We kill people based on metadata. – General Michael Hayden Vulture Watching (#1527) The only way to stop this evil is to bury politicians in lawsuits: The family of a woman who died after she could not get an abortion in Texas is suing doctors and [politician]s including [psychopath-] General Ken Paxton. It is the first lawsuit over a death [caused by] an abortion ban…and the…first to directly sue Paxton, who has taken a leading role in…[using nuisance lawsuits to persecute “culture war”…

I am writing this at 9.30 on a Monday morning, sitting in the garden. Mrs Accumulator has just waved to me through the window and I can scarcely believe she’s there. The past year has been strange, full of awkward trials and tiny tribulations, but the moment that’s just passed between us – well, it doesn’t get better than that. 1 About five years ago, 2 I’d have been desperately fighting bin-fires at the office, with no Mrs TA within a country mile. Work would have felt like one of those mad…

This is the eighth post in the series: Exploring the .NET 11 preview. Part 1 - Running background tasks in Blazor with Web WorkersPart 2 - .NET (OK, C#) finally gets union types🎉Part 3 - Avoiding ToString() allocations with StringBuilder.MoveChunksPart 4 - Closed class hierarchiesPart 5 - Improvements to reading Process outputsPart 6 - Automatic CSRF protection based on Fetch Metadata headersPart 7 - The pain of serializing unions and closed class hierarchies with System.Text.JsonPart 8 -…

My job is typing. It doesn't matter if it's sentences or code. I type. A lot. I don't understand people spending the majority of their time in front of a desk and not upgrading to a nicer keyboard. There are three essentials in my eyes: a good chair, a good mouse, and a good keyboard. I understand not everyone wants to spend a couple hundred eurodollars to get something like the Mode Envoy (it is a beautiful keyboard, though). But nowadays, you have budget-friendly brands making great keyboards…

What is mathematics? Over the years I devoted a few dozen posts to the question “What is mathematics?”. Some posts in this category bring tears to my eyes like Christine Bjorner’s beautiful post: The Golden Room and the Golden Mountain, and Rodica Simion’s poem Immigrant Complex. In one post, I presented my own views about mathematics; another asks the question “Is mathematics a science?” (My short answer is “yes.”) The famous controversy between Hilbert and Brouwer is discussed in yet another…

My Christmas collection Twisted Presents goes like on Kickstarter today! All backers get a free copy of The Last Hour of Hogswatch immediately upon backing (yes, before paying). The Most Wonderful Time of the Year? Bah Humbug! Does your Christmas magic have more Satan than Santa? Does picking a place to spend Christmas morning feel like choosing between colic and cholera? Has stabbing someone over the turkey ever made perfect sense? You are not alone. These eight tales from critically acclaimed…

Day Ten in Tokyo. Apologies for the abbreviated coverage today. I overslept and only caught the second half of today’s action live. Today’s NHK videos include a five-minute feature on Aki 1986 which is really worth checking-out. That tournament featured two brothers who both earned special prizes that tournament for their performance, Terao and Sakahoko. … Continue reading Aki 2026: Day Ten

Let’s see . . . last week. It’s been pretty much the same old same old. At the museum on Monday, the next photo to be charted had four ganseys in it, and this occupied the entire morning. Two were machine knit: one has a pattern of K7, rib 7 (p1, k1, p1, k1, p1, k1, p1) throughout, and the other has a rickrack-like pattern. This is done by moving every third (or possibly fifth) stitch over by one stitch on the first row and back again on the third. Although possible, it would be tedious to knit…

Call me a cheapskate, but I don’t believe in overpaying for camera gear. And in this economy, with inflation and technology prices still rising, it makes sense to save money wherever you can. This is especially true if you’re a hobbyist like I am. Are you pro? Then yes, go ahead and buy the latest […]

You've probably already seen this common pattern in action: blurry versions of the images of a site appear immediately and, moments later, their full versions replace them. This pattern has become so common that many image CDNs, frameworks, and libraries support it out of the box. But every implementation has to do the same thing: Fetch both the preview and the final images. Display the preview while the final image loads. Swap the preview and final images. Clean up after the transition. Below…

Books I grew up in a house stuffed full of books, with no television, and electricity for only an hour or two per day (while the generator was running). There were shelves full of old science fiction (Asimov and Heinlein), as well as books on history, some good old fantasy, and other smatterings collected from second-hand bookstores over the years. My mother read to us each night when we were children, starting with Dr Seuss, all the way to Harry Potter, where she did the spooky voices during…

Back to my usual haunts – went on a short run and then a quick sketch of my favourite barista. Barista sketch Stillman an Birn pocket beta, Windsor and Newton 0.5 fineliner and Schmincke and Daniel Smith watercolours. Line work

A new AI model called Jev launched last week and went viral. It's not an LLM. It doesn't generate text or pictures, but could be very useful for a number of use cases. The creators call it “the first System One model”, tout its performance (193x faster, 444x cheaper) and promise it can't hallucinate. So, what is it? How it (probably) works Behind the impressive marketing is a very interesting model. Jev is a close relative of LLMs like GPT, Claude, or DeepSeek, but is actually more similar to…

