Wed Mar 04
This past weekend I decided I was going to be productive. Not fake-productive. Not “I opened a tab and stared at it” productive. Proper adult productive. So I made a list. It had one item on it. Laundry. That’s it. That was the ambition. Not “learn Italian.” Not “redecorate the living room.” Just clean the garments...
I’ve seen a lot written on the unexpected dangers of letting LLMs run amok in society. Some of the consequences of opening Pandora's box include: AI-induced psychosis, the break-down of truth, proliferation of slop, disregard of human creativity, and collapse of cognitive function. But I have yet to see much written...
Here, to lower the tone, is a little something that Philip Larkin wrote on the, er, challenges of personnel management...AdministrationDay by day your estimation clocks upWho deserves a smile and who a frown,And girls you have to tell to pull their socks upAre those whose pants you'd most like to pull down.It seems...
On my way from Germany to our new home in Denmark, I spent a couple of hours in AMS, capturing airplanes. This was my last airplane photography session in the foreseeable future, so it was a bittersweet experience. I've never had much luck photographing in AMS, mostly due to the abysmal weather every time I was...
A few years ago, while recuperating from our at that time “favourite” dreaded lurgy,1 I stumbled across StreetComplete, an Android app to update OpenStreetMap data in a fun and easy way. It’s reminiscent of games such as Pokémon Go. But instead of tracking down Pikachu, you update the world’s largest open mapping...
A philosopher often praised for the accessibility of his writing, when asked about it (he often took part in advice sessions for younger academics), would say that he is not writing for today, but for the future. What he meant was that rather than clogging his writing with technicalities, keeping it focused on...
For years I’ve tried to have a digital-only note system, but it’s difficult. It’s easy to have an organized archive for quick-reference in digital form, but for daily on-the-go notes nothing beats the availability of pen and paper. Paper is inconvenient. For the system to be reliable, you need to carry a notebook...
(A series in which I ramble some personal perspective on ICYDAK's "30 Proven Tactics to Resist Authoritarianism in Daily Life," because most of this stuff is just default daily life to me.) ICYDAK: 30 Proven Tactics to Resist Authoritarianism in Everyday Life #1: know your rights #2: secure your communications #3:...
I need to do better at recognizing the tremendous blessings in my life and acknowledging God's hand in all of them. A favorite hymn among Latter-day Saints is “Count Your Blessings”. It's fun to sing and has a good message. (1) When upon life’s billows you are tempest-tossed, When you are discouraged, thinking all...
I recently stumbled across a writing tool, which has somewhat changed the way I write — for the better. I Write Like is a web based app, describing itself as "a writer-focused text processor equipped with a suite of tools to analyse and enhance your writing". When you visit the website - iwl.me - you're immediately...
I passed and am now certified as a Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA). Now what?I got the opportunity to go through the CISA course and pass ISACA's CISA certification. It was quite a long journey, and I carefully prepared before I took the exam and finally passed it in the first try. Nevertheless, I still...
Interesting tech talk. I like the approach of committing code review comments and making small fixes on behalf of your teammates as part of code review, which is a (more) superior approach than telling them to do those fixes themselves. Win-win. CR thiagowfx to knuth: the literary programming technique is great but...
We had a lot asks this week, which is rare and fun. AsksOrdered by question, with links where possible.Q: What's the whole OpenAI vs Anthropic vs DoD thing?There's no way for me to recap it here and it's going to continually change anyways. For now, a couple of articles:The Verge: "How OpenAI caved to the Pentagon...
Das Allgemeine Syndikat Freie Arbeiter:innen Union (FAU) Köln hatte Interessierte in das Naturfreundehaus in Kalk zum Vortrag „Anarchistischer Antimilitarismus“ von Dr. Bernd Drücke eingeladen. Herr Drücke—seit 1972 Redakteur der Graswurzelrevolution—ist ein herzlicher, witziger und wahnsinnig intelligenter Mensch,...
When the forecast gets it wrong (complimentary) The weather alerts for yesterday morning were really (and I cannot stress this enough) really on the fence about if it would rain or not throughout the course of the day; variations of "light rain", "mild rain" "scattered showers" kept pinging my phone and to highlight...
(Read part one here, where I discuss my month with Qobuz.) I started with a free month of Qobuz and then used two months to try out Deezer. Let’s run down the list of my observations of how Deezer stacks up against Spotify (with some Qobuz commentary tossed in): Vs. Deezer Advantages Live radio - It’s pretty cool to...
