8690/21609Trying to get the kids (and me) away from screens we used my English Heritage membership for about the 4th time in 5 years and went to Wrest Park. Even though it's only half an hour away from our house I had never heard of it before. But it was half an hour away from our house and that was the clincher for me.The kids were very reluctant to go, just as I was very reluctant to do anything like this as a kid, just like you were very reluctant to do stuff like this as a kid. But then…

It’s a Sunday. Yes, and it’s raining. Yes, and it was darker than I prefer when I sat down to write this edition of Sunday Morning Reading. The content feels darker too. Sign of the times? Or just a look inside what’s caught my attention? You read. You try to figure it out. I don’t think I can. Neither can anyone else it seems. Game on. AI safety is all over the news, which means it has become practically a dead horse of a topic. Is it scam or a real threat? No one knows. Funny. I think that’s…

Here's a three part series I've written about the less sexy side of red teaming focused on explaining the important details that many tend to forget about when looking into red teaming or even approaching threat-led or regulated environments.Everyone wants to hear about the clever pivot or pwn or actions on objectives: the Kerberoastable service account that turned into domain admin, the misconfigured CI/CD pipeline that handed over cloud credentials, the phishing lure that bypassed MFA.…

I like how Australia puts an emphasis on portraiture as a culturally significant art form — a greater emphasis, certainly than it receives in the UK, where I grew up. The 2026 Brisbane Portrait Prize has a selection of interestingly diverse entries, showing what’s possible with this form. An entry that caught my eye was that of criminologist Rachel Dioso-Villa, titled ‘Between the Lines’. It’s a large series of hand-painted notes and images on rice paper. For me this demonstrates how the making…

Cicero, On Friendship 7.23 (tr. William Armistead Falconer): Wherefore friends, though absent, are at hand; though in need, yet abound; though weak, are strong; and—harder saying still—though dead, are yet alive; so great is the esteem on the part of their friends, the tender recollection and the deep longing that still attends them. quocirca et absentes adsunt et egentes abundant et imbecilli valent et, quod difficilius dictu est, mortui vivunt; tantus eos honos, memoria, desiderium…

Sunrise, September 17, 2026September. Night and day in nearly equal length. Sunrise time is perfect, in my opinion, but it doesn’t stay in this sweet spot long. Fall is trying to displace summer, but so far summer isn’t having it. Maybe this week? Eastern-tailed blue in the dew dropsHummingbirds are still chasing each other around the feeder and enjoying the last blooms of the cuphea and salvia I planted for them. Females seem to get more turns at the feeder as the males disappear.September 7th…

It just so happened I was tired of being a physical creature. I wanted to get the upper hand before my body had a chance to inflict more damage upon me. To put it bluntly, three children were extinguished in my womb over the course of five years and I wanted to shed my rogue body and its treacherous movements and waning power. I never wanted to look in the mirror and blanch at my hollow stomach and eyes again. Luckily, I had an experimental scientist and adjunct physics professor for a father,…

A simple illustration of how TypeSafe's Jev works using a homemade code-quality CLI tool.

One of the interesting challenges of the AI ecosystem in 2026 is that new, effective patterns emerge faster than I can adopt them. I’ll find a handful, get back to work, and realize a month later that I’d missed four or five more. The adoption cycle for Imprint this year has been something like: January: get every engineer onto Claude Code every single day March: ok, let’s also get everyone else onto Claude Code or Claude Cowork every single day April: local development is bottlenecked on…

I keep seeing people talk about herdr, so against my better judgment, I searched up tmux vs. herdr. Source: Beware the side quest: tmux vs. herdr I won’t give it away. Go read it. I went down a similar rabbit hole around tinycast, vehla, tuna, Supercmd 2, and Vicinae. I still end up back in Alfred. One might consider that adventure fruitless. To me, the journey is just as useful. Like any good travel, it forces you to reconsider your premise and see things from a different perspective. You…

You begin to make out the floor. There is colour beneath your feet. A dull blue, with grey worked through it in a pattern you can’t quite follow. You stop and look at it. You don’t know how long you’ve been walking on carpet. Somewhere overhead, someone calls a flight. You lift your head. You can see chairs now, and people sitting in them. Beyond the chairs, more people pass with bags over their shoulders. You watch a woman lift a cup to her mouth. You are in an airport lounge. You try to…

Although the coins later minted during his reign as king of the Osgtrogoths name him Baduila, he has become known as Totila through the writings of men like Procopius. "Totila" was a diminutive name, made to make him sound less legitimate.In one sense he was illegitimate, since he was not slated to become king. His uncle, King Ildibad, was assassinated in 541 and succeeded by Eraric. Erratic, however, had been negotiating with the Byzantines to hand over control of the Gothic kingdom in…

I used to be a full-time blogger in another life. I did it for a couple of years before having a mental breakdown. No surprise, looking back at those crazy times. Even though my love for blogging never went away, it took several years before I dared to get back to it. I was afraid of getting too consumed by it again. This was back in early 2023 and so far I’ve managed to keep it at a hobby level. No obligations, just something I love doing without a means to an end. But every now and then, I do…

I am experimenting with gathering links with rss.chat here. I am pulling a rough post together for some of the links gathered there. Education This looks like a very interesting book. As important as her deep reporting on the tech industry’s ruthlessness are Singer’s profiles of the inspiring cadre of academics, educators, and activists who are documenting and resisting the likes of Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Oracle — and now, too, OpenAI and Anthropic — that are “capturing” the…

