It’s been almost a year now since things started changing. not fully a year yet, but close enough that i notice it constantly. sometimes i try to remember what life felt like before all of this and…

Intro If you're active at all when it comes to language model research these days, you almost certainly have an implicit mental model for what kinds of training have been useful for capability…

For the better part of my career I used 'find' incorrectly, or at the very least very naively. The '-exec' trickery eluded me for over a decade; I often relied on running child processes or _worse_…

Nobody understands the point of hybrid cars - YouTube Great explainer on how hybrid cars work. Non-hybrid gas engines use the Otto cycle. They are relatively inefficient because they waste energy at…

When a little black and white kitten fell from a ledge on Fifth Avenue, everyone who witnessed the event placed the blame on the ASPCA and the fire department. We’ll never know who was at…

In a technical talk from SIGGRAPH Asia 2018 on Gran Turismo SPORT, there’s a slide that reads: “ITU-R Recommendation BT.709 = Rec.709 = BT.1886 = sRGB” “Different names, same…

Substack: What I learned from vibe-coding “Every time Daniel Molloy comes on screen play SexyBack” in an hour with Claude Code valstechblog/molloy-detector on GitHub The motivating user story On…

On MacOS, the cmd tab keyboard shortcut only switches between apps, not the individual windows. I use apps like Firefox, where I have multiple windows open and so the MacOS solution does not work for…

I listened to the most recent 'The Students' episode with an interesting discussion on physis vs nomos.I wanted to write my take on it. I dont think I'm breaking new ground here necessarily but maybe…

The topic for this month’s Bearblog Carnival is “your favorite ______ in your niche hobby.” I’m a knitter and throughout the decade or so that I’ve been knitting, I’ve tried an impressive amount of…

So a week ago I added the human.json protocol to my site and wrote a quick and dirty script to load a ton of vouch links in it and added it to the links page and while I was at it updated my youtube…

There sure is a lot of noise out there about so-called “artificial intelligence.” (I won’t bother with the scare quotes through the whole post, but it’s worth noting:…

At the risk of beating a dead horse, I've had a rather pedestrian realization following Kami's post on the red button/blue button hypothetical. A few disclaimers; I agree with Kami on it being an…

The European Union took four years to draft the AI Act - with OpenAI shipping GPT-4 to a hundred million users in two months. By the time Brussels finalised its definitions of…

so a friend introduced me to a fantastic webcomic (so far, only a few years into it) and i'll tell ya'll about schlock mercenary as well. https://www.schlockmercenary.com/ it's a fairly enjoyable…

Pablo Picasso (on social media, anyway.) Quote Investigator says David S. Viscott, with a slight nod at Ralph Waldo Emerson. Picasso sounds nice tho. The post The Meaning of Life is to Find Your…

Google Mail Chatbot now supplies me with suggested replies to emails. Since I have to assume the emails I get were suggested by Goggle Chatbots, it looks like if I send the suggested replies, there…

it's just 9 am. i slept at 4, i don't know what I'm doing up already. i am adamant to open my laptop for work. I've just finished my honeymoon trip and i know how crazy everything has since i left. i…

Anglerfish are a deep-sea animal that uses its bioluminescent lure to capture prey and court mates. Along the way, as the males lack a phallus, they bite onto the larger female Anglerfish, which then…

Ginger Baker was insane. He was also one of the world's best drummers.

Strickland, L. Why Did Thomas Harriot Invent Binary? Math Intelligencer 46, 57–62 (2024) https://doi.org/10.1007/s00283-023-10271-9 PDF

I'm alive. just tired. hope you're having a great day!

A modular camera experiment

Time-blocking my way through postdoc life IV – my routine to plan my academic life This is a post about my planning routine. I promised to write about it and share my time-blocking…

March 1943. "Santa Fe R.R. train stopping for coal and water. Laguna, New Mexico." Kodachrome transparency by Jack Delano for the Office of War Information. View full size.

This One Pan Tofu Couscous is bright, zesty, and so delicious! With crispy seasoned tofu, fluffy couscous, and an herby chimichurri, this one pan wonder is sure to become a staple in your dinner…

What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to…

Seventy years ago this month, the May 1956 issue of Popular Electronics showed these ideas for an emergency radio receiver. If the power was out, or the radio otherwise out of commission, the…

Do it now Claude!

Part of the "FreeBSD on a Laptop" series. Disable password logins on the FreeBSD SERVER in favour of using SSH keys for authentication. Create the necessary SSH keys on a FreeBSD CLIENT that will be…

Banning a digit doesn't kill the cowardice — it relocates it. I banned 7s on my bake ratings, and the middle 6 inherited it. The rule is a lens, not a fix.

An announcement of the Google Summer of Code 2026. Four accepted candidates.

Buying a second-hand 2020 MacBook Pro for twenty-five dollars, upgrading from Catalina to Sequoia, and identifying the problems with the laptop's non-functional screen and Touch Bar. Diagnosing and…

Oh boy yet more linux kernel vulns

In a previous post , I explained that the pivot operation on a table of data is equivalent to a groupby operation on that data, but with the output table rearranged into a squatter configuration. But…

Contents Introduction Specifying what I wanted The Satori plus sharp libraries What posts are eligible for a generated og image? The renderer Caching the generated PNGs The orchestrator Conclusion…

AI is finding bugs faster, researchers pile on the moment one drops, and registries ship malware by the hundred-thousand. Defenders are caught between two contradictory imperatives. The fix is…

Something finally clicked for me. When looking at an ASCII table, you will notice that after the uppercase Z, there are a few other characters before lowercase a: Decimal Binary Symbol 88 01011000 X…

The joys of a small, passionate audience

In The Last Programming Language Might Not Be for Humans, I argued that if AI becomes the primary author of code, the source language has to bend around that author. In What Comes After the Last…

A Spotted Eagle-Owl with unusually heavy feather fraying and a lice infestation is recovering at African Raptor Centre until a full moult restores flight

I am talking to a number of folks about documenting their MCP servers. Others about discovering them. Others about governing them. Generally, we are mostly talking about being able to just see the…

From: Bleepblorp HI I JUST SAW THAT YOU POSTED THE DRAWING OF THE FIC IM GOING TO CRY- THANKYOU <3333 Also hi! Hope you're haiving a good day :D WAAA thanks for stopping by! I love your fanfic so…

Not all business relationships do the same job. Research shows which ones survive the agentic economy, and which were always just expensive due diligence.

i said in my second ceramics class post that i'd be back in early may with a roundup of my third class pieces and, here we are, in early may. i brought my final pieces home on monday and i am so…

On the walk to nursery this morning my wife and kids were startled by a car that drove onto the pavement within a foot of them. After reporting the offence via Operation Snap I spotted all of the…

Lately I found myself having a lot of fun with Frontier Elite II on my Atari STe and I found it brought me back to some twenty years ago, when I played that game first. Then, the somewhat extreme…

A reading note on A Theory of Deep Learning by Elon Litman (May 2026, preprint forthcoming).

A reading note on Neural Tangent Kernel: Convergence and Generalization in Neural Networks by Arthur Jacot, Franck Gabriel, and Clément Hongler (NeurIPS 2018).