Fri Mar 20
The 25th weeknote is a bit short and uneventful. No real reason other than I’m just in a bit of a creative funk for the moment and wading through some general Life Overwhelm (which I feel like needs to be a Slack status or something). How about we just get into a few links and things? Some Links Worth Sharing The...
Spent the whole day in Tokyo Midtown today. I met up with the people from the art circle for the first time in a month or so. It was raining the whole time, so we went to a nearby Starbucks for our sketching session. This is the sketch I produced: Considering the time limitation and the tools I used, I'm pretty...
March 2026. Cologne. Germany. I thought long and hard about blog titles for Cologne. “Day 1, Hour 3” ? “A Sion of the Times” ? “No, STOP bringing the Kolsch !” ? It’s so much easier when the only possible answer is “Gone for a Burton“. I ought to score these Cologne pubs; I score Chinese takeaways and churches...
“The more I learn about the systems I depend on every day, the more I’m convinced that everything in compsci is a dumpster fire that we collectively refuse to extinguish. It’s a social problem - and, of course, everyone is trying to solve it with tech.”
“Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.” “Lights and shadows are continually flitting across my inward sky, and I know neither whence they come nor whither they go; nor do I inquire too closely into them,” Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in his notebook one spring day in 1840. “It is dangerous to...
Última modificação 3 minutes ago. Março não vai deixar pedra sobre pedra nessa casa (e por casa, entenda-se minha vida). Meu companheiro perdeu a bolsa do mestrado, minha irmã foi demitida, e uma das minhas melhores amigas também. Só uma delas vai ter seguro-desemprego -- a outra era escrava via contratação PJ. Uma...
I was busy clearing out a cupboard in the living room when I found a package hidden in the back of the bottom shelf. It was wrapped with a string of rope, and something was written on the front. I squinted to read my aunt’s chicken scribbles. *this is a lovely painting but I hate it so much now I’ve seen the stupid...
It's funny reading posts from people talking about how old they are, how they're changing, how things aren't the same anymore, how they're worried about the future, how they miss their childhoods, how aging is scary, how they miss the wild abandon of their youth, et cetera, et cetera... As someone with aging...
(image courtesy of an unknown artist) a memory of a father and a daughter, brought together by an impossible, infinitesimal fracture within the space-time continuum. sweating towards a shared sun two twelve year olds chase the dying of the sun, down streets streaked, singed with bright light of burnt passion the...
The Radio In 2002, the cancer biologist Yuri Lazebnik asked a deceptively simple question: can a biologist fix a radio? His answer was no — not because biologists lack intelligence or effort, but because their methodology is the problem. A biologist trained in reductionist technique would collect identical radios,...
On March 10, 2026, Miami Heat center Bam Adebayo scored 83 points against the Washington Wizards, which is good for the second highest single-game scoring effort in NBA history behind Wilt Chamberlain’s 100 points against the New York Knicks on March 2, 1962. I have an article idea prepared regarding Mr. Adebayo’s...
It’s impressive how writing a blog and feeling responsible for your readers – no matter how little you know them – can make our brains stick to promises we’d normally break without a second thought. Kev Quirk wrote about this recently, discussing his weight and his desire to lose weight. I found last time that...
I ended 2025 on a hopeful note, mentioning seasonal work that could hopefully be turned into something more permanent. Sadly, it ended up being very temporary after all. As such, I'm back on the market for employment. I'm also trying to branch out, so I'm back on Fiverr. Looking through the service, things are a lot...
What is LanguageToolLanguageTool (LT) is an open source proofreading service for over 30+ languages. It is an EU-funded project and I have been a fan for over a decade. It offers cloud services; a free basic plan that detects basic grammar, punctuation, style, and spelling errors with limits like under 2000...
I enjoy writing. In my career I have written a lot: Proposals; Training Guides; Management Reports; Funding Applications.... For fun, I really enjoy writing my blog, but I am also a bit of a frustrated fiction writer. I would love to write a novel one day. I've had a few attempts at writing and have produced a...
