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L’onanisme des utilisateurs de chatbots Quand bien même les chatbots ne seraient pas les produits de gigantesques entreprises centralisées qui cherchent à nous exploitent en pourrissant nos cerveaux, Internet tout en étant une catastrophe écologique et sociale, je le les utiliseraient pas. Quand bien même l’outil serait éthique à tous les points de vue, je le détesterais ! Le guitariste et le joueur de Guitar Hero John Scalzi explique enfin pourquoi je n’aime pas ça. Parce...
[!NOTE](As I minimise screen time during my holidays, I must admit I still scanned my RSS feed every couple of days — only the favourites tab — and saved anything interesting on Instapaper to read on my Kobo; with the intention of writing a blog post, here's one of those.) zero point one Joel points out how vast options of translations gives him basically decision paralysis. Mainly reading Spanish, but as I have, noticed how translations can become flat. I found it...
Which now is real? since no one edits text machines have sighted, then translated; Gs turn into Cs--we have the evidence! Which shall it be, what shall we make of it? A title shouts: “Hearing--Doing--Crowing”. You see? The race for content fails to polish, or maybe heaven’s finger’s in it, instead of “Growing” we have a pompous Pharisee, no longer on the corners of the streets, but from the pulpit, dressed in latest garb-- he’s dressing down to low denominator (tho’ still...
I'm home from the hospital after getting some surgery! Also general life updates
Lauren Leek's Fantastic Essay explores why in the age of personalized algorithms for everyone, everything feels so samey. In her words: "We have never had more individual data and naive intuition says all that granular personal data should fragment us, splinter the world into a billion niches. And yet the opposite is happening. The more the machines learn about us as individuals, the more alike our worlds look." And to summarize her entire essay with a FANTASTIC quote from...
No es la primera vez que visito un psicólogo/a por problemas de ansiedad. He tenido rachas mejores y peores en mi vida y desde que Chancla está empeorando su salud, decidí volver a pedir cita para obtener algo de ayuda. Creo que lo primero que una persona busca cuando acude a un psicólogo es la empatía. Vas con un problema que para una persona puede parecer una tontería, pero para ti es un mundo. Buscas a alguien que te ayude claro, pero antes de ayudarte necesitas...
This is a recording of our AI Book Club discussion of The MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut, held August 16, 2026. This was the club's first work of fiction, and much of the discussion is about what that mode makes possible: getting inside the madness of scientists like John von Neumann in a way a biography can't. We talk about the book's opening scene as a thesis in miniature, logic carried to irrational ends, the 'death of play' in the AlphaGo match against Lee Sedol, Move 78...
After spending 2 posts talking about how badly these local AI models are doing on my machine, I did want to show a example of the model performing surprisingly well. Using qwen 3.5 I asked it to describe the following image: A photo taken a long, long time ago Here is the description that qwen wrote about a few minutes: This is a vertical black-and-white photograph featuring a group of six young Vietnamese women posing on concrete steps outside a building. Here are...
Sort of a follow-up to my previous post: I went jogging for the first time in ten years. I mentioned at the end of that post that my knee was hurting the day after my first jog, but as the day went on the pain went away. That had me feeling hopeful, and so I decided to go for my Thursday jog during my lunch. The five minute walking warmup was fine, and the first jogging interval was okay, too. But on the second jogging interval, the pain in my left knee started up again....
In 2023, I was in need of a new laptop that should hopefully last me for a while. While looking at my options, I was seduced by Framework’s promise of a repairable and upgradable laptop that supports Linux out-of-the-box without weird driver issues, as well as the option to assemble the laptop myself1 and buy the RAM and SSD I want separately2, back when they were cheap. For three years, the laptop has served me well, until Framework suggested via newsletter to install the...
I fed some of my songs through Google's AI chatbot, Gemini, to see what would happen. That may sound like the precursor to a joke --a joke that will allow me to spend several paragraphs detailing the hilarious, whacked-out observations Gemini made about the far corners of my songbook. The answers would then be allowed to sit alongside the ones you get when you ask it something like, "write a Beatles song." But that's not what happened. Instead, Gemini fed back to me the...
