I have been to San Francisco three times. The first time, I was mesmerized by how beautiful California is. The second time, I was preoccupied with other things and the city passed me by. I have just returned from the third, and it has churned something in me. Physically, there is not much to it. There are AI ads everywhere. There are people working on their laptops on Caltrain. There are the offices of all the products we use every day. That is about it. I did not meet or talk to the important…

Read the full post at - 5 Notes on Visiting an Industrial Electric Motor Factory Every year, the ABB Baldor-Reliance plant in Athens, Georgia opens its doors to employees and their families. My father-in-law works there, so this past year I went. He and his floor supervisor walked us down the assembly line, station by station, explaining what happens at each one. I come from a career of code and stories. So it was genuinely strange to stand in front of a giant plate of steel and rolls of raw…

Source The Forks, Maine yesterday Apparently, fall color is off the scale this year. There are many postings I have seen that say the same thing. Source Skye Glen, Cape Breton Island Not as bright yet but I love it. If I was ever there I forgot it. I likely passed through at least once.

Not the suburbs. Really.Ten years ago, when this blog and Cedar Rapids' post-flood rebuilding were both still young, I was surprised to see infill housing on 9th Avenue SE in a style more typical of suburban developments, with garages in front. My uncharacteristically short post--200 words!--caught the attention of Cedar Rapids Gazette reporter B.J. Morelli, and his piece caught the attention of the Linn County Republican Party, who responded with derision. If there's no such thing as bad…

looking at my blog, you could think i am in general a very unhappy person who cares about ai way too much, which i get. i do not really share any good moments that i experience online - i think it's because it would almost hurt if i got no feedback, or if someone wasn't happy for me. when i rant into the void and sometimes nice people respond to it, that feels fun. if i share an achievement or embrace a sweet moment publicly, silence in a response to the post would be defeating. also ranting is…

RIP Cronos from Venom. A true legend. Whilst this news won’t be as far reaching as when others passed, like Ozzy or Lemmy. The legacy of Cronos and those early Venom albums is equally as important to anybody who likes extreme metal. Not only the music but the look. The attitude of a band that said yes, we are in league with Satan. They had such a colossal impact on the direction of metal and shaping the landscape we enjoy today. Their impact on your favourite sub genre cannot be overstated.…

Bolton Elephants Bolton Elephants II Bolton Elephants III The trio of elephants were reinstalled on Wednesday 16 September.Their homecoming follows the trio’s initial move to Octagon Court in 2015, where they remained for 10 years.Ellie, Elner and Mister Jackbow, who were named by local children following a public competition, will greet Bolton residents and visitors as they exit the Bolton Interchange.The fully restored and repainted models are part of a series of schemes to make the town…

i know there is a discussion about child safety online and child-safe spaces and such and do not get me wrong that is very important of course. however i have a pressing question: is there any extension or a setting to not see child-made content? i am not particularly interested in their memes / dances / opinions about school and such. again, not saying anything bad about it, i am just simply not interested and things they care about is unrelatable as we are in different life stages. it does…

[This is a guest post by Matthew Colbrook. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] (Disclosure: ChatGPT helped me write and refine this post.) Inspired in part by the recent discussions on this blog, we have started a new project, AIM, an initiative to create a community-led opportunity for mathematical exploration. Since AI can make some conjectures easier to resolve, we would like to explore how these developments can be used to benefit…

Newport Street Newport Street II Victoria Square

Nestled in a small corner of Dumfries and Galloway, New Abbey is home to the famed Sweetheart Abbey and offers a small, pivotal slice of Scottish rural life that is now largely overlooked. It is a part of Scottish life that is now overlooked, however, once would have been the focal point for the local community's daily life. Without further ado, I will not "mill around," as I am talking about New Abbey and its Corn Mill. The Corn MillThe Corn Mill is situated in the heart of the lovely village…

In March I shipped Kaunta as a Go binary. It is Rust now, in the same repository, on the same database. The port was cheap because the logic already lived in PostgreSQL. What changed is who owns the layers underneath.

“AI orchestration” pulls around 1,300 searches a month, mostly from people who’ve heard the term in a sales pitch and don’t quite know what it means. Fair. It’s the least glamorous part of building an AI system, which is exactly why it’s the part vendors skip over and the part that actually determines whether the thing works. What Orchestration Actually Is What is AI orchestration, in one sentence? It’s the layer that decides what an AI system does next (which tool to call, which step to retry,…

In the hope of having a bit of a distraction from the drama of trying to sort my career out, I had a quick look on the themes tab here on BearBlog and it's looking all fancy and new and also includes some new themes. How exciting. With that said, I've picked a new theme and done a bit of customisation to make it my own and I'm very happy with how it looks. I've got rid of a couple of pages, changed some things around and tidied up a few more things, as well as improving on my limited…

Welcome to part 110 of my Never Ending Mixtape where the latest additions take us from 5,139 songs to 5,213 with the addition of the utterly sublime Love Me by Arnelle Ramsey that I recently discovered via a Rare Soul & Disco compilation album. This was on the back of discovering my current favourite song Takin' My Time With You by Maureen Bailey via Glasgow disco lover and edit king Al Kent. What a tune! I've just ordered his re-edit on 7-inch.My Never Ending Mixtape is pretty eclectic - I add…

Dear Constant Reader, Happy Friday! If you know your dressing room is going to be a restroom, bring something to put on the floor. I recommend a beach towel. Something you can put your gear and your feet on and you can throw in the wash when you get home. These writings and other creative projects are supported by my 17 Patrons. I appreciate you all so much!

