Recently updated blogs

Powerhouse comedian Chris Farley (February 15, 1964 - December 18, 1997) of Saturday Night Live and Second City Chicago fame has been gone a long time but still makes this writer laugh out loud.Especially noteworthy: the Schiller Visions decaf coffee crystals sketch. . . No decaf for Chris!With apologies to Tony Robbins, Matt Foley is by far my favorite motivational speaker! A key assist on the following sketch, featuring Chris' …

The release of @manton’s new notes app got me thinking about the icons for these different companion apps, and how they might look if they were designed to appear more like a family.Too closely related? Possibly, but there’s something in this, I think.

Two weeks ago I asked the question again about What Rye should be. There has been one thing that I have not publicly shared before and that is that ever since Rye exists I have also been talking to Charlie Marsh about Python packaging and Python tooling. It turns out that we had some shared ideas of what an ideal Python tooling landscape would look like. That has lead to …

I find myself asking that question a lot these days. Another question I've been asking myself a lot is, what the hell am I going to write in this post? I've tried a few things in the days leading up to this (timed) post, and to be honest they all, upon rereading, sound like I'm some combination of coming apart at the seams, in dire need of a vacation in …

Continuing from the previous post, we have a website for the conference now, and you can now register for the conference. We are planning to have two poster sessions, and we might be able to offer some financial support for people who are presenting posters. We will prioritise early career researchers, and given the budget limitations we might not accept all poster submissions. Continue reading...

I thought these guys were dead. But there they were, large as life in the Bourke Street Mall on Valentine’s Day – which probably explains the balloons. Why? Honestly I don’t know, but the characters went way beyond the originals after the franchise was sold off in 2021 – almost to ridiculous extremes. Anybody want to buy a Dumb Ways NFT? (Though even this 2014 life insurance ad from Canada …

An anti-Valentine’s Day book now, Ovid’s Heroides (25-16 BCE, somewhere in there), a collection of fictional letters in verse written by mythical heroines to their no-good boyfriends and husbands. Many end in suicide. Dido castigating Aeneas, Phaedra mourning Hippolytus, spurned Sappho jumping off a cliff. Although strictly speaking written as letters, many of the poems edge close to monologues and interiority, thus their large influence on the European novel and …

ONE LITTLE INDEPENDENT release the next two singles in the Crass Records’ reissue next month, with twelve-inch vinyl editions of Annie Anxiety’s Barbed Wire Halo and Flux of Pink Indians’ Neu Smell, both originally released in 1981. Both records will be issued on black vinyl by OLI, and in digital format through a variety of different online partner platforms, with a 15 March 2024 release date. Annie Anxiety – Barbed …

I think it’s time to step away for a bit.The way the discourse around the Bluesky bridge played out this week was… profoundly disappointing. Watching people with no interest in having a rational discussion making bad faith arguments and engaging in some disgusting ad hominem attacks has left a very bad taste in my mouth. What made it worse was the incredible hypocrisy of it all; you can’t engage in …

“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 …