Bubbles
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I’m halfway through reading “Lonesome Dove”, and it struck me how much “Cyberpunk 2077” is basically the same kind of story. The people leading rough, savage lives on the edge of society carry pistols instead of cyberdecks, but the...
I was keen to introduce my book group to Magnus Mills, and also to choose one of his books that I hadn’t read yet – so earlier this year I got them reading The Scheme for Full Employment (2003). Read on for why I regretted that decision…...
Image from pixabay by Dean Moriarty, CC0 I‘ve written before about the value and importance of asking good questions. I described the qualities of a ‘good question’, including Warren Berger’s emphasis on: Why… (eg Why Isn’t Someone...
Still no rain. I had thought we had a hosepipe ban in Brighton but then I looked it up and it turns out I’ve been judiciously schlepping water about in the watering can for no reason. Using the hosepipe still felt like it ought to be...
Who are you?Hi there - I’m Dinesh Thiru, a writer and dad, living in Barcelona. I grew up in North Carolina, married my college sweetheart from the University of Pennsylvania, and now we have two kids and a goofy chocolate lab.What do...
Be still, my socialist heart:→ Yale School of Public Health
Thanks to everyone who entered the Galen Leather Sinclair case giveaway. I wish I had more to give away but I only have one so let’s celebrate today’s lucky winner: I’m happy to treat you this beautiful case! More giveaways soon so stay...
A small amount of red string appears on a map in Madagascar (dirs. Eric Darnell & Tom McGrath, 2005). ▲ Madagascar (dirs. Eric Darnell & Tom McGrath, 2005)
It seems like I’ve been here before Note: This first ran on this day in 2024. It was well received, but let’s be real; I’ll take any excuse I can get to yap about New Order. If you’re looking for this week’s playlists, fear not! They’re...
For over a decade, I've been a proponent of writing detailed Git commit messages. I find it a valuable use of my time, and continue to double down on it, even in a world where you can get a Large Language Model (LLM) to write it for you....
[T]he web bubble took a bunch of humanities undergraduates and convinced them to become Perl programmers and HTML jocks. And so, when the web burst around 2000, all the dumb bosses who are shipping 90-pound bags of pet food saying it's...
Well, of course nobody really knows. Beyond, that is, the obvious and boring answer — by having lots of people buy it. Crusoe’s Books has a go at answering the question in a post entitled Sleepers. They use as a case in point John...
A sober analysis from the News Agents podcast of the press's role in the death of former Cambridge professor Jason Arday. Sopel is right here to repeat the adage stressed in every journalism school in the world: What's interesting to the...
My friend John Gruber is incensed by the idea that AI watermarking schemes adjust the output of a given LLM so that the output can later be assessed as likely coming from that particular LLM: They say “imperceptible” and “doesn’t change...