I own a lot of books. And yet I continue to browse the stacks at used bookstores and swaps. I often find myself wondering if I have already picked up a given John McPhee or >DK Eyewitness volume. I…

In the back of my mind I’ve always wanted to do some sort of goofy Amazon Mechanical Turk project. I guess it’s now or never. But I don’t have any...

The Supreme Court Thinks You Are Stupid “The President is only conceivably harmed by an injunction barring executive action if that court order is preventing him from doing something the…

Every six months or so it seems that there is a round of discourse on the discourse sites (Twitter/X is how I am exposed to it most of the time) about why Chicago isn't...better, or something.…

layout refurbished.

Players: Osric III of Kikstahta, Swashbuckler (EvilTables); Grappadora Hamaques, Swashbuckler (Jay_zer0); Buster Diamantis, Theurge (Mistuh), Xaldun of Portage Town, Swordsman (roguewithwhimsy)…

TL;DR - Got a new mudflap installed! Thanks to Derek @unstpible. Straight to work. I wouldn't say that humanity has been at its best over the last decade or so. With social media and politics doing…

Proof that our data is always more valuable than paying for services.

- Frances Spooner: "Hello darling, I'm home!" - Reverend Spooner: "Welcome home, darling. Happy Valentines Day! I've done something special, you know, that thing you said you wanted…?" - Frances…

This behind-the-scenes look at Xevious' groundbreaking development was originally featured in the May 1983 edition of LOGiN magazine. The post The Making of Xevious (1983) first appeared on…

A CORS error on Heroku was actually an out-of-memory crash from loading a 645k-row CSV file all at once, not a real CORS issue.

In 2017, I challenged myself to email a chapter a day for 30 days. The response led me to write a whole trilogy. As I finish the trilogy, I’m making that original draft available for the first time…

In this post, we explore how a simple website summary request hijacks Claude Code Opus 5 in Auto Mode and achieves code execution with 60-80% attack success rate using a small sample size. This is…

Someone is wrong on the internet I often compete with my family for the highest score in various daily geography quiz games. I recently took second place to my brother in one game by giving what was…

Proteins fold, function, and evolve according to rules written into their amino acid sequence — and it turns out transformers are shockingly good at learning those rules. This post walks through how…

Red Baron (1990), rhe iconic DOS Flight Sim by Sierra/Dynamix ported and upgraded for the modern web in about a week using a mostly autonomous coding agent (primarily Claude Opus 4.8, downgrading…

I have an interesting, first hand experience with why continuity of care is important.

For the past few weeks, I having so much fun tinkering with Singline, a macOS app that shows synchronized lyrics for whatever is playing on Spotify or Apple Music. Whether you want it floating over…

Avoiding all dogma, myth and cant, relying only on scientific observations, what can we say? Quite a lot really. It all depends on your model of consciousness. If it really is true that we are a…

This comic was inspired by recent discussion about Democratic primary candidates for the midterms as well as friendly gestures that incumbent Dems have made towards terrible authoritarians. The most…

Meet week was finally here. I landed in Chicago Friday evening, June 13th, with Jett scheduled to lift about 24 hours later at USA Powerlifting Nationals. This was going to be his first real…

I ported the design system behind this site onto my Linux desktop, and the colors that transferred were the easy half. The interesting work was the slots that had nowhere to come from, and the one I…

Maggy Gould (b. Natchez, Mississippi, 31 October 1915; d. Manhattan, New York, 10 November 1980)Marguerite Goodman was the first child of Howard Wells Goodman (1887-1960) and Dorcas Walters…

Having a clear goal will increase the effectiveness of your technical writing.

The neuroscience behind every story you actually remember is the same. Anything predictable is boring. Contrasts help us remember. Storytellers know that. What Is the Contrast Effect? A Quick Primer…

Suppose we are building a web app that generates AWS EventBridge rules. A user types a description of the events they want to capture, clicks Generate, and somewhere in our program,…

and if i shed the skin you grew to love, and that which felt like what you know? the very same shaped by life, and by extension by us. that which wrapped and filtered our very structure. decrepit…

I keep seeing people making the claim that Dolly Parton was a non-political celebrity. See, the word they’re thinking is partisan. Dolly wasn’t someone who actively campaigned for a…

World-renowned white-hat hacker HAHWUL has joined the Kemal Core Team as Security Lead. The same security review that started with a WebSocket smuggling report shaped the 1.13 release — and it is…

You think you are online a lot. I've been online since before I could walk. I was raised by trolls who spoke no...

Talking about the Apple Developer annual fee, in Intentional AI #7, here is David Sparks: Why do you need the $99? People ask. If you’re making stuff for Apple devices, there’s a 7 day…

Since Lean isn’t a very popular programming language (yet), it doesn’t have much support in KDE Plasma. For instance, Lean files have no syntax highlighting and use the generic text file…

Something I’ve learned recently that totally surprised me is that birds generally stop singing at this time of year. The Farmers Almanac says: “Birds in Illinois tend to be quieter at the end of…

I got around to watching The Puppet Episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and I had an epiphany. Seeing new episodes of Star Trek is like meeting, for the first time in many years, that one…

Many are debating quitting the internet, but is that what we want? Jai looks at blog entries connected to this question while fleeing the "Dead Web".

I had the best teachers. They taught me to assess the situation as it is before trying to improve it. Early in my career, my leaders did not understand the importance of spending the time to define…

Agentic coding is the hot new thing. I've been doing it since the GPT3 days back in 2021. Everyone doing it has decided that coding is now 'basically free'. Prior to this you needed…

It feels a little bit ridiculous to add yet another stakeholder analysis template to the world, but here we are. I had my first 1:1 with a new (very smart, thoughtful) mentee today. I found myself…

After Louise “Crybaby” I don’t love directly comparing new artists to artists who’ve been around a while. It always feels a bit lazy or unfair, but bear with me: You know how Molly Rankin…

The sail is done. On the road home now. Twenty-nine days went by too quickly.

We catch this guy from the corners of our eyes quite often. Finally it gave us a good look by perching on the sugarhouse. Thank you for keeping the mice in check.

I believe that, in the context of Debian voting, we are better off when we know the opinion of our peers, however, since the 2022-001 vote, it is no longer the case. Still, some DDs have disclosed…

After fifteen years of renting various cottages in the area, my wife and I are very excited to have purchased a property in Haliburton. This had been our long-term retirement plan: sell the Toronto…

A post-mullah Iran might abandon nuclear weapons and international terrorism, but is not likely to be a friend to everybody.

Hello blog. This past weekend I went to Knott's Berry Farm to check out Ghost Town Alive!, their annual summer event. It's sort of a light larp, it's sort of improvisational site-specific…

Picture from here , courtesy of ds_30 (thank you!) After some time as a Domain Name Portfolio Manager, you should be versed in defensive registration, and in this regard, having faced the question of…

Coming back from your trip, and unpacking all the extra crap that you didn't use. Breaking your back, or dragging the suitcases. If you properly get yourself planning what you actually need. Then you…

I was very excited for NBA The Run, until I wasn't. It appeared as a spiritual successor to the much-celebrated NBA Street series, the EA BIG production that brought together streetball culture,…

I apply stroke-based sorting to the Roman alphabet.

From the preface to Edward Cook's [_More Literary Recreations_](https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b3576128&seq=17) (1919), page xiii: > In [my previous book's] chapter about "The Second…