Quick breakfast at Traci's Diner. Back at the docks, a charter fishing captain tells me I might be waiting for wind. "I've checked with the crew, there were no complaints." As I'm casting off, he realizes I am the only one on board. The captain laughs, says he now understands why no-one complained.Sails up 7:15 in the mooring fields with a "Good morning!" from a lobsterman motoring by. Cool, light northwest wind and not a cloud in the sky. Making 1.2 and then 2.0 against the flood tide.7:40…

Breaking Character From the Colagioia Homestead, we regret to inform you… Actually, I think that I need a new logo for this. Hold on a second. Ah, much better. Much more “with it.” It represents the infinite universe and escalating synergies, with a Kilroy -inspired mascot, and…stop laughing. No, that looks nothing like a puckered sphincter with something working its way out. Get your minds out of the gutter. How dare you suggest that the mascot might represent what typically comes out of a…

Before we start: in the time since the last roundup, i’ve also added ten new links to the linkroll, all of which are just as good as any you’ll find here. Check ’em out! The Internet Archive’s collection of “vintage AI” — mostly in the video-game sense, but there’s some Elizas and other chatbots in there too Remember Pink Trombone, that little web toy where you could control a mouth and make it speak? Samuel tries to make it work with real audio of speaking. Spooky! Fairly ranking the most…

You will soon see some changes around here, including an updated T.G.S. Online Storefront launching later today! The legacy store is currently offline during this update and links from the main website may be down or redirect to holding pages while this occurs. We will be moving from Squarespace Commerce to Shopify, so the site will look very different yet hopefully be much easier to navigate. All orders placed on the Squarespace platform are actively being fulfilled and will continue to be…

It's that time again for my weekly update, which includes a short collection of noteworthy finds, posts that inspire, as well as a few reflections from the past week or two. I'll aim to land these in your inbox by the weekend, in time to pair with your morning coffee (or your preferred cup of inspiration).The Latest Drippings ☕️There Is No Epidemic of Loneliness, But There Is an Epidemic of Scurvy. I thought this was an interesting companion piece to an article I shared a few weeks back,…

Here's a simple framework I use for improving the performance of your fav agent on (semi-)complex tasks.

There’s an old line about internet businesses: if the product is free, you’re the product. It’s catchy, but not quite right. The simpler way to understand consumer internet systems is to look at advertiser incentives. You’re not the product. But you are who the advertiser is trying to reach, and that’s where the money comes from and that’s the outcome the product is architected for. On a feed, the goal is to keep you scrolling, because more scrolling means more views, and more views means more…

This book, by The Times' former Architecture Correspondent, stands in direct opposition to A City on Mars. Whereas that book presented a (perhaps too) sceptical look at the realities of living on other planets, Jonathan Morrison's book goes (perhaps too far) in the opposite direction. How to Build a Space Station is a beautiful examination of just how important architecture will be to our colonisation of other worlds. Not just in terms of physical safety - but psychological safety as well. It…

Dreams I remembered my dream for the first time in a long while the other night. I had gone to the old cinema which features in many of my dreams, a cinema which doesn't exist. I'd gone to see a French film which as far as can gather doesn't exist. I was the only one there (which is unusual, as the place is usually filled with everyone I've ever met). At the end I visited the box office to buy a ticket for the next showing to find the actress Laura Fraser working behind the counter (recent star…

OverviewThe common thread this week is control-plane risk. Cisco confirmed active attacks against email-security and network-access appliances, CISA flagged exploitation of ScreenConnect and GitLab, ransomware crews moved onto a vCenter flaw, and attackers used Artifactory and Conductor weaknesses to turn trusted automation into durable access.Brevo shows the same problem without a product CVE: a long-lived Cloudflare key let an attacker alter scripts embedded across customer sites. The…

the Yongle Emperor /ˈjɒŋgəl/

Maybe you were always meant to write long lines—” and he keeps laughing, he seems to find this hilarious— link here Thank you again to Sabrina Orah Mark

More rain, more cool air. So far I’m absolutely loving the autumn, although I’m conscious we’re still getting plenty of daylight at this early stage. Three gyms. I finished Redemption Ark as predicted, despite various technical difficulties which made the audiobook run slightly past the end of Friday’s gym session. I mopped up the last few minutes sat on the sofa yesterday for the sake of starting next week with a clean slate and, well, not undermining my prediction. Despite my initial…

Some books I’ve read recently. I didn’t take detailed notes, so you don’t get detailed reviews. The Evolution of Imperfection: The Science of Why We Aren’t and Can’t Be Perfect – Laurence D. Hurst – 2025 If you had the idea that humanity is the pinnacle of evolution, or that evolution makes masterful, near-perfect machines… well, this book will make you wonder why we don’t collapse in a pile of pink goo. Evolution is a far worse engineer than you probably thought. Nor are other animals really…

During my Digital Declutter (which is still on as I'm writing this), I've reintroduced the Social Hour to my life. The idea: Instead of picking up my phone dozens of times every single day to check my messages, I check them twice a day, half an hour at a time. This is a more deliberate approach to my digital social life. I've been living with my phone's notifications turned off for well over two years now. When I first did this, I wondered: if I allow none of the apps on my phone to send me…