I bought a Zune, but not just any Zune, the Halo 3 edition Zune. You might be asking yourself, "why?". You probably know by now that my favorite games are the original Bungie-era Halo games. Halo 3 of course being my favorite. And as my friend Suliman found out, I am huge into MP3 players, mostly iPods. Now, if you're not sure what the hell a Zune even is, it's basically Microsoft's answer to the iPod. It failed horribly, mostly due to poor timing. It was a very competent...
As a war between humankind and monstrous sea creatures wages on, a former pilot and a trainee are paired up to drive a seemingly obsolete special weapon in a desperate effort to save the world from the apocalypse. It’s got huge robots, it’s got kaiju, this is basically big budget Power Rangers with decent writing and bad ass effects. I do see this every few years, and it’s still one of my favourites. Definitely watch it in 4K, it’s worth it! Six popcorns and jumps into the...
I occasionally hear middle-aged people wax nostalgic about how great college was. Often, they say it was the best time of their life. This has always seemed odd to me. I'm sure many people are happiest in university, but I have a hard time believing it's a general trend. College is certainly better than primary or secondary school. Those are bizarre artificial environments which seem engineered to maximize misery. In college, you get real freedom for the first time in your...
♠ Problem statement: a code block that quotes a markdown file swallows the first closing fence it meets, which is the inner one. The ADRs and LLMs post quotes a README.md that itself contains a fenced template. Written naively: ```markdown # README Use this template: ```markdown # ADR-NNNN: Title ``` That was the template. ``` The CommonMark spec says who wins: The content of the code block consists of all subsequent lines, until a closing code fence of the same type as...
Somewhere along the line like after I did day one and then something else a few times I ended up writing markdown files. This was good. I still enjoy the act of it. It’s a freeing sense that the app I use is not the one I must use. The portability and openness thing.There was something missing though. Like this particular sense of the writing. The capture. The adding different elements. Sure I could do location and weather with apple shortcuts. Easy. I feel today on my...
In the late 80s, a manager at Microsoft named Paul Maritz sent an email to a colleague suggesting they “eat their own dogfood.” What he meant was that LAN Manager, a product he oversaw, should get more internal use. How could they build a tool that others trusted if they didn’t trust it themselves? The term spread through Microsoft and later the tech industry. “Eating our dogfood” or simply “dogfooding” has come to mean precisely what Paul meant: using our own products....
StarringRobert Pattinson, Zoë Kravitz, Jeffrey Wright, Colin Farrell, and Paul DanoDirectorMatt ReevesOverviewUnmask the truth.In his second year of fighting crime, Batman uncovers corruption in Gotham City that connects to his own family while facing a serial killer known as the Riddler.Review The Batman This was fine. But long, but with a somewhat decent story. It didn’t hold a candle to the show it spun off, though. Buy on Amazon
Desert Brat 2026-08-16 you're welcome ig
Holy Smoke! Nice juxtaposition on a Donegal beach. Quote of the Day ”A man’s dying is more the survivors’ affair than his own.” Thomas Mann Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Paul Simon | Graceland Link Triggered by a marvellous BBC Prom the other night Long Read of the Day Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same This a fabulous, insightful essay by Lauren Leek, a great data scientist, on a question that has puzzled me for...
Start with Chapter 1.Calliope stared at Jack. “What are you doing here?”“What are you doing here?” He asked back with that silly grin on his face.Looking back and forth between Mac and Jack, Calliope went silent.“Mac, we have to keep moving. They’re expecting us.” Calliope heard her mother’s urgent voice, although she could barely see her ahead of them. A soft light guided them and her mother moved fast, like a woman on a mission.Mac pulled on Calliope’s arm and then, as...
Book now for my tours through August, September & October There is Roy on the far right with his left hand stuck in his pocket, to indicate the appropriate air of nonchalance befitting a street-wise man of the world of around twelve years old, on a hopping expedition with his family from Hoxton. Roy went hop picking each year with this relations until he reached the age of eighteen and, at this season, he always recalls his days in Kent. Still in touch with many of those...
Everything I shared on social.omgmog.net between 10 and 16 August: two old games having birthdays, a solar eclipse that failed to impress my kids, and a font you’ve definitely seen without knowing it.