If you listen to professional AI Safety folks working at OpenAI, Anthropic, or one of the enormous AI think tanks, you’ll hear countless scenarios where AI causes enormous human misery and even extinction (e.g., https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.09369 or https://x.com/EvanHub/status/2097497037956891126). What they aren’t admitting is that they have invented a tool that can take down the internet, and with it and our modern way of life. If you look at their AI doomsday scenarios, they all start more…

I have been watching a lot of movies from what is considered the Golden Age of Hollywood—the early ’30s and ’40s—and I was fascinated by Ingrid Bergman. I think she is the most beautiful actress I have ever seen on screen. Absolutely gorgeous, but it wasn’t just that. Her acting, her expressions, the way she conveyed her emotions—all of it kept me, as a viewer, completely hooked to the screen. So I went down the rabbit hole, reading everything I could about her story. Her life began with…

Women of Music Volume 18 As noted by an anonymous keen follower of my blog the Volume 18 is the only one still missing to complete the series of Women Of Music. Planned a few months ago, I kept putting off its publication mainly because of the mediocrity of the performances—except, perhaps, the one by Riley Reid, despite the risqué lyrics. So, here it is today, a special release because all the singers have something in common (and it’s not their vocal talent, but rather their on-camera…

[This is a guest post by Ben Green. I suppose the letter, and am also a (corresponding) Fellow, but I have worked in various collaborations with the AI industry and so was not eligible to be a signatory. — T.] The rapid development of AI is of enormous public interest right now, with the possible existential risk to humanity being reported by mainstream news organisations. However, the discussion is often tempered with questions such as `haven’t we heard this before?’ or `isn’t this just hype…

this is a screenshot from the tv station’s video. links to the video and the station’s online article are in the blog post. Many people consider jury duty a burden, but one juror in the Lindsay Clancy child murder trial experienced the bonus of a local TV station splaying his personal-life misdeeds all over the nation. For no good reason.NBC10 in Boston reported on Sept. 11 that the lone holdout juror who caused a mistrial in the viral criminal case faced a misdemeanor charge of domestic…

Hill Dickinson Following my trip to Goodison Park last year, this year I managed to get tickets for the match vs Wolves in the league cup. It's a great new modern stadium right on the Mersey. Oh and we won, 1 -0.

The commerical airport we use here in Bend, Oregon is actually in Redmond, Oregon. Flights from here generally depart very early. It think it’s because they need to make it to bigger airports to make connections to further-away places. Flight typically depart at 4:30-6:30 AM. They want your bags an hour before departure, and the airport is 30 min from Bend, so you gotta be out the door sometimes at 3:00 AM meaning ungodly 2:30 AM alarm clocks. That’s the extreme case though. If you aren’t…

Last month I picked up a juvenile gull at St Nicholas Kirk in Aberdeen who was unable to fly and having difficulty standing and walking. I took him home and cared for him from the Tuesday afternoon 18th August until Saturday morning 22nd August. During that time he improved. When I first found him he spent much of his time sitting on his hocks and looked sullen and unwell. As the week went on, he began standing and walking much more and looked brighter and more alert. I named him Bertie. On the…

Yesterday I wrote about "Buying Something Nice for Yourself." This is a failure on my part because I do not usually buy things. I just don't buy things for fun. This evening, I saw my wife assembling a small Lego motorcycle. She told me that she missed assembling Legos with my sons. My wife enjoys putting things together and create something in the process. As I observed her putting the Lego pieces together, maybe that's the true meaning of life. The set is not complicated or expensive, she…

Very happy to announce that everybody finally loves everything I write. It’s been hard adapting the texts so that they fit everybody. Carefully crafting each sentence and weighing every word, making sure no one will dislike anything. Finally, it’s all perfect. It’s been time-consuming, for sure, but it’s been totally worth it. With the current state of my blog, no one can complain about any content whatsoever. It’s spotless, no matter who reads it. I’ve also set up writing rules that make sure…

Developer: The Zium SocietyYear: 2026Genre: Multimedia ProgramSystem: Windows The Zium Railway is the latest in the series of virtual galleries published by The Zium Society. I’ve been a fan of the series for a while and it has been fascinating to watch these grow from more straightforward galleries (but still impossible to create in a physical space) where you walk around a virtual world and look at pieces of art, to this latest one where you ride a train around a world and enter virtual…

I just experienced a new type of inconsiderate flier: a man stood up during the safety video to get something from an overhead bin. They restarted the safety video. People are endlessly innovative when it comes to being terrible co-travelers.