It’d been a year since I put any film through my Nikon 35Ti, so I loaded some of that expired Fujifilm Neopan 400 I’ve been shooting a lot of lately and took her out. My particular 35Ti works only in Program mode, and the dials up top don’t all work properly. (I knew that when I bought it, and the price reflected it.) But so what? Program mode will take you a long way with this camera. Honestly, if the camera’s other modes and features worked properly, I’d probably still shoot it in Program…

Gaining momentum again on the Wheel of the Year, we approach autumn and its opposite: the moment of genuine balance, called Mabon in modern pagan practice, but which is only very recently named as such — this is in fact a twentieth-century innovation. I will try to consider what makes this point on the cycle special and why it is invested with meaning. A moment of genuine, measurable balanceUnlike all the other points on the Wheel, the equinoxes are the only ones marking a genuine moment of…

dose of fresh things to read

aka the Mystery of Memory I know every word to “Boom Shake the Room” by Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, a song that was on high rotation in the pub/club we frequented in … checks notes … 1993! God, I’m old. Yo back up now and give a brother room The fuse is lit and I’m about to go boom! Mercy mercy, mercy me My life is a cage but on stage I’m free The lyrics aren’t noteworthy and certainly aren’t the type of thing that could, by any measure, be considered useful information, and the fact that…

I’m not entirely sure when it happened exactly, but at some point a few years ago Social Media stopped being social media. The logic of person-to-person, one-to-one connection was replaced by a one-to-many model. Social became parasocial. That was the first change. A parasocial relationship describes a one-sided, psychological connection where a person feels a deep sense of intimacy or familiarity with someone they do not know in real life. The other person, the creator, most likely isn’t even…

Daily Drawing 996

📚🗨️ “Myths are not crossword puzzles or allegories with single meanings and answers.” Stephen Fry, Heroes

Since January 2025, the United States has deported at least 25,447 people to countries that are not their own. According to The Guardian those deported 'include those who spent most of their lives in the US, parents detained on the school run, (and) the adult children of elderly relatives who depend on them for care.'The Deportation Project Map lets you explore the Trump administration's global network of deportations. Click on a country on the map and you can see the number of people who have…

Reading Ed Sheeran’s speech when he opened his Philadelphia concert gave me a bit of a pause, that immediately followed by, “huh. Anywayyyy…” This part, particularly: I don’t want to disappoint fans, and I’ve never wanted to be an activist musician, but this has put me in the middle of an important and passionate argument about freedom of speech and the most complex political issue on the planet. There has always been that voice: “But I just want to make music/play music/draw/create!” Hell yea,…

After strugges with grief and self-denial, Edward Vandermeersch of Oudenaarde's Rolling Hills built a brewery that brought him back to life. The post “Hands On” — The Rolling Hills Brewery of Oudenaarde appeared first on Belgian Smaak.

When a “house of ill fame” collapses, secrets spill out. The sort of secrets that embarrass the unclothed clientele, the city’s building inspectors and the wealthy landlord.Such was the case at 3:00 p.m. on Monday, 3 September 1877 when a very narrow building at 74 Longworth Street collapsed, killing four unfortunate souls. Longworth, a long-vanished Cincinnati street, once ran westward from Vine between Fifth and Sixth streets.In the autumn of 1877, workmen were engaged in demolishing a…

2006 fantasy, second of its series. Princess Andromeda (she prefers "Andie") has her mother Cassiopeia's brains, but not her beauty, and is determined to be useful rather than just locked away until a marriage alliance is needed. But that brings its own hazards.

I ran five different coding agents at the same local model, on the same task, with the same frozen test suite — and then I counted why they failed. The answer wasn’t subtle. About 90% of the failures were harness problems. Only about 10% were the model. And here’s the part that should change how you spend your next dollar: throwing a bigger, less-quantized model at it fixed none of them.

Duncan Rawlinson created this image using artificial intelligence and digital art techniques. Two open palms rise into view, fingers cupped to hold a glowing stream of light that shifts from coral pink at the edges to bright white at the center. Small points of color—orange, teal, and rose—drift upward like sparks or distant stars against a gradient field of deep blue and violet. The figure’s torso appears as a smooth dark form, anchoring the composition while the hands and their glowing…

GARINDAN (Kenner Flavor) The Retro Collection Target Exclusive 3 3/4-Inch Action Figure Set Item No.: No. G2554 Manufacturer: Hasbro Number: n/a Includes: Blaster, communicator, soft goods shawl Action Feature: n/a Retail: $64.99 Availability: July 2026 Appearances: Star Wars Bio: Rediscover the classics with The Star Wars Retro Collection - inspired by the Kenner originals! (Stolen from the marketing copy. Packaging has no bio.) Image: Adam's photo lab. Availability: Click here to buy it at…

As you are almost certainly aware, the government is having to pay much more in interest on its debt than it used to do. Here is a chart based on the last OBR forecast, and the likelihood is that their next forecast will revise these numbers upwards. An increase worth 2% of GDP may not sound big, but it is nearly as much as the current defence budget. Should this additional spending on debt interest be matched by higher taxes or reduced spending elsewhere? It has to be one or the other to meet…

Experiments into predicting GPT2 completions via Qwen models Next token prediction is a magical objective. To predict the correct token in such a vast variety of texts present in the pretraining corpus, the model must infer a tremendous amount of hidden and latent causes that generate that text. Only if you know that the ball comes down when someone throws it up can achieve low loss at texts related to balls. Of course, the pretraining corpus doesn’t just contain texts related to balls. It has…