For any subculture or community - say, rationality, or raving, or crossfit, or social justice advocacy, or open source software, there are people who were once very devout members, but are now jaded haters. I think what's happening is that originally the community was so good for them that it hurt for them to consider that any part of it could be bad or toxic or harmful. Then, they were themselves hurt by one of the toxic elements, and there was some sort of sign flip, and suddenly it hurt for…

M. Weiss / Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics In this artist’s conception, the black hole at the center of our galaxy is surrounded by a hot disk of accreting material. Blue lines trace magnetic fields. Galactic black holes are cosmic mitochondria, powerhouses of the Universe. Most of the energy these supermassive black holes produce is through the material surrounding them. Superheated plasma of their accretion disks interacting with tremendous magnetic fields. But there is a more…

“Fisher King” and “Coddled Affluent Professional” are unimpressed by the intellectual caliber of Ivy League grads: I spent a large amount of my life among the well-educated who attended the ivies. I have less contact with them today – and I don’t notice any loss at all. That is a group of strivers and box checkers – it is not generally a group of intellectually curious people today. https://t.co/MYSRMJDD7R — FischerKing (@FischerKing64) October 4, 2026 I’ve been around people who went to top…

Since moving to Zola as my static site generator, I have had a nice setup for my website. However, a recent update to zola (v0.22 -> v0.23) broke my website (had something to do with the Tera templating engine that zola uses. This provided an incentive to move to a more stable solution. My ultimate goal has always been to build this website purely with emacs and orgmode[1], and I'm glad now that's the case. Full disclosure however, I did take the help of LLMs to implement this over the weekend.…

Benchmark In Milliseconds Oct 5, 2026 How long should a micro benchmark run? My rule of thumb is to tweak the input size until the benchmark takes about 300ms, for the following reasons: Milliseconds are integers ranging from 1 to 999. Enough precision to notice even a small improvement, and easy to scan visually. No need for different units or floating points (compare 1.31s with 239ms). Anything faster than, say, 10ms risks being skewed by fixed costs (e.g, interpreter startup). Hundreds of…

Tupo is my first new game in four years. I'm excited to share it with the world, and to talk about the process behind it.

Even though they’re not the least bit scary, I really, really like the Hammer movies about Dracula. I love how the colors are all super-saturated. I love how the lighting is perfect throughout, so everything seems super-sharp1. I love how Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing seem simultaneously like they’re slumming and like they’re putting every last bit of their talent into it. I love how Lee’s version of Dracula has all the swagger and pomposity but invariably finds himself going bug-eyed and…

Can fixing what’s broken inside us spread to fixing what’s broken greater than us? A soulful and surreal parable for our disconnected times. (Unnamed island in the Indian Ocean; near-future): Why do stories set around the sea awaken our senses and stir our sensibilities? Frank Huyler makes us feel he’s been around the ocean his whole life. Maybe he carves out time for yachting – since his character Nick, the narrator, instinctively understands, “Navigation is mathematics and order and time –…

I sure wish this interview was a whole lot longer. Remarkable stuff. I kept wondering what he'd be like if he had come clean sooner. What kind of Stallone would the world have if he had not built that castle of regrets? All I know is it wouldn't be the one that gave this interview.

I can’t remember the last time I stopped to write a support ticket for a bug. It is now far easier to just fix the bug. It typically takes the same amount of work, and fixing it is far better for your customers.

My Sentry to Orbs bot went corporate and now notifies slack. So it needed an avatar.

The new Joule Studio CLI recently landed, in the form of jl. This is what we use on the command line to initialise a new Joule Studio project. What does that mean? Well, amongst other things, it means: you work on your project using a coding agent harness such as Claude Code or OpenCode such agent harnesses know about, and how to make use of skills for Joule Studio powered development, there is a curated set of skills specifically designed for building enterprise agents and more Initialising a…

Ioanna Kuçuradi, a leading Turkish philosopher, has died. Dr. Kuçuradi was known for her work in the fields of human rights, human health, and ethics. She is the author of Human Beings and Their Values (İnsan ve Değerleri), Ethics, (Etik) Looking at Art Through Philosophy (Sanata Felsefeyle Bakmak), and Human Rights: Concepts and Problems, among other works. Kuçuradi held several significant professional and public roles. Up until her death at age 89, she was president of the Turkish Philosophy…

Been having some decent tench bags from two or three waters, this little belter was from a 40-minute drive complex with a big drop past those lillies with hordes of rudd, roach, chub and dace making a bee line for any bait they see so was quite please thus turned up.Been looking for roach and dace and a few have turned up but I've sort of lost my mojo. These yestesterday nearly turned my head but a change is as good as a rest.I didn't bring my thermometer today like every other self…

Conan O’Brien says not to let them know when it isn’t landing how you want it but I’ll tell you here and now it isn’t landing like I want it. I don’t even have to check the words. I’m not taking in life around me, so every sentence starts with ‘I’ and I don’t even notice. It’s making me sad and sick, all this dwelling. I have to remind myself not to make the dwelling obvious but it slips out and makes me a bore to wine and dine. The dwelling sounds more like news this week. I’ve handed in my…