In 2023 I ported slack-strava to Discord by hand, evening by evening over about three weeks, and it took most of that stretch to get a working bot. This week I ported the same app to Microsoft Teams as teams-strava (“Strata”), and this time I wrote almost none of the code myself. GitHub Copilot CLI did. The 2023 Baseline discord-strava’s git history is a fair record of how long a manual port takes. The first commit, “Initial fork from slack-strava,” landed July 30, 2023. “Most interactions…

The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. ~Albert CamusIn Greek mythology, Sisyphus was the king of Corinth, a clever trickster who offended the gods and was condemned to spend eternity rolling a large stone up a hill, only to have it roll back down before he reached the summit.As a metaphor for life itself, it works, which is why the myth continues to resonate today. Camus' interpretation of the story as related in his 1942…

Something weird is going on with my last entry. On day of posting, I could have sworn seeing double-digit toasts. However looking at it on Monday it had jumped down to 3. Fine, okay, maybe I misread it or accidentally clicked to the post before. I don't believe I did, but it happens. Whatever. They're just toasts so who really cares. Except for the fact I've looked at it today and it's now at 1. Huh. Maybe I'm incredibly misinformed, but I don't believe people can just... take their toasts…

A big thank you to my son Miles for this one – he’s become such a Buldak fan and alerted me to this one. Pretty crazy how up he is o this stuff… At the bottom will be a mukbang with him so don’t forget to check that out. Let’s give it a try! Oh – by the way, this is just different packaging for a Walmart tie in for Valentines Day. It’s not spicier or different, contrary to some folks on socials. Samyang Buldak Hotter Than My Ex – United States Detail of the side panels (click to enlarge). Looks…

Past Hana was the Haleakalā National Park Kīpahulu area: Visitor Center: We did a walk along the Kūloa Point Trail loop:

In spring 2026, we got the third novel in the Paradise Investigations series from Teel James Glenn. This series, set in 1939 New York City, stars Adam Paradise, a private investigator who is Frankenstein‘s monster. The Undiscovered Country is set six months after the prior novel, and it’s now 1939. The Nazis are in power […]

Today I want to talk about something that I think gets misunderstood somewhat in a lot of discourse over urban density: the question of privacy. How much do you experience privacy in a big, dense city versus a smaller one or a town or rural area?Well, that's gonna depend on how you define privacy. 1. Big City SurveillanceLet's start with the obvious: if your interest is not appearing on CCTV, traffic cameras, or other forms of state or corporate surveillance, you'll probably be on camera more…

My wife and I have been paying for PBS Passport. It's been fantastic, really. We have been watching a lot of Masterpiece Mystery, which I have always loved (back when it was just "Mystery!"). We watched all the seasons of "Miss Scarlet and The Duke," now just "Miss Scarlet." It was great, about a woman detective (whose father was played by Tim Downie, who also played Gale Dekarios in Baldur's Gate 3) set in 1882 and the issues she faced. The fun thing about Masterpiece Mystery is that it has…

I usually wait to Sunday to post something like this, but Bill Wurtz is a frog-slam internet treasure, and I want to crow about his return to making thoughtful and incredibly songs and glitch-art videos attached to them, after a three year break, that I want to crow about it from the highest, well not mountaintop. Skyscrapers also seem too high. From the highest molehill maybe? It’s still a really high molehill. Here’s in the future. (3 worthwhile minutes) Also recent (as recent as three months…

Sunny and cool at midmorning, with the smell of woodsmoke drifing up from the valley. The bluejay who stumps the bird app is making his one-of-a-kind call — almost a croon. At random moments, black walnuts drop onto the driveway with a thud.

PHP 8.6 beta 3: Good to know #lamb is already compatible. 2342 tests, 4332 assertions, identical to an 8.4 control in the same image. Zero deprecations from src/!

People continue to do neat things with Obsidian. The latest plugin I stumbled across is Simple Journal (the author also made "Simple Streams", but I don't think I have a use-case for that one). The neat thing about Simple Journal is it creates a timeline-style journal you update using the command palette. I write my journal by hand, but I can see this as something handy to write out notes while working on a project. ¶ And on the topic of Obsidian, Carlos just recently raved about it and while I…

The noises you hear in this place are not like anywhere else. I hate these rooms. I hate hospitals or more, I cannot stand emergency roomsI hate the tones from the nearby machines and the mumbling from the other patients. I hate the dull groans from the sick and of course, I cannot stand the louder ones, or the cries in pain or the screams and the pleading for a nurse or a doctor to help come and help or take the pain away. And the worst?The worst are the quiet ones, the parents who sit…

Some showers early on but nice warm day later. Dot and Jane at home at noon. Cut some of the ornamental shrubs. Fire man came done. The boiler room all ok.

“Oh, if I could only pray”, Luther once said of his dog Tölpel, “the way this dog watches the meat”. Attending to attentive canine figures in half a dozen paintings by Paolo Veronese, Thomas W. Laqueur explores the work of an artist whose love of dogs landed him in hot water with the Inquisition.

On Monday, September 14, Pratik Patel gave his talk, Building a Mini-Software Factory using Pi.dev and Local LLMs, to a full room at the Entrepreneur Collaborative Center in Tampa’s Ybor City neighborhood. Here are my notes from his talk. Blasphemy! The quite-full ECC was about three-quarters software developers, and Pratik had just finished taking a headcount of the Java people, the TypeScripters, the Pythonistas, and of course, the Rustaceans (“most people want to rewrite everything in Rust,…

[“Kaivoin apinan raivolla maata”] Let’s look at some Money Quotes, the best in ridiculous quotes from the news. First off, in South Boston, we have a a true and confirmed scofflaw: [O]fficers spoke to the victim who stated an unknown male entered the store and took a coffee and a snack without paying for them. ​The victim stated the suspect has done this on several occasions​, ​​demonstrating a complete disregard for ​potential consequences. Honestly, if criminals had any regard for potential…