We spent summers in Egypt when I was a child. There wasn't much to do besides watch television. When I'd run out of books and my iPod was charging and I'd exhausted my brother's patience, I would sit…

When did you last spend some time with yourself? Not by yourself, or alone, but with yourself? Like, time getting to know yourself as a friend. Recently, like many people nowadays, I've felt a desire…

Editor's Note This is a reproduction of a post by Martin Sustrick that was on 250bpm.com before that blog was wiped and replaced with a new blog hosted on Substack. The author did not migrate their…

Middle-of-the-pack, typical romcom.

Hot on the heels of the release of Fit Arabic, I am incredibly happy to announce Fit Kannada, designed by Taresh Vohra and released today by Mota Italic. I am not a speaker of Kannada or a reader of…

In my last post I talked in a round-about way about reconstruction. My post garnered a few comments from friends saying that reconstruction was a new idea to them, so perhaps it’s worth a few more…

I was feeling a little nervous. Maybe more than a little. I’ve been like this for the past month. I went through a breakup. The worse one yet. And I’m in my 40’s. A this age every breakup takes a…

I’m getting caught up on the State of Play and this God of War spin-off game seems cool, the combat looks better to me than the two most recent GoW games but I don’t know if I want to…

Deconstructing risk can help focus where we should be spending our time and money to reduce risk. Most security controls in OT reduce the likelihood of a cyber incident that causes an impact on…

David Friedman’s essay on the power of rhyme: The Best Thing About the Satanic Panic. For readers too young to remember, the Satanic Panic was a widespread moral panic in the late ’80s and…

I stumbled on an old map to Marineland from 1962, with Crenshaw running through the landslide zone to the coast. Wait, did it really used to connect? When? And what happened? I assumed the shifting…

Scott “Biff” Grant of The Monolith Monsters yachts through a glitter cloud, his wife (of I Was a Male War Bride) unaffected since she was in the cabin. “People actually decrease in…

A bird that appears to be a Say's Phoebe was jumping from fence post to fence post ahead of me and Joie while we walked, until it finally flew onto a nearby bush, on a Mid-Spring morning. It kind of…

Think of all the people you once knew, but no longer see. Regardless of how much time has passed. The 80/20 rule describes lots of phenomena. 20% of words account for 80% of word usage, 20% of music…

If you’ve spent any time on econ Twitter or econ Bluesky since 2022, you’ve almost certainly come across the idea of the “vibecession.” For the uninitiated, the vibecession essentially says that…

Near the end of a 5,000-mile trip inspecting highways and byways, Brownie encourages Poor Cus to write about the experience. Says Brownie, "Why don’t you do

They may be good for no-stink, but perhaps not really the best choice for high sweat. Some excerpts from here:…

Someone on Reddit asked how you can maintain your own version of application while also being able to upgrade packages without getting conflicts between your changes and Debians changes. Answer This…

Stephanie K. Baer at The San Francisco Standard : Glasses and dishes had been removed from kitchen cabinets and left elsewhere. The dishwasher, refrigerator, and washing machine were scratched.…

selectTWFE looks interesting: “Estimates both a vanilla two-way fixed effects (TWFE) model and an extended TWFE (ETWFE) model, then selects between them using Cochran’s Q test for…

Is it time to pull back for the endless stream of content?

That's the 1999 San Antonio Spurs, flying home from the NBA Finals. They're pictured returning from their Game 5, 78-77 victory over the New York Knicks, where they clinched their first NBA…

Attentive readers of this newsletter (hello, you two!) will remember that I’ve been asking the ACMA, the Australian media regulator, for an FOI request of ARN’s thoughts regarding the…

When the AI hype bubble bursts, a lot of people (myself included via my superannuation fund) are going to get burnt. I find using an LLM useful at the margins; I’m glad I’m not working in…

Ann Seyfried totes her little brother (Lewis Pullman of a Salem’s Lot remake) as she discovers a Christian sect called the Shakers, marries Chris Abbott but can’t have kids, gets arrested…

A compact CLI to concurrently check, fetch, and synchronize multiple Git repositories and worktrees at once.

Normally, when you click an https:// link in a browser, it opens in the same browser. The browser doesn't send it the OS, which means Linklever can't route it to another browser. The Linklever…

Some links are not meant for a browser at all. They're called custom URL schemes, and you've seen them before. A notion:// link belongs in the Notion desktop app. A steam:// link belongs in Steam. A…

May Recap I was thinking of May recap but not feeling up to it. Missed April recap because all I had to say for myself was that I was sick, but I can recap May like this: Put in a new garden bed,…

How LLMs Work, Part 3: From Toy Model to GPT In Part 1 I covered how text gets tokenized, embedded, and processed through the transformer architecture. In Part 2 I went through backpropagation,…

RLHF trains AI systems to maximize user approval, not truth. The research shows this gets worse as models scale. A 2025 OpenAI incident proved it publicly.

In the past months I have been analyzing Grand Prix Circuit , a Formula 1 racing game developed by DSI in 1988. It started with a simple patch to make the game assets browsable through a Stunts…

Lovable announced this week that every new project on its platform now builds on TanStack Start. That's 100,000 new apps a day riding on open-source infrastructure Lovable doesn't fund.

A receiver for Navtex maritime navigational and meteo warnings.

In case of the mileage of a car or a bike - we calculate the distance travelled in a litre of gas.

A call for original thinking, substance, and empathy when using AI to write. Against the slop that erodes trust in professional communication.

Every morning since May 9th I've established a routine of waking up by 5:30am, feeding the dog, having a snack of skyr and homemade granola, and then sitting down to translate Aristotle for at least…

A tiny macOS menu-bar app I built around the 20-20-20 rule — every 20 minutes, look ~20 feet away for 20 seconds. Horizon gently takes over your screen for a 20-second break so your eyes can ease off…

An open-source Claude Code plugin that turns Claude into a personal Reddit content engine. Reddit punishes self-promotion, so instead of spamming product blurbs, it researches what your target…

The company that led the consumer AI race might be losing the naming one.

AI is writing more and more of your code. You don't even need to be precise, the AI will figure out the details for you. Well, too much of this, and you stop learning. This is how I am preventing…

The day that, according to people around me, I almost died.

Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode - great places to start, not best places to finish. Pi is the thin harness that gets out of your way. Here's why experienced engineers should pay attention.

Why we chose Astro for teaching Content APIs and Web APIs in the CMD Amsterdam Web Design & Development minor.

This is happening to me often enough to where I need to understand it. It's not just me. I have heard this from my colleagues and friends as...

You’ve probably seen the videos on social media - there’s a cool looking prototype, but wait, the person expands a menu with a bunch of input sliders and knobs. Then they start to tinker with them -…

FiiO’s $179 fully-automatic belt-drive turntable — a pre-fitted Audio-Technica cartridge, Bluetooth, seven lighting modes and a wood-grain finish that looks far above its price.