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A few days ago I mentioned playing around with local AI models, despite having low strength hardware for the task. Yesterday I was trying our some new models - tinyllama and smollm2 - and I asked each model the same question to compare the answers. After doing this for a few questions, I had the same feeling I always have when I’m doing a repetitious task: computers would excel at this!Full post

What brought me joy New coffee! I’ve had this coffee resting for 4 weeks and it’s finally ready to be opened! Opening a new bag of coffee is always exciting. I’m a few brews in and I’ve found that I prefer it brewed with the TORCH Mountain Dripper over V60 because it gets me a bit more acidity. The fermentation notes are quite strong with this one and I’m not 100% loving it so far, though it’s highly possible that I just need to make some adjustments with my brewing. I do...

I love that people are writing on Substack, because it is almost a return to what blogging originally was: openly sharing connected and linked learning and insight with the world. A couple of things frustrate me about Substack though and these are things that really distinguish it from a proper blog: 1. It's really hard to comment. In order to comment on a Substack post, I have to be a subscriber to a person's substack and I have to log in to do it. That is a bit too much...

There’s a bizarre aspect of AI coding that I’ve been trying to put my finger on, and I think it’s this: you can basically just decide how many bugs you want your software to have now. We discovered this first with security, because of course security bugs are the most non-negotiable ones. But I think once the vulnpocalypse is over, we’ll start to turn our attention to other types of bugs: correctness, performance, accessibility, reliability, etc. Some of us are already...

I had an old Kindle sitting in a drawer for years. It still charges, the battery seems to work, and the screen is perfectly readable in daylight. Throwing it away felt wrong and at the same time I kept opening Proxmox or Uptime Kuma in a browser tab just to check whether anything in my homelab was broken. That is a lot of clicks for a question with a one-word answer. So the Kindle now stands on a shelf and shows the answer without me asking. How it works The split between...

Bridgy Fed is roughly 20k lines of code. If you add in all the other parts of the stack that we own – granary, arroba, lexrpc, etc – it’s 51kloc total. (Excluding tests; those add another 81kloc.) I’m not really proud of this, or embarrassed. Just wanted to put it out there for anyone who thinks more code is better, or worse, or an important metric either way. All code is liability. Results are what matters. Write code to do what you need to do, try to minimize it in...

Three and a half millennia ago, the people of the Bronze Age Minoan civilization revered the double-headed ax, which is conventionally known today as a labrys (plural form: labryes), as a religious symbol associated with powerful goddesses. Over a thousand years later, the historical Greeks and Romans often depicted Amazons, mythical female warriors who lived in a society without men, as wielding the labrys in battle. Today, the labrys has become a prominent symbol...

I've been practicing photography seriously for about as long as it takes to get a fine art degree. Looking back, I can see real growth in how I approach editing. These two versions of the same photo illustrate the shift: In the original edit (above), I leaned heavily on AI touchups, crushing the shadows, increasing contrast, and punching up the saturation. In my recent revision, I've taken a lighter touch, while also adjusting two important aspects of the image that I...

DC has posted several preview pages from next week’s issue of Absolute Flash, and you can see them at Adventures In Poor Taste. The preview features Wally and Linda back at the Mission and recovering after the events of last issue…but things with Ralph Dibny take a turn for the strange. Check it out at the link! ABSOLUTE FLASH #18 Written by JEFF LEMIRE Art and cover by NICK ROBLES Variant covers by EJIKURE, CARMINE DI GIANDOMENICO, and GIUSEPPE CAMUNCOLI $4.99 US | 32...

ThanKs to Charlie Horse 47 and Killdumpster for Their Sponsorship of This Post, via The Magic of Patreon. ***Who remembers Glenn Medeiros?I certainly do.And July 1988 was doing its best to make sure it stayed that way, as he spent almost the entire month at Number One on the UK singles chart, thanks to his smash hit Nothing's Gonna Change My Love for You, before being dislodged by Yazz and the Plastic Population's The Only Way Is Up.Over on the accompanying album chart,...

Having both very much enjoyed the dam at Thompson Falls more than I thought we would - and having already completed two stages of the Montana Backcountry Discovery Route over the course of the day - we had no aspirations to make it deep into Stage 7 before settling down for the night. Rather, our only hope was getting out of town. If we found a nice spot with a view, that would be icing on the cake. Headed out of Thompson Falls, into the Cabinet Mountains. As they'd been...