On December 7, 328 CE, somewhere in the Syrian steppe about a hundred kilometres south of Damascus, a stonemason chiseled six lines into a slab of black basalt. The inscription was an epitaph for…

On February 20, 1727, Sergeant Major Francisco de Melo Palheta sailed out of Belém at the mouth of the Amazon with five large ships, four smaller boats, and more than two hundred soldiers. His…

A while back I wrote about Jupyter notebooks and all the little tricks that make them pleasant to work with. They’re great for poking at data and keeping code, notes and plots in one place. But if…

In my employment contract there is no mention of productivity or an expected outcome. The one thing that is stated: I give time, I receive money, which means I trade time for money. Wouldn't it make…

When you're ingesting a continuous external stream — live transit data, market ticks, IoT telemetry, whatever — the consumer's job and the job of interpreting what was consumed are tempting to bundle…

Mark Pesce · University of Sydney · June 2026AbstractWhen it becomes as hard to evaluate machine intelligence as it has always been to evaluate human intelligence, a threshold has been…

Dave Winer recently posted asking developers working on apps supporting inbound/outbound RSS to send him a post on it, so here is my post. I created an web app in 2023 using rssCloud and supporting…

I’m a little worried that I’ve given Google’s fake brain an aneurysm.

I love Herman's writing, often because it pushes me to try something new. This post on becoming a day person is a few months old but worth a look if you're burning the midnight oil watching TV and…

Usually I do these review videos completely off the cuff. (With maybe an outline to go off of) This time I actually wrote a script so you can read the script below the video if you’d rather do…

Read the full post at - Notes On The Death of Culture by Mario Vargas Llosa I pulled Notes on the Death of Culture by Mario Vargas Llosa off a library shelf somewhat serendipitously after reading...

Seattle made its FIFA World Cup debut this month, cementing its status as a premier soccer city. The host-city selection was a vindication for passionate Seattle fans who were long-disappointed when…

my nickname use to be clown staples.

When I meet a government which says to me, “Your money or your life,” why should I be in haste to give it my money? It may be in a great strait, and not know what to do: I cannot help that. It must…

A lot of my series involve the sights of a meandering walk, a collection of photos taken over a long period, or perhaps most of all, the simple documentation of time. This set, however, is a bit…

I had a classic Sean realization this weekend (that I've had many times before) when I spent the entire day being outside with my friends then when I had a spare moment and I checked my phone and…

Australia’s AI future won’t be decided by AI boomers or doomers, but by who owns the compute, sets the rules, and gets paid back for the infrastructure we build.

Is creating things innate to human nature? Why did the first painter paint? Why did the first writer write? Why did the first sculptor sculpt? Why was the first song created? Whatever the answer may…

I’m reviewing two books here with their origins in the mid-1970s microcomputer revolution: These two companies – Apple and Sphere – started at around the same time with similar…

weather: ☀️ pool time critters: grackles gracklin' at this, the hour of pride month's twilight, a brief list in no particular order of fictional guys i like to blame for extrinsically turning me gay…

after being cooped up since Friday, we wanted to get out on SundayI wanted to go to Yakiniku King because they are having a Shin Okubo fair, with all sorts of Korean street foods that will end soonwe…

Or how to plot a very famous album cover.

Over the last three or four months I have been on a bit of a quest. I have been looking for a private digital assistant. Not another chatbot or the latest frontier model, but something I could run on…

Cartesian and polar forms, the complex plane, the nested number sets, and the core relationships (real/imaginary parts, conjugate, modulus, argument) with a worked example.

This 1985 Earth Force Flight Team figure is all new to me. By Pace, this is Major Blaster Barton. He looks a lot like He-Man to me! Is this a bendy leg line you know ?

Solomon Guggenheim Museum Permalink . Tagged architecture , art museums , guggenheim and nyc . Reply by email .

“There’s something to be learned from everything. From even the most ordinary, commonplace things, there’s always something you can learn.” – Haruki Murakami, Pinball,…

Awhile ago I moved this blog to an AWS EC2 instance and, to try and reduce load on the instance, put the blog behind Amazon CloudFront, since CloudFront makes a decent front-side cache and has a free…

Gram release 3.0.0 Hi everyone,I hope everyone in Europe and everywhere else where it's unusually hot (or usually hot for that matter) are doing OK despite the heat. Even up here in the mideast of

Hi I'm back because I'm finally done with my exams!!!! I did a lot of stuff: 🧫Added a new journal entry (the night(s) before exams, wildlife, walking lightly on earth, ode to childlessness, sins,…

Team Ratings for Round 18 The basic method is described on my Department home page. Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.…

Team Ratings for Week 18 The basic method is described on my Department home page. Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.…

I’ve lived in Japan for three years now, and today is the first time I’ve had a tamago sando from 7-Eleven. I go to 7-Eleven often. Maybe a few times every week. That's a lot more than I used to go…

 Welcome back to the steaming, perpetual overcast of Cytherea! Adapting this setting for the Cepheus Engine (and classic 2D6 sci-fi systems) means swapping generic fantasy descriptions for…

Back in 2023 I started another collection whilst on holiday in Florida. Having never having been interested in buying Metallica records on vinyl, I got sucked into trying to collect the Walmart…

The Guardian phrases its description of what the EU is doing more sympathetically – “EU introduces €3 customs charge on small parcels to curb cheap Chinese imports” – but the…

Random compilation of (n)vim tricks I picked up over the years You can pipe input to vim.

All matter comes from a primary substance, the luminiferous ether Nikola Tesla .

tl;dr If you do not need stable instance ordering, call SetRemoveSwap() on InstancedStaticMeshComponent to massively speed up instance removal.

Calculating the position of trajectory lines is fast, but strings are slow.

This week’s AI Engineering World’s Fair just posted my talk on the agony and ecstasy of voice in, visuals out agents . It’s a challenge to get model responses that feel immediate, but when it works,…

vibe: iced ginger tea cuz i feel sick and i know the hot water would help but i want to chew ice when i'm done with it. nick is sleeping so no music, but lately obsessed with ozzga gas was $5.70 this…

When it comes to Northwest wildfires, many only consider precipitation and temperature. But for most Northwest wildfires during the summer, another element is more important: strong winds. Recent…

Plaintiff, a TikTok creator with roughly one million followers, makes his living livestreaming on the platform. After an anonymous Reddit user posted a 27-second clip of one of his livestreams…

Cyrus Janssen China is launching a new gold backed gold exchange in Hong Kong next month and this will change the future of the US dollar forever! China will now back it's currency with gold and use…

[It is, in fact, pretty clearly worse for all.] As regular readers know, car bloat is killing us . Recently, the New York Times created an impressive interactive article that details the problems of…

Turis longa tele sub mari multi per Jul Bern |Jules Verne| (abrebi tele) (This translation is a work in progress. I will occasionally post a new chapter as I finish one. ) biblo 1 1 The year 1866 was…

Called out of work for the first time today after checking I had enough sick time for it. I just didn't sleep well at all last night. I couldn't get comfortable, couldn't get the right temperature,…

So the Supreme Court issued a pile of decisions this morning, including one in which the only good part was intellectual honesty about being disingenuous (of which more in the future). It is that…