We have done this before, we take a useful technology, wrap it in a huge financial story. We centralize it, try and monetize it to turn it into a platform. Then we pretend the social consequences were somehow an accident, it is what we are doing with LLMs. We took an interesting piece of software and started selling it as AI, then AI became AGI, became super-intelligence. This smoke and mirrors feeds the path of building gigantic data centres, burning enormous amounts of energy, raising…

I loved Kev’s latest post, It’s Never Too Late to Learn, for lots of reasons. It turned out that writing and learning are a lot of fun, and I was constantly looking for ways to practice my new found writing skills. I think that’s part of why I still love typing - I just find creating words on a screen a lot of fun. Yeah, I’m weird. I know. I once applied for a data-entry temp job because typing numbers in cells for hours on end sounded fun to me. So if you’re weird, I’m worse. Kev’s post also…

I recently bought a copy of Los Alamos Rolodex, a book displaying business cards from Los Alamos Nation Labs from 1967 to 1978. You can find some examples of the cards here. One of the cards in the book is for Eugene Frank, President of B & F Instruments. His card lists his phone number as (215) MErcury 9-7100 At first glance I thought the “E” in “MErcury” had been accidentally capitalized. Then I realized the intention was that someone would dial ME (i.e. 63) and ingore “rcury”. So the phone…

Last night, the sliding door (in front of my shelves of shortboxes of comics) popped off when I was sliding it open. I had noticed that it had gotten a bit “sticky” lately, but hadn’t really investigated. And… this turned out to be the problem: Those “rails” at the bottom slid out. Like WTF. And it turns out that they’re only fastened with double sided tape! Like… wat? I mean, there’s not supposed to be much pressure in an outwards direction, so you could see how that would work OK… But look —…

We had a resort day, renting a beachfront cabana, relaxing, and swimming in the ocean. Our cabana for the day: Swimming: Moloka’i: Hard to see, but there were some dolphins in the distance: Sunset: A peek of the luau from our balcony: Backstage:

It is February 1986 in Jackson, IL, and Dr. Andreas Gelé is visiting both Beecher and MacAlister colleges to give lectures on the exciting field of cryonics and its use in surgery.The town is unseasonably cold, even for February, and the townsfolk are worried that they are in for a repeat of the Winter of 1985.February 14th, Friday night, sometime after the school dance, Valerie Beaumont leaves the school, walks to her car, and is not noticed missing until the morning of Monday the 17th, when…

Here is the latest collection of indie games I (Josh Bycer) covered through Game-Wisdom. Please reach out if you would like me to look at your game.

An essay version of the video is below – not just a transcript but a text that I’ve rewritten thoroughly to work as text. As is an audio version. You can subscribe to the audio-only unlisted podcast feed here if audio is more your speed. Overview # In this opinion piece – very much my opinion based on my experience and practice, not on academic studies – I explain one reason why short videos, such as what you get on TikTok, are bad for learning and information. Did I mention that this is my…

by Eurocheese Ruth Madeley might be a new Best Actress contender for her work in BEING HEUMANN. Coming into the fall festivals, no category has been a larger question mark in the Oscar race than The Film Experience’s highest honor – Best Actress. Aside from a couple of clear frontrunners (see my comments on The Debut), there appears to be room for a number of new challengers to find their way into the race. How likely are some of the pictures debuting at Toronto to factor in? If these two world…

Peace lilies are a popular houseplant with glossy, dark green leaves and white flowers. 36 Peace Lily

I saw The Odyssey (2026), and it was good. This post will contain some spoilers for a nearly 3,000-year-old story, as retold more recently via a more popular medium than epic poetry, so if you are absolutely allergic to that, just go watch the movie (perhaps in IMAX 70mm, that should be easy to find a showing of) then come back and read this immediately. I have the “can’t stop thinking about elfgames” disease, so here are some lessons that came to mind as being illustrated by the latest…

A lot of people went to Tokyo Game Show today. And many of them were carrying unreasonably large bags.Today was as well-attended as any TGS business day I can recall. The enormous number of attendees is good news for the show, and it's greatly encouraging to see that it still generates this much interest, but it was bad news for anyone who had only 4 minutes until the start of their Final Fantasy VII Revelation demo, and two halls standing between them and the Square Enix booth.So yeah, a lot…

Since I spoke on Retrocomputing yesterday, I wanted to talk about its sister discipline/concept: Permacomputing. Now, I can't talk about it at length as anything remotely approaching a subject matter expert, but it is something I've been fairly interested in for several years, ever since I learned about uxn and CollapseOS. Whereas Retrocomputing looks at the past with rosy-colored glasses, Permacomputing looks to the future (or at least the present) with utterly sober, if not bitter/brutal…

A series of hardware tests that run directly from the web browser. It has for keyboard, mouse, screen, video game controls… For free.

