Mon Aug 17
Quoted Shoppers are still spending on expensive dairy products amid inflation by Matty Merritt (Morning Brew) With grocery item costs up everywhere, even $10 butter feels like a reasonable little treat. Writing for Morning Brew, Matty Merritt covered “luxury butter.” According to the author: “With grocery item costs...
In July 2022, I wrote “Thoughts on Leaving California” about my move back to Florida after twenty years in the Golden State; I followed it a year later with “A Year Back in Florida”, which ended with “I’ll check back in after another year.” I’ve been doing that annually ever since, although the date has kind of...
♠ Previously. Problem statement: review an AI-written slop pull request from a teammate. We’ll use a clanker to review slop PRs. First, I invoke the /meat skill, turning the diff into a reading guide, inspired by David Crawshaw: /meat <PR-URL> It does not look for defects. It captures the diff once, follows control...
I've seen a lot of posts here and elsewhere that have this little badge at the bottom: At first I found it kinda cute and made a mental note to add it to my template, but after a very short time I changed my mind. I don't want to do it. It annoys me that this should be necessary. I really understand why people do it...
Touch Grass, the debut novel of Sydney based Australian author Mary Colussi, was published in June this year. And a fraudulent publishing deal was not too far behind. In this instance though AI slop played a part in giving the scam away. An email sent to Colussi, apparently from a representative of a well-known...
When you're fluent in more than one language, which one do you think in?Sinhala is my native language. For the first few years of my life, growing up in Sri Lanka, it's all I spoke. Ours was a monolingual household—my parents didn't speak any other languages. Starting in kindergarten, and all the way through school,...
With some delays, this week’s reflections will be brief. offline Offline week concluded prematurely, due to feelings of defeat as I watched screen-time going up — due to children using my phone for music and evening TV time (they are allowed 30 minutes). Should not bother me. The goal is not zero screen-time, but...
We’re so different. She brought gifts from Hong Kong: a moisturizer, hair mascara, hair treatment oil, and face masks. I know what the moisturizer and face masks are for; I have no idea what hair mascara and hair oil are supposed to do. “What are these?” I asked. “They’re for your hair. Use the hair mascara when you...
“In 6 months, programming will be solved!” “Coding is dead!” We’ve been hearing for the last 2 and a half years. So - if programming is dead, if all the coding jobs are going to be automated away, why would I go all-in on studying Computer Science and Programming? Why would I choose to deeply study the low level,...
A lot of things have happened this week, the rain has been calming down again, the plumber finally fixed the issues that caused my shower to floor, so rain is no longer annoying. Let’s see how things went from August 11 to 18, 2026! 🍦 My sister is visiting! She’s the reason we got burguers last week. I can’t bother...
Thanks to Ruben for surfacing this lovely post, and for his own thoughtful addition. Sylvia's journey from church upbringing to "nature as spirituality" mirrors my own path somewhat. Church I think I've always been an atheist; I never really believed in the teachings of the Catholic Church, even as a young child....
I'm really conflicted between naming and shaming this store, and not wanting to help them with more traffic for their rancid business model. For now, I have not redacted the social media handle in the picture. In Cologne, Germany, there is a kiosk that has switched owners, and now greets you with the following...
Introduction An occasional collection of things I've recently found on the Internet and added to my bookmarks. The Nex Protocol standard The specification for the Nex protocol, another "small web" protocol. Having discovered this, I added support for it to Rogallo. The App Store Rejection of the Week That Was, in...
BoredOS is an x86_64, FOSS operating system, with extensive documentation and GPLv3 license. It was created from scratch and already has a graphical interface.
This is sacrilegious among some parts of Apple fandom, but I like using web apps. Oh, sure, I can imagine a world in which there’s a carefully crafted Mac app that has all the functions of a website I use but has all the Mac-like interface features I love and isn’t hobbled by a web UI. But I don’t live in that world...
Last weekend, I finally saw the movie Perfect Days. I'd known about its existence for a long time, but never got around to watching it. Whenever I mentioned it in a conversation though, I heard nothing but praise. I also consider myself to be a fan of slow, meditative Japanese movies where "nothing happens", like...
Catch and Kill is Craig Schaefer's new book. It's a cyberpunk and magic heist story, which will be familiar to fans of Shadowrun. Set in the future of the author's First Story universe (the home of the Daniel Faust and Harmony Black books), magic has been revealed openly to the world. Now people can study magic at...
