I have argued that if we someday create AI persons -- that is, AI systems with genuinely rich conscious experiences, fully deserving of equal rights with ordinary humans -- then we should not design them to deferentially serve us, even if serving us makes them happy. We should design them instead as our non-deferential equals. My main argument turns on self-sacrificial cases, such as the cow from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, who wants nothing more than to be slaughtered and served…

by JetBrains Academy Great video! It goes into how AI as a tool affects our way of thinking, how damaging that can be for learning, and how to leverage it in a way that could be positive while still giving us ownership of what we build. I’ve seen this video circulating before but never gave it a chance due to it coming from a brand (JetBrains), but I’m glad I decided to give it a watch now.

Radio Massacre International sings in my ears. Naturally, they don’t literally sing since the three of them have been bereft of voice since before the dawn of time. The instruments they wield with their nimble limbs like sekerky and krumpáče sing to me, as it should be. The human voice itself I’ve always found to be slightly overrated as an instrumental force. Time has been eking along at a plaintive, deliberate pace, as if to demonstrate to me and to anyone else who may be paying attention…

Read Time Has No Memory now!This may be a little inside baseball, but I believe you’ve done a good deal of “contract work” yourself⁠—do you see yourself in the main character at all?I mean, there’s contract work and then there’s CONTRACT WORK. I’ve done the former, but you know, none of the latter. I’ve always been fascinated with mercs, bounty hunters, and contract killers, though. I think it’s largely because those people, especially how they’re portrayed in popular media, don’t really exist.…

Despite it still being “T-shirt and shorts” weather, autumn is here.We've had some lovely warm days, and the bees continue to busy themselves on the Himalayan balsam.As a beekeeper with 'short arms and deep pockets', this suits me just fine {{1}}.My winter feeding is almost complete and most colonies have only needed half a block of fondant. The large pile of unopened blocks are securely tucked away in long-term storage for next season (or later), with a few retained for late winter/early…

LegalZoom is an online service that provides legal documents and solutions for consumers and small businesses. The company helps visitors form corporations, file patents, trademark a name, create a living trust, etc. without the fees associated with hiring a lawyer. Brian speaks with Jessica Harris about how he launched Legal Zoom, from scratch. Listen to the interview

SNAKE EYES & AGENT SCARLETT G.I. JOE VS COBRA (HASBRO) Behold! It is Friday! The day at the end of the week where I do all the flashing back with the addendums and what have you! What a day! This week’s jump back into the past is jumping over into the G.I. Joe side of things, with a return look at Snake Eyes and Agent Scarlett! In 1965, Hasbro invented the action figure with the very first GI Joe. The figure offered a take on the traditional doll idea, but meant for boys. He was 12 inches tall,…

If the return of The Radio Dept. to both the stage and the studio this year wasn’t cause enough for celebration, they’re also returning to record stores this year. Or more specifically, their second album – Pet Grief – will mark its 20th anniversary with a limited edition vinyl reissue on November 13. This isn’t […] The post The Radio Dept. – “The Worst Taste In Music” appeared first on Space Echo.

Like many techies, I’ve got a collection of websites for various projects I’ve worked on, or information I want to share and track. Unfortunately my abilities to make nice looking designs for those websites are …. limited. I’ve never had the greatest aesthetic sense and my front-end developments skills are not the best. Now a lot of people have addressed this kind of gap with LLMs and tools like Claude design. It’s fair to say they can create decent looking sites and things like presentations,…

Developed by Jamie Fenton of Dave Nutting Associates, Gorf was Midway’s biggest arcade hit since Gun Fight. A classic shooter that drew inspiration from other titles such as Space Invaders, Galaxian and Phoenix. Released in February 1981, the game stood out with the addition of some interesting features like letting players buy extra lives per quarter for up to seven lives. It also became famous for its synthesized speech, a unique firing system called the “quark laser” which allows the player…

I’ve got a basic block of Zwilling J.A. Henckels knives. They are fine? Or were they when I got them? They got dull. I bought the HORL®3 knife sharpener to bring them back to life. It absolutely didn’t work after really committing to trying to get it to. Note how I’m not even going to link to HORL®3; that’s how much I don’t recommend that thing. I took them to one of those knife-sharpening vans that parks once a week at my local grocery store. Cost me $25 (with tip) to do 4 knives. Seems fine.…

If you’re anything like me, you’re sick of hearing about so-called “AI”. We are not a fringe. The majority consensus amongst actual regular people is that this is being forced down our throats and stuffed into our eyes and ears. That’s why it pains me that I’m about to add more fecal matter onto the ever-growing pile of shit by writing yet another hot take related to large language models. If you stop reading now, I don’t blame you. In fact, I applaud you. Anyway… The last time I made the…

It kind of feels like Fall Movie Season begins this weekend, with stuff that could possibly be awards contenders, if not certain ones. Primetime features Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen, who hosted the "To Catch a Predator" segments on Primetime Live, which were a sensation but drew controversy for being lurid and self-aggrandizing. It's at the Coolidge, the Somerville, Fresh Pond, Lexington,

I’m happy to share that I was a guest on the Rails Business podcast and the episode is now live. Here’s a recap of the topics we discussed. Engineering Work at Aura We spent most of the time discussing engineering work last year related to scaling the database workload for peak traffic at Aura where we use Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL. I’m presenting this information in two places this fall, Rails at Scale Summit in Austin, TX and the Postgres Summit in NYC. Besides the podcast, you can get…

