Bubbles
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As usual, part 2 of the weekly deals with speculative, regulatory, political and alignment questions. Xi gave an important speech yesterday, so this post opens with that. There is talk that Kimi K3 is sufficiently strong that it upends...
The past few weeks I'd been talking to a friend of mine about fountain pens. As an enthusiast himself, he was somewhat aghast that I didn't own a fountain pen, and hadn't even used one since I was very young. So he set about correcting...
And the music?Man . . .The music has always meant everything to me.Or if not everything, the music has always meant something to me.understand? I swear there is nothing quite like the gift of sound. And, so, should I ever lose my ability...
A Friday Hodgepodge1. "How About a Genuine America-First Policy?," by Peter Schwartz (PeterSchwartz.com):The movement Trump launched claims that his policies will "make America great again." Here, too, there is a prior question that...
A practical conference session on building PHP extensions with Go and FrankenPHP, then wiring them into Laravel and Symfony as native-feeling features. It uses an in-memory LRU cache as the example and offers a nice tour of framework...
There's a scene early in The Name of the Rose involving barrels of pigs' blood. It was autumn, and time to slaughter the pigs, but of course you wouldn't want to waste the blood.You could not, however, just let the blood pour into a...
What I am up to now. Check out my /now page for the latest update. This is going to be a very brain-dumpy update. There’s a lot that has happened since my last update to my /now page! Two weeks ago on July 1, my son was born! He and his...
Unseasonably cool with the pall of wildfire smoke over the region. It is as thick as a thin mist and burns my throat. But even though their sun is a lurid red, the goldfinches and a common yellowthroat keep singing.
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book. Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana...
The petri dish sits under a hood of soft yellow light, humidity monitored, oatmeal flakes portioned out like communion wafers. Inside, a yellow blob called Physarum polycephalum is doing what it's done for hundreds of millions of years...
Hi there! It’s been a few days since my birthday, but if you want to give me a belated present and you’re in the US, you could contact your legislators and ask them to oppose H.R. 7661. This bill ties federal funding to excluding...
Some 105 years ago, 18 July 1921, off the Virginia Capes Successive leisurely flights of land-based Army and Navy bombers dropped an assortment of bombs over the moored and abandoned 6,600-ton German Wiesbaden-class scout cruiser SMS...
Check out this recent test by the Swedish Navy of the BAE Bofors 57mm Mk3 naval gun system (the Mk 110 in the U.S. Navy), engaging aerial and surface drone targets during live-fire counter-drone exercises aboard the Göteborg-class...
This column is a guest author feature, written by a friend of the site whose work I am thrilled to host at Retro XP. This entry is from Ashley Schofield, author of VA-11 Hall-A: Design Works. Previous entries in this series can be found...