This is an observation I regularly have during everyday life. Some days feel like I have all the time in the world. I manage what I set out to do, I move, create, read, learn. These are fulfilling days. Then, in the evening, I have this feeling of “being done”. I can properly wind down. But then there are days where...
Russia is not a great power. It is in no way a contender for the title, and treating it as one of the “power brokers” of the world benefits no one except the autocratic regime that hinges its legitimacy on it but that has simultaneously suppressed the abilities of the Russian people to attain such a status. One of...
During my first year at Figma, I designed and printed a run of posters for the office titled “Design is more.” The idea was to highlight that UX design is more than people expect, and connected in interesting ways to other domains. Today, they feel like a spiritual predecessor to this blog. The first series was...
The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect of AI is a pretty well documented phenomenon: The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is a cognitive bias describing the tendency of individuals to critically assess media reports in a domain they are knowledgeable about, yet continue to trust reporting in other areas despite recognizing similar...
the sublime Web The sublime form of the Web is when complete nerds geek out in minute detail over their obsession in a manner specifically designed to let any random surfer-by understand and geek out over it as well. For example, this guide on how to convert units of measurement: Stan Brown, How to Convert Units of...
Quoted Snowy Owl Overview, All About Birds, Cornell Lab of Ornithology (allaboutbirds.org) Thick feathers for insulation from Arctic cold make Snowy Owls North America’s heaviest owl, typically weighing about 4 pounds—one pound heavier than a Great Horned Owl and twice the weight of a Great Gray Owl (North America’s...
This is an excerpt from my journal. I describe the prevailing conditions in my mountains and how those relate to matters of complacency, responsibility, foresight, and adaptability. The rainy days continue. Twice I went with the dogs for a walk while it was pouring, only to encounter heavy rainfall along the way. We...
I have long struggled with getting things done, or atleast feeling like I'm getting enough done. It feels like there isn't enough time per day to get things done, but every time I tried to prove it by adding up all the mandatory things I needed to do, I was still left with a good handful of hours where I could do...
He opened his eyes to be greeted by shards of sunlight effortlessly radiating into the room. The golden rays faced no challenge breaking through the curtains. The room was still; not a sound. Glancing around, he was not sure what time it was. Spring had sprung and daylight hours were creeping earlier into each...
Dave Rupert puts words to the feeling in the air: the unspoken promise of AI is that you can automate away all the tasks and people who stand in your way. Sometimes I feel like there’s a palpable tension in the air as if we’re waiting to see whether AI will replace designers or engineers first. Designers empowered...
A kitchen adventure Recently, I've been told that we have not one, but two Asian groceries in 15 mins walk radius. Then my genius turned to 11: The Kid loves sushi, so let's step up the game. I will make an onigiri! And so I bought the ingredients for a tuna-mayo one. One thing I've learned: when they say the rice...
Decoupling business logic from storage in Go, adding transaction support without leaking SQL details, and coordinating atomic writes across multiple repositories using a unit of work.
Love it or hate it, everyone is talking about AI all the time. It’s so boring. It’s worse than talking about global warming or US politics or anything else, because AI, as a topic, has all the problems of those things—i.e., there are lots of opinions and everyone has their special one and it seems like everyone is...
Ava is traveling and shared this from the Victoria and Albert Museum: A lengthy, imperfect article on how much Minnesota mattered this winter. (archive) The challenge of this work week has been trying to figure out a way to streamline the moderating Pika blog posts. With only two of us on the team, it’s impractical...
Okay, this one was a disappointment. Not that bad but not good either. 3 out of 10. Having an ingenious timeline and a clever solution and an eccentric detective and a very video-gamey setup are all plusses in my book. The meta-stuff “let us admit we are characters in a novel and not make excuses” is tired now but...
