I’ve found that simple productivity techniques work best for me – the more complex the tool, the more likely they are to feel overwhelming and draining. The most helpful tools have been maintaining a simple to-do list daily and using the Pomodoro Technique (Wikipedia link) for short periods of focused work. I’ve experimented with different lengths of time for the work sessions. Some people have suggested 45-minute or 90-minutes intervals for deeper focus. However, I’ve found that 25-minute…

Euripides, fragment 610 (tr. Christopher Collard and Martin Cropp): Get lost! You can do nothing—you can only talk. φθείρου· τὸ γὰρ δρᾶν οὐκ ἔχων λόγους ἔχεις.

I made a really nice image of my daughter earlier. It perfectly captures her stance towards homework: pure disdain, with a side of resignation. (Poor thing.) But since I'm not comfortable sharing too many images that feature my children as the main subject, you get popcorn instead. (If you want to see the image, you have to come by for a visit and have a look at the next year's book, which will 100% feature this image.)

Poem by Al-Mutanabbi (915–965), tr. Bernard Lewis in Music of a Distant Drum: Classical Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Hebrew Poems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 68: Tastier than old wine, sweeter than the passing of winecups is the play of swords and lances, the clash of armies at my command. To face death in battle is my life, for life is what fulfils the soul. Related post: A Stirrer-Up of Strife.

Why don’t students use AI-based tutor-bots? Holt calls this the 5% problem: only about five percent of Khan Academy students use the platform enough for gains to show up on standardized tests, and that five percent skews toward higher-income, higher-performing kids, who would have done fine anyway. Ben Riley, over at Cognitive Resonance, names a […] Source

I took targeted triceps work off the table today as they both still have a twinge in them. I’m still really sore from all the pull-ups earlier in the week, but I gotta burn off some stream. Unknown location (probably inside)

Disclaimer Previously… Rivals Conclusions The Bad The Weird Stay Tuned… Disclaimer In these posts, we discuss a non-“Free as in Freedom” popular culture franchise property, including occasional references to part of that franchise behind a paywall. My discussion and conclusions carry a Free Culture license, but nothing about the discussion or conclusions should imply any attack on the ownership of the properties. All the big names serve as trademarks of the owners, and so forth, and everything…

Hello from 10 kilometers over somewhere in the Midwest, as I sit in a tiny airplane seat and appreciate the privacy screen on my laptop. I've been writing a monthly newsletter here about what I am up to for the last four years. Over the dozens of posts, the format has largely stayed the same - some bullet points about what I'm up to and links to things I like on the internet. Well, I've decided to change that up today. I'm in the mood for a meandering, disorganized, prosaic post. Buckle in. I…

A spiritual masterpiece. View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize Been searching high and low for this masterpiece for several years but never found the coveted 1st pressing with the single logo box and the ringwear-prone cover in good condition. The search is now officially over as I’ve found this lovely example.…

September saw the temperatures here finally cooling down, and the world going a bit greener again… just in time for autumn to hit as the leaves start browning. I do enjoy autumn, though! September in general: It was a busy month for work once more, but hopefully that’s drawing to a close now… but other than that, it’s been a pretty quiet month with a lot of mood reading. Some energy has been spent on getting my ebike spruced up so I can ride again, after a year where I kept off it for fear of…

E-books (not paper/print books) seem set to start shipping with extra AI features, akin to the bonus features that once came with film and TV DVDs: Google recently announced a partnership with Bloomsbury, De Gruyter Brill, Johns Hopkins University Press, Macmillan, O’Reilly Media, and Penguin Random House to enhance e-books from its Google Play store with AI, allowing readers to interact with the text of the books directly, ask questions and get answers, and develop tools such as quizzes and…

The showrunner of Ask This Old House, which starts its 25th season this week, talked to me about everything from YouTube and TikTok algorithms to standing by the work the show's tradespeople do.

a good sleep won't fix this the rest and recharge needed for my revival requires such safety only the presence of another warm body could offer

Quoted Exclusive: A Day in the Life of Luxury With Carl Gambino by Kristine Hansen (realtor.com) "It is unusual to find a 25-foot-wide Brooklyn Heights townhouse that preserves its 1848 Greek Revival character while offering a fully rebuilt interior," says Gambino. I came across an article about a “fully restored 1840s Brooklyn Heights townhouse” available for the low price of $12.75 million. It looks nice. But the artcile does leave out some potentially important notes about its location. It…

“Slop” typically describes the kitschy, formulaic output of generative AI. It can also be a useful term to describe the form of abstraction tools like ChatGPT and Sunno use to create those tasteless outputs. This type of abstraction creates a...

