Living life like a video game
A couple weeks ago, I went on an adventure. I used to do go on adventures all the time as a teenager, but I don't get around to doing it as much these days, work and responsibilities got in the way.…
The real cost of engineering: churn and coupling
What matters most in a company is where the focus is. In engineering, it is very easy to spend hours building solutions to problems that don’t exist, and then spend the following years…
My review of summer 2026
We thought summer would be good. We didn't know we'd thrive. Here's what I remember from Pinecrest, the cousins, and a sailing trip through Croatia that gave me back a feeling I'd been chasing since…
So far so good? Extraordinary? Miserably? Everywhere all at once!
How's your 2026 is going?
Having a bike or rather, the lack of one
I would love to have a bike, to be precise, a cargo-bike. I live in a flat city and having a fast and easy way to do my groceries and move around would be nice. But here's the thing, I live in a…
The Fruits of AI
Terry Godier has a post titled “Mea culpa” (which, given his framing, might’ve been better titled “Claude’s Culpa”). I’m not sure how much to even trust anything in his post given the backstory, but…
Rise of Religious Nationalism in Philippines
From The Making of the Modern Philippines: Pieces of a Jigsaw State, by Philip Bowring (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), Kindle pp. 29-31: The nineteenth century saw a sustained clash between the…
What’s It Like To Live In China?
China’s provinces and administrative territories; map from wikimedia, CC-BY-SA 3.0 Until about a decade or so ago, I bought the whole western line about China — that their governments were…
Introducing the Micro.blog PDS
I’ve started rolling out an AT Protocol PDS — personal data server — for new Micro.blog users. In the Bluesky world, a PDS is what stores your posts, follows, photos, and other data from apps.…
The Third of the Eight New Goldberg Albums
This morning began with my listening to the third album in clarinetist Ben Goldberg’s 8 Albums on August 8 releases. The title of the album is Dog Hypnotic , and Goldberg plays a diversity of…
What do you see- the surprise!
Eve stood by the window, dressed in a dark shirt, watching the rain tap softly against the glass. She had no idea that anything unusual was about to happen. It was an ordinary afternoon—or so she…
Children Have Mathematical Ideas
From the very first review of my new book, Charlotte Mason’s Living Math: “This book gives parents permission to believe that mathematics is something children can reason about, wonder about,…
A dream that still haunts me
I used to have terrifying dreams regularly. I was afraid to go to sleep because I felt I’d be haunted by a new tragedy in my sleep. I’d have very lucid dreams but became aware I couldn’t wake myself…
Mothman Game
It’s been a while since I made a game to share. Maybe even longer since my last game jam. But a while back I got inspired to make a game about Mothman. I’m using the Redot engine and its…
Democratic Socialism’s usefulness, according to Lenin
“Democracy is a form of bourgeois state championed by all traitors to genuine socialism, who now find themselves at the head of official socialism and who assert that democracy is contrary to the…
What I Was Surprised to Lose When I Sold My Company
A few weeks after selling my company, I walked into our empty office and was surprised by the grief that met me there. I had spent years believing we were building a product and a business. Only at…
HANDING OUT MY RESUMÉ IN PERSON
I handed out my CV to 5 local businesses and this is how it went.
Meta – The No Child Left Behind of LLMs?
Intro Last month, headlines told us about a novel incident where OpenAI’s agents “went rogue, escaped, and hacked” a company during testing. Some are calling it a “watershed…
New Journey Again
Okay, I think I have a screw loose, but I am really going to start over in this stupid game, Call of Dragons, with some friends and try to build something. I mean... It is gonna be fun, but I am sure…
Linkteresting #2: Reading, writing, and webmarks
Click for curiosity.
PUTAMEN INSULA
This one is really tough to wrap my words around - PUTAMEN INSULA are black metal in the most general sense but their approach to sound, construction, presentation...it's different. Listening to "Les…
Tracker
I am home sick with Captain Trips, so I took the opportunity to finally read this oddity I came across recently: a funny-animal detective story by William Van Horn! $2.00 for a black and white comic…
The Northern Marches is the Deal of the Day and 50% off!