Brian flicked his tail against the cool glass of his aquarium, watching the same plastic castle and rubber plants bob in the current he created. For two weeks, the world beyond his tank had been silent—no Mark, no cheerful "Good morning, Brian!" as his owner tapped the glass with a flake of food. Just the hum of the...
See the series post for an overview of all the episodes. Notes 00:00 Introductions. 05:00 A first look at expressions in the context of the new Declarative Constraints feature. 06:00 An overview of CDS and the languages within the CDS family (CDL & CSN, CQL & CQN and CXL & CXN). 07:05 A first look at the...
I met Brandon 42 years ago. Today we gathered for lunch and introduced each other to the folks that make us better. ⊕Currently Listening: Francis, & Her Fawn “Cold Water / Midnight”Reply via email
I really like having Jason Gorman’s blog posts in my RSS reader. Especially when he’s highlighting some critical issues with AI assisted coding. This paragraph for example really made me smile: For example, a common strategy they use when they’re not able to fix a problem they created is to delete failing tests, or...
A particle bounces inside an enclosed court. If the court’s walls are curved in just the right way — a stadium shape, a square with a circular obstacle — the particle’s classical trajectory becomes fully chaotic: exponentially sensitive to initial conditions, mixing through phase space at a rate measured by the...
This post was written for this month's Bearblog Carnival. Thanks to Suliman for hosting this event! What happens if a blonde woman and a white cat meet each other? They just start fighting for the spectacle in the Internet world. This is how it happened for Taylor Armstrong and Smudge the Cat. A meme template...
The people at Mastodon recently released a share button for websites! and I think it works rather well, as it remembers the instance you selected for the next time you use it somewhere else. I added the following button to the bottom of my articles! I made use of Jekyll’s Liquid syntax. <a class="button"...
Hi friends, In February, Scour scoured 647,139 posts from 17,766 feeds (1,211 were newly added). Also, 917 new users signed up, so welcome everyone who just joined! Here's what's new in the product: 🔮 Inferring Interests from RSS FeedsIf you subscribe to specific feeds (as opposed to scouring all of them), Scour can...
Llevo un tiempo aprendiendo italiano. Empecé con Duolingo, donde llegué a tener una racha de más de un año. Luego cambié Duolingo por Babbel, aprovechando que pude hacerme con una suscripción de por vida (ya sabemos cómo va eso), y reconozco que me gusta un poco más, porque Babbel explica gramática y es un poco más...
I finally got you. You were much trickier than the curious Robins of the last few days. Either my reactions are getting quicker with practice, or you were milliseconds more generous with your perching time than usual. This wasn't a JPG straight from camera though. That experiment continues but this image still...
Now, after yesterday’s dark post, here’s a post about a chair. Living in the age of excessive consumerism definitely has its sweet side. On one hand, I have endless options to fully enjoy my passions and hobbies. If I like something and it’s popular enough, there’s the book, the movie adaptation, the cereal, the...
Red Rising; Thoughts on the Society I recently finished reading through the full Red Rising series, completing Light Bringer just a few days ago. After sitting with all of these wonderful books, I wanted to dig into some of the bigger topics the series raised for me. I’ll try not to post spoilers, but that’s hard to...
I really didn’t get what I needed from Healing Together this year. There’s usually a calm, breath of fresh air feeling. I’m able to relax because I’m surrounded by others that either have DID or OSDD themselves or are therapists that work with DID, so everyone understands intimately what I/we are going through. They...
Doing okay. Everything just feels 'meh' and I just want to have a long lie down. I want to do things well (like this fucking challenge) but it's as though I'm half asleep in my own body.
Catch up!Matthew BurbridgeThe story so far:Issue #1Issue #2Issue #3Issue #4Issue #5Issue #6Issue #7Issue #8Issue #9Issue #10Issue #11Issue #12
I am something of a packrat. I derive comfort and pleasure from the artifacts of my past. My parents’ house is still full of material remnants of my youth, from art projects to my physical music collection to once-beloved items of clothing. Sometimes, this works out: last year, when my son got into thrifting...