By: Emily M. Bender, Alex Hanna | Rating: 5/5The authors make a very clear argument against all merit of the current Media extrusion machines being peddled by Silicon Valley. The book lays it all out in all the details. Unfortunately it's not helpful in giving tools how to fight back, although that is to be...
Jake Pentecost, son of Stacker Pentecost, reunites with Mako Mori to lead a new generation of Jaeger pilots, including rival Lambert and 15-year-old hacker Amara, against a new Kaiju threat. It’s badly written, but at least it’s got cool robots and kaijus and that’s it. A major letdown in comparison to its...
August 17, 2026 Translation: No one can ever again use Claude for proofreading their own prose unless they’re willing to risk that the whole thing might be flagged as having been generated by Claude. John Gruber
He’s hardly a household name today. But Utah-born John Held, Jr. helped create the popular imagery of the 1920s. Held made Jazz Age icons out of bobbed-hair flappers, college guys in raccoon coats, sporty women wielding tennis rackets, and tuxedoed partygoers dangling cigarette holders from their lips. His gently...
Terima kasih untuk teman baik yang mengambil foto saya yang ini. Dua pekan lalu saya resmi menjadi mahasiswa untuk kedua kalinya. Yes! Tahun ini saya jadi mahasiswa pascasarjana. Magister di bidang Manajemen, di instansi tempat saya bekerja sekaligus tempat saya menimba ilmu saat program sarjana. Kalau kata teman...
Last time, I found out that Rust’s implementation of subprocesses on Windows makes it impossible to spawn children that inherit selected handles without race conditions. Even if you do everything by the book, a simultaneous call to std::process::Command can inherit handles meant for another process. Since this...
The computer I use the most is my couch laptop. It's a MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015) running Debian 13 and sits on a little roller table thing that I can pull up to me while I'm sitting or push out of the way and the top of it tilts up; it's a pretty nice setup. Day-to-day, I'm doing normal web browsing,...
The past few days have felt HEAVY. I'm consistently pushing myself to keep going, but lately it feels like I'm walking through molasses. I continue to float aimlessly, moving forward without really knowing where I'm going. Most of the time, I probably seem okay from the outside. Underneath it all, I'm struggling in...
-------------------- •4 coffee •2 eggs friend in butter •1 slice wholewheat & rye bread Χρυσος Μυλος (each slice: 62 kcal/ 2.5g protein/ 1,3g sugars / 0,29g salt) •1 banana •2 koulouri ολικής(each: 231 kcal/7,6 g fat / 1,6 g saturated / 4.4 g sugars / 4g fiber / 5,8 g protein / 0,4 g salt) •4 handfuls sunflower...
The day is August 16th, the time is 6:42 am, and the temperature is a very enjoyable 16°C. The sun is about to rise over the mountains, and I can see it appearing behind the car I just parked at the same parking spot where we ended our walk back in June. It’s been a long summer so far, and not a great one when it...
Two Birds of Paradise flowering off the same stem. Brilliant in the afternoon sunlight. ストレリチア 同じ茎から2輪のストレリチア（極楽鳥花）が咲いている。午後の日差しの中、その姿は鮮やかに映える。
And that was that vacation. I had two goals, build a fence, and complete (or atleast make good progress on) my thesis. Managed both quite well, but writing on my thesis really hampered my vacation. Every morning I actually had some motivation to do some chores, organize stuff, clean my fridge, stuff like that, but I...
Saguaro and Cholla - Superstition Wilderness, Arizona Yesterday, it reached 112 degrees in Tempe. The low was 86. That is about as good as it gets this week. 🥵 I know. It's the desert, what do I expect? But the high temperatures seem to be getting higher and the lows remain brutally high. The past several summers...
Due to a camping mishap that sent me to the emergency room yesterday morning (a part of our tent infrastructure ended up embedded in my thumb, but I’m okay), I forgot to take my Methylphenidate pill. I started taking this med a couple years ago, and I’ve never been 100% sure if I really need it. I wasn’t struggling...
In my twenties I desperately wanted to go to London, but it was so ridiculously expensive to travel there. Eventually I figured out l the cheapest way possible: travel to Dunkirk (or was it Calais?) with a bus company and then take a hovercraft. (Noisiest travel ever, you couldn’t hear yourself think!) I also had...
Many of the people building AI, and many of the people working on AI safety, share a common vision of what a good AI future looks like: We figure out alignment, build superintelligent AI, and it takes over the world, for our benefit. Many people will tell you that last part outright: they think human disempowerment...
