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Penn & Teller have this philosophy about their craft. Or, I guess, all stage magicians do, but Penn & Teller are the ones who spend the most time talking about it.They will spend months on a single trick. Years, sometimes. More time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect, they...
Short stories offer you the chance to dip briefly into a world and then skip out so there's not much time for development; just straight in to the plot and off we go. But this is all exposition and very little action. Rather than let the plots develop naturally, there are just vast passages of infod...
->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> Top Sources: None --> Today's links Goodhart's Law vs "prediction markets": Putting a gun to the metric's head. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Apple v interop; Yahoo v the world; Rasputin v the Haunted Mansion; O...
In the nightmarish world of 2026 it can be difficult to know how to help at all. There are too many horrors happening to quickly to know where one can inject even a small amount of assistance. However I wanted to quickly post about something I did that was easy, low impact and hopefully helps a tiny...
This newsletter is free to read, and it’ll stay that way. But if you want more - extra posts each month, access to the community, and a direct line to ask me things - paid subscriptions are $2.50/month. A lot of people have told me it’s worth it. Upgrade On any given day, I have roughl...
Watching OpenClaw do its thing must be like watching the first plane take flight. It's a bit rickety and stuck together with a lot of sticky tape, but squint and you can see the potential for agentic AI to change the world as we know it. And I don't think that's hyperbolic. A lot of w...
TLDR PT2 is in production!! Water resistance update - 30m What you need to know about Pebble Time 2 Address confirmation emailβ¦...
Wander 0.2.0 is the second release of Wander, a small, decentralised, self-hosted web console that lets visitors to your website explore interesting websites and pages recommended by a community of independent personal website owners. To try it, go to susam.net/wander. This release brings a number o...
I'm still working on improving the test loss for a from-scratch GPT-2 small base model, trained on code based on Sebastian Raschka's book "Build a Large Language Model (from Scratch)". In my training code, I have this code to create the optimiser: optimizer = torch.optim.AdamW( model.parameters(), l...
A financially motivated data theft and extortion group is attempting to inject itself into the Iran war, unleashing a worm that spreads through poorly secured cloud services and wipes data on infected systems that use Iran’s time zone or have Farsi set as the default language. Experts say the ...
A customer was developing a Windows service process, and it is important to them that the service keep running on their servers. They wanted to know if there was a way they could prevent users who connect to the server from terminating the service. In particular, they wanted to make sure that the us...
I have always enjoyed the act of typing words and seeing them come up on screen. While my favorite word processor of all time might be WordPerfect (here), I've used almost all of them. These programs were what sold me on the entire value proposition of computers. They were like typewriters, whi...
This is a blog where I talk mostly about programming in the workplace. These past few years the subject has often been AI, because it affects everything. From the hiring process to the very code we type. AI might just replace me mid-sentence... So when a subject that affects us all dominates the wor...
->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> Top Sources: None --> Today's links Understaffing as a form of enshittification: A way to shift value from workers, patients and shoppers to investors. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Marvel v "superhero"; What's ...
This newsletter is free to read, and it’ll stay that way. But if you want more - extra posts each month, access to the community, and a direct line to ask me things - paid subscriptions are $2.50/month. A lot of people have told me it’s worth it. Upgrade In 1944, the Wehrmacht launched...
I shipped some updates to my notes site. Nothing huge. Just small stuff. But what is big stuff except a bunch of small stuff combined? So small stuff is important too. What follows is a bunch of tiny details you probably donβt care about, but they were all decisions I had to make and account for alo...
I called a large company the other day. Did I know the information I wanted could be found on their website?0 And was I aware that I could manage my account online?1 And would I like to receive a link to chat with their AI assistant via WhatsApp?2 Naturally, call volumes were higher than expected. I...
Het Internationaal Energie Agentschap zegt dat we zuinig aan moeten doen vanwege de oorlogen in het Midden Oosten. Ministers in Den Haag zeggen dat het niet hoeft, want er zijn hier geen tekorten (!). Doet wel erg denken aan ‘COVID blijft in Brabant’. Kennelijk een Nederlandse traditie! ...
One night, I wrote a simple tool to pick a random programming language. After shuffling a few times, I landed on Arturo. I decided to try it for fun. What’s Arturo? Best I understand, Arturo is a stack-based programming language. It’s primarily maintained by Yanis ZafirΓ³pulos. They publi...
I wrote a web app to choose a random programming language. It’s very simple; I hestitate to even call it an “app”! The interesting part was scraping all the languages on Rosetta Code, and even that wasn’t very interesting. But I hope you like it! I learned about a language ca...
Cargo ship Marine Angel navigating the Chicago River in 1953. Via History Calendar.Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week: damage to the Ras Laffan LNG facility, housing bubble risks, North Korea̵...
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 thereβs a palpable tension in the air as if weβre waiting to see whether AI will replace designers or engineers first. Desi...
This series of articles chronicles the history, both real and pseudo, behind Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned. Rennes-le-ChΓ’teau enjoyed its first watershed moment as a media phenomenon when Albert Salamon wrote his newspaper articles in 1956. Its second came when a documen...
I hear from a lot of people that are filled with bilious fury about the tech industry, but few companies have pissed off the world more than Adobe.As the foremost monopolist in software, web and graphic design, Adobe has created one of the single-most abusive, usurious freakshows in capitalist histo...
We begin the episode with the absolutely ingenious and surprising way in which Kepler discovered the laws of planetary motion.People sometimes say that AI will make especially fast progress at scientific discovery because of tight verification loops.But the story of how we discovered the shape of ou...
Our survey of stack limit checking wraps up with arm64, also known as AArch64. The stack limit checking takes two forms, one simple version for pure arm64 processes, and a more complex version for Arm64EC. I’m going to look at the simple version. The complex version differs in that it has to c...
Many years ago, someone tried to get me into cryptocurrencies. "They're the future of money!" they said. I replied saying that I'd rather wait until they were more useful, less volatile, easier to use, and utterly reliable. "You don't want to get left behind, do you?" They countered. That struck me ...
If you only listen to spokespersons for AI companies, you'll have a skewed view of how AI is actually being integrated into the workplace. You probably don't need to convince a developer to include it in their workflow, but you also can't dictate how they do so. Whenever I sit next to another develo...
On March 20, 1996, Orchid Technologies announced the Orchid Righteous 3D, the first consumer graphics card based on 3Dfx technology. It retailed for $299, achieved FCC certification July 24, 1996, and reached retail shelves October 6, 1996, beating Diamond Multimedia’s The post The first 3Dfx ...
Three episodes, one week. AI bots that hallucinate VPN requirements, recommend Apache configs on nginx servers, and suggest replacing 128 GB of RAM with a cloud VPS. A field note on the cost of mistaking confidence for competence....