Among people who are enamoured of the idea of free will – “You can do anything you set your mind to!” and similar platitudes – determinism can seem like a bleak and defeatist doctrine. And yet, approached with an open heart, it is anything but bleak. As Robert Flix writes (Spinoza in Plain English: Understanding Determinism, Freedom, and Joy pp.48-49): Spinoza insists this is exactly where true freedom lies. Freedom is not breaking the rules of necessity (impossible), but understanding them so…

last updated 0 minutes ago at the risk of telling on myself - weird person online sees weird things in their algorithm and thinks that everyone sees said weird thing everywhere! - my algorithm on YouTube is really trying to push a few uncharitable and annoying narratives about other people recently. namely: no one is authentic any more; no one has original ideas these days; every creator and artist and everyone in between is a carbon copy of each other. naturally, i click the options menu on…

I always look forward to the first session of the Glorious Grasslands Winter habitat management programme, and today I set out for the eighth season since I started doing it in October 2019. We returned to a regular site, which we’ve certainly been coming to for four years, maybe even five. The first time we encountered it, it was nothing more than a steep slope covered in dense mature hawthorn trees. Today, it has been transformed and is now mostly grassland, dotted intentionally with pockets…

Enjoying endive and red chicory hotchpotch, served with pork belly slices and seasoned with a touch of curry powder.

Some links to game engines and procedural generation that could be used for a walking simulator game.

There is a particular sort of arrogance in listening to somebody describe an experience which has troubled them for years, and then informing them that they have misunderstood their own feelings because those feelings do not fit the explanation you prefer. I have encountered this often enough that I no longer believe it is always an innocent misunderstanding, because there are people who seem genuinely offended when somebody refuses to accept the identity, motive or belief they have assigned to…

Postcard From The Past #2: LNER ‘Claud Hamilton’ 4-4-0 No. 8783 hauls the Royal Train to Wolferton near Sandringham in 1938. A history of dedicated royal service on the Great Eastern.

I graduated from college in 1982. Social Security was broke at that point, with promised payments exceeding incoming revenues. Since the system was “fixed” in 1983, the trajectory has been clear to me. I would pay into the system my entire working life, first to support those who were already retired or soon-to-retire in the 1980s, but also to build up a “trust fund” that would help to finance benefits for those retiring in the early 2000s. But then, just about when I reached retirement age,…

Not every November reality TV show premiere deserves your time, so let me help by highlighting some must-watches and gonna-skips.

Telenia TVox is susceptible to Unauthenticated OS Command Injection in the /reportExporter/Export endpoint. In this blog post, we discuss how, while investigating previously disclosed TVox vulnerabilities with Claude Code, the AI autonomously discovered a novel unauthenticated RCE, and how we manually validated it on TVox 24 and 26.

Just a little late for Halloween, I've got a scary blogpost for you. Travel with me to a town just on the edge of the Twilight Zone, where William Shatner nearly misses becoming the latest victim of a large language model... The story starts, as many stories do, in my childhood. I convinced my younger brother that I could speak with his Squirtle Pokémon card by flipping a coin and interpreting the answer. By the end of an afternoon, he was in tears, convinced that his Squirtle card didn't like…

Where the Journey Begins, paper collage, 2026 Here are some collages I made this week. Most of these are two and three pieces, which are at once the simplest and most difficult compositions for me. They’re the simplest because they have few component parts, and for that reason, they are also the most unforgiving. In […]

I wanted to learn a Latin language for years. Dating a Colombian woman had me learning Spanish within a week (there’s an obvious Romance language joke here).

Frost at first. Sun later. Put a new set of fire bars in the incin. Bert came to see the X former. No bond yet. Cleaned silage lab again. Dot and Jame at home.

Clinic “Model Citizen” Clinic have essentially sounded exactly the same for nearly 30 years, but they’ve also never made the same record twice. As I’ve noted many times before, they work within a very specific and highly recognizable style – the buzzing vintage organs, the dubby melodica, the jaunty rhythms, Ade Blackburn’s distinctive nasal vocal tone – but they’re always tossing different musical references into their familiar stew. Or, in the case of their 10th record Wild in the Streets, a…

A raw day with some heavy showers. Mopped out the office and out side T. Cleared silage lab and workshop. A new set of fire bars came for incinerator. Cleaned No1 jet.