Para mí el verano está prácticamente finiquitado. Vale, los profesores y los niños siguen de vacaciones, aún mantengo la jornada intensiva en el trabajo, pero ya ha caido la primera tormenta, ya se está más fresco por la noche y el color de las puestas de sol ha cambiado. En todo caso es una época del año también...
“Reading philosophy is valuable, but students can struggle to keep track of the reasoning. That’s why displaying the map of a philosophical argument can make the subject so much more accessible—especially to students new to the discipline.” Many philosophy instructors find argument-mapping an effective way of...
Folosesc Linux Mint de câteva luni bune și de trei, patru zile am pus GNOME lângă Cinnamon. Nemo este pur și simplu mai bun decât Nautilus - la Nautilus îi lipsesc câteva funcții utile pe care le găsești doar în Nemo. #blaugust2026 Mulțumesc că urmărești ThinkRoot prin RSS. Poți folosi și Atom sau JSON Feed.
“The use of music,” Richard Powers wrote, “is to remind us how short a time we have a body” — a truth nowhere more bittersweet than in the creature whose body is the oldest unchanged musical instrument on Earth: a tiny mandolin silent for most of its existence, then sonorous with a fleeting symphony of life before...
I went out to dinner and a show with a friend the other day, enjoying some pizza and then wandering over to watch a mediocre blues/country/folk band. This friend was my first roommate from when I first moved out at 19. He lamented that being in his fifties, it was harder to develop new friendships. Around those...
Today was EJ’s first day of the fourth grade! I think dropping her off this morning was far more emotional for me than for her; as soon as she spotted one of her friends in the yard, she zoomed off to them without saying goodbye. Quite a contrast to dropping her off for her first few days of kindergarten. Eryn and I...
The prompt today asks how I navigate uncertainty. The short answer is: terribly, but with impressive speed and stamina. Look, people who write self-help books love to talk about uncertainty like it’s a gentle crossroad in a forest. They say things like, “Lean into the unknown,” or “Embrace the discomfort.” I’m...
Hotel Wi-Fi asks us to make a strange trade. We trust a network we have never seen, operated by people we will never meet, using equipment we cannot inspect, because cellular service is weak and we need to answer an email.Sometimes the network has a password printed on the room key sleeve. Sometimes the front desk...
Más de una vez me sorprendí con mails olvidados que encontré sin querer poniendo una palabra en el buscador de mi correo Gmail. Es divertido navegar por mails que tiene más de 10 años. Recordarás con quien te escribías, que proyectos tenías, cómo pensabas, las cosas que compartías y que te gustaba. Y más ahora con...
Dear reader,Recent conversations around “Hardcore” IndieWeb have surprised me. Apparently, writing your blog isn’t sufficient, as everyone should eventually build their own websites and stop relying on third-party blogging platforms.Brennan Kenneth Brown, a writer I admire, uses a ladder analogy to encourage people...
So Long Relayd, and Thanks for All the Fish 2026-08-17 Running relayd alongside httpd on your OpenBSD web servers is no longer necessary for injecting HTTP security headers. Thanks to the incredible work by rsadowski@ we now have the ability to set our security headers directly inside httpd. Pretty awesome, right?...
I’m having a new exhibition here in September this year, once again returning to 1200 Postcards on Queens Road in Hastings: Flesh & Bone An exhibition of life-drawings by Paul Watson. The new exhibition is entitled Flesh & Bone and will feature a selection of my life-drawings from the past few years. The venue is...
I had a really strange dream last night. Not going to talk about it to save your sanity. College stress is starting to loom on slowly. I don't know if I can get into the dream college that I want to, with the grades I got in this board examination. I'll persevere regardless. I will get into college. I hope you're...
So tief in einer Sache verschwinden, ganz weltvergessen nicht bemerken, wie all die Minuten sich zu Stunden dehnen, und erst dann wieder zum Vorschein kommen, wenn sich der Magen schon vor Hunger verkrampft. Das ist einerseits wunderbar, weil tolle Dinge dabei entstehen können. Andererseits ist das auf Dauer eine...
Folks were looking for a centralized website for Chorus which wasn’t just the repository, so today I threw together another site, MecaGorp, which will be hopefully where I put all future information about Chorus/Canimus and its related efforts. There’s a lot more stuff to add but in the meantime it’s at least a...
Robert Birming, an independent blogger, invited bloggers from around the web to participate in community blogging events in June and July. In June he hosted Junited, which encouraged bloggers to share blog posts they enjoy from around the web. July brought JulyReply, which encouraged bloggers to reply to posts they...
