It's weird how hotel breakfasts cause you to eat the most random of foods. I started my travels round the M2 full of a combination of cocktail sausages, frittata, and fried peppers, a combination that I wouldn't eat under any circumstances back in the UK. Somehow if you put it in a breakfast buffet I work my way along the row of cloches and shove a heap of everything on my plate. (Although I did draw the line on the Thursday when I opened one up and found peas underneath. Peas are not a…
Disclaimer Previously… The Siege Conclusions The Good The Bad The Weird Stay Tuned… Disclaimer In these posts, we discuss a non-“Free as in Freedom” popular culture franchise property, including occasional references to part of that franchise behind a paywall. My discussion and conclusions carry a Free Culture license, but nothing about the discussion or conclusions should imply any attack on the ownership of the properties. All the big names serve as trademarks of the owners, and so forth, and…
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Irish novelist Edna O’Brien passed away two years ago. When I read of her death I didn’t know anything about her writing except that her first novel, Country Girls, had been banned in Ireland. That made me decide to read some of her work. As it happens the first book by her that I came across was the last she wrote, in 2019, which I bought over a year ago and has been sitting on my coffee table ever since. I started reading it this evening and found it so compelling that I couldn’t put it down…
I'm so grateful for my time at OpenAI, where I led alignment safety for the official ChatGPT basketball. I gained so much valuable experience building Altman's armageddon engines, and I'm taking it to the next level with my new startup: Jurassic Park. At Jurassic Park, we're resurrecting the ultimate apex predators to defend humanity against misaligned AI. Cyberdefense Capabilities Further reading: OpenAI incident report, Anthropic incident report. According to the fossil record, dinosaurs…
This is my entry for AuguStory, a blogging challenge from Robert Birming to tell the story of your blog. Once upon a time, Newsonaut was called Newsloops. The name was a mashup of news and Kamloops, reflecting my frequent commentary on local news for the newspaper where I worked. The internet was still new-ish back in 2010, but we could see it was coming for our lunch. One of our strategies was to embrace it, doing anything we could think of that would bring us into the digital age. And for me,…
We missed the sadly short-lived stage adaptation of the 1985 time-travel escapade movie Back to the Future (BTTF), during its brief Australian run, in late 2025. I did however catch A Future on Stage, trailer, a documentary about bringing the original film to the stage as a musical. The words “we didn’t think we could do this”, and “we had no idea what we were doing”, and similar such, may have been uttered a few times too many throughout — since we know the show eventually succeeded — but…
From On Library Holds by Parker Adey:Holds appear on a special shelf in the library with their spines turned away. Each book wears a printed band showing who it is being held for. Elastic bands hold the printed slips on the books. When you put pick up your hold, you put the elsatic band in a little recycling bin so it can be reused for other holds. The whole setup is daintily anonymous.My holds are labelled 8466 GL. There is another patron whose label is 8466 HU. Our books rub shoulders all the…
Lost poem: Looking for lost owner.
So, you’re a person who has decided to embark on a creative journey of self-expression — to make art, in other words. First off, this is awesome! The universe needs more people making art, whether that art is writing, painting, music or any other form that humans are capable of creating. You have the drive, now all you need is to find an instrument. Will it be a guitar? A pen? A paint brush? A camera? Yarn for fiber art? What will you choose to take those first steps into a larger creative…
With judicious application of ice-packs, tiger balm, ibuprofen, walking up and down the garden and lying on my side, my bad back has slowly gotten less bad. I can now sit upright for more minutes than previously and occasionally forget to take my walking stick with me to the bathroom. I have a doctors appointment (more accurately a musculoskeletal specialist) tomorrow so I’m sure it’ll have totally cleared up by then. The text message with the appointment reminder called them “The MSK” which…
This week on the podcast: Stephen and Myke are joined by Jason Snell to talk about CarPlay on boats and the new version of Pastebot, before useful consumer advice is given about weather stations and network-attached storage.
We’ve been a bit busy lately and the heat has made it unbearable to do much outside. This evening was cooler and the boys were itching to go for a walk, so we headed towards a footpath that had been blocked by nettles a month or so ago. Thankfully, the nettles were gone and we enjoyed a lovely stroll into a valley and back up the other side before retracing our steps. The sky was beautiful - a warm orange sunset on the way out and a moody blue twilight as we headed home. Too many lovely photos…
A couple of years ago, a friend of mine asked me if we wanted to exchange mixtapes. I was actually deeply afraid. Despite working with music, I'm very self conscious about my taste, probably due to some bullying during my formative years and my brother going "still listening to your Japanese stuff?". Others like me, who listen to a lot of different genres, are often at loss against "What kind of music do you listen to?" and risk answering "You know, all sort of things...". I had this…
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“OpenAI is making a big change for ChatGPT users on its free and Go tiers: Starting next week, users on those tiers will be able to have unlimited text chats with the chatbot, according to OpenAI. Right now, you may run into rate limits if you do too many text chats on those tiers, but those limits, just for text, will be going away soon. Next week, OpenAI is also adding a Think button for free and Go users that they can use to access higher reasoning for harder questions.” Which may be great…
In this blog post, we will tear into ChatGPT's code execution sandbox. We will decipher and benchmark the real compute and memory limits behind the claims of 56 cores and 4 GB of RAM.
