For as long as I can remember, I have drawn. In the walls, in my books, in my homework, in any paper I could find. I was never a great artist, does not matter how much people around me tell me…

This year marks my twentieth year in the industry. I get messages on LinkedIn from college students who want to work in software engineering but feel like their degree, school, or background puts…

The inspiration for this post came from Dave’s Garage YouTube Channel. It featured dbrll/ATTN-11, which used machine learning on a PDP-11 to reverse a sequence of numbers. I’m not (quite) old enough…

What’s the secrets to unreasonable hospitality? That’s what I wanted to find out when I sat down with Will Guidara and Brian Canlis. Will spent over a decade running Eleven Madison Park,…

Running coaches all over the world have become increasingly anxious during the past few years with the advent of large language models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini. But…

Bob Grant: The Mysterious Hantavirus Outbreak That Put the Virus on the Western Map. European hantavirus is what you get when mice pee all over your idyllic mountain cottage. It causes your kidneys…

Share your anxieties, hopes, horrors, and pleasures around relationships in this quick installation I made at the Dublin branch library in metro Columbus, Ohio. Many responses will be included in a…

An EBM finally crossed 800M parameters without collapsing. Nobody has independently reproduced the 35% scaling claim. Both halves matter.

Poem by R L Raymond Interstitial originally published in dead skunk magazine

Neither the success of your marriage nor the memories of your guests will depend on the price of a party.

It was summer [1964]; Roger and I had come to spend the day in Paris, and, after visiting a museum, had decided to go to the cinema. Suddenly, on the opposite pavement, we saw Blanchot with a woman.…

On “By Endurance, We Conquer” and framing scenesAllow me another one of those posts where I think out loud about how to run roleplaying games as a GM. Yesterday, I ran By Endurance, We Conquer for…

There is a particular kind of early-’90s computer game that does not politely introduce itself. It kicks down the door, throws a manual the size of a small regional telephone…

How Iran is parking the bus on 'America'

A sequel to my magic blades ! There is little I love more than a good old-fashioned whacking stick. My favorite weapon in Dark Souls has always been the reinforced club. Of course, at least until I…

Plus! Table Stakes; Agent-Based Modeling; Coordination Problems; Insiders; Compute

I rarely feel inclined to grab a bike to get to work in the morning. Today the morning was nice, I looked at the bike station and loitered a bit, not feeling like biking to work but knowing it would…

And the American consumer is struggling! The post I thought Elon hated Anthropic appeared first on Cautious Optimism.

Nostalgia for the pre-AI era grips us. Dr Mohamed Mannaa confesses “I remember what it meant to write before this era. Writing a single paragraph often required reading dozens of papers,…

When a buck-ninety-nine house in a trendy Toronto hood sold for a million over ask the other day, we wondered. Did we just bounce off the bottom? Earlier this week this pathetic blog wandered into…

When I released Catppuccin Complete UI for Mastodon 2.0 , I felt like the project had finally grown into what I wanted it to be. It was no longer just my own Mocha-flavored tweak of Bird UI. It had…

This practical framework shows you 9 steps for line editing scenes in crime and thriller fiction so that every sentence pulls its weight and delivers the appropriate level of tension.In this post​Why…

Conventional wisdom suggests that we should ask AI chatbots to adopt an expert persona to elicit better answers. According to this advice, prompts will yield better responses if they include…

Thesis: reliable agents tackling complex tasks need deterministic control flow encoded in software, not increasingly elaborate prompt chains If you’ve ever resorted to MANDATORY or DO NOT SKIP ,…

Daily Drawing 858

Las Vegas, NV–May 5, 2026: Audio Advice expands into the western U.S. with the opening of a new super-showroom in Las Vegas. Former Eagle Sentry executive and industry veteran Chris Oram has been…

– Octave Records’ latest release features Benthall and his quintet on an instrumental musical journey into jazz, classical and contemporary influences, captured in superb Pure DSD high-resolution…

Just random thoughts.

My dotfiles for my MacOS rice and Emacs configuration live in two public repositories. Both repos are shared as a reference; clone, fork, or just lift the bits that look useful to you!

April 2026 was a very exciting travel month indeed. I embarked on a 17-day solo trip to Central Asia, visiting Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan! It was my first time visiting this part of the…

Home Assistant automation triggers are becoming easier to use. Here is what purpose-specific triggers and duration support mean in a real smart home.

After many years of running a few Wordpress sites, last year around September I moved the last of them over to static content serving. It’s been over 6 months, and today as I was checking…

«My glorious prose, filtered through the minds of the insane? [a sudden, consoling thought] Who knows? They might improve it.» The Marquis, using the inmates [...]

Gas prices are up from about $1.30/litre to $1.75/litre across Canada this year.  There is conflict in Iran. Markets are reacting to geopolitical uncertainty once again. So what should investors…

image by AI, of course; my own prompt Climate change may be a mechanism through which the planet eases its human burden…[or] new patterns of disease could trim the human population…War could have a…

The codebase doesn’t care how it got written, but you will. Robby Russell wrote a piece that I keep thinking about. His argument: the pros dismissed Access and FileMaker, but founders built…

Editorial note: I originally published this over on the Hit Subscribe blog. I was perusing the Heavybit newsletter this week when I decided to wander over to their site and see what they were up to.…

Charlie Haden: Photos, Pt. 7Charlie Haden: Photos, Pt. 7. Photography of Cheung Ching-Ming.

A bit late, but finally here are the few submissions we got for April’s Vim Carnival about notes, and PKM. I hoped to get more people involved, but that wasn’t the case. Perhaps the next…

A study in the International Journal of Business Innovation and Research has looked at women’s employment in Saudi Arabia. It suggests that workplace empowerment is closely linked to an employee’s…

A day of trecking in the not too green wilds. This is Scotland a few minutes before the rain. Not very wild either, just a bit dangerous underfoot for those of a certain age. I may have parked up on…

The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn't a Guy at All 1 by Sumiko Arai translated by Ajani Oloye Yen Press 2024 The cover of The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn't a Guy at All stands out for its…

A few classic variants appear in Dead Island 2 (Dambuster Studios/Deep Silver, 2023).

Better late than never. Today I'm finally sharing my Gundam Aerial HG build, a model I picked up as a souvenir in Akihabara, Tokyo, back in 2023 and finished in early 2024. It's been sitting on the…

I’ve been in some discussions lately about AI in writing, which is, at the moment, the hottest topic in publishing. Everyone has an opinion. I have one too. Mine is going to make some people on…

To this day, researchers don’t fully understand quantum physics. But in a new paper, physicists from MIT say that that’s okay – because the phenomena we use quantum physics to explain can actually be…

I was so excited to be camped in my favorite spot in all of Death Valley National Park - with an amazing view of Striped Butte - that I was ready to go even before our alarm went off in the morning.…

Eyeglass Scratch Repair turns out scratched glasses can be repaired easily enough, I had no idea! Tags: glasses eyeglasses spectacles repair diy cleaning scratches

Jonathan Chu is a software engineer and Emacs enthusiast who’s been looking for a note taking app that he can actually use. He’s tried all the usual suspects but found them too…