In Japan it is said that ‘O-kyakusama wa kamisama desu’ – ‘The customer is God.’ While The New Xenophobia has eroded some of that traditional deference – alongside the now widely recognized phenomenon of kasuhara –an abbreviation of kasutmaa harasumento – aggressive harassment by unreasonably irate customers of business and restaurant employees that has created a retreat into the shell of staff who were already on occasion a little coldly robotic – in general, politeness and good service do…

I wasn't going to mess around too much with this kit, but once the sides and ends of the cabin were fitted, the corners didn't look very good. Picture on the Petitie Properties website suggest I haven't done anything wrong either. To me, the solution was obvious: stick some slips of stripwood in the corner gaps, and sand them flat. Shock horror, the plan worked. I found some suitable wood, which was slightly oversize, and PVA'd it in place. Then went away and let it dry properly. A couple of…

Apple is very excited about all its software updates, naturally, but I am particularly appreciative of MacOS 27. While it does not hit the thoughtful design highs of the pre-Yosemite era, Apple has corrected a bunch of problems it introduced in last year’s Tahoe release and, as a matter of fact, from the past decade of releases. Jason Snell, Six Colors: The fact that there are more design changes in macOS than any of Apple’s other 27 updates speaks volumes about how broken many of the Tahoe…

I let an AI agent work through my backlog over a weekend. I came back to 66 pull requests and still had to decide what was worth doing.

Laurie Voss on an open source funding model

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For a long time I've talked about wanting to make a survival/crafting or survival/construction game (like Minecraft, Terraria, Valheim, etc) about traveling rather than building a base. It seems like an interesting design challenge, and I've been curious about what you'd need to do to marry those two fantasies ever since I started playing Minecraft. I wrote a number of incompetent undergrad-esque design docs about this fifteen years ago! Minecraft has slowly added content over time which…

Someone might need a refresher course

Once again your room is at the top of its game. No more tripping on crumpled jeans flowers on your way to the light switch. No more grabbing random sweaters off your desk only to notice streaky mustard stains later in the day. Nope, no more dust bunnies, no more dried-out pudding cups, and no more bedside tables jammed with junk. As you sit on your bed and look around you enjoy a brief moment of living in an IKEA magazine. Crisp and clean, free and fresh, you can practically hear the phone…

My third Detective Beans book is now available worldwide, yay!!! Beans is on another full-length adventure in Cat Town and I think it’s my best one yet. You can pick up a copy at your local bookshop! :D

Neon Reign is a simple game I have played several times, and still don't understand. This is a 2-player card game about those 1v1 fighting arcade games. There are several characters you can play, and every character has their own deck of cards. To win, you need to reduce the opponent's life points to zero. You have a hand of seven. Your cards are mostly button

I’ve taken to wearing a tank top after work. It is very comfortable and it makes me feel good.

Jonah and I went to four baseball games in two days last week . . .it was A LOT of baseball, a lot of driving, BUT we did have a great time. The itinerary was leave Eugene at 5:00 am and drive to Tacoma, Washington to see a day game involving the AAA level Tacoma Rainiers. The Rainiers are affiliated with the Seattle Mariners. Then when that day game concluded, we drove to Seattle, about 30 miles away, to catch a Mariners game. My brother joined us which was fantastic. We then ferried across…

Karl Bode: Earlier this month a 27-year-old who had been employed at Anthropic for all of four months declared he was quitting the software company because he believed that software automation poses an existential risk to humankind. […] The problem is – and shockingly the ad-based clickbait press didn’t do a very good job explaining this to anyone – there is no actual evidence that software automation is on the cusp of gaining full human awareness and soylent greening the entire eastern…

If vintage shopping is one of the main reasons for your London trip, staying in Shoreditch or Spitalfields makes a whole lot of sense. Stay in the right place and you can spend the weekend exploring largely on foot, drop purchases back at the hotel when your bags get cumbersome, and head out again without wasting time crossing London. On Brick Lane alone, you get the Truman Brewery vintage markets, the shops on Cheshire Street, Rokit, ATIKA, and more lesser-known vintage shops than you can…

OverviewCurrently I'm using Linux Mint 22.3 Xfce 64-bit, and I installed Cult of the Lamb using the Heroic Game Launcher. The game works great out of the box. But how do you get the BepInEx mods like Quality of Life (QOL) working with it? After fighting useless battles with r2modman, I decided to just get the BepInEx files directly in the game's installation folder and configure Heroic. Notes: Because Cult of the Lamb is a Windows-only game, you'll want the Windows version of BepInEx. Don't…

I’m back on schizogram again. The posts are all different, but all the same. A man hides in the bushes from the authorities. A shirtless old woman yells obscenities at her camera. A wild-eyed college burnout shares his discovery that we’re living in a 300,000-year-old simulation. Each video has millions of views, and the comments range from concerned to encouraging. “Keep talking to the AI, it’s working.” “Please get help!” “I think bro is onto something.” In any case, the audience shares a…

In this Dancing with the Stars season 35 episode 2 recap, Marshal Knight celebrates the women bringing passion to the dance floor—even Giada wasn't horrendous!

