Bubbles
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(Previously: No Screens Cafe) At the Cowork Cafe, you can look at your little screen when you’re supposed to be looking at your medium-size screen. Welcome to the Cowork Cafe! We can’t wait to optimize you. Please set your chin here and...
Today been a very busy but hugely enjoyable day. We had a big turnout for the Eclipse Event at Maynooth University – I don’t have attendance figures right now, but will update when I do – and good weather in the build-up to the eclipse....
I’ve previously waxed enthusiastic on here about Mothership, having been very pleased with my hauls from Tuesday Knight Games’ Kickstarter for the 1st edition boxed set and supporting material and Anodyne Printworks’ Hull Breach...
Photo by Ramal Wickramasinghe on Unsplash🍕 I’m JA Westenberg. I write essays about technology, philosophy, productivity, and what it means to be human. If you like ideas that take their time, you’re in the right place.While you’re here,...
One hundred bounties, fifty planets, ten hunters, a courtroom procedure, and a carceral moon. I’ve never liked the “200 npcs, 55 burgers, 55 fries” approach to selling books. At its best, those numbers are a reductive marketing stunt. At...
What do you do when teaching programming with LLMs that isn’t in this list? Critically review AI output. Have the LLM answer a programming question or explain a concept, then ask learners to review its response collectively for...
I hadn’t seen Robert Wise’s ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW for close to forty years. I saw in at Edinburgh Film Guild with my friend Robert. We were anti-Wise because he recut MAGNIFICENT ANDERSONS and, worse, defended it, so we were anti the...
Historical note: Matt and I were idly going through some of the 276 unfinished draft posts on this blog (don’t judge us!) when we stumbled on this — written on 3 March 2011, but inexplicably not published. Here is is, as written. Yeah, I...
Love to see a turnout record for the Minnesota primaries yesterday (1.1 million), about a quarter of eligible voters in the state. There also seems to be a collective reckoning that primary polls are terrible.
Desert Brat 2026-08-12 rawr
In our previous post we looked at fixing a super 8 film projector. While watching filme with a real projector has its own charm, it is inconvenient to say the least. First of all you make the entire room properly dark or you can't see...
Power Cat 2026-08-12 zap
Mark Liberman’s Log post inspired me to discuss the very interesting word solidus ‘slash (mark).’ It developed from the name of a gold coin of the Roman Empire, which gave rise to the Latin name for a variety of medieval coins, mostly...
Specula is an agentic system that automates the process of software bug finding through authoring and model-checking a spec for the code. It derives TLA+ specifications automatically from the code, checks code-spec conformance through...
With more people talking about the idea of a dead internet, I find weird comfort in the gaming site Blue’s News, which served as my homepage over 20 years ago and looks pretty much exactly the same now as it did then: You can almost...