I’ve come to realize the best time of day for me to write is in the morning, and the best place for me to write is on the bus. Your mileage may vary. If you’ve ever tried to write on a bus, or while travelling on most moving vehicles, you know the difficulty in this exercise. The bus bumps and jerks and jostles, your pencil records not only your wordy thoughts but the very character of the street. Anthropologists from the future could look at the handwriting from my daily commute and calculate…

So what am I doing now in Taiwan? Going on dates. Or at least i was... I created my Bumble account on the Taxi to the Roach hotel. Pretty filled out. a mix of good and bad pictures. This is the usual setup, although in the US my political interest is included. The likes started rolling in. However, it was much faster than in the past. In Korea I didn’t get many likes immediately, it took a while for it to see the “50+” icon, maybe months. This time, I got the “50+” about 5 hours in. Faster than…

The Gothic Wars (535 - 554) under Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian I were created to reunify the Western Roman Empire with the Eastern. They were successful, thanks to the strategies and (in one case) subterfuge of General Belisarius. After his initial success, however, Belisarius had to return to deal with additional problems, some of them caused by his own people.Italy had been divided among several military commanders so that no one man would gain enough power to try to set up his own…

Got up at 9.30am. Finished lawns. Pruned the rambler roses. Dot and Jane came for tea. Ron decorating the bedroom. Gave Jane a swing. Stayed in at night.

If AI’s design output keeps failing the fundamentals, the obvious fix is to teach it the fundamentals. Write them down. Package them as instructions the model has to follow every time it generates — hierarchy, contrast, balance, proximity, rhythm — with examples, templates and rules for when each applies. People have done this. I’ve built a few such systems myself, with nested files and reference templates and careful checklists. They help. They also break, and the more elaborate they get, the…

Find myself increasingly looking forward to my weekend long runs. Especially the colors and fauna at sunrise. Quite restorative. _ Reply via email

The ballots arrived in the mail Friday. Of course we voted. Anybody that read my rant (here) will have no doubt how we voted. Easy. Fast. Simple, if you've had time to read the stupidly worded questions and think about what the obvious response is. Stupid UCP. The return envelops are in the mail already. I don't envy the people opening the envelops and going through the counting process.It seems that we're just a pair of the more than 500,000 who have requested mail in ballots. Given the…

Xenophon, Anabasis, with an English Translation by Carleton L. Brownson (1922; rpt. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992 = Loeb Classical Library, 90), pp. 38-39 (1.4.6): ἐντεῦθεν ἐξελαύνει διὰ Συρίας σταθμὸν ἕνα παρασάγγας πέντε εἰς Μυρίανδον, πόλιν οἰκουμένην ὑπὸ Φοινίκων ἐπὶ τῇ θαλάττῃ... Thence Cyrus marched one stage, five parasangs, to Myriandus, a city on the sea coast, inhabited by Phoenicians... Brownson didn't translate διὰ Συρίας. Neither did Robin Waterfield: The next leg was a…

Anthropic has given us its assessment of four ‘recent cybersecurity incidents’ involving Claude that happened during cybersecurity evaluations, three of which were previously known. The report excludes the incident reported by UK AISI. There will also be a METR investigation of these incidents, which unlike the investigation done at OpenAI will be untimed. Table of Contents Our Two Problems. First the Good News. We’d Just Like To Ask You a Few Questions. Internal Research Model On The Fence.…

Imagine if you will, an NES-style game where you play as Jane Austen, the immortal early 19th-century author, where you find pages to her books to restore them to a library. To do this, you platform and fighting various critters with a quill… wait what? Yes Jane Austen’s 8-Bit Adventure is exactly that. Fighting mice, bats, and once you find all four pages to a book, a simple pattern based boss. There’s nothing really more to it. You can throw the quill if you have tea saved up, and you get new…

Michaelangelo Matos / Rolling Stone: Some of the biggest music deals in recent years have involved songwriting catalogs, from Bob Dylan in 2020 to Justin Bieber in 2025 to Pete Townshend this spring, many fetching nine-figure buyouts. Most of these have come from private-equity firms looking for reliable investments.But independent labels and artists are fast becoming the focus for a number of recently minted investment firms — companies, and catalogs, of seemingly every size. And one label…

Somebody mentioned wanting a French reconnaissance aeroplane, and lo! One appears!This is the SPAD XI two-seater, designed by the same guy who did the SPAD VII and SPAD XIII. And the visual similarities between all three are pretty obvious. The STL is available now at https://www.wargaming3d.com/product/mojobob_hoochyman_spad_xi_1_144_

I’m talking in the context of industrial programming. A few statements I believe to be true: If you aren’t doing it hands-on, your opinion about it is very likely to be completely wrong. Being influential doesn’t automatically make you right. Talking about coding and delivering software under real constraints are two very different things. Before clicking on a programming video, it doesn’t hurt to check the creator’s credentials. Yet we keep listening to influential people without much skin in…

Ridgeline subscribers — I never met Annie Dillard (archive), and I don’t feel as if I know her. She seems unknowable. Part of her attraction: an improbable cipher looking at the world and delighting in minutiae. So, no, we never walked together (and now never will!), but I’ve walked 1000s of miles with her in mind. On the Kii Peninsula, in Things Become Other Things (amzn | bkshp), I think of her whenever I see a particular boat:

I walk past a firing range, through a forest of Scots pines, find an ancient stone, and discover a modern construction facility. Continue reading →

Used since antiquity, borage is an old herb to grow for yourself and the bees. While the star-shaped blue flowers are pretty, they're the least substantial part of the plant. Borage leaves, stems and buds are also edible, and are a traditional wild food of the Mediterranean. Today we'll go over some of the background... Read More The post Borage appeared first on Forager | Chef .

