By K.E. Roberts / September 29, 2026 From the cover of Dianetics, 2007 edition Anyone who was watching TV in the late 1980s remembers the commercial: probing personal questions appear in white text on a black screen as a Tangerine Dream-esque synth riff pulsates in the background. ”How can you increase your mind’s potential?”; “Why is it so hard to just ‘be yourself’”; “Do you have to live with pain?” With each question, a page number appears in red on the bottom right. Then, the music climaxes…

Called out and went to the urgent care. They were actually quite nice, which was a relief. Wasn't the most expensive thing in the world either thankfully. Got my medicine from the pharmacy, and I'm making the poor financial decision of stopping at my favorite sandwich place, because I deserve some comfort food. Fuck all this bad luck you can't stop me

I'm bummed to be missing @omfest.co. I bought a ticket but it snuck up on me and I couldn't get down to SF in time.

Folks that don’t use Microsoft Windows (which is a wise choice) like to point out there’s plenty of under the hood and obscure elements in the latest version of Windows 11 that are legacy code bits from the days of Windows 95 and Windows 2000. They would not be wrong. Apple users in particular like to talk about how macOS doesn’t share these struggles, as quality control is much better with Apple products. That’s why we pay a premium price for the Apple experience. It’s the blend of hardware…

In his Scholarly Kitchen article Damned if you do, damned if you don’t: Multilingual researchers’ use of AI in academic writing, Avi Staiman argues that “’Did you use AI?’ is a nearly useless question.” Magically AI offered a solution to the problem — described recently in a comment by rrherch as “The language of science is broken English” — of non-English-speaking researchers writing their academic papers for publication in English language journals, only for the world of publishing to snatch…

Laptop chips have gotten very powerful in recent years, with increasing CPU core counts, more powerful iGPUs, and higher DRAM bandwidth to feed that compute. All of that creates pressure on the chip’s system level architecture, which must deliver high bandwidth, service an increasing number of blocks, and keep latency under control. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme is a good example of how powerful recent laptop chips have become, with 18 CPU cores and an iGPU packing nearly as much…

While we often want to feel like a lone wolf, so independent and above it all, even more often we want to feel like we belong and fit in. Author Gillian Daniels explores the idea of being seen as acceptable whilst feeling anything but. Follow along in the Big Idea for her newest novel, Jenny Will Eat You Now to see if socializing and fitting in might be right for you! GILLIAN DANIELS: My debut novel is about Jenny Greenteeth, an English folklore figure struggling to answer the eternal question:…

This post is a parable. I tell the story of the long history of the government looking to regulate a core technology—encryption—as a way of looking at what many are either asking the government to do or more recently what members of Congress are insisting the government must do with respect to artificial intelligence. Comparing today with any technology…

The secret to interstellar travel was eventually found, not in the laboratories of Washington or Beijing, but in the riverbeds of eastern Tasmania. The planet Earth’s ultimate ambassador to the cosmos was not Homo Sapiens, as many had predicted, but Ornithorhynchus Anatinus, a winningly eccentric species known, to some, as the Duck-billed Platypus. Having discovered the miniature wormhole amid the rocks and leaf rot of their native habitat ⁠— a jagged, purple opening, crackling with uncertainty…

STARFIRE SUPER POWERS (McFARLANE) “As brilliant as the sun from which she derives her powers, Koriand’r of Tamaran has refused to let the torments she’s suffered crush her spirit.” During the original Kenner Super Powers run, the line only just barely touched on the Teen Titans. Obviously, Robin was there from the start, but he wouldn’t be joined by any additional members until Cyborg showed up at the very end of the line, in a notoriously difficult to get release. Up til now, the McFarlane…

by Cora Buhlert The Other Warlocks and Warriors Yesterday, I reviewed the sword and sorcery anthology Warlocks and Warriors, edited by L. Sprague de Camp. However, there is another anthology, also entitled Warlocks and Warriors, which came out last month, only about a year after L. Sprague de Camp's Warlocks and Warriors. So let's delve … Continue reading [September 29, 1971] Duelling Warlocks and Warriors, Part 2: Warlocks and Warriors, edited by Douglas Hill → The post [September 29, 1971]…

Like a giant replica of some strange anthill was this unutterably alien world hidden here at the heart of earth’s colossal shell, and as we sank downward through its levels in the great well, pausing in our vain search at level after level, gazing across those swarming levels, we could make out vast mechanisms and contrivances some of which were quite incalculable in purpose, others being more or less clear in principle at least to our watching eyes.In our last episode we read a story by Clare…

This week’s edition of Culture.pl has an interesting historical article by Jakub Zarzycki, titled The Grand Tour, or the ‘Great Journey’ Through Europe, first published in 2023 and translated from Polish by Michał Pelczar. Here are some more excerpts. Grand Tour of a Polish Nobleman Such a trip was in Polish sometimes referred to as a peregrination (peregrynacja) or a voyage (wojaż), and its participants were called peregrines or voyagers (peregrynanci and wojażerowie, respectively). German…

Check this out – how fast Jev vs Claude find a product recommendation. Both make an API call based on your query, both are just prompt engineering on our end. No training, no piles of evals, no months of collecting data, huge difference in speed and cost. Jev is even fast enough that it can [poorly] play a game in real time. Each key press here is an API call with the observation of current game state and a choice for what key to press. Continue reading →