I was originally going to feature the photo below, but these flowers from that October 9th feel better today1. The gnat problem has largely resolved. It’s very possible the yellow sticky traps I put at the base of every plant in the office did the trick, along with one of those blue light Zevo things. Gnat trap I’m writing this a month in advance after the results of a historic midterm election. Between tasks I’ve taken to watching celebration videos and been dabbing tears of relief all day. ︎…

Not a bad day. Rain at first. Some sunshine. No 2 on red. No 1 can’t light. Think X former is done. Rand Nuway. Stayed to dinner. Did all the T. Spew lot time on the burner. (I don’t understand much of this)

A fun video from Vidya James about a specific moment in The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask on Nintendo 64 that starts with a bug (similar to this thing we talked about once), and ends with a fun effort to find the perfect conditions to put that bug to some good use: This is in some way adjacent to the Mega Man glitch story, and also the Quake speedrun story, but there’s a few different angles here: statistics, brute forcing, and code analysis. But I also feel like this in a strange way talks…

I have a wonderful little family. Beautiful and caring wife and two unbelievably amazing children. They are my world. Our kids are still young and need us. To me, that need to protect, teach, love, assist, etc. overrides everything. I have no desire for career or excelling in hobbies. Sure, I have them. But that’s not my purpose for being alive. Having children has given me purpose in life. Those kids NEED me. And that’s what scares me. One day, faster than I’ll ever be ready for, they just…

Gale still blowing. Some gusts very strong. No cars. Did office and all the T. Cut some wood up for the incinerator. Cleared some old F.W. out of the library.

You know I love a Monstera. Charlotte is particularly skilled at cultivating them.152 words · 2 images

A scroll-driven walkthrough of LLM context and how tokens pile up.

A zine chronicling the Conquering the Barbarian Altanis D&D campaign. This issue includes sessions 126, 127, and 128. Adventurers battle the Flaming Eye. You can download the issue here. Overlord's Annals zine is available as part of the Ever & Anon APA, issue 17: #Zine Subscribe to get the latest post in your inbox. No spam. rootringPrev · Random · Directory · Next

While we await confirmation of the next 24-hour strike planned for Thursday 12th November, I’ve been making contingency plans for teaching. A recent article in the Irish Times states that the Government’s offer is worth about 7.75% over 20 months, which is so far short of the cost-of-living increase required that it is insulting. Given the gap between the two sides I think the strike is highly likely to proceed. On that basis I went out and bought some thermal underwear in anticipation of…

I actually took time out of my day to head out with my camera. I heard these migrating birds before I was able to see them. I had only the 50 mm lens, which obviously wasn't enough to get any details. 👉 View one more image

When I want to write something down, I have to decide where to write it. Currently, the choices are... My Tinderbox Daybook TheBrain TiddlyWiki My Org mode daybook.org Denote's journal entries Org-journal Baty.net One of 5 of my "current" paper notebooks The problem is obvious. The solution...not so much. You see, I refuse to give up any of the above. I've tried. It doesn't work. ✍️ Reply by email

The reason I dug into the translation settings in the first place was this popup – it keeps coming up after dismissing it. Not every time, but frequently enough to be really annoying. There appears to be no way to disable it.

I’ve heard about and thought about proxies for pkg servers for some time. Perhaps years, but definitely months. I never took action until I saw this commit in today’s FreshPorts new ports email: ports-mgmt/git-proxy Caching proxy for package registries, including FreeBSD pkg Today. This morning, during coffee at my local shop, I implemented one in my basement. The following shows you how I did it. Every host in the basement fetches packages: base from pkg.FreeBSD.org and everything else from my…

On this day 24 years ago at 14:07 I posted my first blogpost. This post is just a brief moment of reflection for myself, and a way to mark the difference or not with last year, when I was slowly trying to make space for my sense of wonder again. This after a long period of high stress and loss. A year on, I do feel better, but the need to further my sense of wonder is still strong in order to ensure I keep feeling better. I’ve written here less than I hoped, but I did write a few things more…