Aesthetic Movement at The Met – New York, New York I visited the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of many wings in this sprawling and impressive museum. The interiors I featured yesterday and today represent styles prevalent in the United States during the 19th century. The first two pictures in this post are from the Worsham-Rockefeller Dressing Room. It was originally Arabella Worsham’s private dressing room in her New York townhouse, complete with built-in wardrobes,…

See the intro post Progress reportYay, look at me, I’ve made it to week two :) I just have to not think about how slowly I’m writing, and everything will be fine :’) I wrote for about 15 minutes today, getting started on chapter two. I’m not actually a fan of writing with chapters, it doesn’t feel natural to me yet, but I have to practice anyway, and the breaking point did feel natural. One thing I’ve done that’s a bit different than I’ve done before is in order to get over my perfectionism…

Yesterday's post about cognitive surrender was a low-key hit. It led to a lot of really good offline conversations about the phenomenon —— and the upvotes weren't bad either. "Cognitive surrender may be the most dystopian term I've ever heard," said a friend. I'm prone to agree. It's so apropos and visceral, and you don't read it as much as you feel it hit you in the chest like a football between the numbers, a puff of air sharply exhaled to communicate the force of the thing. I'd write more…

In the world of FOMO and “first” or “pertamax” (do people still do that?), I decided to… comment on things after days, or weeks, or months, of thoughts. As Terry Pratchett said: “First sight, second thought”. The reason being: I can be really explosive when voicing out my opinions, be it orally or in writing, so… yeah. More than a couple of days ago, a well-known Indonesian public figure got into a public backlash over her video on “staying mindful in the middle of bad news”. Her video on…

Anthony Baldino’s music seems to emerge from two adjoining rooms whose shared wall has become susceptible to the mold of determination. In one, he designs sound and programs synthesizers for Ludwig Göransson on projects including Venom, Tenet, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. In the other, he sits alone among modular systems and vintage machines, teaching private grief to speak through oscillators. Each practice contaminates the other productively.…

AI rehashes what social media already proved about our species, which is that (in part), humans are easily convinced they suffer from problems that don’t exist, and are quick to buy into the solutions peddled to solve them. In short, we’re gullible. The disinterest from creative types in AI isn’t complicated. One reason is they know the unique ideas they strive to create aren’t assembled from a finite pool of recycled material. Creativity is largely unquantifiable, and that quality is part of…

Good morning, afternoon, or whenever it is that you read this. I start off my Halloween readathon with When Devils Sing. Check out the content warnings in the hyperlink, as there is some disturbing graphic content. When Devils Sing is a YA southern gothic horror story by Xan Kaur. Southern gothic is a genre near and dear to my heart. It is a rebuttal to the sanitized, idealized version of the American South. It is about rejecting the concept of the genteel southern gentleman, confronting the…

I love everything about this, and the @omfest.co website, but I especially love the line near the bottom of the homepage: You don't need to have known Om; you only need to be curious. ❤️

It saddens to see parents (dads and moms alike) lead their online bios with the quantity of their offspring – much like academics lead with their list of earned titles and degrees. It turns me off and signals to me that This individual wears their quantity of offspring as a badge of honor deserving of praise and awe. You have 6 children? Or 2? Or 12? Great – but don’t wear one of the most ordinary and basic pieces of what humankind has always done as a badge. At least don’t lead with it.

A Whole New World Lately I've been using agents and SOTA models for all of my software development work. It wasn't easy for me to give up writing code by hand. But in early May, while working on a new Kubernetes operator for QuestDB Enterprise, everything about agentic coding just seemed to click. I was running multiple concurrent sandboxed sessions in tmux, each with their own set of subagents churning away at a greenfield codebase. And after around a week, I had a working product with…

The four bracket winning teams from our 8th annual Team SPS Kubb Tournament!

Just another shameful chapter in 45/47’s abuse of public institutions and attempts to create idols of himself. Embarrassing. The central character refuses to allow needed renovations unless he gets his name on the building.