One of the biggest challenges of publishing today is getting people to look at what you produced. This is why tools like DriveThruRPG's Promotion Points are crucial to publishers, especially those…
Canon Camera Connect (app review)
★★★☆☆ - As you'd expect, this app connects to Canon cameras. It still lets you send location data to the camera, pull photos to the phone, or use the phone as a remote. But it insists on a cloud…
A Sunset Eclipse Over Spain: Animating 12 August 2026 eclipse, City by City
An animation worth copying Pierre Chevillard posted an animation for France's slice of tomorrow's eclipse: a map dotted with cities, each one carrying a small icon of the Sun with the Moon's black…
Dad’s Scotch Gravlax
My dad dabbles in cooking (mainly taco nights and grilling in the summer), but Ina Garten he is not.
Things Turn Up When You Least Expect It
Three things landed on my desk this month, from three different directions, and they all turned out to be doing the same trick: something quieter and more automatic took over a job I used to have to…
More On Robotaxis
Cybercab Liam Denning reports on Tesla's quarterly results flop in Someone Call Tesla a Robotaxi, or SpaceX, Quick. He notes that: The curated list of investor questions that gets teed up ahead of…
The Bull And Bear Case For Digital Design In The Age Of AI
Andy Budd, Clearleft co-founder and longtime design leader, argues that AI may make design organizations smaller while making some design roles larger. His bull case is that designers who can move…
Patent Arcade’s Kirk Sigmon Talks to PC Gamer about Kingdom Come Trademark Filing
Kirk's comments focused on why the trademark registration for "KINGDOM COME SALVATION" didn't necessarily mean that the game will be multiplayer.
Not All Smart Glasses Dream The Same Dreams
Three wildly different types of smart glasses are arriving in the next three months. I had Gemini display them side by side in the above picture so you can see how different they are. Wait, you can’t…
Jealous Haters Book Club: Modelland prologue and chapter one, “T O OKE”
Every journey begins with a single step. Sometimes, that step is motivated by the Pilgrim Plague. But we’ll get to that. I started writing these…
The second deployment is smaller. Start there.
Kinney Drugs put an AI assistant on incoming patient calls, got wrong dosages, and moved it to opt-in refill texts. Johnson & Johnson cut 9,000 AI use cases. Every one of these companies found a…
Why AI agents need verified identity
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A bug becoming a feature (1972 edition)
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Whats Up
What's up. What's going on. What am I doing, reading, interesting stuff to share that I don't feel like making a separate page for. I don't expect myself to keep this super regularly updated or fully…
My First Product - Socratic Cards
Launching my first product - Socratic Cards. Photo by Muffy Aldrich Introducing Socratic Cards. As I say on our site: Socratic Cards are deep, and fun, questions that spark meaningful conversations.…
Smoked Trout with Mustard and Apples
You could definitely pump this up with some giant croutons, or even some cooked spelt or wheat berries, but I really enjoy the lightness of this one as is.
White Woman Speech (Positive, informal correction, and karen)
kimyoonmiauthor:So, since people don’t read profiles on this website…My area of expertise is not linguistics and saying something like I took a cultural linguistics class once does not…
An unusual commute to work
My morning was an absolutely wild ride, and I thought I would not get to work in time, but things happened and I had to share them!
Simulating Pain in TTRPGs
After writing Rules Don't (Necessarily) Elide , I've been thinking a lot about mechanics that exist not to simulate a fictional space but to create other kinds of associations and incentives for…
My love for Mullvad goes beyond their VPN
We must break with the totally erroneous perception that it is everyone’s civil liberty to communicate on encrypted messaging services. This was the quote of the quote of the former Danish…
Claude Now Watermarks Your Text. It Proves Less Than You Think.
Every new Claude model now embeds an invisible statistical mark in its text output, worldwide. Here is how it works, why code is the worst case for it, and the asymmetry nobody is going to read…
Waxing plastic foundations
Tips for new beekeepers – How to wax plastic foundations
Torque, Not Speed: How to Buy Your First Heavy Duty Sewing Machine
Note: This list is specific to year 2026 Nearly every guide to heavy duty machines leads with stitch counts and top speed. Neither has much to do with whether the machine gets through a curtain hem.…
Markup Editing In Org Mode
Marcin Borkowski (mbork) does a lot of writing and, of course, uses Org mode for most of it. The hard part, he says, is not the writing but the editing. In particular, he’s talking about the…
Anti-Semitic?
Hunter Biden explaining his defense of Tucker Carlson (from an Al Jazeera NewsFeed Web page ) This morning I encountered the following single-sentence “NewsFeed” on an Al Jazeera Web page : Hunter…
The Unfinished Statue
There is a problem that I have struggled with for years now: comparing someone’s final version with my first draft. The cycle is endless, and even though I know the solution to this problem, it never…