Recently updated blogs

We all know how the internet works—lots of “hot takes,” polarizing opinions, trolling, and ignorance. Recently, everyone has opinions on AI and LLMs/GenAI in particular. I won’t focus here on “gold rush” influencers, bad grifters, people who build their business … Continue reading →

Do you get frustrated when you have to throw out fruits and vegetables that have gone bad?Have lots of kitchen scraps but can't be bothered to compost them due to possible smell, rodents, HOA rules, or time commitments?Welcome to "blendposting". That's my made up name for a technique I "invented" for handling kitchen scraps or wasted fruits and vegetables.It's really easy to do, will help your garden or flowerbed immensely, …

On August 2014 I made one of the most difficult choices of my life: I left my home country, my family, my friends and everything I knew to move to the United States. I arrived in Florida, and while Florida still speaks a lot of Spanish for a US State (not in a bad way, I’m not complaining! It made my life easier) it still took a bit of me …

Trumpeter Swan observed last week at Ragged Mountain Reservoir, near Charlottesville, Virginia Well, this is it: The last post at Mountain Beltway here at the AGU Blogosphere. AGU has been so accommodating, hosting my blog for these past 13+ years, but they’ve let me know that it’s time to “sunset” the AGU Blogosphere. This didn’t come as a shock – the pace of posting around here has slowed way down …

It's 2024, and it's time to move on from Bearblog for the moment. It's a great place to write, and Herman has been a very gracious host, but recently I've found myself wanting something different. Dreamwidth was on my shortlist of places to start a blog when I signed up here, and I think the reason I went with Bear instead is that I didn't think Dreamwidth had a mobile …

A huge amount happened in the Lean theorem prover community in 2023; this blog post looks back at some of these events, plus some of what we have to look forward to in 2024. Modern mathematics I personally am a member of the Lean community because of its phenomenal mathematics library mathlib, which was born around six and a half years ago and has now become a very fast-growing database …

UPDATE 8/1/22: Some confusion about the date for this one. Some are saying that it was the end of November, but one newspaper article (coming to this page soon!) published on Tuesday 10th December indicates that the party took place on 7th December. A Spirals document entitled SPIRAL TRIBE’S CALENDAR OF POLICE HARRASSMENT AT FREE PARTIES – 1991-1992, still accessible via Wayback Machine, describes the bust at the end: 9.12.91– …

Yes, this is my first post in almost a year. I’m no longer prioritizing this blog, but I will still occasionally post something. I wrote ~2 years ago that it was hard to point to concrete opportunities to help the most important century go well. That’s changing. There are a good number of jobs available now that are both really promising opportunities to help (in my opinion) and are suitable …

The Times has reported that next month the UK will to deploy 20,000 military personnel across eastern Europe as part of the NATO exercise Steadfast Defender. They will be accompanied by one of the Royal Navy’s two aircraft carriers, eight other warships and F35 fighter jets. The article quotes Grant Shapps, the UK Defence Secretary, as warning that the world had moved to a ‘prewar’ phase as global conflicts escalated. …

In the first part of this chapter we discussed what we might need live regions for, and how to create them using HTML and ARIA. In this part, we’re going to discuss what live regions are not suitable for and why, and we’re going to discuss more robust ways to implement some common UI patterns that you might otherwise consider using live regions for. After that, we’re going to go …

After 25 years of running this blog under various names — all of which can be lumped under the "Archidose" monicker — I've decided to shut it down, moving this hobby, this labor of love, to Substack, which I have used since mid-2021 and where I will continue to send out weekly newsletters focused on architecture books, but in a new format. (You can subscribe to my newsletter here or …

That’s it, I’m no longer posting to this site. New blog posts can now be found over on Substack at Andrew Old’s Education Battleground, or sign up to receive them as a newsletter. Details of signing up for paid content can be found here. Since the last time I posted on this site the following […]

This nebula is very, very dim and therefore it's not very popular with astrophotographers as it takes a long time to get a decent image. All in all this image took me over 50h of total exposure time over multiple weeks.The nebula itself is quite similar to many other nebulas with a center that glows from oxygen and sulphur emissions embedded in a larger area of hydrogen gas. There's also …

This is an exceptionally long post detailing pretty much everything I learned at an event shortly before Christmas at Meta’s offices in San Francisco. I’ve been delayed in writing it up because of traveling back to the UK for Christmas and other commitments – and because I wanted to capture everything. It’s roughly written, and I’ll probably edit it a bit after posting. If you have questions or comments or …

A few years ago, we interviewed Jen Cardello for Finding Our Way, and she shared that her team (UX Research) is peered with “market research, behavioral economics, brand, and advertising research, and customer loyalty” in an independent Insights team. The idea was for research to avoid a functional bias, so that it couldn’t be “weaponized” by marketing or design. And while UX Research is still typically found within a UX/Design …