I often read about getting LLMs to work for a long time toward a goal. So, for example, Claude has a /goal command, and many of us (directly or indirectly) care a lot about how models do on TerminalBench, which is made up of tasks in which agents get one shot at doing a big chunk of work. More generally, long-running tasks are the sort of thing you hear about on podcasts, read about on Twitter, and so on: how large a bite can an agent chew? There are some obvious, good reasons to care about…

Finished reading: All Hail Chaos by Sarah Rees Brennan 📚 In stories there are two ways to end a character. There is the death of the character; for example Mercutio from Romeo and Juliet. And then there’s when you kill any reasonable reason to like a character; for example Jacob from the Twilight Saga. In the first book, you can think of our “villains” as people making the most of a situation that they have no control over and working with characters that they didn’t feel were real. In this…

I forgot I had this. This is what happens when you’re moving. With today’s prices the way they are this 1TB SSD must be worth a hojillion dollars! Bids start at $1mm US.

With fall bird migration in our area, I expected to see a number of migrating warblers in our area as they fly south. What a pleasant surprise to find a juvenile Rose-breasted Grosbeak stop by the platform feeder to feed on some sunflower seeds. (Note the bits of seeds around its bill.) I haven’t seen a Rose-breasted grosbeak at our feeders for over six years. I know they’re in our area, since I regularly see and hear them at neighborhood parks. When I first saw the bird, I thought it was a…

I started working full time again this week and some of the downtime I used to have in the past disappeared as work took over that but I still had a few moments I wanted to write about. Storm and the neighborhood cat There’s a cat in my neighborhood, actually across the street from me, who has been abandoned by the owners. We never saw any lost cat posters and one of my neighbors mentioned they might’ve been passing through the neighborhood as some people do in Portland. The cat was sleeping…

Watched a few laps of the UCI men’s elite World Championships circuit before heading to one of my favourite Montreal breweries, Dieu de Ciel. I’m at: Brasserie Dieu du Ciel! - Brouepub Montréal, Montréal, Québec Location map: https://misterchrisjones.ca/location/chris/7397/ Note tags: checkin, food, montral, qubec, brewpub

I’ve done quite a few posts recently about the ending of summer – the Autumnal Equinox and the start of a new Academic Year being two examples – but now we really have reached which I regard as the definite conclusion. Today was the last day of the last round of matches in the County Championship. Here is the Table as it stands at the end of the last round of matches: I haven’t followed county cricket all that closely since I moved to Ireland almost 9 years ago, but I do check the score now and…

I was a big fan of the original CONTROL, so am happy to see its sequel, CONTROL Resonant, hit release. These posters on this wreck of an old building in town are an interestingly on-point representation for the game!

So far my "Best of 2026" Spotify playlist has two hip-hop albums on it, and they couldn't be further apart in style.

Remember MarsBot? M.G. Siegler (@spyglass.org) asked a question yesterday that got me thinking: "Where is the 'Where I've Been' Service?" He took a trip down the SoLoMo (social, local, mobile) memory lane with apps like Foursquare, Swarm, and Gowalla. His focus was on the location history aspects of these apps, but I wonder if the "where are my friends?" function of those apps was the bigger draw, and if apps like Find My were the real nail in the coffin. I personally gave up on the check-in…

Thanks to Charlie Horse 47 and Killdumpster for their sponsorship of this post, via the magic of Patreon. ***Colin Jones recently pointed out in the comments section that pub landlord and Philosopher Supreme Al Murray once declared that DC don't care about us.But do we care about DC?Here's where we find out.As you would expect, Superman's not failed to notice that the country he lives in is 200 years oldHowever, much of the book is composed of reprints from the 1940s and 50s and we kick off…

A bee collects pollen from dandelion flowers in a McKinney, Texas, lawn. The post Workin’ appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

Saw this sign and wondered: The letters replacing "au" are gold color and the atomic symbol of gold is "Au". Coincidence or visual wordplay? When I got home, I looked up the color of beryllium (atomic symbol "Be"), and it's steel-gray. Whoa, nice.

I think I've written about this before, but the closest LA-area river to my house - Ballona Creek - ends near Marina Del Rey, where an automated barge designed to remove trash from the river is constantly anchored. I went down there a few nights ago to take pictures of it (and some plants). Here it is: The walk from one quay to the other is like 20 minutes even if you aren't stopping constantly to take pictures of random crap, so by the time I got around to the other side, it was dark as shit.…

Watching discussions happening online, I see a frequent unfortunate tic I’ll call the Expert Asterisk. A beginner is asking for help, and experts are answering. Then in the spirit of completeness, an expert throws in a fact or detail far from the learner’s abilities or needs.As an example, here was an interaction about git: a new learner was having trouble getting properly oriented. They were asking how branches relate to directories, and how to undo a change. They knew about git init but…

Free trials are all the rage, but paid auto-renewals pose real risks to users' relationship with your brand. Is the short-term revenue boost worth giving customers a negative feeling that could last much longer? | Read full post >>

A modern fruit breeder would never name an apple anything like "Anton Poulter." It would be trademarked as "HoneyCluck" or "Sweet Chicks" etcetera. ¶ But today's apple dates from a gentler time, when a farmer might discover a new apple growing on his* farm (*for surely Anton was a man) and bring it to the state fair or horticultural society.

