weather: ☀️ TGIF critters: my cat i guess i'm in agreement with the general book blog consensus that we've trodden the same few topics with the same few people way too many times, as discussed by frances--who, conveniently, has proposed some new topics over which we might spit righteous fire the argumentsi rolled a pair of bone dice and they say "comestible" should be used only twice in an average book. i'm below a certain age so i can't not hear the word yelled by plankton from spongebob for…

Heading out from Onuma, the next spot on our Hokkaido roadtrip was Cape Arutori where we planned to make use of their free campsite for two nights. After our free camping experience at Mt Yotei where we thought a bear was going to pop out of the woods at any second, I’ll admit I was rather dubious at the thought of staying at yet another dodgy campsite. However this was supposed to be a hiking + camping roadtrip, and yet we had spent the last 4 nights in a hotel… So I was glad to be getting the…

I’l dial back my mockery of the email newsletter being the new definition of a web site (not here), but the Wayback Web Machine that is in my head went to remembering how a big effort/motivation the first year I set up a web server (what do I win for it being in 1993?) was to put on the web a newsletter from the center I worked on. The memory was nudged by a recent email from Steve Crawford who currently directs the Maricopa Center for Learning & Instruction (MCLI) the faculty development…

I have had a taste of reality a couple of times. It was when I blocked all the blockers themselves. When I decided to do nothing practically. Then... There was this stillness and silence even though I was in the middle of a relatively bustling public park. I get to realise that reality is a quiet place. It makes no sound. It is slow and in no hurry. I always enjoyed it and I want to experience it frequently but I am surprised by the tendency of us humans to escape this silence and 'no rush'…

Happy Saturday, everyone! Here on Global Nerdy, Saturday means that it’s time for another “picdump” — the weekly assortment of amusing or interesting pictures, comics, and memes I found over the past week. Share and enjoy! Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot The post Saturday picdump for Saturday, September 19 appeared first on Global Nerdy.

Multiple studies find that – without exception – the reliability of autonomous agent workflows decays geometrically over many steps. There are no examples of complex, reliable software created autonomously by agents – or anything even close. On a per step basis, humans are – of course – equally unreliable. And yet, somehow, there are many examples of complex, reliable software created by humans. Despite being just as fallible, humans are able to stabilise reliability in a way LLM-based agents…

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PERHAPS SILICON VALLEY'S BRIGHTEST have miscalculated. I suspect those leading and investing in the AI labs have underestimated—vastly underestimated—the chance that progress in machine intelligence can be slowed, damaged, or outright strangled by political forces outside the industry’s control.

About ten years ago I did a bit of napkin math, or at least something like napkin math, and at the end of a lot of deliberation I decided that the only two places I could really live were Toronto and Montreal. Every few years I come back to that decision and the variables that helped me make that deliberation, and at the end, every time, I find the same truth: Toronto or Montreal. I like where I live. And I like that I like where I live. There's power in knowing these things, I think. 🌲 gonna 🌼…

No notes over the last one month since I haven’t been reading much. I’m slowly catching up on my read-it-later. Stop ruining it Trust isn’t something a brand builds with an ad campaign. It’s what’s left if the marketers don’t ruin it. IntersectionObserver API Performance Many vs. Shared In Angular 11.0 Use one IntersectionObserver per configuration – root element, margins, and threshold – and share the same observer to observe similar elements. This approach has better performance than creating…

I took last week off. The point of taking the week off was not to do less stuff. It was to do more stuff. Or more specifically, other stuff. I wasn't writing. I was digging potatoes, picking vegetables, cutting flowers, saving seeds, canning, pickling and generally dealing with everything that September had decided needed to...Read More

One of the things I was most looking forward to when Apple announced it was moving to a new connector in the iPhone was the prospect of faster data transfers. It had been years since this new USB specification was finalized, and Apple was already supporting it in its newest computers, so it seemed predestined the new iPhone would get it, too. That was the naïve view I had in 2012. That September, Apple announced the iPhone 5 and, alongside it, the Lightning connector. Like the 30-pin “iPod”…

Second Branch Bank Facade, The Met – New York, New York We are continuing with the architecture theme at The Met, but this is obviously very different from the parlor rooms I’ve shown you in the last few posts. I must admit that The Met kept surprising me with the variety of its exhibits. As I entered the large, well-lit Charles Engelhard Court in the American Wing, I didn’t expect to see a building like this. Despite my earlier misgivings about art museums, this one is different enough that…

Danah Henriksen and I recently finished the latest column in our TechTrends series, a piece on what we call “hollow signals” that should come out in the next few months. Soon after, I read Steven Barrie-Anthony’s essay in The Atlantic, “The Dead Silence of AI Therapy.” Barrie-Anthony is a psychoanalyst, and he signed up for […] Source

