In this episode, we join Martin Butler M1MRB, Chris Howard (M0TCH), Martin Rothwell (M0SGL), Frank Howell (K4FMH), Bill Barnes (WC3B) and Leslie Butterfields (G0CIB) to discuss the latest Amateur /…

Observation #1: LinkedIn sucks LinkedIn sucks. At this point, I doubt anyone needs to be convinced of this obvious fact. AI slop content has largely taken over the site. The one-sentence paragraphs,…

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Photo: © Stan B. None whatsoever, to state that we are dealing with an openly racist Presidential administration. The dog whistles and subtle code talk of yore are no longer needed and can no longer…

The Laziest Generationby Ibrahim DialloIbrahim talks about house prices in the US, how it's only getting worse, and the perception from previous generations that kids today are somehow lazy because…

How a 1940s design principle explains a 6 square metre hotel room in Copenhagen

Terry Tao on how university students should control AI diet

The problem that started this was not philosophical. We were trying to write down our SDLC. Not the aspirational one on a Confluence page, the real one, the one an auditor could follow and a team…

What if the singularity already happened? And a neuroqueer cyberneticist from Germany has been engineering the gap for months?

The Library of Alexandria was the ancient world’s greatest repository of knowledge — and its greatest single point of failure. It didn’t burn in a single night. It declined across decades, through…

I don't understand why this generation can't afford a home. When my grandfather was 18, he had already saved enough money from his paper route and various odd jobs to buy his first home. By the time…

A few days ago, in The Rungs , I reached for a phrase to describe something I'd found reassuring: two doors, one room . I'd been teaching a Rails application to compile itself into nine languages,…

Very nearly 3 decades ago, I got involved in an American lawsuit. Forsyth v Eli Lilly Bill Forsyth was a wealthy man even before he sold the land his car rental business was on to Los Angeles…

Step one in the quest for good transit in Kingston: hexagons, census data, and a whole lot of ST_Intersection.

WTF is up with sugar allergies? Friday evening we were on the patio at our local brewery when my wife overheard a young person expounding to his two friends about how people wear CGMs to manage their…

I dislike and distrust Substack. It’s centralized, funded by people I distrust, has an unmitigated history of giving a pass (and profiting from) to some pretty hateful content, and could very…

Or: How an AI Invented a Plant and Someone Started Selling the Seeds AI images created by a scam Facebook advertisement selling seeds for Hosta plants There is a plant for sale on Facebook that does…

I recently read Will Manidis’ Against Taste and found myself nodding along to much of that essay: The taste thesis, at its deepest and most simple structure, reverses this order. It places man at the…

The largest coming conflict in the new AI world is not the one between AI giants or the one between those giants and governments. It will be the conflict between containment and expansion of personal…

In 2022, I wrote about the damning fall of events tech company Pollen. The short of it:Pollen seemed to have pulled off the improbable feat of building a business in the notoriously low margin…

A small story about CAD software, ownership, and changing while it is still your choice.

I’ve been contracting in the public sector for several years now, and seeing how time and resources (money) are sometimes spent can make me queasy. The public sector seems immune to approaching…

Why proxy servers sell Claude tokens cheaply in China, how AI assistants are reshaping technical interviews, a Vedanta–Buddhism–Navayana comparison, and a Proxmox I/O-hang server fix.

This is not normal. It’s been a week of heat . Too hot to sleep. Too hot to cook. Too hot for the office air con to work. Too hot to think. The couple days of anxious waiting to see if schools would…

The bug your angriest customer is emailing about and the bug wrecking the most lives are almost never the same bug.

A few days ago, I came across the paper “Demoing Stochastic Parrot: A Candid AI Cohabitant” by Chang et al. This paper—published by MIT researchers at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing…

AI can blast a thousand emails in one night, yet it cannot close a single client. A confession from a UK study-abroad salesperson: once AI flattens a standardized skill like drafting essays, what…

How to introduce consumers to gambling before they even get to launch Counter-Strike on the thing.

I discussed almost exactly three months ago my concerns with how physical media disappearing could lead to issues due to how we never really seem to, "Own," digital media--even if we, "Buy," it. Some…

Here is a short, yet interesting, tale that I would like to report on. It’s kind of cute and helps us to think about our life and the lives of others. I’d like to use it as a springboard…

Much ink has been spilled on the negative externalities of optimizing for attention. Or whether they were externalities at all, given the politics of our tech oligarchs. The zone has definitely been…

Speculative strategy uses artifacts from plausible adjacent futures to help organizations examine present choices before they become product, policy, investment, or communications commitments.

I previously wrote about the upcoming UEFI CA rollover. Well, it's happened now - the old Microsoft UEFI CA from 2011 expired yesterday: Third Party Marketplace Root (used for signing option ROMs and…

One keyboard bug three decades in the making. (New version of an essay originally posted in February 2015. 1,800 words.)

I’ve increasingly been hearing people assume or claim that meritocracy and social mobility go hand-in-hand. Their argument often goes like this: This argument is extremely compelling because it is…

It is difficult to express how the feel of capitalism has changed over the course of my lifetime. When I was a kid, you didn’t know who was […]

You might see, BREAKING NEWS, RUSSIAN Hackers steal SIGNAL BACKUP KEYS, or other such styled headlines. Wow this sounds super … Continue reading If you ask people, often they just do things!

Paul's Redacted Brands shows just how well following FIFA's World Cup branding rules have gone. Temporarily renamed stadiums, disguised brand logos, and taped-over product labels all triggered the…

Here are my thoughts on news across the internet this week. We touch on rent denialism, collapsing job markets, corporate productivity theater, and the many ways AI is being oversold, misused, or…

By Eric Schubert As Harrisburg reflects its 100th anniversary era, it is worth highlighting figures whose lives connect this region’s civic history to broader national change. One of those figures is…

Yesterday went pretty well in regards to the pride commander event I ran at the local card shop. It was myself and 2 other people, so another low turnout but it was enough to play so it was good…

A story about post-AI collaboration. An agent gets packed, sent through a portal, and arrives in a competitor's mirror to verify a claim. The walls hold. The work happens. Both go home better than…

How Reddit accidentally leaked its spamurai system.

GLP-1s changed my life; unfortunately, advertisers have changed GLP-1s.

The Tennessee House may pass a bill, but it cannot unmake a holy family built in a Tennessee home. Sarah Vance dismantles dangerous legislation by declaring that love needs no state permission to…

We can't fix society with tech Just capturing this thought from an online friend. You are not going to fix anything, until we find some other core principles to build on. Like cooperation and…

There’s still a bit of a tone in some security circles that we’re somehow unique in constantly having to push back against ill-advised moves, or even outright craziness, from our business,…

1. It’s hot in London so I’ve been seeing a lot of handheld portable fans, usually with a strap so you can hang it round your neck. My faves are the ones with thermoelectric coolers in the middle of…

A number of people seem to freak out when I write a piece like this, but it’s a huge mistake to define ourselves by what we’re against, and darkness is not all that exists in the world. And we are…