I signed up for Bear Blog at the beginning of the year. I’ve been trying to set this blog up the way I like it—trying things out and then reverting back. I’m finding that I don’t really know what I want. Should I put these in the top headings? More pages? This theme vs. that; tags vs. no tags. One thing at a time. It wasn't set out to become anything. 6 minutes ago |

Nonsensical diary entry

A few black and white versions of photos I shot between fifteen and twenty years ago.

Dry but cloudy at first but heavy rain in the afternoon. No cars. Cleared all the lab bins out. Cleaned the burners and cut some wood up for the incinerator.

This is a follow up to my previous post: "Call out to BearBloggers - Have you experienced this?" So it turns out I'm not losing my mind, Toasts are being stripped from my posts. Thank you to everyone who reached out and also confirmed in real-time that they watched the number rise and fall. As of writing this, my previous post has been knocked down from a count of 25 Toasts to 1 (Thank you for re-toasting, Tash, even though this has also been wiped for a third time🥲), and the post previous to…

I love my mother, and also her most consistent skill is to disappoint me on my birthday. This year is no exception. This year, she disappointed me because I was today years old when I discovered the Integrated Taxonomic Information System exists: https://www.itis.gov/ I learned this from refdesk.com. Not from my mother. *Who is a botanist.* She says "I thought everyone knew about ITIS." Mother. Mom. Momther. Are you serious right now. Mom. What. Why. Mother. Seriously. (I am only half joking.…

Aside from the good advice, one of the things I like best about Miss Manners is how well she cuts through the fog to identify an issue, and then communicates that issue and the attendant etiquette effectively.A good example of this is her reply to a self-proclaimed "accent nerd" who wonders if there is a polite way to ask someone Where are you from?(I can both cringe and imagine a younger version of myself doing something like this.)There are, of course, numerous contexts within an existing…

Hello from out here in sandland. Thunderstorms for the last two days, the temperature has dropped by a good twenty degrees. There's something about the after storm air isn't there? Standing outside this morning, coffee, deep breaths.

Last year, I saw this play in London with Stephen Fry as Lady Bracknell and

Here are the collected posts for our Balkinization symposium on Mark Tushnet and Bojan Bugaric's new book, Constitutionalism and Its Discontents (University of Chicago Press, 2026).1. Jack Balkin, Introduction to the Symposium2. Sabrina Ragone, Constitutionalism and Its Discontents: A Comparativist’s Take3. Laura Gamboa, Constitutionalism in Times of Democratic Backsliding4. Jedediah Britton-Purdy, The (not so) Secret Life of Constitutionalism and Its Discontents5. Roberto Gargarella,…

I think I bought this thing at some grocery store endcap or something. The magic is that it can do all three advocotasks: Cut avocado in half (little knife thing) Take out the pit (little indent with teeth thing) Cut avocado halves into slices (grate thing) Amazing! All in one! My review: I actually kinda like it. I do reach for it when I have this job. But I’ve shown it to several people who have almost viscerally bad reactions. Like, they can’t explain it; they are just: nope. I literally…

This is neat: The idea behind the Picard maneuver comes from the way a faster-than-light spaceship would outrun its own light. If the spaceship were going at a constant, faster-than-light speed, then another ship at rest would see two images, corresponding to two different times when light from the ship could reach them. […] While the details were wrong, [Brazilian physicist Níckolas] de Aguiar Alves was impressed that the episode reproduced the core textbook idea mostly accurately. “The main…

Big thanks to our distributor, Ra & Olly, for taking Escape Everything! to the GLUE Bookfair at London’s ICA this week. * New Escapologist Issue 19 is available to order NOW! NOW! NOW!

Last week PlayStation made another bold move and announced they would no longer be funding and collaborating with Kojima Productions on the action espionage game PHYSINT. "An update from PlayStation Studios: After careful consideration, we have made the difficult decision to step away from collaborating with KOJIMA PRODUCTIONS on its project PHYSINT. We continue to have great admiration for Hideo Kojima's vision for the game. Our relationship remains strong after three decades of…

Ok. Look update. :)

I had a privilege of being invited as a guest to Matt’s and Mike’s podcast iPad Productivity, where as a fellow iPad power user we talked about how I made my iPad most versatile and productive computer there is and how I run Nozbe with it. It’s a 2-hour conversation and we geek out on all things iPad - take a listen! More info ℹ️ Listen to this episode: …or Join Matt and Mike’s iPad Productivity community