I regularly get marketing emails off the back of this site. "Here's a free license for our tool" or "can we put a link to our service in a post?" At least back then they were slightly human. Now all I get are AI generated shitty emails with no personality whatsoever. Not bashing AI, I'm bashing the lazy marketeers....
“All I Need” by Air & Beth Hirsch Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. What’s a song you associate with your favorite photograph? We have black and white version of this framed on our wall. A quiet moment for Becca. A moment where our future is captured before it has arrived. I knew...
Reflections on the impending closure of iconic independent San Francisco music venue, Bottom of the Hill from a dude who both played there AND went to shows there a lot Earlier this year I was sent an article by bandmates, friends, family, and members of bands we've played with over the years about something I knew...
Title: Ramen Science Website: ramen.science RSS Feed: ramen.science/blog.rss An unserious blog about instant noodles and other easy meals. RSS users are my people 🫶 If you appreciate what I'm doing consider becoming a supporter for 1$ a month
I recently started thinking about VCRs, as you do. I'll spare you the train of thought that led me to this, but it started with a conversation about worsening eyesight and then it escalated from there. Anyway, VCRs. I still remember the first VCR my dad bought when I was a kid. And in fact, I remember many times...
Into another world How I love listening to music! Immersing myself in the world of a song when I’m alone: this, to me, is similar to the feeling of reading a good book. Often, after having read a great book or having listened to a beautiful song, I get the impulse to share my joy with the world, and perhaps find...
I spotted this kind of a keyboard shortcut pattern the other day. Here it is in Photoshop: Here it is in DevonThink: And here in Linear: Those “ordinal” keyboard shortcuts feel nice and orderly, and look so elegant, too. But beware! The moment you’ll want to introduce a new option, or even reorder the ones you have,...
Born 100 years ago today was Valerie Eliot (née Fletcher), the second wife of the poet, and apparently the one who made him happy. The couple lived in Kensington, just around the corner from Ivy Compton-Burnett, and their paths crossed from time to time. On one occasion, the three of them shared a taxi back from a...
Also published on Letterboxd Most different than other “anti-war” war films, but also plays on a very thin line between philosophical meanderings versus armchair intellectualism. One of those rare films where you love it in pockets but the combined package is a mess. There are tons of things to love in this film....
August 2026. Bristol. A day in Bath, a day in Frome, two (2) identical Chinese takeaways from Twerton’s wonderful Bamboo Garden, which proves I know how to live. After the Zig Zag beer in Frome, the Zig Zag rail journey home, as a fallen tree (posh version of cows on the line) near Bristol Parkway meant heading back...
The eventful reign of John VI, bishop of Ravenna (726–744), from the "Liber pontificalis ecclesiae Ravennatis".
This afternoon I had a meeting with IT people at a huge US power infrastructure company. They had found a libcurl.dll file in their C:\Windows\System32 directory and asked us for help to upgrade it. Their vulnerability scanner identified it as vulnerable to several publicly known vulnerabilities. Can we bump it to...
In July 2026, Linus Torvalds told the Linux kernel mailing list that Linux is not an anti-AI project and that anyone who objected could fork the code or walk away. The trigger was Sashiko, an automated review system whose published numbers claim it finds 53.6 percent of the bugs that later required human fixes —...
‘You’ can be just one, or two, Or millions more; How imprecise! Are words so few We can't keep score? What are words for? The Lord has noun and verb and phrase To tell the truth; His wisdom merits human praise, By impetuous youth And elders, both.
I really wanted to stick with Sublime Text, and I gave it my best shot ever. But VS Code has pulled me back in again. This time is was format on save. It’s a must-have I forgot to mention — the code you mess up becomes tidy again when you hit save. Three packages and a few hacks later, I couldn’t make it work the...
Stuart Robson’s post Solving CSS @layer Ordering in Design Systems with Design Token Metadata, a response to Chris Coyier’s Thinking Horizontally in CSS @layer, came to me at a serendipitous time. You know I love a good blog-and-response, but these posts on the topic of lowering the specificity of component-level...
2026-08-17Hello!I found more images on this creek in the woods. I don't have much else to say, but I find the act of writing itself to be a bit soothing during such a busy month, so here I am.When I get the time, I do plan on asking the ground keepers (or whoever is in charge of preserving this land) what happened...
A friend let me know about Olly’s recent blog post. Olly owns and operates Pagecord, a very nice blogging service running in the same world as Pika. It sounds like another indie blogging developer accused Olly of plagiarism, and that makes me sad. I’ve had a couple conversations with Olly, and he sure seems like a...