I had ChatGPT expand for me on the idea of learned feature bundles generally, after happening upon the concept related to commonly-recurring personal and location names generated by AI systems. Anywhere, here is the three paragraphs it gave me, more as a placeholder than anything: Learned feature bundles are groups of characteristics that a generative model has learned to associate with one another. Rather than treating every word, sound, image, or concept independently, the model learns…

Multi File Editing - An UpdateA while ago I wrote about some ideas I had around scripting text manipulation where I mentioned a few ideas, namely: A text-based implementation of Zed's MultiBuffers A programming language for text manipulation that looks something like Macros The final solution I had in mind was to make something composable that could make it really nice to apply huge chunks of changes to many files in a structured way While at some point I'd like to get to the text manipulation…

If there’s one thing that Donald Trump and his sycophants love to do, it’s name or rebrand things to name them after hinself, make them sound more “extra”, or both. Consider: John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, often called “The Kennedy Center” The U.S. Institute of Peace The Department of War Palm Beach International Airport TrumpRx, a prescription drug website Passes for national parks Trump Accounts Renaming the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario Trump-class battleships and F-47…

Randomly, I just finished the first book in the Asimov Foundation series. I cannot think of a better fiction book to read right now. Given everything that’s going on in the world, and especially as a U.S. citizen living in the middle of a deeply red state, all of this tracks great with Professor Jiang Xueqin’s Predictive History channel, of which the premise is: things are going to happen and roll, and history repeats itself. Whereas the Bible plainly puts it, there’s nothing new under the sun.…

In a comment on an earlier post, a professor suggested as a topic for discussion, “Academic integrity violations becoming commonplace (analog, not just AI!) and what to do about it.” Diane Arbus, “Screaming woman with blood on her hands” I’ve certainly heard from many professors about rampant AI-enabled cheating in their courses. Here’s one horror story from an instructor of an online course: 24 students started the course. 7 dropped on the first day immediately after being informed there would…

Jeremy Keith: I’d love to see the technology decoupled from the current depressing narrative. I’d love to see a thousand homemade software flowers bloom from open local language models. Me too. At work, we use some of the subsidized models Jeremy talks about. We well know that the current token cost is likely to change. I think it is going to continue to march to near zero. Jeremy thinks we’ll get priced out of paradise. We’ll see which happens. But, ever since I was a young man helping a local…

I haven’t written anything here since July and my last newsletter was in May. It is the longest I have gone without writing in over a decade. The irony is that I started my monthly newsletter 11 years ago to write off my health stress. But this year it is the health stress that kept […]

The 3D Heesch Hemiobelisk: a nonzero-Dehn-invariant hexahedron with a complete corona (\(\mathbb{M}\)). The Immerman–Szelepcsényi theorem formalized in Lean as part of the LAX Lean archive (\(\mathbb{M}\)), a form of literate programming for Lean proofs that includes definitions for computational complexity theory. This year’s STOC call for papers has made significant changes, in the face of an onslaught of AI-generated submissions (\(\mathbb{M}\), via). Submissions must list authors, all of…

Getty Images, the most recognisable name in stock photography, is now facing something considerably more serious than declining contributor royalties, AI disruption or another round of cost-cutting. Ultimately, what does this mean for contributors?

Below, a quick roundup of a few of the things I learned over the past few months. The International Labour Organisation has adopted the first binding global labour standards for gig workers. Backed by 406 members, the new convention sets protections for platform workers in ride-hailing, food delivery and other app-based jobs, including measures on occupational safety, minimum pay and protection from unjustified termination. The standards will need ratification by individual countries before…

September has felt really long, so much action and adventure. Still pretty warm and summery. A good month! Updates here 26 posts updated and improved my blogroll and links posted my personal canon page though there's still lots to do, aunting and niblings, and a wishlist fixed up my images and captions a bit. Finally! Progresses elsewhere had an excellent birthday with a huge black forest gateau and went to the park with the family. Also a weekend away with my wife for our twenty-fifth…

Thanks to everyone who entered our giveaway this week. Now, for the winner of our Owl Paper Co. A5 Undated Planner: I hope this A5 planner convinces you to give them another shot! Stay tuned for more giveaways soon!

This is the latest anthology album from Infloresce Records, a collection of meditations on sexuality by different artists from their label. Fascinatingly diverse album; every artist on here has a very different take on the subject matter, a very different mood and sound. I especially loved track 3, which has such an open and optimistic feel - very much communicates the feeling of joy the artist talks about in the accompanying zine.

Not sure how they managed it, but the new Siri is so bad that it made me long for the old Siri. I had to turn it off. It’s slow as hell and it doesn’t work half the time.

New high temperature record beating previous record of 25.7 degree in 2011.

