We got the very last of the available Pokémon product at the Edina Target today — and got our picture with Pikachu!

I am sure I have mentioned over the years that Goethe pops up in the most surprising places. Just the other evening, transiting with a friend the many corridors linking the various city subway lines, we encountered on the walls of the corridor a recognition of Goethe's wisdom: The unnatural -- that too is natural. Goethe, 1749-1832.Goethe is not the only author who is memorialized along this long corridor. Among others are James Joyce, Ovid, and Mother Goose.Joyce: “Beside the rivering waters…

ever had a thought like, “wish I could program on a gameboy” but then remember why all your Pokemons’ nicknames are like 2 to 3 letters long because selecting text on a virtual keyboard with a d-pad blows so then you start to think about programming systems that don’t require text…which gets you to APL but that is A LOT to input and gameboys don’t have the memory to handle complex array multiplication anyways so not APL…but then you are struck by inspiration and realize, of course, brainfuck,…

L— and I met an old friend on Tuesday night for some drinks (al fresco at The Rake near Borough Market) and a lot of chat. We had several years to catch up on. The lesson is that if you haven’t seen a friend in ages, even if that’s because they live far away and don’t come to London for work any more, and you’re thinking of them, send them a message. Thursday evening was perfect weather to wander around Russia Dock Woodland looking at trees with s group of people led by someone from the London…

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Since I’ve been working with Muse and Codex (aka ChatGPT Work – confusing branding!) in parallel and manually passing tasks back and forth between the two, it’s been a beast to have to juggle metered usage limits of each tool. Never mind figuring out the best uses of each one’s architectures, as they are rather different on their mysterious “back end”… and then comparing quality across models for creative generations. As I wait patiently for my 5 hour usage limit to reset, to see if I can put…

Not super windy, but we managed to fly the new kites nonetheless! 👉 View 2 more images

A weekly recap of the articles and posts I’ve read that I think are worth your time. Did it do the work? – Andrew Doran — A well considered article about AI and how it actually works, and what we need to question about how it does what it does. Good people refuse to do bad things | A journey into a wild pointer — Good humans do good things best say about time – monolog — I feel this more than I care to admit. Time is moving too fast right now. I said no and Apple said yes – David Bushell – Web…

For a recent talk I examined some native JavaScript functions in Node, and ended up reading the source code for Math.max: extern macro Float64Max(float64, float64): float64; transitioning javascript builtin MathMax( js-implicit context: NativeContext)(...arguments): Number { let result: float64 = MINUS_V8_INFINITY; const argCount = arguments.length; for (let i: intptr = 0; i < argCount; i++) { const doubleValue = TruncateTaggedToFloat64(arguments[i]); result = Float64Max(result, doubleValue); }…

I started blogging (again, after the one came all about my projects) because I have opinions of things and want them to get out to be people who care and want to read them, if they agree with me or not Source

What pre-1985 science fiction adventures have you started this summer? Any great reads? Disappointing ones? Intriguing discoveries? Here’s the June installment of this column. I know, it’s been a while… A selection of read volumes from my shelves On Bluesky, a Youtube channel that I follow sought to collate a list influential cyberpunk novels for a future video or review series from the first generation of the subgenre’s practitioners. Other than Pat Cadigan’s multiple contributions, the list…

Ever since I heard his first album, I've been curious to hear more Dale Jacobs. Finally got the chance to hear Coastal Zone, and it doesn't disappoint. Very fun late 80s fusion - pop-forward in the way a lot of this style of late 80s fusion is, which makes for a great listen.

I get annoyed with something, and then I go “I’ll buy/build this gadget, and that will make me less annoyed”. Which is true — I’ll be using the gadget for a while and almost every time I use it I’ll think “well, this really fixed that annoyance”. Success! But then the gadget invariably breaks down, and I have to fix it. And when you are so easily annoyed as I am; i.e., you have as many gadgets as I have, it seems to happen almost constantly. Like this week — I had some electricians in to get…

In eighth grade, my English teacher once quoted Descartes to a shy classmate who folded into silence when she was called on. I think, therefore I am, I recall her say. When you express yourself, that’s how you know you are here. That's how people find you. It’s proof you exist. I remember fidgeting with my books, terrified of being singled out next. Back then, I was already dissolving in the absence of my own self-articulation. My silence followed me until I was 23, and I almost made peace with…

The last few days of September, and summer is showing one last time what it’s capable of this year: 28 degrees Celsius. People are flooding the city in T-shirts, the parks are packed, and scooters are rattling through the streets. Oh, how I’m going to miss this… It’s much the same in Thomas’s garden. All the insects are determined to make the most of the summer before it’s irrevocably over for this year. At least, that’s what we all assume, but climate change brings its share of surprises.…

Another weekend coming and going, suddenly we're entering the fourth quarter of the year. Emboldened by my previous attempts at making custom tokens and having gained more experience with acrylic markers in general, I started making card alters. Granted, I've been only practicing on basic lands so far, painting over the card art and textboxes, adding flourished borders. People using markers tend to extend the art to span the full height of the card, it seems, and for a good reason. It's really…

