Mon Mar 02
Estimate: ~15% (range 10–20%) Base rate. Forced irregular removal of authoritarian leaders runs roughly 2–4% per leader-year (general literature estimate, not verified against Archigos this session). The question’s disjunction — flee or cease to be president — covers the full removal distribution. Starting prior:...
We mourn our craft: The worst fact about these tools is that they work. They can write code better than you or I can, and if you don’t believe me, wait six months. This point stuck out to me. I’m going to take it completely out of context to make my own point. I haven’t yet found an LLM that is writing code better...
this shitty haiku is infinitely better than your sludgy slop Send me an email Latest 3 posts 02 Mar, 2026 Haiku for AI 01 Mar, 2026 Haiku for Your Mom 01 Mar, 2026 Haiku for War Criminals Older Posts I'd Like You to See 05 Nov, 2024 Election Night, Anxiety Night 03 Jul, 2024 Every Cat's Got a Bit of an Asshole in...
The NVMe in my big HP Workstation died yesterday. I’m not sure why other than it was cheap and used from eBay. I, however, decided to treat this as an opportunity instead of crying in my beard. Something I’ve planned for a while now, but had been putting off, is a significant refactoring of my home lab. My setup...
I'm glad I read so much philosophy 2 years ago before reading this, I see what people mean online with the whole degree thing. You don't need a degree, just basic knowledge of the world.
I've noticed nearly all new cars these days incorporate safety features which seem to benefit only their own drivers in isolation. Are we not looking at the net safety of everyone on the road? HeadlightsWhy are headlights so bright these days? It seems I'm not the only one to hold this opinion. I suppose it doesn't...
What the days look like now. I buzzed my hair down today. I needed to baseline it. I still have a healthy amount of hair, but it’s going. I have a semblance of vanity, but I knew from my father’s own hair loss where mine would eventually head to (hahahaha). I’m not vain enough to pursue hair transplants in Turkey or...
引新年新气象，今天将 305 篇博客从 WordPress 迁到了 Bear Blog。 是搬家，也是对自己过去几年的整理和归档。 回忆与 WordPress 相处了四年，有许多美好的回忆，改了很多版主题，也做了很多插件。 目前使用的 WordPress 插件 WordPress 插件-NeoDB Integration 书影音展示页面 | Another Dayu 如果你想使用这套 WordPress 主题 减肥前的准备工作 – Strava Running Sync WordPress 插件 WordPress 友情链接插件 Simple 版 WordPress 插件 – 旅行地图 WP Travel Map...
One of the most mysterious keys on the PC keyboard has always been Scroll Lock, joining Caps Lock and Num Lock to create the instantly recognizable LED triumvirate: Scroll Lock was reportedly specifically added for spreadsheets, and it solved a very specific problem: before mice and trackpads, and before fast...
» En Italia hemos tenido 25 años de Berlusconi y en cuanto a hegemonía cultural fue el verdadero ganador. En cuanto a la derecha, me parece que expresa muy poco, sobre todo con un estilo y un lenguaje de épocas que desearíamos haber olvidado. Ciertamente, asistimos a un choque brutal, un ataque a la democracia y a...
⚠️ Potentially triggering content. Current politics discussion. I am afraid. I want to live and I want to live long life. I've already escaped one war, I don't want to be in the middle of a second conflict. Why do we, as a collective never learn? Why do 70 year old men with Alzheimer's choose when to press a button...
State of the Browser was electric. This is how I summarised my experience at the annual State of the Browser event in London in my notes. I like to capture moments as they happen, then write about them later. The note is the essence of a blog post; the starting point. The note blossoms at home.State of the Browser...
Occasionally I listen to a podcast called “The God Minute”. These are daily prayer and meditation programs that last 10-15 minutes. They are a wonderful way to help me focus on God and on sacred things. And they often feature wonderfully curated, beautiful music that draws your thoughts heavenward. One of the songs...