I’ve written a few posts on Zsh’s glob qualifiers recently, covering: (om[1]) to select the most recently modified file. (m0) to select files modified today. (e) and + to select files with arbitrary code. (OL) to find the largest files. (n) to sort in natural order. These single-character codes are powerful, but dense and forgettable. Luckily, you don’t need to memorize them at all exactly, because Zsh has a built-in cheat sheet: tab completion within the qualifier parentheses. Type a glob, an…

The LEGO® Pick a Brick team have advised they will be updating their North American service in 2027 to be the same as the rest of the world, where there is no distinction between "Bestseller" and "Standard" bricks. To prepare for this change, Standard bricks will cease being available in North America starting Monday 2 November 2026 until some time in Q1 2027, to provide time to migrate Standard piece stocks (currently shipped from Denmark) to the American warehouse (pictured above, apologies…

Next Wednesday I will be taking a night bus to Frankfurt, Germany to attend Cauldron, “an OSR Euro Con.” This year the con will run four days, with packed schedule: old-school games, Chainmail competition, AD&D tournament, you name it. I will be running four OD&D games using little brown books only: Thursday Block II Halls of Viridian Mist: You fell down the pit trap. Now you are rolling in a pile of refuse while green mist is making you gag. Will you get out alive? Or will you feed what lurks…

weather: ☀️ santa ananas? pineapple express? is that anything? \ i'm just extremely stoked about seeing a lazuli bunting at the neighbor's open tray bird feeder. they exist here, but rarely i'm also reading down and out in paris and london. i feel like it'll be a good companion piece for the thief's journal which i'm still not finished with

Started a trial of super low dose steroids to reduce the joint pain before we consider higher-order lupus meds. Seems to be helping, but the improvement could also be a result of dropping a potentially problematic med. Time will tell. Good day so far.

A couple fresh album suggestions for #BandcampFriday: Skeletor Bag is a new album by Del The Funky Homosapien and Mars Kumari, with appearances by Jel and Dose One. Shoegazy beats with Del’s oddball flow. Doom Scroll takes that crusty folk-punk style of bands like Blackbird Raum, and adds a poppy almost ska sound to it. Honestly, this works much better than I thought it would. They have a new album coming out in 4 days, but this EP is a great intro ⣎⡇ꉺლ༽இ•̛)ྀ◞ ༎ຶ ༽ৣৢ؞ৢ؞ؖ ꉺლ (aka Wingdings) is a…

Remember when Netflix was going to acquire Warner Brothers Discovery and the deal was all but done? Recall how Skydance/Paramount wouldn't quit trying to make itself the owner, and kept at it until Netflix said, "Screw it, we're out," and walked away, with Skydance/Paramount, "Winning?" Well, Skydance/Paramount has gotten past a bunch of legal questions and has maneuvered itself to being an even bigger entertainment company than ever, with the head (David Ellison) being known as a bit of an…

Just so you know, if you unironically refer to people or things as "degenerate" you have already lost any moral ground you may have had to start with. We are now in "tell me you're a fascist without telling me you're a fascist" territory. Also, Hilary Layne is a reactionary hack. Thank you and good night.

I have several Hall effect keyboards from Gravastar, MelGeek, and others, that were designed for switches with lenses optimized for transparent keycaps. For many things, I prefer the front-legended, diffusing white keycaps from TacType. However, those switches don’t adequately illuminate the legends. I bought several sets of Hall Effect switches. I installed them on a Gravastar board. I put some TacType caps on the switches. All are better than the standard switches, one of which is on the…

Last week, I opened a can of worms. I asked on social media: Sometimes all you need is a trustworthy title HTML attribute for a text-only tooltip. Only problem is: it can't be styled! Do you want these tooltips to be stylable? Maybe with a ::tooltip pseudo? See the threads on Mastodon and on Bluesky. If only styling was the only problem! I quickly realized that I hadn't had to think about tooltips on the web for a long time. Turns out, the title attribute is strongly discouraged for most use…

Looks like we found a rare Authum crocus in the wild.

This is the first half of the third part (I, II) of our long-delayed series looking at Hearts of Iron IV, Paradox Interactive’s World War II grand strategy game, easily one of the most popular historical games on the market today and thus tremendously influential in both the popular history and gaming spaces. Over the last two parts, we took a look at the military simulation that sits at the heart of Hearts of Iron, a division-level operational simulation of World War II, along with the…

Treat your to-read pile like a river | Oliver Burkeman I think this is good advice! It’s something I put into practice with my RSS feed reader. I realized that readers with unread counts and an inbox/email like design were just not a good fit for me.

Some mesmerizing renditions of Star Spangled BannerAs you can see on the cover, some spectators had funCarl Lewis.mp3Cela Harper.mp3Christina Aguilera.mp3Fergie.mp3Ingrid Andress.mp3Kinsley Murray.mp3Malea Emma.mp3Maya Rudolph.mp3Roseanne Barr.mp3Sound&Sight God Save AmericaThe others can rot