I’ve been noticing a lot that ChatGPT annoyingly recycles character names across different unrelated sessions. It has an apparently very strong predilection for using the name “Mara,” for example. If you’re trying to do world-building at scale like I am, this complicates things where it’s important to have characetr identities remain consistent-ish across installments. If you keep getting characters introduced as “Mara” and other unrelated elements use that same label in your universe, well, it…

Amm Get Better We are on the cusp of October as I write this. The nights are beginning to feel longer, and you can sense a collective desire for cosy, even whilst the temperature outside remains a steadfast 20 degrees. Into this context slides the syrupy Get Better but Amm. The San Diego dream pop musician was inspired to create the song after hearing her husband, Lee, playing the guitar. Something about his playing that day made Amm emotional, and she set about recording his performance,…

Life magazine, July 27, 1959, p. 10 Mrs. Fred Dalone Jr. was the grand prize winner of a sewing contest for members of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs in 1959. The challenge was to create an outfit suitable for a women’s club meeting. The only requirement was to use a Vogue pattern, generally considered the most sophisticated of American pattern companies. Her outfit was chosen from a pool of over 200,000 entries. I think her creation is quite dull compared to others featured in the…

Issue 3 is out! Source

🤖 This post includes some LLM-derived content 🤖 I've recently been doing some work with improving the performance of Renovate on larger repositories. To guide this investigation, I'm leveraging our OpenTelemetry support to more meaningfully understand how Renovate operates in parts of the codebase, and hone in on areas of improvement. One of the repositories I'm running these tests is particularly large, and leads to traces of roughly ~30MB in size. When trying to ingest them into my local…

Marques Brownlee just released a video essay titled “Dear YouTube”. I loved it. He talks about how YouTube is going to start shipping this new feature where makers can essentially publish different “variants” of their videos and see which performs best (an A/B test). Which immediately begs a lot of questions. Brownlee voices his: If I’m watching a video, do I know if it’s part of one of these A/B tests? If I’m reading the comments of a video, how do I saw the same thing as another commentor?…

Saving future me from past me.If you’re like me and using Astro + Sveltia CMS for your website, you might want to add this script. Last week, I lost all my changes from a draft after spending over 20 minutes writing it, and it was incredibly frustrating. Sveltia does have a restore option that appears when you reopen the page, but I find it a little finicky. I’d much rather have a warning before I accidentally close or refresh the page. I honestly thought this was already built in. diff --git…

Digital Swamp Log - Q3 2026 307 commits • 354 files changed • 35 content updates • Generated 9/30/2026 📈 Activity Summary ✨ 7 new notes created 🔄 28 notes updated 🆕 222 other files created 📝 125 other files updated 🗑️ 6 files deleted 🎯 Most Active Areas Swamp: 32 changes Root: 17 changes Logs: 7 changes Maps: 6 changes ✨ New Content 7 new notes were added: 🎓 Academic content: research, spatiotemporal dynamics of human high gamma, optical flow neonatal seizure detection, exposure-normalized bed…

ALL TIME FAVORITE RIGHT HERE This is book 2 from the Dreamblood Series. Book 1 was a banger. Book 2 might have been even better. I'm not going to spoil anything below, except for basic world-building aspects you learn pretty early on. (though! If you wanna read this book, you should let the book do the worldbuilding and skip my description) So anyway. We are in an egypt-esque setting (but not on Earth), where magic is real, and it centers around dreams. There are three types of priests,…

It's a short lil novella by the author of one of my favorite series. We're set in a world of literal angels and demons (and mostly humans). There are two main groups (races, basically) of humans, one that's considered demonic and the other considered angelic, basically. It is very clear, obvious commentary on racism. It is also a pretty good little fantasy story. The main character's sister is accused of murdering one of the ... uh ... basically cops. Idr what they call them, but they're…

My new book, The Age of Immersion: Make-Believe Worlds from Medieval Cathedrals to the Las Vegas Sphere, is out June 15, 2027, with Astra House! I started researching the book three years ago after wondering why immersive experiences had exploded in popularity. Is “immersive” just a buzzword, a relabelling of existing forms – and if so, which ones? Is it a response to the loneliness epidemic and the rise of screens, or the inevitable result of new technology, as VR evangelists would have it?…

In the middle of watching this, I got so bored I got up and started making a complicated savory pastry for my lunch, leaving the DVD running and glancing at the TV from the kitchen as I worked. Some may call that disrespectful to the film – but honestly, if the film wanted my undivided attention, it could have done a way better job of retaining it. Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud, who we actually last saw in The 400 Blows) is an unemployed guy in Paris, living with his girlfriend, shopkeeper Marie…

Celebrated our wedding at Mutant Radio in Tbilisi and brought back Wirescapes for the occasion. Built a new welded steel frame for the installation and documented the result. Released Copy Editor, a local writing tool that keeps editing suggestions beside my draft while leaving the writing to me. Continued developing Hypercontext and its native clients for macOS and iOS. Contributed a Georgian translation to Gridfinity Layout Tool, merged on September 10. Completed the first draft of the new…