In the afternoon, I attended the GOGBOT festival again and volunteerd as art guardian.

What you feed your brain becomes what normal looks like. Judgement is the main thing left when AI can produce anything, and slop is what wears it down

I found another independent blogging service in the same general vein as Micro.blog, Scribbles.page, Pike.page and Pagecord.com. It is called Inkwell.social. Inkwell is inspired by the old LiveJournal. I never used LiveJournal myself, but I certainly heard of it. After looking around Inkwell, it feels very much in the spirit of the IndieWeb to me. It is open source, supports ActivityPub, lets you use your own domain, and gives you ways to export your writing.

Some screenshots of my WT Builder custom app to create issues of the Weekly Thing. This was fun to work on and will give me a great base to build off of as the Weekly Thing evolves.

I just published Weekly Thing 350 which is notably the very first issue to go through my new WT Builder app that I created with Claude. It worked pretty well and since it was first time on new code I told Claude to literally watch me use it on the server it was running on and fix things in realtime.

Omarchy 21 Sep, 2026 I made the jump to Linux in 2019, and I've been using it regularly ever since. I must admit that distro hopping is fun. I've done my fair share of it in the past. I've tried Ubuntu, Arch, Manjaro, Mabox, and Debian for extended periods, and many more just briefly. This year I spent my August holidays at home with my wife to save money, because we are building a house. It was one of those summer days: between a bike ride and a homemade ghiacciolo, I stumbled upon an Omarchy…

Whether you love it or hate it, I don’t think there is any denying that generative AI is an incredible technical achievement. I use Claude, ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot multiple times a day for all kinds of different things. But I’ve been struggling with questions about the technology that nobody around me seems readily able to answer. Worryingly — I think — I also rarely come across anyone else asking these questions. In a work context, there is pressure to get on and deploy this technology…

As a child, you drink Kool-Aid. Then somewhere along the way, you stop. Maybe you switch to sugary sodas your parents never let you drink. Realizing it's just sugar water, you switch to a healthier option. For me, it took a little longer to grow up. I had the Kool-Aid jug and matching cups, and even the cycling hat which I wore until the flip up brim fell off. These things brought me happiness, but I always had this unrealistic vision of saving up enough points to get a car, or whatever the…

Started playing Marvel's Wolverine on the PlayStation. I've only played a couple of hours, but I can't tell if I like the game or not yet. I felt like I was doing a lot of button mashing in the early combat stages. I'm liking the linear levels though. Makes a change to every game being an open world. I watched Manchester United on the TV during the week. I had actually tuned in to watch Brighton, who were playing them in the Carabao cup. But you wouldn't have known that from the TV coverage who…

In 2022, every line of code I shipped passed through my own hands. Four years later, most of it is written by agents on machines I rarely touch, and this is how that happened, one change at a time. Manual coding In 2022 the whole setup fit on one laptop: an editor, a repository and a browser tab open to the documentation. Every line of code went through my hands.The routine was old and familiar. I read the docs, wrote the code, ran it and searched for whatever error came back. The browser was…

Wanting to destroy your computer has been a desire for as long as computers have been around. On Mastodon, my bud Christian Kras was trying to remember back to early Windows (XP, 98, ME, 95?) about a game that turned your desktop into an interactive space where you could destroy your computer desktop (digitally, of course) by choosing weapons, shooting things on the screen, placing explosives, etc, and it had chickens walking on the screen and lots of blood. After some digging, he found two…

Götterdämmerung, Act 3: Siegfried's Funeral March (Twilight of the Gods) very well could be in the top 5 of the most moving pieces of music ever created. Those of us who were around in 1981 may have seen the John Boorman movie "Excalibur" (or maybe watched it years later) will recall the final battle and the death of King Arthur, where his body is carried away to Avalon and the sword Excalibur is returned to the Lady of the Lake... all playing out with Siegfried's Funeral March emotionally…

The tale of classicist Erich Segal’s popular rise and professional fall in relation to the wild success of Love Story was very well known back in the day, half a century ago, but I suspect it’s been forgotten by now; at any rate, it’s well told by Beth Blum in the Chronicle (archived): Love Story presents the unusual case of a work written first as a screenplay and only later as a novel. Paramount Pictures asked its author, Erich Segal, to produce a paperback to be released on Valentine’s Day…

Last updated 6 minutes ago hey, welcome to the sixty sixth weeknote! i am in a funk! mild depression/generally down vibes. as a result i have not done much this week, besides the necessary and unavoidable. i have had a lot of thoughts i will try and make legible. the main "bad" thought, to give value judgments my therapist would argue with, is that what is the point of anything i am doing? what's the point when it inevitably ends in death, and likely contains suffering for me and those around…

Over the summer, I’ve been playing quite a mix of console games. On my PlayStation 4, I’ve been playing shorter titles such as Dave the Diver and Lara Croft Go. Meanwhile, on my PlayStation 5, I’ve enjoyed major releases such as the sword fighting adventure Ghost of Yōtei and the science fiction action game Pragmata. It was a good mix of games, both long and short, with mixes of action and strategy. Dave the Diver Dave the Diver is a retro pixel-art adventure where you dive through a…

The Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, appears to have watered down a commitment to compensate Australian creatives whose work is being copied by AI companies. In a speech given at the University of Sydney, in July this year, Albanese undertook to enshrine, in law, copyright protection for all Australian artists and writers: Australian writers, musicians, artists and journalists must retain ownership and control of their work. Our laws will spell that out, plain as day. An artist’s…

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The SourceThe Lost Places: Iron Keep (by Jason E Perdue)1 was one of the adventures that were used to playtest Into the Dungeon: Revived. The ConversionOnly the parts that need to be adjusted are listed here. Contents General Notes Locations Main Floor Second Floor Third Floor Monsters Magic Items General Notes ↩ Money: 1 gp = 1s 1 sp = 1p 10 cp = 1p Needle Traps: d12 DEX Loss; DEX Save to disarm without triggering. Locations ↩ Main Floor ↩105 Central HallMarked as 107 on the map. 106 Planning…

glücklich Heute war ein perfekter Sonntag. Ich habe Pancakes gekocht und den ganzen Tag Videospiele gespielt. Zunächste spielte ich „Tomodachi Life” (auf Deutsch!) und anschliessend „Witcher 3”. Es war auch eine sehr produktive Woche. Wäsche-MontagFrüher haben wir unsere Wäsche am meistens donnerstags gewaschen, aber das funktioniert jetzt nicht mehr so gut, weil Daniel arbeitet. Deshalb wechseln wir ab sofort am montagnachmittags. Das passt besser, da wir montags sowieso reinigen. Es ist auch…

We have the week booked off as holiday which mostly means intense scrubbing. This week we focused on the grout in the showers, it involved some heavy cleaning and then painting the grout white again. It looks a lot better and is quite satisfying tbh. I played online board games in Matlock for the first time, new setup is great, I did badly at the game though. It’s quite nice being able to play without headphones because I’m so far away from the other house occupants. On Wednesday I took…

Camille Carlton (of Center for Humane Technology) speaking on The Future of Human Meaning. Choice quote from the presentation: This is what is happening in AI right now. We are in what I call ‘the messy middle.’ It is a time when a powerful technology has arrived, but the rules and protections for what it will affect have not. The future of human meaning, by Camille Carlton This is descriptive and points well to the core of the situation: Rolling out a technology faster than understanding its…

A few of my students were deported. It’s happening everywhere, and we talk about what we’re allowed to in the halls between our training sessions. The kids I lost were some of my best artists with great families who tolerated my compliments of their kids’ work in my poor Spanish. I’ve screamed a lot. And felt sad and still, then screamed again. TPS ending has been devastating to our communities. broken tamagotchi feels I held my hands the way your voice held my mind. to love the cosmos ⤥…

For decades, we’ve been debating the horrific dystopian world depicted by George Orwell in 1984. I particularly remember the old reassuring adage: putting the Party controlling machinery in place would be unfeasible because of technicalities. Too many cameras, too much maintenance, too many people required to be “on the other side”, constantly watching and monitoring. The failed real-life example of East Germany spoke for itself, they said. Then, a revolution driven by technology changed the…

Elizabeth performed in Les Misérables this week with Leading Lights, an Aberdeen-based youth musical theatre group. There were five shows starting on Wednesday and finishing last night. Ben and I went to the matinee yesterday and as always we’re impressed with the amount of talent on display. This was Elizabeth’s third and final year with Leading Lights as she’ll be heading off to university when they do their show next year. She absolutely loved being part of the production and, after all the…

Eight years ago, for my firstborn’s first birthday, instead of a normal present, we bought her a plank on the Crystal Palace bridge (to be built) engraved with her name. The donation was to fund the renovation of the dinosaurs and the building of a new bridge to help with maintenance. In the time since that happened, I have heard absolutely nothing about this project from the people to whom I donated. Some days I even wondered if it had been a very convincing scam. We have also moved away from…

corridor Datum One of the problems of writing about the Culture is that for every descriptive statement that you make there are always exceptions. How can it be otherwise with a multi-species, cross-civilizational grouping of trillions of individuals? For example, after I’d been aboard the GSV for a couple of years I wanted to be able to say that there was nowhere “special”. Now, I know what you are thinking - what’s NOT special about a multi-billion tonne, 20 kilometer long craft laden with…

A lot has happened with my homelab rack since my last update. In fact, this post is a bit challenging to write as my plans have changed and changed again. Some communicated and some not. My last update, from late 2024, contains many plans which have later been abandoned. So let’s see if we can navigate through this mess and set the record straight.

glimpses of a future flood in silly little things not important the most important portraying the lightness of shared rooms the closeness of shared thoughts and the tenderness of shared air

I moved my domain and posts over to blot.im two days ago. Some teething pains still linger but the big stuff has been done (RSS feed updated, redirects are working, internal links to media mostly working). Anyways, if you thought something was weird or off, now you know.

StarringAlan Ritchson, Agnez Mo, Sydelle Noel, Anggun, and Christopher Rodriguez MarquetteOverviewReacher's back.Jack Reacher, a veteran military police investigator, has just recently entered civilian life. Reacher is a drifter, carrying no phone and the barest of essentials as he travels the country and explores the nation he once served.Review Reacher This was one hell of a season. Reacher isn’t award winning television, but it’s fun as hell. Sometimes you just want to see the big guy do…