I'm exaggerating a little, you are after all (probably) reading this on the website which therefore can't be totally broken. What has been broken is the popular history books database that I have been maintaining for the last three or four years, showing all hardback history book publications (that I can find) in the UK: those books aimed at the general market rather than academia. With luck it may be up and running at the point in time you are read this. (What hasn't broken is the reviews and…

The job of an automatic transfer switch (ATS), put simply, is to let a load be powered from two power sources, selecting the preferred input if it is available and the backup input if it is not. A good ATS will do this quickly enough such that the changeover time is short enough that a majority of appliances won’t even notice the interruption in power. Such switches are extremely useful where you want to have single-input devices be powered from multiple sources, or in my case, where you’d like…

You cannot, in the present era, sell a used item to another person for a stated price. If an item is worth $50 and you price it at $40, you will either be ignored (because there's clearly something wrong with it) or else be counter-offered $25. It's been years since I've seen anyone accept an offer as-is. I don't think it's stinginess. It's competitive imperative. People rush forward to perform the juice squeeze to indulge their adversarial impulses. An opportunity to conquer and crush!…

A few days ago, the first beta for Vapor 5 was announced. If you don’t know what Vapor is, it’s probably the most popular web framework for Swift. I’ve posted about it before. Vapor 5 is the first new major version in six and a half years and promises a lot of new features, particularly when it comes to concurrency and other performance enhancements. This is the list of highlights from their announcement blog post: No more EventLoop or EventLoopFuture! Vapor 5 is fully async/await with real…

Tickseed beggarticks at Sewickley Heights Park, 11 Sept 2026 (photo by Kate St. John) 20 September 2026 This flower is a closeup from the field of yellow flowers at Sewickley Heights Park. Tickseed beggarticks or bearded beggarticks (Bidens aristosa) are pretty flowers but they make annoying seeds. The path of yellow flowers on the Pipeline Trail at Sewickley Heights Park during 3RBC outing, 11 Sept 2026 (photo by Kate St. John) Fertilized flowers create “hitchhiker” seeds, each with two barbed…

I like both Everybody's Golf Hot Shots and Easy Come Easy Golf, but both of them lack something the PS4 entry had - making your own character and improving their stats. I miss this element. Not really any other casual golf series out there to turn to either.

Back in 2001, BMW made a series of short films that they released to the web. They starred a then-unknown Clive Owen as “the driver.” He was a guy who drove BMWs and… did stuff. Some of this was spy stuff, some of it was private detective stuff, but all of it was very cool.The films were five minutes or so, and they got some named directors for this: I remember John Frankenheimer, Ang Lee, and Guy Ritchie (along with his then-wife Madonnna). Production values were sky-high — each film was a…

porting Naruto to Blades in the Dark is looking more and more like "What if the movie the Warriors was set in Edo era Japan?"These are some prompts to generate gang aesthetics (d12). Roll as many you want on each until you like it. 1. Tattoo/Mark (discrete)2. Tattoo/Mark (showy) 3. Bandana or scarf4. Patterned robes5. Elegant robes6. Modest robes7. Make up8. Signature hat or hairstyle9. Rings or bracelets10. A necklace or hung ornament11. A mask12. Vest or armorStyles:1. Spiritual (an animal? a…

I love Disney wedding cakes, I admit it. So I thought I'd feature some today inspired specifically by the Disney princesses. Aww yeeeeaah. Princess powers go! [By I Believe It's Cake in LA, California]Aww, how sweet is this? Cinderella's blue birds and pink ribbon add the perfect finishing touches - and if you look closely, the top filigree design looks like her pumpkin coach! Or how about this Beauty: [By Chocomoo Cakes in Sheffield, UK]Fairy lights, roses, and allll the sparkly glitter on the…

by Eurocheese Rinko Kikuchi could become the first Japanese Best Actress Oscar nominee ever if HA-CHAN, SHAKE YOUR BOOTY! goes all the way. Continuing our quest to find potential Best Actress contenders among TIFF screenings, we have already seen nomination potential in The Debut, Being Heumann and Onwards and Sideways. Next up, we have the Canadian premiere of Rinko Kikuchi’s performance in Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty! after its Sundance competition slot earlier in the year, and the…

In chapter 8 Lanier says that our quest for free software and the capitalist idolization of getting rich led us towards free ad-supported software1. What feels ironic about this is that the free open-source software contingent is often militantly opposed to corporate interests. Many don't want to sell their software figuring that they're contributing to the commons and that is its own value. But they need to eat, and not everyone is as militant about software being free. The big problem comes…

Could this be the first decade without a dai-yokozuna? The 2020s have so far been an era of unprecedented parity in sumo, and I’m of two minds about it. In many ways this unpredictability has made the sport a lot of fun—would anyone tune in on Day 1 if we already knew who would be … Continue reading Dai-Yokozuna by Decade

I was pleasantly surprised to see a book by Thalassa pop up when I did a trawl for everything tagged femdom on romance.io, that is not clearly a shitty AI cover erotica short sold for male subs. Normally, this author write high violence, brawling dynamics between supernaturally powerful men and scrappy women who fight to the death in Dark Romance settings. Since they are such an inventive and delightfully unhinged writer, I wanted to see if they gave things the same commitment to the extreme…

I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.— Jacob Coxon (@hilbertspaess) September 9, 2026 This is how Jacob Coxon said goodbye to the AI industry, on X, last week. And in a follow-up post: “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of…

Qwen3.5 9B through Ollama (GGUF and MLX), llama-bench, mlx-lm and rapid-mlx on an M3 Ultra. Measured tokens per second, memory, and what MTP changes.