This is... a difficult subject, especially in the context of gratitude. What I wanted to write about is some of the people I've lost along the way. One thing you begin collecting as you age (without warning) is departed loved ones and friends. It's not a fun process. And honestly, I can't stand it when people say things like, "Well, death is just a part of life." That's some serious carrion comfort to me. But I found I couldn't start writing about departed friends without it geting extremely…

The battery in the new iPhone 18 Pro Max has so much more capacity that we have to create a new thing you need to do before shipping your iPhone, says Apple. This feature discharges your battery to below 20 Wh and sets a charge limit so your iPhone stays below this limit while shipping. ~ Link: Prepare Your iPhone 18 Pro Max to Ship, by Apple

The best part of the new Resident Evil is the extended opening sequence, which could be an outstanding short horror film on its own, before it even shows us a title card. Austin Abrams is fantastic as Bryan, a medical courier who agrees to take on an urgent request (at double pay) to deliver a mysterious package to the hospital in Raccoon City. We see him driving in the snow at night, knowing far more than he does about what’s going to be waiting for him as soon as he reaches his destination.…

Steve Lemay, Apple, talking about the new iOS in iPhone Duo: We didn't want it to feel like you're starting a different operating system when you unfold it. And you're never searching for the button you were just looking at. ~ Link: Apple’s “All-Bew” iPhone Duo is Design Nerd Catnip, by Robert Leedham, GQ

Saturday, September 19, 2026 - 07:00 lhmpodcast.jpg Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 352 – Is Your Sapphic Protagonist Worried About the Wrong Things? - transcript (Originally aired 2026/09/19) Every historic romance novel needs some roadblocks and potholes on the path to a happy ending. The question is: what type? How do those barriers to love emerge naturally from the setting and the priorities of the characters? Considering contemporary romance for a moment, if one of your…

In the early afternoon of a Thursday I use the public toilet up behind Tai Hang, near the temple. As always I am grateful for the infrastructure, for the cleaning staff, for the rubbish removers, and the maintenance workers. Living in Tai Hang for much of our eight years here, and working mostly from home, I’m familiar with their faces, if not their names, and much of the neighborhood’s rhythm, the bustle of early morning school busses and taxis, the ebb and flow of the coffee shop crowd, the…

Well, we finally managed it. We weighed all the cats. All 21 of them. Sort of. The only way we could do it was to have my daughter stand on the digital scale to get her weight, then weigh her while holding a cat and doing the math. The problem with that is, the digital … Continue reading Weighing in, and hardy survivors

A practical, start-to-finish guide to keeping your personal Linux setup reproducible. If you enjoy trying Linux distributions, reinstalling a system, or maintaining more than one machine, you eventually meet the same chore: rebuilding the small choices that make a computer feel like yours. Shell settings, terminal profiles, launcher preferences, text-expansion snippets, and application configuration all live in scattered files—usually “dotfiles”—inside your home directory. chezmoi is a tool for…

set -g fish_autosuggestion_enabled 0 Thank you, AmanicA

I haven't painted in almost three years but now, more than ever, it feels so vital and important. Being a great painter has never been my goal. Whatever great means, very few people carry the label. Engaging with the canvas through paint and brush is so distant from the sycophantic grift of ai that it feels like freedom. From ai shills, I often hear this line: get onboard or be left behind. Artists have always used the latest tech. So, if an art practice involves ancient Japanese calligraphy,…

tall oregon grape! for real this plant is a winner if you have a large spot that a spiky shrub would work (I planted mine a bit close to a walkway 😬) The light was muted this morning so I decided to haul out the ol’ dSLR and take some photos in the garden. The sun came out so I went in for lunch, then I decided I needed to go back out for sunny shots! 😂 I keep saying I’ll pull out all the euphorbia but then it looks like this — this is a much more rule-abiding specimen, unlike the wulfenii this…

The absolute chaos of the move is now over, I can slowly start seeing opportunities of how to make the house better, to feel like an actual home. It will take a few weeks.

A software organization can generate competitive advantage in many ways: network effects, branding/counter-positioning, switching costs, etc. One historical way to build power has been creating leverage through engineering: an engineering organization that can generate value quickly or cheaply is better than one that can't. Gauging the efficacy of an engineering organization is, sadly, an unsolved problem, but three useful aspects are: speed stability cost These must be considered as vectors,…

I have the habit of sending quickly message and only noticed the tone a minute later when it was already read. already proved that TypeSafe AI's Jev model is fast enough to sit in a save-triggered loop for code review, so the next question was: could the same model catch a bad message before it goe…

Maybe things will change one day. :\

I sometimes wonder if we have, as humans, forgotten how totally inconsequential we are in the grand scheme of, well, everything. In Peter Brannen’s The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions, he places humanity within the almost incomprehensible scale of geological time.1 Brannen argues that humanity’s presence on Earth is almost imperceptibly brief when viewed against that scale. Human beings tend to interpret the…