Como la vida pasa sin control, en febrero me propuse centrarme en un único aspecto. Escribiré sobre ello en algún momento. Como fue más o menos bien, he decidido hacer lo mismo en marzo. En marzo he decidido volver a hacer deporte. Mi problema es que no tengo ni idea de hacer deporte. No me gusta hacer deporte....
we write to taste life twice. When I read a post from tiramisu I always feel so calm, I don't know what it is, it feels like I'm getting a cup of tea while I'll listen (read) to them speak. The sentence "tasting life twice" makes all the sense to me, I was like: Yea! that's how it feels. Why I changed my mind about...
Hoy escuché que el tiempo vuela cuando estamos nerviosos y que se desdobla cuando estamos en un estado de paz interior. Recuerdo de chico cuando me decían “El miércoles vamos a pasear”, faltaba una semana y era la semana mas larga de mi vida. Yo creía que manejaba un nivel altísimo de ansiedad y estrés, pero parece...
February 2026. Hull. Just back from a lovely evening with James at the “new” Harlequin, burgers and 12% Dutch banana bread pastry stouts, and finding it hard to find the enthusiasm to complete my blogs on Hull. Which probably sums up the whole problem with BrewDog. No-one cares any more. Leaving Sam Smith’s Blue...
Welcome back! There was no Weekend Edition because my little pup ate a sewing needle, which left me in a state of nervous panic for about 48 hours... This also meant I had to speed-run to listen to some new music to get this together... The good news is my little pup is doing just fine now, although I'm still keen...
An outline of some grass-roots reform movements that are trying to humanize the Internet
Ayer hizo un día estupendo, con viento pero con sol. Y decidimos hacer planes. Con unos amigos fui a montar en kart a un pueblo cercano, y la verdad es que me encantó la experiencia. Incluso se me hizo corta (hubiera dado otras diez vueltas muy tranquilamente). Planeo repetir tan pronto como me sea posible. Por lo...
A week that felt rather short. Like, I don’t even know what to write as an introduction for this one. Oh! The weather! Things are starting to warm up again at last, all I need to wear in the mornings is a hoodie, no extra sweatshirt or jacket anymore. Other than that, I’ll just leave you with the notes, I guess. 🌃...
A few days ago, news spread through the web about a Meta project for letting an AI run the social media account of a deceased person, as it could emulate the person's activity like posting content and responding to messages. The goal was to maintain engagement on the platform and reduce the grief when a person...
Hanging branches of ume plum blossoms in the garden of Umemiya Taisha shrine. 梅宮大社の庭に枝垂れ梅。
In which I challenge myself to draw a pokemon every day until I stop I've had a rough couple of days, man! Even though I was committed to drawing these every day, I didn't get around to taking photos or editing them until now so please enjoy. Thurs 02/26/2026 - Rolycoly Coal. Lmao. It's coal. Wow. Anime UK has...
I collect cool, interesting links spread all over the web and share them here in daily posts. Hope you enjoy! More of them in the archive. Apple announces iPhone 17e. With the 17 series chip (A19), double the storage (256 GB), and finally, magnets on the back (MagSafe). Suggested price is the same as the previous...
One of my goals this year is to learn more about the AWK programming language. I'm interested in not only the beauty of the language itself and the Unix history that surrounded it, but in how AWK shaped one of my favourite languages of all time, Perl. In some ways AWK and CAP are similar, in that there's beauty,...
Social media has an attention problem, everyone knows it, and yet the design stays the same. I've been thinking about two small structural changes that might actually help, without dismantling what makes these platforms useful in the first place. Notifications on a scheduleWhat if you picked one moment in the day to...
AthleticI just love that even D-Wade doesn’t have LeBron as one of the best leaders he played with—cause he wasn’t. LeBron as a leader is so overrated. It’s why he needed Wade and Bosh and Irving and Love.
The start of this article made me laugh: The first time my team shipped an agent into a real SaaS workflow, the product demo looked perfect. The production bill did not. FinOps for agents: Loop limits, tool-call caps and the new unit economics of agentic SaaS I wasn’t laughing out of malicious joy, but as […]
These past few weeks have been pretty rough for me, as you might have seen. I recently just haven’t felt like myself. Haven’t felt like getting on the internet much at all. As a result of that, I haven’t been writing much articles/posts on the blog. I have been trying to get back into the groove of things, but it...