Another fairly local harvest with Glorious Grasslands, at a farm near Sapperton. When I got there, I realised I’d done it previously back in 2023, but this was a different field. Two harvesters today so we set up a large tarpaulin and landing area. Five of us today, which sounds like too many, but we didn’t really have a lot of down time. There was a priority to harvest the field this week because it looked as if everything might well drop soon. As it was we got plenty of cowslip, knapweed and…
Why Target Common Lisp for Code Generation? I’ve been asked twice now: if the generated code doesn't matter—if the AI is doing the heavy lifting of writing the syntax—why do I vibe code in Common Lisp? Why not target Python, TypeScript, or Java? These are mainstream languages with massive training sets. The models can generate code in them with a high degree of statistical accuracy. So why do I choose to target a niche language like Common Lisp for code generation? There are a lot of reasons,…
Just had a little trip up to my favorite city of Juneau, Alaska. So lovely. Here’s just one story from the trip. There is a Big Thing going on there right now which is essentially an impending flood that is going to happen any day now. It’s an “Outburst Flood” or GLOF (“glacial lake outburst flood”). The weather.gov page explains in one graphic: So there is the famous Mendenhall glacier. Mendenhall lake, formed by it’s melt, is like 30 minutes from downtown Juneau, so it’s quite accessible for…
British musician Charli XCX released her eighth studio album, Music, Fashion, Film, in July 2026. Not so much of the glitchcore this time around, though there’s one or two (digital) scratches in the mix.
How uptight a place must Ravnica be if the theater community is made up entirely of hedonistic, nihilistic, demon-worshiping anarchists? I mean, I’ve known my share of actors, but this still seems like a slight exaggeration. (Disclaimer: I have not been to Burning Man, so there may be relevant experiences I’m lacking.) The Cult of […] The post Rakdos NPC Tactics appeared first on The Monsters Know What They’re Doing.
Much progress yesterday and today. Builder Brad and Builder Bob were on-site with Bob's daughter and grandson, and Brad's right-hand-man Derrick to frame up the interior walls of the walk-out basement. It looks different IRL than it does on paper. That long wall of doors for one thing. But it's a basement, it's not the main living space, so we'll get over it. Met with Energy Vanguard yesterday to discuss details of the HVAC design. If there's one piece of advice I'd give to anyone building a…
Every disappointment, breakup, or failure turns into inspiration. A disappointment becomes a short story. A breakup becomes a poem. A failure becomes a lessons-learned post. Writing helps you revisit, process, and reframe. Nothing is wasted. It’s all material. I share some of my life lessons in 10 Surprisingly Simple Ideas That Changed My Life.
I know that when walking the coast of Britain, many people did it to raise money for charity. I didn’t mainly because I was doing it whilst working full time and for my own enjoyment and I didn’t think I could really justify asking for sponsorship for something it might take me 20 years or more to finish! Or put pressure on me to actually finish if I decided I didn’t want to or I wasn’t up to it. I didn’t want to take peoples money for something I didn’t end up doing (and I don’t like asking…
Galen, On Avoiding Distress 1 (tr. Sophia Xenophontos): [You also said] that you learned that when his books were lost in the fire, Philides the grammarian wasted away from depression and grief and died, and that various others were going around in black clothing for a long time, thin and pale, resembling mourners. πεπύσθαι δὲ ὡς καὶ Φιλίδης μὲν ὁ γραμματικὸς ἀπολλυμένων αὐτῷ τῶν βιβλίων κατὰ πυρκαϊὰν ὑπὸ δυσθυμίας καὶ λύπης διεφθάρη συντακείς, ἄλλος δὲ καὶ ἄλλος ἐν μέλασιν ἱματίοις προῄεσαν…
A roundup of interesting links I have enjoyed recently. A typewriter wiki: typewriter.wiki William Jardine’s 40-volume series on natural history: c82.net A searchable index of nonfiction book prizes: book-prize-index.vercel.app The Federalist Papers: federalistreader.org The making of the Declaration of Independence: jeffersonpapers.princeton.edu An atlas of carpet styles: rug-belt-atlas.vercel.app Drawing resources as curated by Robb Knight: rknight.me A call to kill the cookie banner:…
I had a lunch of takeout sushi in my car and managed not to drip any soy on my shirt. If you knew me, you’d know that this is definitely a win for me. You may now send applause my way. Send me an email Latest 3 posts 06 Aug, 2026 Today Was a Special Day 05 Aug, 2026 Chatting While the Robot Lawnmower Mows 04 Aug, 2026 Sometimes… Older Posts I'd Like You to See 05 Nov, 2024 Election Night, Anxiety Night 03 Jul, 2024 Every Cat's Got a Bit of an Asshole in Him 17 Jun, 2024 Popeye as a Role Model
