Pete Reynolds, McSweeney's: For as long as humans have created SHIT with our BODIES AND BUTTS, we have been asking this FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION: What if there were a COMPUTER that could ALSO SHIT? ~ Link: We Must Create the Shit Machine, by Pete Reynolds, McSweeney’s

American-born dancer, singer, and actress Josephine Baker spent most of her career performing in France.

Here are the collected posts on our Balkinization Symposium on The Global Political Economy of Artificial Intelligence1. Jack Balkin, Introduction to the Symposium 2. Valérie Bélair-Gagnon, The Fragmentation of Truth3. Ignacio Cofone, Public Institutions Can’t Outsource Their Reasoning4. Amy L. Stein, The Tech Energy Transition5. Ava Liu, Defining Predistribution6. Claudia E. Haupt, Professional AI’s Dual Trust Problem

Marcus Werner, of the Breach, put together a video illustrating the persuasion tactics Canadian politicians are using as they argue for greater A.I. data centre development. It is what referred me to the fracking discussion I referenced in the article I published last night, so I wanted to shout it out for that reason. But I could not find a good way to insert this video, and I thought it was worthy of its own link anyway. ⌥ Permalink

📷 232/365 - Guess where I'm at. Almost late for my business trip flight due to no available parking. Luckily the security checkup was quick and my flight got slightly delayed.

TW/NOTE: I quote some transphobic comments below as part of making my point. Before I get into the main bit, I want to highlight this study reported in Healio last year: A majority of [gender affirming] surgeries among adults (59.7%) and almost all surgeries among adolescents (96.4%) were related to the chest, the researchers reported. Four in five breast reductions among adults and 97% among adolescents were performed on cisgender men and boys. You read that right. The study found that 93.5%…

Selwyn Raab, James L. Swanson, Charles Manson, and more in today's reading round-up.

Blue Velvet/Blue Star Montage - Isabella Rossillini and Angel Badalamenti [1986]Speaking of Blue Velvet which is still kinda my favourite all time movie like The Pixies' Doolittle is my all time favourite record because I experienced these at the age of 16 and 17 and they were my favourites then and apparently this is how brains work...Perhaps everything Lynch did after this was better but this was the seed from whereth it all groweth. Here we have the deliciously aberrant nightclub singer…

I just realized I haven’t blogged for quite some time and I have been wallowing in some kind of unhealthy-type of doomscrolling (isn’t doomscrolling always been unhealthy?) and putting myself in inexplicable rage on… everything. Mostly because of the haze caused by Indonesia’s forest fires (which, I believe, is not accidental. In Indonesian, we say it “dibakar, bukan terbakar”.) AirVisual screenshot Ugh. Because of the haze, we have been having a really limited time to do outdoor activities.…

Even for experienced freelancers, quoting on new projects can be a challenge. One of the inherent tensions is timing: quotes are often requested before committing to a project. This is completely reasonable, but it’s the same moment where there’s the least information available about the project. One common solution is to perform a discovery phase before committing to a scope and fee. Even then, there’s a reasonable chance the scope will change during the project, leading to dreaded “out of…

Introduction Sigh, I hadn’t wanted to jump in on this whole saga, but it seems that it’s about time that I got off my arse and said a few things. I’ve been watching lately as Unstory has gone after numerous people in the IndieBlog world, including Brennan, Manton Reece, Gordon McLean, and Korin. I’m sure there are others, but honestly, I’m not invested enough in his style of mockery to make a habit of reading them routinely. However, I think everyone is overcomplicating this situation. The…

I went to Manchester last week on a team day out from the Grayston Unity/Meandering Bear in Halifax and rather than traipsing around the usual suspects we mixed it up with one or two places I don't get to visit that often....We normally have a team day out in September after the summer gigs at the Piece Hall in Halifax, which being very close to both bars, bring in a lot of extra business. And whilst I don't generally do as much as I used to during that period, I always get tasked with sorting…

Oddities make the world, and life in it, more interesting. I have an affinity for the esoteric, especially when it expresses someone’s passion. Not all oddballs are lovable, but… The post Xeric Halograph III appeared first on The Time Bum.

I’ve just received a lovely gift all the way from San Francisco, sent by my old friend and Polaroid aficionado Scott Boms. I’ve long been a fan of Scott’s personal site and his dedication to a creative, hands-on process, including his love of riso printing. He recently launched Matter Editions, which he describes as “an independent publisher specialising in handmade, limited edition books, zines, objects and printed ephemera about culture, technology, and design”. Scott recently bought some of…

Who thought this was a good idea? Or this? (Never in my life have I so fervently hoped that a cake was chocolate.) Or, Aunt Flo help us, this? "So, when's the party?""At the end of the month." Amy M., Jenna B., & Kim W., URQTs. At least, I like to think that you are. Not in a creepy way, of course, or like I know firsthand because I secretly stalk you or anything...that would just be weird. I mean, look, I'm just trying to give you a friendly compliment, in a completely platonic,…