Days without turning off site blockers: 13 I can't belive I'm two-thirds of the way through my digital detox. Also, I can't stop thinking about Jacob Geller's most recent video, The Future is a Blank Room; specifically when he talks about Ray Bradbury's The Veldt. “I don’t want to do anything but look and listen and...
Kyoto Tech Meetup held its Community Hack Day for February this past Sunday at FabCafe Kyoto. All attendees had code live on the site by the end of the day.What we shippedWe're now up to 8 contributors on the repo.Our changes included:Revamped our layout and navbarHosting moved to CloudflareUpdated and expanded our...
As leader of ComSoc at my school, I guide the Year 12 and 13 students and keep on the lookout for any new opportunities we can take part in. A few months ago, we practised for the British Informatics Olympiad, a challenging set of three questions that required us to design accurate algorithms to solve. Over a short...
El misterio de la lavandería de Yeonnam-dong de Kim Jiyun es otro ejemplo de healing fiction asiática. Esta obra es surcoreana pero sigue las mismas premisas de los libros japoneses del mismo estilo. En esta ocasión nos trasladamos al bullicioso y popular barrio de Yeonnam en la ciudad de Seúl. Allí, entre...
"Cortegiana famosa" (Famous courtesan) from the "Habiti delle Donne Venetiane", published by Giacomo Franco, c. 1610.
Today, Apple announced “the new iPhone 17e”. I personally have an iPhone 16e, so naturally, I have no reason to upgrade. This was expected, as I am not the audience. Apple tells you as much themselves, as the product page offers comparisons to what they assume your iPhone is: iPhone 11, iPhone 12, or maybe some...
When over the past 85 years have certain terms and persons been more or less frequently discussed in the philosophical literature? Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) has begun looking into this. In the following guest post, he shares some initial findings. The information may be useful in a number of ways. As he...
Streaming sucks for artists because the major players pay squat per stream. And in Spotify’s case, artists who don’t get many streams may get literally nothing. One alternative to traditional streaming services is to bring focus back to your own personal music collection. That could be simply playing music locally...
I share the process of designing the PlugBrain logo including some tips on making a logo and style guide accessible.
I’ve never been much of a foodie. Between being a picky eater as a kid and some gastrointestinal issues as an adult, I’d describe my relationship to food as mildly adversarial. Consequently, I was never interested in cooking. That changed going into 2025, when I resolved to cook more at home. I wanted to learn a...
I read a lot on the web. I almost never look at websites, though. I consume almost everything through an RSS reader. As AI reshapes the way online information is organised and consumed, it increasingly feels like I'm behind the scenes, watching the performance from the wings rather than seeing it from the front as...
Editor's Pick
In 2007 I was deep in the DS flashcart scene, cycling through a string of carts. GBATemp threads, firmware drama, custom skins, compatibility lists. By 2009 I’d moved on. Nearly twenty years later, the DS Pico has pulled me right back in. Open-source, built around an RP2040, and around £10 from Chiscart on...
Nothing is more gut-wrenching than realizing that there is an error in a dataset that was used to make a critical decision. Team members may start scrambling and ask questions like: Does this change the conclusion of the analysis? Will people think the entire analysis is wrong? How did this mistake happen, and who...
The title is a little over the top, but barely — we have two fantastic talks this Thursday (March 5) that you should go to. (I’ll be there!) Laura Savino will present “Learn Out Loud”: As devs today, we’re supposed to demonstrate immediate skills in tools whose configs change once a fortnight, while shipping...
Saw a musical about corn and enjoyed a wander through an art gallery. ⊕Reply via email
In my ongoing efforts to reduce the reliance on US companies and services, I decided from Let’s Encrypt to the Italian Actalis. Sure, Let’s Encrypt works fine, is non-profit and had a huge impact on today’s internet security, but nonetheless it is still US based and required to comply with US law and government...
This is an entry from my journal. I describe how boredom works and why it helps to be honest with our feelings. My dogs understand all the verbal and non-verbal cues that signify “I am done with the computer for now”. I had a meeting until 21:00 this night. As soon as I said “goodbye”, the dogs raised their head and...
