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Anthropic: Future Claude models will generate text that contains a watermark. This is a way of determining the likelihood that Claude was involved in writing the text, and we, along with several other major AI providers, are implementing this change to comply with the EU AI Act. In this article, we share answers to some of the questions we’ve received about how our chosen watermarking method works, whether it affects Claude’s outputs, and why we’re making this change. To...
Dickinsonia, Kimberella, and FunisiaLong before teeth began biting, shells began clattering, or trilobites developed the audacity to scuttle fashionably across the seafloor, something was stirring in the ancient waters of northern Canada.It was soft. It was strange. In some cases, it looked rather like a quilted bathmat.And according to a remarkable collection of fossils announced in 2026, it was
We are in Week three of Blaugust. I’ve been keeping up with all the bloggers taking part. Skimming though posts that appear in my RSS feed until I find one that catches my eye. What I came across this morning was another by Sarah Honeychurch at NomadWarMachine. The post was Bernard Pivot Questionnaire. That led me to Roger Edward’s blog Contains Moderate Peril where Sarah got the questionaire. Roger has completed a few other questionaires. The one I fancied having a go at...
Finding a better way to waste time.
Lance has posted about his, and around 160 others, being laid off from IIT here.Hence I looked into what is happening at IIT to see if there is a lesson for us all.I) I wondered why IIT had declining enrollment. I wondered which of the two was the issue (and of course there are other reasons). --The enrollment cliff--International students have declined in number. Why? (1) Having getting student visas, (2) They think they are not welcome here (3) Schools in their home...
Nau maiYesterday we played at Gundlach Bundschu vineyard in the Northern Bay Area of California. It wasn’t a bad first view of the morning, looking out across a gravel lot at lush, unpruned trees, canted telephone poles, neat rows of grape vines, and a rusty old pickup truck with a couple of barrels on the back. This seemed like a land of riches and optimism we were in, a place where anyone could plant a seed in the ground and create something magical. I prepared a...
➜ after my great citytrip weekend it was my first day at home again with D. back to normal. the day was mainly filled with our new hobby, sticker by number (like paint by number, but with stickers!). D had her own books with cupcakes, rainbows and unicorns to sticker. and I had my adult version with artworks. it was surprisingly meditative. ➜ on Tuesday it was time for a little outing with D. we took the bus to Maastricht to visit the bonnefantenmuseum. we saw the born to...
Sushi und Sashimi gibt es in Berlin an allen Ecken, vom Supermarkt bis zum Edel-Restaurant. Die November Brasserie ist hier deutlich im hochpreisigen Spektrum verortet, bietet dafür aber fantastische Qualität bei den Ausgangsprodukten, hohe handwerkliche Qualität bei der Ausführung, einen professionellen Service und ein dezentes, stylishes Ambiente. Dabei war das an dieser Stelle einmal ganz anders. Was gibt es hier japanische Gerichte mit rohem Fisch Internationale...
Every week for the past month I’ve been trying to catch a brown pigeon with awful string foot. I have spotted her a couple of times but she remains on the edge of the flock, too far away to attempt a catch. It’s so depressing as she’s clearly in agony. I have, however, seen Agnes a few times now and she looks marvellous! Her feet will always look a little odd but this makes her immediately recognisable to me. I photographed and examined those feet under a microscope so...
There are many ways to navigate China and even more ways around an obstacle. The post Four Days in Beijing, the Long Way Around first appeared on Correr Es Mi Destino.
Gordon Brander writes: The thing about computers is that they can do anything you wish, so long as you specify your wish in exacting detail. However, LLMs relieve this constraint. An LLM can extrapolate what you mean (more or less) from just a few words. So computers can do vibes now. It used to be that computers could only ever do exactly what you told them to do, nothing more. If they did something unexpected (a.k.a. a bug), it was because you failed to 1) anticipate it...
It’s popular for certain news organizations to have their reporters ask politicians how many genders there are. The “right” answer, apparently, is two. But a question like this is not fair to the politician or to voters. A politician’s opinion about the number of genders is irrelevant. The number is what it is, and their opinion changes nothing. It also puts them on the spot. They know if they want votes from a particular segment of the population, they will have to resort...