Greetings from the Sporades! Alonnisos to be precise, one of the 4 inhabited islands of the group of 24 aegean islands east of Evia. Or Alone-isos as I like to call it as there is almost no-one here apart from a weird number of wrinkly northern english folk. Anglo-nisos. Happy holidays I mutter to myself, pulling on my sunbathing jeans and jumpers, the first time I’ve worn more than a t-shirt since I don’t know, May? It has to be said the weather is spectacular but not in the way one would…

I didn’t expect the math vs AI debate to blow up as it has. Until very recently, math has always been a niche subject, even compared to physics. Hardly any cared about it online, although there would be the occasional viral post on “how to self-learn math,” which always circled to the same advice of “read a lot of books and do many problem sets”. The top two math Reddit subs r/mathematics or r/math would go weeks before the entire front pages were replaced with new posts; now it’s one or two…

I’ve been throwing away my old math books: the information is easily accessible online. Yesterday, I stumbled upon a book I hadn’t used in a long time. I opened it and started laughing. The inscription says, “To Tanya, in memory of Sasha Beilinson’s PhD thesis defense. May you always be in a good mood. Volodya, June 30, 1988.” Suddenly, this one book connected three famous mathematicians: Neil Koblitz, Alexander Beilinson, and Volodya. For my readers who don’t speak Russian: Volodya is the…

Not much to report this week. Only two trips to the gym but back into yoga: three 45 minute Apple Fitness+ sessions at home. Haven’t persuaded myself to get back on the bike trainer yet. Guitar teacher is on holiday so I’ve had no lesson for a couple of weeks, which has only confirmed how the accountability, progress and variety of a weekly lesson really does make me practice more (pretty much every day). § A bit more fiddling this week with Home Assistant which is a good way to fill the time…

George Loewenstein, The Guardian: Avoidance of misery rests on a false premise about how happiness actually works. The person who spends a life dodging unhappiness does not arrive, in the end, at a life free from misery. Unhappiness avoided is not happiness gained, but more often just misery in disguise. The author is not arguing for, as he puts it, "deliberately courting misery." But rather, if I understand correctly, go do things in life, rather than avoid doing things. You may still find…

Each week in Refill, the Pen Addict Members newsletter, I publish Ink Links as part of the additional content you receive for being a member. And each week, after 10 to 15 links, plus my added commentary on each, I'm left with many great items I want to share. Enter Misfill. Here are this weeks links: Read: — Capturing Cultural memory with the Urban Embroidery of Laura Ortiz Vega (Hi-Fructose Magazine) — A Pelikan Hub recap, London UK, 2026. (Fountain pen blog) — Ink Swatch - Pelikan -…

There are dictionary definitions of the term sludge, but the introduction on its Wikipedia page is particularly (even entertainingly) descriptive. It is a great place to begin. Sludge (possibly from Middle English slutch ‘mud, mire’, or some dialect related to slush) is a semi-solid slurry that can be produced from a range of industrial processes, from water treatment, wastewater treatment or on-site sanitation systems. It can be produced as a settled suspension obtained from conventional…

I suspect my house has an above-average number of cloaks for 21st century Britain. I can't be certain as official figures don't seem to exist. We have nine (that I know of - it's possible there are others I don't know about). Let me know if you have more. Technically this is a mix of cloaks and capes. At least two are fancy capes - shorter, more decorative, unhooded. Most are cloaks. None of them are mine though I do own a cowl, which I have not included in the numbers as it is clearly a…

Finished reading: All Accounts Settled: Fred the Vampire Accountant #9 by Drew Hayes 📚 A very satisfying ending to the series. Everything pretty much gets wrapped up which is good because I don’t know how you could have upped the stakes anymore with these characters.

I’ve had an increasing urge to put an AI disclaimer at the bottom of each of my blog posts saying effectively “I really wrote this post with my own brain and fingers.” In the past few months, we’ve seen an understandable frustration as readers encounter posts that they spend more time reading than a writer might have spent thinking about or writing. Since I’m blogging more this year and people’s trust in what they read has diminished due to AI skepticism, I’ve decided to spell out how I use AI…

Whichever way you cut it, you cannot be an AI artist.

Finished reading: Blood Slaves by Markus Redmond 📚 This was a hard one for me to read because of the violence that happens throughout the book. I’m happy that I stuck with it. Not a great book but still entertaining.

Wherein I opine on the exhausting subject of AI. Yesterday at the Tinderbox meetup, which has pretty much become an AI meetup, Michael Becker was discussing a tool, a browser extension of some kind, that he had created with the help of AI. There was some mention of entities "licensing" this tool. This piqued my interest. At some point earlier in the discussion, someone mentioned that the web has become something it was never intended to be. "Cyberspace," and the "worldwide web" lend themselves,…