2026-09-20Hello!I'm not familiar with architecture or design, so I can't imagine the planning and permission required to install hundreds of reflective glass panels to cover this building (a parking garage?). It's like a modern skyscraper, but fancier and more fragile. And without scraping the sky.I remember the Walkie-Talkie skyscraper of London burning cars and ruining items because it reflected light to a point on the ground to harmful amounts. I assume architects and designers have learned…

A very slow week, all things considered, with all the excitement concentrated towards the tail end. I wish I could say the same for next week, which is bound to be exciting throughout: new office, Amogh coming over, CONTROL: Resonant releasing, and IndiaFOSS 2026! Social Expand image🙌 ABSOLUTE CINEMA 🙌 Yash made an impromptu plan for him, Mayank, and me to watch Resident Evil on Friday morning, and it was an absolute riot. The first half had a handful of excellent jump scares that made all of…

Much like mourning, shopping never ends. And though several months have passed since we honored, ogled, and fervently bid on Marian’s Richters, with fall comes a new round of auctions to remind us of what we’ve lost, and what’s newly available. Orchidee II-II? Marian Goodman’s second Gerhard Richter edition, 1988, offset print on lightweight card between plexiglas, this one is ed. 21/25, the one last May was ed. 18/25 And if some of it feels familiar, that’s just how grief works. And art…

Learning Project My project has these instructions when I want it to teach me something: Whenever I ask you to teach me something, think about the what, why and then the how of the thing. What is this thing? Why does this exist? What does it replace? Why is it better and so on? And then finally, the syntax, the how of the thing. This section should be more detailed than the other sections. It should have commands or how to do a thing in the UI, whatever is relevant. It should also have a…

It is strange to think that today marks 54 times that I have spun around the sun. I have somehow managed to survive 54 trips.54 birthdays.54 times that I can say yes, I managed to pull off another year. And yes, age is a funny thing. Age is neither kind nor unfair and at the same time, age is one hell of a trip.My body went from very small to bigger than what I expected. Also, my life has changed more times than people change sides with their political views. I have managed to survive the wild…

On 20 September 1991, the church of St. James Garlickhythe, was almost demolished when a 170ft crane crashed through the roof. Having survived the Blitz, narrowly escaping a 500lb bomb which failed to explode. The church’s name ‘Hythe’ is Saxon for landing place it was London’s most important Hythe. Garlic, a vital preservative, and medicine in the Middle Ages was unloaded here and probably traded on Garlick Hill. On 20 September 2005 Battersea Bridge was struck by a gravel-laden barge causing…

There I was, paying attention to Celina as she charged her solar batteries. Then I saw some lovely light on a flower and scuttled for the camera. While working on that, a bee showed up. Once I saw these, I of course thought of Susi.Of the DayDriftwood (NZ)FilmLinda, and two of her sisters.NewfoundlandNew BrunswickWhy ever didn't I publish this, and maybe I did90 days, or so ago and FlowerLandscapeSerendipity

“System One” models like Jev are fast general classifiers. Classifiers have existed since 1958, but they have to be trained for specific tasks: if you build a classifier to identify images of dogs, it can’t be used to tell you if a streetlight is red, or if a letter is urgent. Like a LLM, Jev can be prompted for a wide variety of tasks, from sorting email to playing Doom. I think models like this are going to be important. There are many tasks that a LLM could do in theory but are too slow and…

§ This week we got to try our first few ripe maypop fruits and figs. We also blended up a big batch of pesto with the basil we’ve been growing all season. § Last Sunday Caroline and I took the baby to the Village Peddler Festival at Lake Farmpark. There were way more vendors than we expected and it was a nice alternative to the county fair that we skipped this year. Our favorite part was visiting the park’s “Plant Science Center” greenhouse with demonstrations on hydroponics and aquaponics. §…

Updated September 2026 Egg-in-a-hole goes by many names: bird-in-the-nest, the breakfast Olympia Dukakis makes for Cher in Moonstruck, or, as one follower’s son calls it, “good day eggs,” because you can’t have a bad day when you’ve had one for breakfast. That last one is obviously my favorite. This version combines that childhood classic with my unapologetically basic adult favorite: avocado toast. Crisp sourdough surrounds a runny egg, then gets topped with lemony avocado, a juicy salted…

Got to dive deeper into Teddy Charles’ catalogue… View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize An elusive New Jazz gem recorded in 1957 and released in 1959. This one flew under the radar for me for a very long time. In process of going back to exploring earlier hard bop stuff again I listened to this and was very pleasantly surprised by how good this album is and what a…

⏱️ 02:17 total (1:40 actual) ⇄28.9km ⌀17.2km/h ↗109m ↘?m At last, the weather was cool enough to go for a bike ride at a reasonable hour. I stopped early on at the still new park along the river for coffee and a bun to fortify me. There was a gaggle of cyclists already there, mostly MAMILs, and I was dead chuffed when one came over and asked if he could lift my bike. “Complimenti,” he said, then beckoned his friend over to guess how much it weighs. His friend was more interested in the suicide…

On a train trip West from Tokyo on the Chuo line you pass by the Northern slopes Mount Fuji, but from the angles offered it’s hard to see the summit. This was doubly the case when we did it on the way to the Nagano prefecture because that early September day was rainy and misty. I pointed my phone’s camera in the vague direction of the peak but I was guessing and it wasn’t worth pressing the shutter. There was nothing to see. Mount Fuji’s looming presence expressed itself as an absence beyond…

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A little while ago, as I was wrapping up my day, I discovered an active webhook configured in the digiusher code repository. Events including PRs, issues, and commits were being sent to this webhook. I make it a habit to sweep our authorized apps on GitHub occasionally but I had never paid attention to webhooks for some reason. It didn’t help that this webhook was configured not at the organization level but on an individual repository.