I’m resurrecting an old tag after almost 4 years (!!!) because I wanted to note (to myself mostly) that I’ve added webmentions to my site, as well as proper Bridgy support. I think that means that my site is genuinely IndyWebbified, something I’ve been wanting to do for years. In essence, I have a Github Action that sends any new post to Bridgy, which then publishes my posts to Mastodon and Bluesky. Once I receive any reaction from Mastodon or Bluesky, Bridgy detects it...
I will not be surprised if Black Bag wins the Booker Prize this year. This was the book on the longlist I was least excited to pick up, the sixth one I've read so far, but enough people had told me how much fun they were having with it that I made an effort to go in with an open mind. I didn't want my preconceptions to colour the whole experience before I'd even opened it. I wanted to be pleasantly surprised. And for the first hundred pages or so, that's exactly what...
My friend Dave, of Callisto Comics, has been working on a website all about the Spector Club Comic Show and its history. It is the Midwest's oldest comic show, and he's been hard at work already doing interviews to build a detailed oral and print history. I always love going to the Spector Club shows and encourage anyone who can plan on going to be sure and attend the next one on October 11th. In the meantime, I look forward to any updates Dave posts!
I created a collection page in my Bullet Journal to track and plan my 2026 Blaugust posts. It's dead simple, with my goal number of posts at the top followed by a weekly plan/log. I am loosely using some ideas from the festival calendar prompts but I'm not following them too strictly. For writing, I'm mostly drafting posts on a dedicated lined notebook that I set up just for blogging. (I wrote about this notebook here.) I have a page with ideas, and then I just have...
A moment ago in the sweet sad seeming of April,this fat plum was a tiny white un-blossom.Now the hummingbird’s persistent tick scolds you to attention. The perishing golden catastrophe of a late August dahlia means something that you cannot look up in a book. Children play on earth but grown-ups gaze through thingness into quieter worlds.But perhaps it's the other
Messier 33, also known as the Triangulum Galaxy, is one of our closest galactic neighbours. Located approximately 2.7 million light-years away in the constellation Triangulum, it is the third-largest member of the Local Group after the Andromeda Galaxy and the Milky Way. Seen almost face-on, M33 reveals a remarkably open and irregular spiral structure. Its arms are filled with young, hot stars that give large parts of the galaxy their distinctive blue colour, interspersed...
Speaking of user interface guidelines, developer Matt Sephton and others compiled many of Apple’s human interface guidelines, starting from 1980, all the way to 2014, including some goodies like early drafts, NeXT, Newton, and so on. Elsewhere, designer Geof Crowl put together his own list that goes broad instead of deep, including style guides other than Apple’s, too. The list was made in 2020 and a few links are already broken, but there are some gems here like the...
Bottlenecks to GoalsEvery person, process, and goal has a bottleneck somewhere in the line because not everything is equal. The pursuit of eliminating bottlenecks just shifts it to a different spot in the line—when capacity in one area outgrows capacity in another, the latter becomes bottlenecked.Certain things should not be bottlenecks depending on the area; if they are, then measures should be taken to remove it quickly. Time and money are often the bottleneck in growing...
I’m very sorry to have to report the sudden death yesterday of my esteemed colleague Randy Picker, who was well-known for his work on antitrust and intellectual property, among other topics. A triple Chicago grad (B.A., M.A. in economics, J.D.), he clerked for Richard Posner, and joined the Chicago faculty in 1989 after practicing law in Chicago. Many readers will be familiar with his scholarship, but few will know what an extraordinary institutional citizen he was, not to...
I’m coming off of a week-long vacation, or staycation, if you will: we didn’t go anywhere in particular, save for the overnight in New Brunswick. I just made salads and boiled eggs for the week ahead. Of course there’s some Sunday scaries, but not too bad. We did a lot of floating in the pool during the day. I’d usually have something for breakfast and then skip lunch, and then we’d have some cured meats and cheese and other pickings (peanuts, pipits) phon the deck or in...
Originally written on lamb-releases: A release candidate for 0.13.0. Try it on a test install before you put it on a site you care about, and report anything that looks wrong. The headline is that you can now get your content out of Lamb and back into it: a full site export, and importers that read it back. Login also gets a brute-force throttle, and Micropub gains several fixes.
My installation of Feedland is one of the services I currently do not have access to due to the Proxmox host failure. Fortunately my installation of River5 is on another host, but this circumstance gives me the opportunity to try out FreshRSS. Learning a new RSS aggregator takes some time, but I am working my way through.