Trying to work with an intermittent connection to the internet. The fact that Teams messages end up in a ‘failed to send’ or ‘failed to schedule’ state instead of being queued is very frustrating. Is a poor network connection an edge case now?

Currently reading: null: $cat /dev/null_ by Dienw Neb 📚 I found this in the back of a 2600 Magazine and it intrigued me. Side note: I wrote a post about turning this Amazon ebook into a PDF. I emailed the author, and they emailed me a proper EPUB back. Bonus points for being a nice person.

I just finished reading “Lonesome Dove”. I see why so many people say it’s their favorite: it’s near the top of my list now, too. Wow. I hate that I’d passed it by for so long. I had it in my head that it was a romance novel of some sort, like “the lonesome dove sought her true love in the American West” or such. And in a way, it is. Even more, it’s a brilliant exploration of hopes, fears, motivations, and survival in a brutal environment. Go read it. It’s great.

Admit it, you were wondering where the hell the gas-station staples Combos came from just as much as I was. Anyway, I figured it out. At one point a drill was involved.Today in Tedium: As snack foods go, Combos I would describe as the perfect B-minus food. It’s a combination of crunchy and cheesy, nothing more, nothing less. They are the closest a road-tripper is going to get to chips and dip without stopping. But it’s not like the best food you’ve ever had. It’s the kind of thing that gets…

Deinonychus antirrhopusIf you met Deinonychus in the Early Cretaceous, your first thought might be, “What a splendid bird.” Your second thought, if you were a small animal, would probably be, “Oh dear.”Deinonychus antirrhopus was a two-legged, meat-eating dinosaur that lived in what is now North America roughly 115 to 108 million years ago. Its name means “terrible claw”, which is

Background Problems Some Quick Overall Thoughts Why Today As a quick “programming note,” this post goes out late, not because it came together at the last minute—in fact, as I tried to figure out if I had anything to post, I stumbled across this old draft already written1 that indirectly talked about other things that I’ve had on my mind—but because the Nor’Easter has apparently knocked out Internet everywhere, somehow, despite all the alleged preparations they’ve announced over the past week.…

Reading this week: The French Mind by Peter Watson If the previous day was all about the agricultural history of Charleston, free or otherwise, this day was going to be all about coastal fortifications. The real big destination of the day was Fort Sumter, but that was only part of the day of course, and so the first thing we did was arrive at Fort Moultrie pretty much the moment it opened. We had wanted to take a bit of a look at Sullivan’s Island, and also of course Fort Moultrie and Fort…

What does it feel like to be 20% non-imprismed? Somehow that seems more dangerous than being fully enclosed. Guest post by Quirkz: [But a note from Chet first: I broke the last entry in a weird place. Quirkz was in the middle of exploring Level 5 of the dungeon. He was so engrossed in reading plaques on the wall that he missed the fact that he was approaching a key plot element. We pick up with his narration.] After reading 10 walls of plaques, we turn around and realize Lady Synd is right…

Book Do Walk by Libby DeLana. I’ll never fault a book that extols the virtues of walking, but it’s the first time i wanted to put one through the shredder. DeLana is an executive creative director, whatever that means, so she felt the urge to trademark her practice as ‘ThisMorningWalk’. (Of course there’s a podcast.) I guess ‘daily walk’ sounded too… pedestrian? At best, Do Walk reads like a performative take on a wishy-washy understanding of meditation. At worst, it sounds like yet another…

I read Sylvia’s lovely post Who I blog for, and I wanted to write my own view on it. It’s not that different from hers, actually, and I think that’s the case for many bloggers. First and foremost, my blog is an outlet for my own thoughts and feelings. I’ve tried journaling in other ways, and sometimes still do, but blogging is what makes it consistent. I think it comes down to the feeling of creating something outside of my own safe space, even though no one might read it. This is where the…

After a very dodgy start this summer's season at Shakespeare's Globe has significantly improved, and it ends with one of my favourite Shakespearean comedies - one of the least coherent plots, but a jumble of confusions and setpieces that can respond well to just embracing the chaos. So where I was a bit disappointed that last year's Western Romeo and Juliet didn't do anything with the high concept beyond the visuals, Sean Holmes, who this time co-directs with Charlie Josephine, gets better…

Country People – Daniel Mason For some reason, I’d thought this book was about my part of Herefordshire, but it’s not …. not by a long chalk. Rather it’s a novel about a Californian academic family relocating to rural Vermont, interlaced with fairytales and folktales. And in tune with the folktale theme, there’s a Successful Wife, Hapless Husband, Smart Kids, Roguish Dog, all encountering The Interesting Locals. And it’s genuine interest, there’s no sneering superiority. Very enjoyable,…

The main highway through Hawi is Akoni Pule Hwy., though it looks more like Abbey Road in this photo! This week’s Sunday Stills challenge theme is ‘Your Home Town.’ See more responses here. Downtown Hawi is only about a block long, but it can be a busy little place, and popular with tourists on their way to and from Pololu Valley. Locally made ice cream is available at two spots, across the road from each other! A new business in town. Saturday is Farmers Market day, though it got rained off…