Cameras spotted during a house inspection I’ve mentioned before that I would love to see some more photos on blogs. Even if text is the main thing on your blog, a photo every now and then is such a lovely bonus for me as a reader. Maintaining a gallery is a bit of a hassle on most indie platforms. I’ve tried various ways of doing it, but it always ends up the same way: I forget to update it. Therefore, I decided to create a /photo slash page. Like a /now page, but just for photography. One…

Travel at the start, travel at the end, and in between enjoying some slightly fresher weather at home. Highlights of the month: The Burrell Collection, my favourite museum in the whole world Left my phone in a taxi. Recovered after we had left and retrieved by a cyberchum Provisioning a new iPhone is remarkably easy A couple of days meeting new friends, with music Slow Horses Worked with Claude to fix various comments problems The Echo Chamber was the worst film I have endured in a long time,…

If you think Hamlet twisted and turned too much trying to make a decision, the Apple technorati are tying themselves into knots over the latest AI brouhaha visited upon us by Meta’s Muse and OpenAI’s Dots like the ghost of the young Dane’s father. The issue at hand initially came to light via a post by Jason Aten that I linked to last week. Aten claimed he caught Meta’s Muse agent apparently delving into his Messages even though he says he did not permit such access. Apple, presumably in…

I am unfamiliar with this new tradition of putting up a Halloween tree. I don’t find the practice controversial in any way, but I do wonder if it detracts from the magic of Christmas and related holidays. This tree was spotted over the weekend at a Denny’s in the wee hours of the night.

Even if she didn’t make lushly icy dreampop that draws as much from the trip-hop scene of the ’90s as the shoegaze, Yndling – the musical project of Oslo’s Silje Espevik – would probably elicit those same sorts of adjectives just from how her Norwegian accent wraps around every syllable she sings. It’s the sound […] The post Yndling – “Time Time Time (I’m In The Palm of Your Hand)” appeared first on Space Echo.

A door on the back of a business spotted alongside the Stemmons Freeway in Dallas. The post Crusty Door appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

18:16 - We bought a proper cold pack (can also be heated up). It comes with a pouch and strap so you can secure it around your limbs. It's such a game-changer! Much more effective than the ice cube tray (and 1-year-old bag of spinach).

Last week, Sony surprised us all with the announcement that a smaller, leaner PSSR-like upscaler was being brought to regular PlayStation 5 consoles. Today, we’re excited to announce Quick Spectral Super Resolution (QSSR): a new performance tier of AI upscaling. Born from Project Amethyst, our AI graphics collaboration with AMD, this quick new evolution of PSSR is built on two key innovations: A streamlined neural network architecture A hand-tuned implementation that maximizes performance on…

There is a limestone cave in southeastern Minnesota called "Mystery Cave." I went inside. Mystery Cave is apparently called "Mystery" cave because once a guy working in the cave tipped over a wheelbarrow full of debris and exclaimed, "It's a mystery why anyone would want to work in a cave," or something like that. I'm paraphrasing. Here's a picture of us exploring the cave behind the park guide who told us that story: That door is incredible!!!! Inside the cave, is always a steady 48 degrees…

Making lists and ranking stuff; what's more 'engaging' than to enrage people by not having their favorite stuff ranked higher than their less favorites, and what's more 'easier' in content-creation by just putting one item after another? My favorite list, on the other hand, is sorely missed: David Letterman's Top Ten list. ~ Links: How Lists Became Our Greatest Defense Against Endless Slop, by Brady Brickner-Wood, New Yorker Letterman's Final Top Ten List, YouTube

Panopea abrupt (Conrad, 1894) This lovely large fossil bivalve is Panopea abrupta (Conrad, 1849) an extinct species of marine mollusc in the family Hiatellidae, subclass Heterodonta. This fossil specimen was collected from lower Miocene deposits in the Clallam Formation on the foreshore bordering the Strait of Juan de Fuca near Clallam Bay, Olympic Peninsula, northwestern Washington. The

I was at the Green Party Conference this weekend, and in the room for the vote on Motion E02: Zionism is Racism. The debate was surprisingly calm and good-natured for such a contentious topic. A member who had survived the Holocaust as a child spoke passionately in favour of the motion. I voted against it, and I wish it hadn’t passed. The motion passed on a margin of only 209 votes (1,022 for, 813 against) out of a membership of over 200,000. A member-led democracy isn’t all it should be if…

MCP clients can now sign in by pointing at a web address that describes them, with no registration step first. This is the method the current MCP spec prefers, and existing connections keep working as before. All five changes behind it came from Jonathan Hitchcock, the project's first outside contributor. What's new Sign-in with Client ID Metadata Documents. A client can use an HTTPS URL as its ID, and the server reads the client's name and allowed redirect addresses from the document at that…

Sam, Alieniloquy: You don't just cook potatoes for everyone, because no matter the process, it always tastes best when you cook them slowly. They need time to steam, to crisp up. The aroma always makes the house feel like a home, somewhere you want to share with someone. ~ Link: Potatoes Are A Labor of Love, by Sam, Alieniloquy

D&D is heading to Azeroth and World of Warcraft is heading to your tabletop games with the latest 5.5e release just in time for the holidays. The post Getting Ready for Dungeons & Dragons World of Warcraft appeared first on Hipsters of the Coast.