I’ve just complete a project using AI, namely Claude. It involved linguistics. I’m new to using AI seriously; I first used Claude only a month ago. AI has been mostly irrelevant to what I…

Njabulo S. Ndebele, Boxers Die Alone: Reflections on Boxing in the Eastern Cape (Johannesburg: Picador Africa, 2026) OVER four decades […]

(Yes, it’s long. I have many many thoughts, and even left some of them out!) Event PyCon Africa 2026Dates October 7–9, 2026Location Speke Resort Munyonyo, Kampala, UgandaWebsite…

Catarina must deal with a belligerent patron

It has been quite a while since my last post, and during this time I have been investigating a couple of complimentary things: TabPFN and revisiting my Kalman-EMA filter. I say complimentary as I…

I often say free advice is worth what you pay for it, but after extensive experience in a brutal job market during the Great Recession, I found a few tips that helped me get through it. A lot of…

A recent Anthropic blog post contained a short paragraph, not at all the point of the post, which has been buzzing around my brain since I read it: A new level of operational excellence is possible.…

I visited an iconic tourist destination in Central Park, New York City and photographed the fountain under construction on a cool autumn day.

I drew this week’s cartoon thinking about this strange period of figuring out how to market to the agents that (I almost wrote “who”) are increasingly shopping on customers’…

I feel somethin' so right doin' the wrong thing And I feel somethin' so wrong doin' the right thing Everything that kills me makes me feel alive And I feel somethin' so wrong doin' the right thing…

Clonfert Cathedral, not far from the banks of the River Shannon in east Galway, on ground St Brendan the Navigator first chose for a monastery around 563 (yes, that Brendan - the one whose legendary…

It’s early afternoon on Friday 16 October 2026. I enter the public transport office in central Strasbourg, next to the Alt Winmärik tram stop. Alt Winmärik means Old Wine Market in the old Germanic…

Stepping into a wild jungle 🌴 When the rest of the world 🗺️

The tragic final march of the Man of Faith. Unpacking the TV show LOST — Season 5: Episode 7

A few months ago, I wrote about getting back into blogging after almost a decade, and casually mentioned that this website is running on my homelab. I also promised to write about how I set it up.…

If some details (like sequence charts) display incorrectly, please check the website version of this page . The Formal Frontier and Formal-First Research By Fabrizio Montesi. Created on 2026-10-19.…

Reading Time: 2 minutesHere is a link to a talk I gave at the Independent School for the City about the Banana ... as a way to talk about the relationships between artificial environments, colonial…

I was invited to take part in a project about songs that describe America, and, well, if you look up “paradox of choice” in the dictionary, it’s really just a picture of my invitation email. I’m…

Again, I’m late to updating my Now page for September, but this time I think I have a decent excuse: my son was born at the end of the month. Anyone who has had children will likely know exactly what…

We’re looking at recaps from the Jealous Patrons Book Club’s read of Tyra Banks’s Modelland. We read this in 2023, so some references to current…

Last week we reviewed SPIRITUAL CAPITAL. The week before that I did an overview of all five forms of capital we need to cultivate in our family business and specifically in the family room.We MUST…

The all-out-to-burnout cycle isn't about time or boundaries. You're running a marathon like a sprinter, and an ADHD brain can't see mile twenty coming.

Some disorganised, cluttered thoughts about the rise of AI in my life.

Yesterday marked the sixteenth anniversary of this blog. It has been a great year, with more readers, more subscribers, and the placement of posts on LinkedIn for the first time, so that readers have…

With last week’s training not going entirely to plan, I’ve come up with less structured approach for this week, hoping that life allows me to follow through with my 30km...

TL;DR I’ve wanted Claude Code to compact my conversations in the background for a long time. It now compacts a long session when I walk away from it for about an hour. My Claude went through my…

Across 24 tasks mined from my own Git history, model rankings correlate with Cognition's FrontierCode at 0.96 Spearman over 10 shared configurations. Here is what it took to build: qualifying tasks,…

Run your thumbnail along the frame of a 1930s steel casement and you can feel it. The section is barely a quarter inch thick, yet it has held a pane of glass square for ninety years through…

Questions and answers.

A new picker with aliases, first-class worktrees mapped to GitHub issues, faster caching, and more.

It takes an enormous amount of math to train AI

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***** A lot of book readers today would love to read more classic novels, but everybody knows that old literature can be more difficult to read than today’s average bestseller. However, if you…

We added 80 new records, updated 54 records, and made a constellation of improvements and updates to the Semantic Farm and Bioregistry in the first two weeks of October 2026. This post gives more…

What is this?A weekly note on what I've been up to. Last week's is here.Tuesday: Just a normal guy definitely enjoying the taste of GuinnesstldrPast 1,000km for the year. Doorframes…

I made a photo of a lady playing music to a horse in Mexico in 2023 and it was published in a magazine recently. Never give up on your dreams of making a photo of a horse going to a concert in Baja…

Deb’s tablet games only worked online and were full of ads. On our flight to New York I vibe coded her an alternative: Pocket Arcade, nine casual games with no ads that install in the browser…

Every app is becoming a tool your AI can use. Your assistant will know more about you and do more on your behalf. Who owns that memory, and who holds the approve button?

I’m emerging from a few months of doing things, art workshops, childcare, days out and other such activities that are easier done than documented. It seems odd to write about this as the leaves…

… few doubt that the middle east is in the grip of epoch shaping convulsions. Nothing speaks more eloquently to this truth than the astonishing territorial gains of Yemen’s de facto government,…

Click on any photo for truly lovely hi-res photos (by Brian Gee, visit his website and Instagram and show him some love, and FYI photos were taken with a Sony A1 Mark II with a Sony 24-70mm f/2.8 GM…

Moon Monday #297 and Indian Space Progress #45: 🌘 🧊 👀

I can’t see anything

Once more, Tom Roberts has worked his magic. Feast your eyes! (The cover here is followed by the rough and then the line drawing - both stages that cover artists share with the publisher art…