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“Friends who had known him in the old days would comment on the uncanny resemblance between his two wives.” Cracking open Gabriel Josipovici’s novel The Cemetery in Barnes (Carcanet, 2018), we are immediately ushered into a world of ambiguity, confusion, and repetition, even though it’s a simple story of a man and his two wives (none of whom is given a name). He works as a professional translator with a …

Hello you. It’s Valentines Season once again and time for us all to show our love to some good causes. Here are three that are very close to my heart, and no doubt yours as well. Please consider supporting one or all of them and let’s all do our bit to support grassroots art and culture in these gloomy times. First off, as regular visitors to this site will be …

My ‘Unnecessary Rankings!‘ series have quickly become my favourite blog posts to write, and I love reading your comments – sometimes in agreement, but usually not, and that’s the most fun. Of all the authors I’ve done so far, Stella Gibbons has the widest range – i.e. some of her novels are all-time favourites, and some are unbearable trash. As I put this together, I realised I’d read fewer than …

In the meantime and just at this moment the fool people called Addison and the lady called Bubbles tumbled together out of the San Remo Café into the night thick with snow swirling down through the light of the corner streetlamp.“Fucking hell,” said Bubbles, “look at this shit.”“I adore the snow,” said Addison. “It reminds me of the Norman Rockwell Christmases I never had as a lad myself, and now …

Here’s the latest installment in the series on working with LLMS: Creating a GPT Assistant That Writes Pipeline Tests. Once you get the hang of writing these tests, it’s mostly boilerplate, so I figured my team of assistants could help. I recruited Cody, GitHub Copilot, and Unblocked — with varying degrees of success. Then I realized I hadn’t yet tried creating a GPT. As OpenAI describes them, “GPTs are custom …

Staying at Ecocamp Patagonia was the biggest highlight of my monthlong honeymoon in Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay. I completely adored this place, and it made my time in Chilean Patagonia incredibly memorable. Ecocamp Patagonia is home to the world’s first geodesic hotel room. That’s right, they were first — and we can thank their influence for the hundreds of dome hotels that have sprung up all over the world! But …

In the comments to episode 4 of our back to basics series of live stream episodes on CAP, on the Hands-on SAP Dev show, there was a question on my use of code in VS Code, which, when invoked in the terminal (e.g. code services.cds) opens the file directly in a VS Code editor window, like this: The question was about code being recognised in SAP Business Application Studio (BAS) …

I get a lot of odd emails pitching me services I don’t want. Private jets and yachts aren’t really my thing. But one offering to ‘build my audience without spending hours writing content’ intrigued me so I followed the rabbit hole to see what was down there. It turns out there’s a whole industry of people who will pretend to be a better version of you on social media, especially …

Joseph Smith's "Explanation or Key to the Various Manufactories of Sheffield" C. 1816Joseph Smith's "Explanation or Key to the Various Manufactories of Sheffield,"also known as Smith's Key, is one of the earliest tool catalogs. Originally published in 1816, The Key is simply a collection of tool engraving showing many different tools and style. Pretty much all the manufacturers made the same products. Smith, a printer, would print the engravings and …

Nowadays it seems that it’s the fringe and Off-West End venues that are keeping the spirit of international theatre alive in London. Whereas much mainstream and big-name theatre feels increasingly insular, the smaller players are embracing their freedom to experiment by staging work from beyond these shores. A great example is Sergio Blanco’s When You Pass Over My Tomb, translated and adapted by Daniel Goldman; it’s a brilliant meta-theatrical piece …

Sunshine, space cakes and sitting down. Source

As everyone knows, AI will definitely turn against us and destroy all humans within the next couple of years or so. As a result we only have a short window to point out its flaws and laugh at it. More importantly of course, it is imperative to test how well it can produce pictures of […]

Pygmy Owl, abducted by aliens and examined.A game warden called from up in the county seat. Someone had brought him a Northern Pygmy-Owl (correct ID on his part) that was "in danger" on a highway. We met on a side street, and he transferred the owl to my carrier. And there was a second passenger, a small lizard. Apparently the owl was about to eat dinner when the well-meaning two-legged …

In the very first episode of our new Fourcast podcast, I sat down with Tyler Sticka, and we unpacked the often daunting world of legacy application redesigns. It’s a tale of fear, strategy, and a dash of humor, navigating through the redesign realm without falling into the dreaded Land of perpetual redesign. (That’s a passport stamp I’d like to avoid!) At the heart of our discussion was an essential truth: …