Closeup on one of the hanging branches of this cherry tree, at the former location of the Konoe Residence in Kyoto Gyoen, the former Imperial Palace park. This "Itozakura" weeping sakura is the most famous cherry tree in the park, drawing many visitors on this spring day....
Wouldn't you love to just download a single self-contained 1clinux.exe and run it?
It’s been another hectic week, but towards the end, it was a bit relaxing because of Ugadhi and Id breaks. Wish you all a happy Ugadhi and Id. The war continues. I doubt the folks who started the war know what they want or how they want it to end. This war is not just illegal but also foolish. I still think pushing...
While sifting through board games to find dice the other week I hovered over this nugget from 1963. Thrift is a card game about collecting money wrapped in a fine mid-century commercial art style. ⊕Currently Listening: Harry Styles “American Girls”Reply via email
When I woke up this morning, I knew I wanted to open the blinds early – to let the spring light in. The previous night, I had made sure the book I wanted to read was sitting by my bedside, ready for me in the morning. I enjoyed the soft yellow light shining through the room as I read, my book temporarily taking me...
A pretty significant turn in my thinking came when, around a decade ago, I discovered the anthropologist Susan Harding’s concept of the Repugnant Cultural Other. That concept ended up playing a big role in How to Think — and in a different way in Breaking Bread with the Dead, because there I argue that encountering...
Leaving a digital footprintI spent some time earlier this month archiving two past projects that I had been involved in. The first was the podcast—The Bad Take—I used to host with my friend Himal. We started in 2018, and recorded the occasional episode until our last one in 2022. Producing regular episodes was no...
Work can feel meaningful if one of two prerequisites are met. Either the work you do is contributing to a greater good and the output of your work is part of a larger framework that tries to make a positive impact on society or your community or directly serves these people. Or the execution of the work is...
Malaysian secondary history classes have changed so much, so I am not sure what is being studied now. But during my time, we studied the history of Malaysia (of course), world history, which includes Islamic civilisations, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. We didn’t go in depth with all of them; we just learned their...
Large Language Models (LLMs) are often marketed as the ultimate productivity boost for developers: “Write code faster! Debug with AI! No more manual work!” After a recent experience, I can confirm that LLMs are incredibly useful for writing and even structuring code (I’ll write about this probably in a later blog...
Que te digo. Para el post más original que pude haber escrito, le clavan un strike por copyright. Introducción Todo comienza con un mensaje del Google Search Console Aviso de Google sobre contenido protegido por derechos de autor Para el propietario de https://interlan.ec/: Se ha notificado a Google de que tu sitio...
From the depths of the Daring Fireball archives: New feature at Daring Fireball: the Linked List, a daily list of interesting links and brief commentary on DF-related topics, updated frequently but not frenetically. Call it a “link log”, or “linkblog”, or just “a good way to dick around on the Internet for a few...
I didn't really follow Brendon's career post-Buffy but he made a lasting impact on me as Xander. The role of the only non-magic member of the "Scooby Gang" allowed for some amazing storylines ably acted by a young man in an acclaimed breakthrough; from the hyena mind meld to abandoning his fiancée at the altar,...
Tumbleweed es una distribución de GNU/Linux «Rolling Release» o de actualización contínua. Aquí puedes estar al tanto de las últimas novedades. openSUSE Tumbleweed es la versión «rolling release» o de actualización continua de la distribución de GNU/Linux openSUSE. Hagamos un repaso a las novedades que han llegado...
Read Morris' story, Escape Algorithm, now!The first thing people tend to think of these days when they see the word “algorithm” is typically tech related—that’s not the case with this story. Was that dissonance intentional?I recognized the dissonance, but I can’t say it was really intentional. I stole the phrase...
"It's so weird that this isn't weird" The voice came out of a pile of around a dozen people. The room was dark, I couldn't see who said it. The people in the pile were lying criss-cross on top of each other, forming a kind of net of interconnected human beings. They were touching, holding and caressing each other....