A few days late just means there is more to cover, right? Programming and Scripting This week I worked on my homepage quite a bit. I added a ListenBrainz widget and fixed quite a few bugs that have been bugging me for a while. I also worked on Mattrix, but I’m thinking about scrapping it. Between Claude and me,...
i'll spend my whole life looking for the next best thingbut when I finally find it, i’ll be too busy lookingfor the next best thingI had spent half of the day travelling and the other half looking at art. Whenever I am going anywhere, I like to arrive as early as I can and either walk around or go to an art gallery;...
I had a ~2-hour chat with Joshua Blais, a fellow Emacs user, over at the @JoshuaBlais YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@JoshuaBlais. We covered Emacs at length and also talked about general life issues. The first topic we cover is how to place constraints on yourself in order to avoid backsliding into bad...
MacBook Neo. Apple has announced a new entry-level MacBook. Colorful and equipped with an iPhone chip (A18 Pro), it starts at USD 599 (without Touch ID, available only in the most expensive version). Will it be a hit? Vykar Backup. The creator of BorgBase and Vorta has launched a new backup app. Vykar promises to be...
Go to English translation La pequeña e inocente mandarina no se esperaba terminar en el estado en el que se encontraba en estos momentos, junto con cadáveres de pedazos desechados de otras frutas y verduras de los dueños de aquella casa. Ahora estaba en el fondo de un cubo de basura mal oliente. Todos parecían ya...
Ah, randomness. A favorite of the average ADHDer. Today I bring you a little bit of that on one of my past times: hyper specific facts about dead languages and/or word etymology. I have no intention of deep diving or learning (academically speaking) any of this, but I love stumbling upon these random facts and...
Bear blog supports Embedding blog post lists, for example displaying the latest posts: {{ posts|limit:5 }} However, it does not support displaying random posts. Then, I created a small plugin that replicates the official layout while showing random posts instead. The result looks like this: First, insert the...
Oh boy. The pollen allergy season is in full swing already. And of course I forgot to order my antihistamines. Reply by email
February 2026. Downham Market. £9.30 “invested” on an old person’s evening out in Downham Market, and all I had to show for it were some blurred photos from the Crown, which I’m out to convince you is a great pub. Perhaps I can borrow Mrs RM’s superior phone camera (she denies it’s any different). Even my chosen...
Welcome, to the Soft Metal Lounge, a portal for time travel between the past and future. My name is Elle and I'll be your timesplitter. The Soft Metal Lounge is my life or at least reclaiming the life I thought I lost. I woke up one day wanting to escape inside a dream of a Y2k future that never came. Its not too...
Looking over some brush along the Yodo River at the Umeda Sky building and other Umeda high rises. 淀川沿いの葦原越しに、梅田スカイビルやその他の梅田の高層ビル群を眺めている。
The town of Kitzbühel, Austria, from high up in the mountains. A four-day working week with a long weekend away at the end. I needed it. At the start of the week I noted that I felt as though I was going through a tough period, but one week on I’m doing much better. The highlight of the week was a trip with fifteen...
ನಿತ್ಯಾನಂದ ಬಿ ಶೆಟ್ಟಿಯವರ ‘ಅಳವು ಅರಿಯದ ಭಾಷೆ’ ಪುಸ್ತಕಕ್ಕೆ ಇಸ್ಮಾಯಿಲ್ ಅವರು “ಕೇಡಿನ ಭಾಷೆಯೇ ಆಡುಭಾಷೆಯಾದಾಗ…” ಲೇಖನದ ಮೂಲಕ ಪ್ರತಿಕ್ರಿಯಿಸಿದ್ಡಾರೆ. ಸಮಯ ಸಿಕ್ಕಾಗ ಓದಿ. ಆ ಲೇಖನದ ಈ ಎರಡು ಪ್ಯಾರಾಗಳು ನನ್ನ ಮನದಲ್ಲಿ ಉಳಿದಿವೆ. ಆ ದಿನಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ಕರಾವಳಿಯಿಂದ ಪ್ರಕಟವಾಗುತ್ತಿದ್ದ ಸುದ್ದಿ ಮಾಧ್ಯಮಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ಮಾತ್ರ ಬಳಕೆಯಾಗುತ್ತಿದ್ದ ‘ಅನ್ಯಮತೀಯ’ ಎಂಬ ಪದ ಈಗ ಕನ್ನಡ ನಾಡಿನ ಎಲ್ಲಾ...