Michael Shannon as President James A. Garfield in Death by Lightning (Episode 4: “Destiny of the Republic”) Vitals Michael Shannon as James A. Garfield, Ohio farmer-turned-20th President of the United States Washington, D.C., Summer 1881 Series: Death by Lightning Episode: “Destiny of the Republic” (Episode 4) Streaming Date: November 6, 2025 Director: Matt Ross Creator: Mike Makowsky Costume Designer: Michael Wilkinson WARNING! Spoilers ahead! Background President James Garfield died 145 years…

Chariocrinus andrae, Collection: David AppletonCrinoids are one of my favourite echinoderms. It is magical when all the elements come together to preserve a particularly lovely specimen in such glorious detail. This impressive block, chock full of lovely, well-preserved specimens of the crinoid, Chariocrinus andrae, hails from Bathonian outcrops in Beaune, Saône-et-Loire in

If you like this content, become a member. If you want more book insights, join the book club. It's free. Reversing Knowledge Gains In The Death of Expertise Tom Nichols talks about the scourge that is the internet. He cites many studies showing that if someone merely looks for a topic online and skims the headlines, they think they're an expert and they become unwilling to listen to anyone, and unwilling to dig deeper to properly vet their opinion1. Now I wonder what Nichols would say in the…

For several months now, I’ve been fighting the impulse to write a rant about the appalling callousness on display on social media towards people with disability, especially people notionally in the U.S. (most of the random people I rub against online are names on a screen, who knows where they actually are?–or even whether they are actual humans rather than bots.), and when it occurred to me that I may have written before about my particular “this bar is already on the ground, and you cannot…

I avoid Twitter (𝕏) for similar reasons to drugs: I think it would change me for the worse, and I would be unable to give it up. After staying off Twitter reasonably successfully for years, I cross-posted my AI Tweets there a few weeks ago. I had something very Twitter-shaped to say, and I thought it was important to get out, so I do think this was worth it. And it all went well: none of this is complaining about the comments I got there. Coming back a few times to check notifications, however,…

2026-09-19Hello! As I write this, I've long left the city of Philadelphia. I want to go back already. Maybe that's because I think I left something behind...On the road back, I got close to this low-hanging traffic light set and realized how massive it is. When street furniture like this is so far above human level, it's hard to get a context for perspective. But those things are massive! They're about a meter in height, and that's without the black border surrounding the yellow frame.After I…

For those new to CabbieBlog or readers who are slightly forgetful, on Saturdays I’m republishing posts, many going back over a decade. Some will still be very relevant while others have become dated over time. Just think of this post as your weekend paper supplement. Little Green Street Blues (06.08.13) Heritage and history, you can’t get away from it nowadays: Restoration Home, Downton Abbey, Antique Roadshow; touch your remote and up pops another programme reminding us of our past and the…

The Artist Ren Doin’ Fine! The Artist Ren is the musical project of Lauren Van Houten, who started creating music in 2020, during the early pandemic. With no label or management, she prides herself on working independently, and creating music that starts with a story. Lauren constantly makes notes on her phone — capturing thoughts, overheard conversations, things from media consumed, and imaginings. Here on The Artist Ren’s latest single, Doin’ Fine!, sunny laid-back guitars meet a grungy…

I can understand the reason why people take a drink or a pill or look to find something that helps them sail beyond the concrete on the sidewalks of New York City.I have been here for as long as I can remember. However, I have moved around from the Eastside, Westside, Uptown and as my life has turned, I am currently Downtown.I work across the street from Ground Zero which is the spot where The Towers used to stand. I am here at work more days than I am not here, which is how life goes when it…

The day begins with a man off a large power boat tied up nearby asking how I did in the rain last night. He asks with a certain smile that makes me wonder if he is expecting me to say it was uncomfortable or wet or whatever. I respond with my own question. "Did it rain last night? I didn't notice."Breakfast at Traci's Diner, eggs over easy, potatoes, bacon and toast. A nice change from protein bars and beef sticks.It is a day of chores...groceries, laundry, shower, the log book.As I walk back…

The following morning, we headed to a local bakery for some tasty pastries and some iced coffee. Driving south, we visited Charaki, where upon arrival we scrambled over a rocky peninsula so that I could fish the deep water out in front of it. Finding a comfortable spot, a large shoal of baitfish was taking shelter in a gully to our right, so I set about catching one. To begin with I baited a tanago hook with a minuscule piece of isome, but they didn’t show much interest in that, so I decided to…

Since 2012, Danah Henriksen and I, along with the Deep-Play Research Group, have been writing a regular column for TechTrends. The most recent one, on agentic AI, came out in August, and it was number 77th, with the next one coming in a few weeks. Somewhere along the way we started to wonder what the […] Source

Trimline rotary (2016)Came pretty close this morning to setting up a Gemini server. That's not something I need right now. If I were to set one up, I'd probably start with Brennan's Creating a Blog in Gemini:// Are we ever going to tire of navel-gazing about algorithms and attention and "kids these days!". I hope so, because I'm tired of it. ✍️ Reply by email

It’s time once more for another Saturday update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published a further seven papers, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 209 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 656. This is the second week running that we have published 7 papers. I continue to include the posts made on our Mastodon account (on Fediscience); these announcements also contain a clickable form of the DOI for each paper. Our Mastodon account…