At the risk of turning this blog into a calendar of saints' days, I must, as a Mercian and now a Lichfieldian, note that today is St Chad's Day, marking the death in 672 of Chad, Bishop of the Mercians and Lindsey People, and founder of the church that is now that tri-spired wonder Lichfield Cathedral. Chad's death...
So Much to Write, So Little TimeI started this blog in October 2025. Prior to that, there were some timid attempts at writing online again after the great depression of the 2010s (started a few tumblrs, tried write.as, attempted to log back into my old blogger.com account and failed). Hopping into Bear Blog -- not...
At the bottom of his heart Candide had no wish to marry Cunégonde. But the extreme impertinence of the Baron determined him to conclude the match, and Cunégonde pressed him so strongly that he could not go from his word. He consulted Pangloss, Martin, and the faithful Cacambo. Pangloss drew up an excellent memorial,...
Sometimes when writing a blog post, you need many words and examples to drive your point home. Because without them, nobody would understand. But sometimes, you don't, and you can let the music and its message speak for itself. Like today.
These days I have quite a lot of ambition but not enough energy to execute on it. I’m trying, though. Several months ago I realized I was feeling like I did back when I was off estrogen entirely because of the embolism and got my levels checked for the first time in a while. And they were dangerously low.My doctor...
It's been forever since I changed something on this site, but I finally sat down and implemented something I already had in the past and wanted to bring back for a long time: A links page. It's still very much a work in progress. For now it contains a blogroll (more blogs to be added soon), a list of my favourite...
The Foundation ProclamationOyez, oyez, oyez! The Foundation made a proclamation!Yesterday, after months of speculation, The Foundation made their proclamation. Fanboys and nerds waited with anticipation for the proclamation of consociation.We've settled on an association. And with this organization, we shall work in...
Plumbing AchievementLast week, I tacked a leaking pull-out/sprayer-style kitchen tap at home. The cartridge/handle area had been leaking slightly for some time; but it got significantly worse last week when the handle stopped working altogether (couldn’t turn the tap off—luckily we had isolation valves beneath the...
At the end of February, I was privileged to spend a week in the Los Glaciares National Park down in Santa Cruz in Argentine Patagonia. Beyond a nice amount of regular hiking, we also got to do a guided tour on the Perito Moreno glacier, spending a good part of the day on the ice with crampons. If you look closely,...
In “Why is Claude an Electron App?” Drew Breunig wonders: Claude spent $20k on an agent swarm implementing (kinda) a C-compiler in Rust, but desktop Claude is an Electron app. If code is free, why aren’t all apps native? And then argues that the answer is that LLMs are not good enough yet. They can do 90% of the...
It is a bit baffling. I’m working with a whole bunch of WordPress installations, every single one of them with the server time zone set to UTC and the WordPress time set to Europe/Berlin. It works fine in all of them – except with one client, where there’s always a weird mismatch of times. Reply by email
Convention season is upon us, and it's time to kick off the year for me with Evercon 2026 in Wausau, WI! Well Rothschild, really -- but if Syfy can conflate the two, so can I. I mean, it pretty much is in Wausau. Just, like, next to it. I'm going to be in the main vendor room at booth six, roughly in the same spot...
Desired outcome: ❯ claude ▐▛███▜▌ Claude Code v2.1.63 ▝▜█████▛▘ Opus 4.6 · Claude Team ▘▘ ▝▝ ~/.dotfiles ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── ❯ ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── .dotfiles (git:master*) [Opus 4.6] $0.00 sid:9afc33ee-610d-47cc-8bde-1a52d1b22832 The status...
“Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.” “If our heart were large enough to love life in all its detail, we would see that every instant is at once a giver...
(image courtesy of kuropin) Soundtrack: Life with Masks (Mystic Messenger OST) today, i have very little to "give back", per se. to an entry, a reflection. i just have... plain words. so i'll start to unpack my closet. beginning with the pair of overalls and Hello Kitty shirt that I wore today. it was a day where i...