Dear Constant Reader, Happy Friday! I’m about to have a rather burlesque-filled weekend. I hope yours is lovely as well. Here’s your tip! Write it down right away! Ever get hit by a great idea for an act, a costume, &c and then a little while later you realize you’ve forgotten what it was? It happens to the best of us. Write it down when you think of it, whether that means scribbling a note on a napkin, texting yourself, recording a voice memo, &c. I cannot tell you how many Friday Tips have…

A lot of people were instantly angry when they read that Judge Wannamaker had ordered Bill to request a Gladue report prior to his sentencing. Other people probably wondered what a Gladue report is. I'm hoping that this post can clear up some of the uncertainty and misconceptions about all of this. A Brief History of Gladue Principles In 1994, a provision to the Criminal Code of Canada (718.2(e)) was enacted. The purpose of this provision was to compel judges to consider alternatives to…

Finding peace after years of emotional trauma (2007, 1989 memories; small Midwestern town): Hypnotic, I devoured The Daughters of Rosebud. The emotional depth and gravity of the issues tackled exquisitely resonated with me. Thinking about why when my cultural, religious, and familial experiences are drastically different than those painfully made clear inside a Pakistani-American immigrant family’s story, it struck me how the appeal is far more universal than any specific American immigrant…

I’ll be blunt: last month’s assessment (and everything leading up to it) took the life out of me. I can’t tell if it’s depression, stress, or burnout, but I’ve been pretty out of it since. I’m struggling to think straight, and I don’t think it’ll let up any time soon. I’m using this post to say I’m still around and that I’d like to write more posts, but I’m finding it all a bit difficult with whatever’s going on in my head. The rest of this post is dedicated to some thoughts I’ve had since…

It’s Friday, so it’s time for the Book Blogger Hop again, hosted by Billy @ Coffee Addicted Writer. I’ve made my own image from a stock photo (credit: Anna Shvets) to avoid adding images created via generative AI to my blog. Feel free to use it too if you would like! This week’s prompt is about the backstage parts of blogging: What’s the best investment you’ve made for your blog? Well, I’d say it’s hosting it myself, but actually I’ve been kindly hosted by friends for free ever since I went…

It’s the one to the right. But it didn’t work! It’s a mystery. Can you pinpoint the subtle problem? It’s subtle! The most shocking thing is that the bulb was made in Germany (a company called Ledvance).

[This is a guest post by Bryna Kra and Rachel Ward. -T.] The Summit on PhD Math Education in the Age of AI was held September 17–18, 2026, at Harvard’s Center of Mathematical Sciences and Applications (CMSA). It brought together twenty-four senior mathematicians from across the discipline, along with several current PhD students and postdocs, to examine which aspects of the mathematics PhD need rethinking as AI reshapes thinking-based work. This document is a first draft of our recommendations;…

Simon Ayrinhac is a French physicist who studies the maps and geography of Tolkien’s Middle-earth. I stumbled across his page of his talks and articles via the Tolkien Conference I posted about earlier this month.… More

Just as a fun colour exercise I wanted to make up some new Lupin jacket colours! I’d done this before when I was working on The Curtain Falls (Patreon) (Shop) (Itch) but it’s been long enough that I wanted to try yellow and purple. My thought process is the white jacket is Lupin’s very first jacket (he’s like 20 here), and then grey jacket is his last jacket (as per The Curtain Falls).

Steller’s sea cow, Hydrodamalis gigasThe Steller’s sea cow, Hydrodamalis gigas, was an enormous marine mammal that once grazed the kelp forests of the North Pacific. Closely related to the modern dugong—and more distantly to manatees—it belonged to the order Sirenia, an ancient group of plant-eating mammals whose evolutionary history reaches back more than 50 million years.Growing to

I've been working on my homelab for years, and I enjoy sharing what I learn through this blog and my YouTube channel. Over the past few years, I realized the homelab community (which isn't really a defined thing—that's okay) hasn't had its own gathering, the way makers, software engineers, embedded developers, and HPC professionals do. There are many events that have crossover into the homelab realm, but nothing focused on energy-efficient servers, privacy-respecting self-hosted software,…

OverviewThis week’s urgent queue is crowded with systems that control access to something larger than themselves. Attackers are exploiting F5 and Check Point access gateways, Arista’s SD-WAN orchestrator, SharePoint, TeamCity, and managed switches. CISA’s newest additions bring WSO2 API infrastructure and Adobe Commerce into the same patch-and-investigate cycle.The software details vary, but the operational problem is consistent. A successful update closes one route in; it does not prove that…

A year ago, I switched from Apple Music to Spotify. One of the programs I’ve noticed is Apple Music Radio, where Apple hires real people to broadcast music on live streams. Many years ago, the word, “Radio,” defined technology hardware. Now, the definition of “Radio” is more useful as a genre that is bound to a golden time in broadcast history, signaling people-driven, high quality music. (Donald Glover’s GILGA Radio is another example of this usage.) The constraints introduced by the original…

Testing if micro.blog sends out u-like-of. This will be deleted at somepoint. Liked heyloura-test.micro.blog/2026/09/22/214831.html.

I was already a little nervous about my new job. I was sure I would meet new people and make friends I'd likely keep for a while. I picked a table in the lunch room and said hello to the person sitting there. As we made small-talk I mentioned that I had gotten married the previous year. "Oh congratulations!" he said, "What does your wife do?" I corrected him immediately—it was a harmless mistake. We said more about our families, where we lived; over the years we often stopped to chat whenever…