(image courtesy of an unknown artist, on pinterest) i was planning to write more. i apologise (to no one) in advance. this afternoon and evening, for a few hours, i totally and utterly lost sight of my identity. i was floundering, treading water within a sea of endless comparisons with my Past Self. or, Past Selves,...
A note before you read—this is an experiment. I've spent years accumulating ideas, learning, and ways of thinking about risk, ego, the body, the noise in your own head, the difference between a life you choose and one that chooses you. This post is what happens when you feed all of that into an AI and ask it to...
I’m back with Part 5 of the Everyday Defense track in my CybersecKyle Security How-To Series. Here’s what we’re going to cover: the pressure patterns scammers lean on, the exact one-minute routine to follow, and the safest ways to verify messages without using an attacker’s links or phone numbers. Most scams do not...
“In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” In 1957, Albert Camus (November 7, 1913–January 4, 1960) became the second youngest laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded to him for work that “with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human...
I had the absolute pleasure to be joined by the great Protesilaos Stavrou for a conversation about emacs, minimalism, life philosophy, interconnectedness, and infinite depth. Come along for the ~2 hour journey! As always, God bless, and until next time. If you enjoyed this post, consider Supporting my work, Checking...
I’m trying out a ton of design and art software at once (which I might write a blogpost about), and today I got into Pixelmator Pro, and when figuring out the Effects panel, I was overjoyed at this design detail: You could hang your laundry on that! When I first pressed that button, I had 0 doubt about what was...
Quoted Mallard Overview, All About Birds, Cornell Lab of Ornithology (allaboutbirds.org) The oldest known Mallard was a male, and at least 27 years, 7 months old when he was shot in Arkansas in 2008. He had been banded in Louisiana in 1981. I subscribe to Cornell Lab’s All About Birds RSS feed. Through the feed, I...
Making big public statements is always fun and people who think themselves to be important love doing it as a way of trying to influence public opinion and/or politics. They are a way for institutions and individuals to organize and try to shine some light onto important issues. We’ve seen many such things in the AI...
I found my fairbuds, finally! For a second there, I thought I had lost them for good. They just fell out of my jacket pocket in the closet, though. *breathes sigh of relief* This means that I can now go back to listening to thought-provoking podcasts before starting my work day, while walking the dogs. This morning...
In February, my gratitude subscription was expressed with a donation ($10) to Johan Sanneblad, lead developer of Notebook Navigator. Notebook Navigator is an excellent plugin from Obsidian that made me fall in love with Obsidian all over again. I wrote that Bear was definitive, and in fact he was for a long time....
Why your mutex wrapper should accept a closure for mutation instead of a plain value, with examples from the standard library and Tailscale.
2025-02-23（月・祝） 因为感冒刚好，就自觉戴上了口罩（运动用布制）稽古，结果喘不上气差点晕过去…… 这一次没再被指出挑剑尖问题，但是依然感觉自己的面还是慢，不是速度慢，是反应慢。 本次最大的收获来自 TM老师的指导。打击的最后一瞬间要把注意力集中在剑尖，可以打出更快的面。我还发现这样可以最大限度避免落剑尖。 KH老师指出我在打击动作比较早的阶段就开始身体前倾，但其实只要稍微注意一下我就能做得很好，如此可见还是需要多多进行刻意练习。 2025-02-28（土） 从去年开始，TM桑就每个月都给我分享每次都会请八段老师去指导的稽古会情报，但是我直到上周才第一次有时间参加。...
Tengo una fijación con el clima, tiene mucho que ver con mi estado emocional en curso, justo en el momento de escribir algo de índole personal. Algunos prefieren las frases, otros las emociones, yo prefiero el clima. El viejo y poco confiable clima que nos acompaña desde el principio de los tiempos y que creó las...
Leviathan es un anime de estética steampunk y ciencia ficción que presenta una versión alternativa de la Primera Guerra Mundial. En esta serie, que consta de doce episodios, adapta los libros de la trilogia escrita por Scott Westerfeld. La serie ha sido realizada por el estudio Orange, conocido por Beastars y las...
(Nota bene, each entry has a review using Seth’s proprietary three-point Good-OK-Bad scale, with emojis representative of something that stood out to me about the work; please do not tell Seth, I am very scared of him) (R: Re-read; B: Reading To Mrs. Columbo At Bedtime Book Club) 1st Who Will Make The Pancakes -...