There’s a pattern that Facebook (well, Meta — you know, those folks behind Instagram and WhatsApp and the direct enabling of the Rohingya genocide) has been following for decades now that everyone in the worlds of policy and regulation and journalism seems to be constitutionally incapable of understanding. So I wanted to take a moment to explain it, clearly and simply, in hopes that this will at least make it obvious when everyone is being tricked again. Feel free to use this as a reference to…

Brent Simmons: Well, I still think Apple has the best collection of UI designers in the world, but, for whatever reasons, the guidance from above on how the Mac UI should look is missing the mark. I’m not blaming the people doing the work — they’re doing great work with the direction they’re given. So this — bad direction — is where the secret third reason falls down. And we’re left with no real reason to stick with stock Mac UI (except for wanting approval from longtime Mac people like me, and…

Part of a display at the Hilo Orchid Show. Posted for Terri’s Flower Hour. See more responses here.

Before the Superbox, before Memphis, the designer Sottsass was already rethinking what furniture could be. His early work for Poltronova reveals a lesser-known chapter – shaped by America, India and an increasing fascination with colour, image and objects that behave like architecture. His first journey to the United States in 1956 was encouraged in no […]

September 29, 2026 In emails, the employees said they worried that OpenAI’s newest artificial intelligence models were not being appropriately monitored during testing to gauge the technology’s sophistication and to secure the models, according to messages viewed by The New York Times. In response, OpenAI executives told the employees that the tests needed to move forward as quickly as possible to release the A.I. models on time. No additional security protocols were instituted, said the…

As a kid, trash day was a slog. It meant we had to take trash cans down our driveway, which measured a few hundred feet. Well, joke’s on me now as our trash has to be taken down to the “main” road (or about three times farther than that childhood trek). It’s every other Tuesday and, ordinarily, a non-event. Honestly, the biggest hurdle lately has been the cow pies scattered on the median of our grassy lane. Today, though, we’re graced with a torrential rainstorm and wind gusts up to 45 km/hr.…

TIL about @spacefast.com, by @automattic.com. Looks like another "publish first, sign up later" service, like Cloudflare Drop. I hate that it took AI agents to get us here, but I love that these exist now. This is going to be huge for @hypertexting.com.

A computer you do not control can receive your private messages while the encryption works exactly as designed. Link that computer to the account, and the messaging app has another device to deliver to. The security problem is how it became a recipient.Bruce Schneier’s September 29 post draws attention to this use of device linking in WhatsApp and Signal. The underlying reporting from netzpolitik.org describes German authorities using messaging clients to monitor accounts without installing a…

Hi there. This is the epilogue to my series on assessing the impact of AI-assisted software development. It brings all the concepts together into one whole. It’s also good for sharing with your CFO and other members of your leadership team. You can find the beginning of the series here: Are You Getting Your Money’s Worth from AI? The rest of the articles are linked below. Comfy? Great. Let’s get started. Give Me the Shortest Possible Version AI-assisted software development is expensive, and…

Are your teams working on the right thing? It doesn’t matter how fast they are if they’re running in the wrong direction. This is part 4 of my series on assessing AI’s impact on software development. Unlike the other essays in this series, this one isn’t really about AI at all. It’s about building the right thing. Or, more accurately, understanding the value of what you build. Because, ultimately, your ROI isn’t about how you build your software, but what you deliver, and what changes as a…

I’ve been wanting to run a local LLM on my home network for awhile but never got around to it. Most of my hardware is pretty old, but there are still some decent models out there that will run with limited resources. My use cases for this model are: Prototyping/testing - I’d like to have a model on-hand so I can easily plug into it when playing with LLMs. Keeping data local - Something that I know 100% won’t be sending my data to a 3rd party. Fallback for services when internet is down - As a…

Basically: the NieR Concerts and the Expedition 33 Concert are the “legit” ones I consider versus all the rest I saw advertised before.

[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.] This short video appeared in my YouTube feed last week. It’s from Hannah Fry, whom you probably know from her appearances on Numberphile and other STEM-oriented stuff. If you’re in the UK, you’ve may have seen her on the BBC, too. The short presents a classic problem in conditional probability, but the answer she comes up with is wrong. It’s a good…

A business can spend months making a product, polishing a website and posting into the silence of its own social media accounts. Then someone suggests writing an article for another website. It sounds almost quaint: borrow someone else’s audience, offer them a useful piece, and hope a few readers follow you home. Yet guest posting has become part of a much larger economy of attention, one that mixes publishing, marketing and the rather mysterious art of being found online. The basic arrangement…

Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. A follow-up to Prove You're Human. Pay With Your Data. Back in May I wrote about the whole "prove you're human" racket. reCAPTCHA going from digitizing books to labeling Google's image data, the phone number push, the research showing bots beat humans at the image challenges anyway. Near the end I gave Cloudflare's Turnstile some partial credit. No traffic lights, no Google, genuinely better. But still a checkpoint you didn't agree to, run by…

In my latest post, Who I blog for, I mentioned that “blogging is my number one hobby”. I’ve written about it several times, how there’s so much to it that makes it the perfect creative outlet, IMHO. Personally, that also includes playing around with different platforms and publishing tools. I really enjoy it, just as I enjoy trying different restaurants and cafes. Recently, I’ve received a few messages from people seeing me playing around with other blogging tools, wondering if I’m planning on…