Every day we encounter a diversity of materials: liquids, glass, ceramics, metals, crystals, magnets, plastics, semiconductors, foams, … These materials look and feel different from one another.…

Hello, I wanted to do a deep dive into Next.js's structure and how it differs from traditional HTTP servers such as Flask, Express.js, and many other frameworks.As you know, Next.js is…

Turning 50 comes with a myriad of cliches: Not caring what other people think. Taking stock of what's really important. Focusing on health or other things that have been neglected for years. But for…

[confluence title=""]https://stardock.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SDEnt/pages/3492381043/Dev+Journal+116+The+Tech+Tree+in+the+Room[/confluence]

Archaeologists racing to excavate the bones of a lost race of giants in a remote wilderness. Hints of a lost civilization. An attack by hostile Natives, and sensational dispatches from a reporter on…

I just finalized my itinerary for my upcoming international trip, and boy was it a challenge...I waited on hold for over an hour with Aeroplan today and over 2 hours yesterday. So that motivated me…

I mean, fuck Aramark, UK's food quality has been declining since they privatized out to them. But a... Continue reading →

My coding agent, sid has a compaction strategy I’ve not seen in use elsewhere; I call it, “Ask an Expert!”

Courage Patience Diligence Love

The Apology is Plato's account of Socrates' defense at his trial where he faced charges of impiety and corrupting the youth. The most important thing to understand going into reading this is the…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Do it now Claude!

One of the problems — arguably, the core problem — with the current generation of AI chatbots is that they give the user the impression of authority, while in actual fact they do not necessarily have…

In two recent blogposts I have outlined the history of our field, one on the history of proof assistants and another specifically about earlier work on the formalisation of mathematics by machine.…

Many companies today are facing increasing pressure to adopt AI and launch AI-based features. While AI is a transformative new technology, such pressure can be unhealthy and counter-productive. Faced…

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…

How about some links that aren’t about computers? Or, not directly related. Mostly. On the enshittification of Audre Lorde. Landslide; a ghost story. Of course, here I am sharing a bunch of…

London's shape was decided by a Roman bridge at the narrowest practical crossing of the Thames around 50 CE. Two thousand years later, every commute, every property value, every neighborhood boundary…

We are self-hosting LaSuite, an open-source Google Docs alternative, for our small agency - and opening it up for others to try.

We are happy to share that the paper The Antipodal Method: Fast, Accurate, and Robust 3D Generalized Winding Numbers has been accepted to SIGGRAPH 2026. This is joint work between Université de…

Learning becomes less natural when working in hostile environments, but learning must never stop. There are always opportunities to learn. This article will give you my tips.

How about adding such letter on main Nozbe home page? Just to show the prospective buyer that the same tool we’re selling is the same tool we’re using and it’s reflecting our values and the way we…

Hey, look out! this is an addendum to yesterday's post on setting up a Sun Ray server on OpenIndiana Hipster 2025.10 . all of this is written with the assumption you've followed the setup steps in…

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…

Almost all the algorithms/methods covered so far have been action-value methods (except gradient-bandit algorithms, Section 2.8). Action-value methods learn the values of actions and then derive the…

Jwt should not be persisted

...

Quick post with some life updates!