated rhythms and the almost out of place turntables. But the second half…

straddling the crunchof ice cube buoysadrift in his frozen milkshake,I can’t help but wonder,how did we get so small?✱she assumes every head nodsin solidarityas she reads her scifaiku⁠—but I’ve never seeneven a single episodeof star trek✱orbital traffic’s nonexistentrubbery whine ⁠—no airborne atmosphericsto circulate the rocket’s treadJulie Allyn Johnson is a sawyer's daughter from the American Midwest whose current obsession is tackling the rough and tumble sport of quilting and the…

RAVEN SUPER POWERS (McFARLANE) “A founding member of the New Teen Titans, Raven, the Daughter of Darkness, fights for a world to which she fears she can never truly belong.” One of the three original creations added to the line-up when Teen Titans became New Teen Titans, Raven was actually the whole impetus of the team forming in the first place. When the JLA turned down her request for help dealing with her demonic father’s arrival, she found a team of younger heroes to help her, and that’s…

by Amber Dubin Night Gallery, Season 2 debuted this September of 1971, just in time for Halloween season, and Rod Serling once again hits the ground running. The episodes follow a similar formula as the last season, with the opening sequence adding a new “featured actors” segment; Serling clearly wanted to draw attention to the … Continue reading [October 6, 1971] Night Gallery: A Prophet, Aunt Ada, and a Death in the Family → The post [October 6, 1971] <em>Night Gallery</em>: A Prophet, Aunt…

Much like a lot of other people, I subscribe to quite a few of the newsletters of TLDR. As I re-use the things I found there in own publications, I did find the newsletters – ironically – not quite succinct enough to go through them quickly. I wanted to skip sponsored sections and other cruft, so, of course I wrote a PHP script to help me with that. Here it is and you can find it on GitHub. $URLS = file_get_contents(‘tldrs.txt’); $out = ‘’; foreach (array_filter(explode(“n”, $URLS)) as $url) {…

By law, above-ground gasoline tanks are ALWAYS painted white or silver. This minimizes solar heating and thus minimizes day/night breathing emissions. I'm a tank inspector from way back. I had a consulting business, and I've been around, over and in thousands of tanks, from 500-10,000,000 gallons. E10 loves to absorb water from the atmosphere. If the water content reaches about 0.5% (more in summer, less in winter), the water will separate, taking the alcohol with it and creating a…

Near the end of yesterday’s swim, I was greeted by this sight in the top photo. Spinner Dolphins coming my way. They were traveling at a leisurely pace as they dipped down and glided beneath me. After they passed, they came back up near the surface of the water and I thought they might loop around again, but instead they continued on their way. Still, it was a lovely encounter, and my first with dolphins in quite a while. Swimmers are supposed to stay 50 yards away from dolphins because they…

Using LLMs to find bugs and vulnerabilities in software is no longer new and cool, and my 2025 post about using specialized tools to look for vulnerabilities in open-source codebases seems like a distant fever dream. The new cool thing is creating static or deterministic checks (gates, oracles, whatever you want to call them) to verify that an issue discovered by an LLM is really a vulnerability or not. This post outlines all of the lessons I’ve learnt while attempting to create these…

1. “Après le bal” (After the ball) – a micro 19th century art genre of its own “Après le bal”, Eugène Auguste François Deully “Après le bal”, Charles Baugniet “Après le bal” Alfred-Philippe Roll “Après le bal” , Roman Casas y Carbo “Après le bal”, Alfred Emile Stevens “Après le bal”, Henri-Lucien Doucet What makes it unusually genre-like is that it isn’t merely “a woman after a party.” Across different artists, the same little narrative machine keeps appearing: evening dress still on, flowers…

There’s a new web platform feature flighting in Chromium called Declarative Partial Updates. This proposal adds a new <?marker> element which enables out-of-order streaming of content. Rather than the traditional way of building the HTML you need on the server, or sending JSON down to a JavaScript framework, you can staple HTML onto the initial response and use the <template for=""> syntax to inject that content into the <?marker name=""> placeholder. A simple example of this would be: <!--…

Source His site with a memorial from his daughter. On October 2, we lost one of the greatest of the Greatest Generation. Tom Kelly. The Colonel. Daddy to me. And ’Ol Tom to his grandchildren. It is impossible to capture 99 years or what he meant to our family, his friends, his troops and his loyal Legion of followers in a few words. But I wanted to share a little about the remarkable man we were so lucky to know and love. To the members of the Tenth Legion, thank you for the friendship, the…

From Japan, 1941: Countdown to Infamy, by Eri Hotta (Vintage, 2013), pp. 124-127: In the summer of 1882, the year the Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors was issued, a tall and slender beauty with a perfectly oval face stood on a college auditorium platform in Poughkeepsie, New York. She was one of the select few in the graduating class asked to deliver a valedictory address based on her dissertation. Yamakawa Sutematsu stood out among her classmates at Vassar. She was class president,…

In some ways, the short story is the ideal format for science fiction. If science fiction is all about ideas, a short story is a way to take an idea and play it out without any obligation to build a bigger world around it. But short stories can work the other way too. If you have a bigger world that’s been established in full-length novels, a short story can be just the right format for exploring another corner of that world. In Lake Of Souls: The Collected Short Fiction by Ann Leckie, you get…

hi friends! it's been quite some time...

after working on it on and off for a week or so, i finally got niri behaving on my first void linux install. while i think that learning how these things work for yourself is important, i found the documentation a little opaque, so i'm dropping in my full shell script to get from a fresh install tty to a working niri environment with waybar and tuigreet/greetd as a greeter. if that's not enough for you to get going, void linux probably isnt for you just yet, and theres nothing wrong with that.…

Next week Analogue is due for their annual announcement. My prediction is the same as last year—they'll reveal a PlayStation FPGA console. I can imagine the marketing now: a bunch of physical discs and proud declaration of supporting and preserving physical media. I really just want to see the 8BitDo DualShock. I'll spice up this year's prediction though with a price, a price hear around the world as it were—$299.

I am back on Bluesky after a break and decided to add a link to my profile on the front page. I noticed that there wasn’t an SVG image in the theme so I added it, here’s how: First locate the theme’s svg.html located here: themes/PaperMod/layouts/partials/svg.html Open the file in a text editor, make a copy first of course. Then add the following block of code into the file, you will see the format and just copy the ones that are in there. {{- else if (eq $icon_name "bluesky") -}} <svg…

Apparently today’s LinkedIn mini-sudoku takes exactly 53 seconds to solve.