Pink Perkins brings back the two kid characters—revealed here to be the Tidewater children–who previously appeared in the “Hitler Goes Good” strip. They don’t get first names here; the family name matters because their dad is initially in trouble. He runs the Tidewater grocery chain, and the mob is shaking him down for protection money. It just happens the mobsters in the Spirit comic strip use similar threats as the mobsters in the Gumshoe Gus comic strip the kids read. And that comic strip is…

Damn, George W. Bush’s painting of that baby really did look like Alice Neel’s babies. Neel, Alice Alice Neel, Untitled, from A Portfolio of Thirteen Prints to Commemorate the Conversion of New York City’s Second Avenue Courthouse Building into the New Home of Anthology Film Archives, the First Museum Dedicated to Avantgarde Film and Video, 1981-82 [whitney.org]Previously, related, 2020: If I Did It: George W. Bush Paintings At The Kennedy Center

I accidentally broke the handle for the smoothie machine, then I fixed it. I only ended up getting it for 1.50 (pre-pandemic slushie prices ...)

[Epistemic status: intuitions and anecdotes.] Recently, several posts and projects (Thoughts Memo, Babel Translation, Please Give Them a Chance) have taken important steps towards raising AI safety awareness and sharing rationalist philosophy in China. It’s great that we’re recognizing the importance of solving the messaging problem for China, and thus laying the groundwork for an international AI pause. Below I record my perspective on cultural differences which are relatively underdiscussed,…

I did not start this because I wanted a screenshot for /r/unixporn. I wanted to stop moving windows around manually. That was basically the entire plan. Four days later I have Hyprland, Waybar, Rofi, custom battery logic, a terminal file manager, several small helper scripts, a reproducible installer and documentation explaining

So I have been playing Carl v. Linné over the last couple of weeks. Like a lot! And it culminated in a repeat session with a good friend of mine where after two hours of planning, hustling, and finding workarounds, we tallied up the score and came to the sudden realisation that we actually had to look up if there was a tie breaker. 188 points, the both of us! I had to laugh. It was the biggest score I had seen in all my plays—by a mile—and we had hit it at the exact same time. What was even…

I didn’t think I’d want to read a long-ass profile on Mark Zuckerberg, but I could not stop reading Jeremy Stern’s piece for Colossus. I still think Zuck’s products are rancid, though.

Joints didn’t hurt as much today. Still working on the wings for BB’s “Ghost Skeleton Demon” costume.

I see a lot of posts about people leaving platforms. This one about leaving Reddit, this one about leaving WordPress, and a bunch of others about leaving Discord, GitHub, Codeberg, Photoshop, and more. There are also those talking about leaving the web entirely for the smallweb (Gopher, Gemini, etc). The reasons vary. Pricing changes, AI training on everything you post, a new owner, a new policy, or just the slow feeling that the place stopped being built for you. But the posts all have the…

On October 3, 2025, I published a local Brooklyn news report titled Christmas Countdown Clock in September. The article began: I was walking up Degraw Street on the afternoon of September 29, 2025, when I happened across an unexpected seasonal decoration: An inflatable snowman with a Christmas countdown clock. As you can see in the original link, I did deliver the promised inflatable snowman with a Christmas countdown clock, which accurately indicated that we were 86 days away from Christmas. I…

Read the full post at - Any Human Ever: one life from over 100 billion Any Human Ever: one life from over 100 billion Is possibly one of the best teaching tools I’ve ever seen on the internet. The concept is simple. There have been about a hundred billion humans to have ever lived. We each are occupying one of those lives, but what would it have been like to be another life? And it takes what we know from the median person from time and place and simulates if you could draw another random life,…

I continue to check my little dashboard of #SanFrancisco COVID numbers each morning to decide whether to stop in a little bodega on the way home from an errand to pick up a professionally-made sandwich with 💕everything💕 or to go home and made an OK sandwich with the few ingredients I can be bothered to keep on hand. Lately, the numbers have been OK. The last time I blogged, the numbers were sorta-OK but, annoyingly, not agreeing. Lately they've been agreeing! I've resumed going places.…

Egg: Buttercup Festival 3-400

Marcin Wichary has posted today an article “The left hand should know what the right hand is doing” on his blog Unsung. It shows several scenarios across different apps and websites, in which one part of the app suggested something useless or impossible, while the other should already have been aware that it makes no sense. I immediately remembered two similar cases. 1. Amazon shows ads for refrigerators after I bought one This one is maybe borderline, but I suppose not many people decide to…

Screenshot taken from Itch.io page The Annual Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival is a cute online game by the designer of another game I love, A Short Hike. You explore a small town, carve pumpkins, and do other Halloween stuff! It’s only an online game for the month of October but you can play offline all year. Every year they add more stuff and even from playing for just 15 minutes I already found something new. I suppose it’s possible that it’s a thing from last year that I just never saw but it…