Written by Morpheus KitamiNot a popular destination, then.We return to where we left off on Innocent Until Caught, freshly arrived on planet Tayte, looking for the nearest bar. First we have to get through airport security, and you can tell this is pre-9/11, because it goes over smoothly. With how aggressive the IRDS is, you'd expect space TSA to perform exploratory surgery, but goes by so quickly that you might not notice it. Even talking to the guy is optional.Nothing but class from our man…

2026-09-16Hello!I waited for a decent amount of time for something interesting to happen at this location. I had convinced myself that if I could get a good photo out of a dull store on the corner of a block, I would buy myself a bubble tea drink.I waited for interesting cars to drive by, or interesting people to walk past. Yet nothing like that occurred. On the one occasion that someone did walk past with colored clothes, a truck came by to block my view. Bad luck there.So after waiting long…

Let’s start with a question! Is this program well-defined? int main() { while (true) ; } If you said yes, you’d be wrong — at least before C++26. A while (true); loop with no side effects used to be undefined behaviour. Compilers were free to assume it terminates, and some — Clang in particular — would optimize it away entirely, with spectacular consequences: // https://godbolt....

I have upgraded my iPhone to iOS 27, and I have upgraded my Mac to macOS 27. Actually, not really. I am placed on the waitlist for the Siri AI beta, and I have no idea when I will be on the beta train to play around with the headliner feature of the new OSes. Until then, have I really upgraded my iPhone and Mac? Some things are failing. I've tried to set up a "Notify Me" thing for a web page in Safari, and I've received an error message that actually doesn't tell me what went wrong. I've tried…

Current concerns about AI agents‘ autonomy extend to their use of – and invention of – language Last week the Guardian‘s Technology Editor, Rob Booth, asked me about the characteristics of language shared by, or seemingly invented by AI. Rob’s article is here… https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/15/syd-barrett-ai-chat-language-poetic-tech-bro-jargon-oversight?CMP=share_btn_url To follow up on the issues raised from a purely linguistic perspective, I did what I usually do when…

How we politicize technology in service of a better world is an open and contested question. A few days ago I shared a piece on historicising enshittification. In it, Arvind L. U. explores the limits of how Doctorow’s framing around that term is both ahistorical, in that it limits itself to a view that ignores the realities of the global south, and lacking imagination for not even considering a real alternative political economy of the internet. In response, Henrik shared a quote out of Digital…

You can watch Episode 16 on YouTube or listen on your favorite Podcast app. September is National Suicide Prevention and Mental Health Awareness Month, so for Episode 16 we decided to talk about a topic that's close to both of us: Journaling for mental health and techniques we both find helpful for self care. Part I discusses our own techniques, and Part II will discuss additional journaling techniques that we may not use all the time but have tried in the past and break out periodically. Of…

If you know what to look for, you can work out the restaurant lineage of Impala just from a quick scan of the menu. Firstly, and most importantly, you want to try every last item - a feat frustratingly unavailable unless you're eating with at least ten of your friends. Between four of us last week, I think we managed to try about half of what was on offer, and looking back on the menu now some of the things we had to leave unordered still make me quite sad. But it's the attention to ingredient…

While Attending the Annual Convocation of Cause Theorists and Bigbangists at the Local Provincial Research University, the Mad Farmer Intercedes from the Back Row Wendell Berry ‘Chance’ is a poor word among the mazes of causes and effects, the last stand of these all-explainers who, backed up to the first and final Why, reply, ‘By chance, of course!’ As if that tied up ignorance with a ribbon. In the beginning something by chance existed that would bang and by chance it banged, obedient to the…

At The Hill, an alarmed Republican bemoans Trump's latest unforced error: His ridiculous trade war with Canada.Surprisingly enough (for Trump, at least), slapping huge import taxes on the biggest international trading partner of many "red" states is harming their economies in ways voters will probably notice, and correctly blame on Trump and his party:A recent assessment by the Visual Capitalist highlights 23 states that get most of their imports from Canada. Among the states with closely…

A concise overview of what's coming in PHP 8.6, including partial function application, clamp(), the new Duration class, and several smaller language and standard library improvements. Read more

I just posted the following to my Github profile about AI usage in my programming projects. Sharing here to document my current thinking on the subject: AI Usage I know that opinions on AI usage are very divided at the moment. Some people I respect, like the hosts of Fallthrough and Mike Kennedy of Talk Python don’t see any issues with using it as part of the development process. (Although the Fallthrough hosts are against AI Slop, especially in communications ). Others won’t touch any repo…

I listened to the English audiobook, and it was great. Funny, sometimes excessively prolix, I enjoyed it very much! I’ll probably continue the series. Rating: 💣Hey, thanks for reading my blog via the RSS feed! Feel welcome to get in touch!

I neither can, nor want to, retire. I’m more attracted by the idea of retirement, I think. Or rather, being able to retire. It’s financial freedom…the ability to not work, rather than actually not working. A large part of my financial planning and saving over the last few years has been geared towards pulling my theoretical retirement data earlier and earlier. Right now, I think I’m at the point where, if I pulled every lever I have available, I could retire at 40. I could keep up our current…