Recently updated blogs

Last year, I wrote a book called You Deserve a Tech Union. When I first announced it, I said it was the hardest thing I’ve ever written, and that I was incredibly proud of it. I think that assessment holds up, even now: I’m deeply glad I got the chance to write it; I’m beyond grateful my publisher was willing to publish a book about the urgent need for unions …

This is an adaptation of an internal doc I wrote for Anthropic. Recently I’ve been having a lot of conversations about how to structure and staff teams. One framework I’ve referenced repeatedly is to break down team leadership into a few different categories of responsibility. This is useful for a couple reasons. One is that it helps you get more concrete about what leading a team involves; for new managers, …

Lately I have been reading quite a bit, and while doing so I came across the Literata serif font. I really like its style and how well it reads in both regular and italics, and decided to play around with it on my weblog. It escalated quickly, and now you can get a taste of those well-crafted glyphs right here. This replaces almost all the Monaspace fonts introduced late last …

Дали щурият Exorcist II: The Heretic е първото анти-продължение, много преди The Matrix Resurrections? Тук сякаш студиото е нахвърлило бегли идеи за втора част и ги дало на лудия титан Джон Бурман да прави каквото си иска. Съответно режисьорът на изтрещялия Zardoz и пост-модерната крими драма Point Blank направил точно това. Добре дошли в обратната страна на монетата, където светлина и психеделия заемат мястото на сивия смразяващ оригинал. Филмът на …

Book Review by George Simmers: Maurice Walsh (1879 -1964) was a popular Irish writer, and this is a book of five interlocking stories, all of them set in Ireland of the early twenties; most of the central characters are members of a flying column of the IRA. All five are ultimately love-stories, and all link, directly or indirectly, to a prologue in which a woman, Nuala Kierley, gains access to …

This year's Lone Pine Film Festival, coming up Oct. 10-13, 2024The tiny town of Lone Pine, Calif., is the site of some of the most spectacular filming locations around, and each year in October the town honors its place in movie history by hosting one of the country's top film festivals. The picturesque Alabama Hills, just outside of Lone PineThis year we'll be taking a deeper dive into the Lone …

We’re a couple of years into the LLM era now, and the Gartner hype cycle from last year seems relevant: Image credit: Gartnerhttps://www.gartner.com/en/articles/what-s-new-in-artificial-intelligence-from-the-2023-gartner-hype-cycle The purpose of this post is to share two hard problems (in the CS sense of the term) that I and a friend solved with an LLM. The problem and impetus I’m friends with a couple of guys who have a podcast. (I know, right?) It’s been …

I know! It’s been awhile. Things have gotten a bit busy here At Home. My hope is that in the fall I will be able to give more love to Jessie At Home, and update and release patterns. In the meantime, I’m having a 50% off sale on Ravelry!!!! Use the code Summer and get 50% off any and all of my patterns! The code expires on July 31st, 2024 …

Well, I said I'd be back with something soon. And how has that turned out? Have I come up with something that you want?I hope so. My new blog "Everybody's Number One To Someone" focuses on all the tracks which reached number one in the NME indie charts, from 1981 onwards. It's over here, comes with complete Spotify playlists (of absolutely everything that charted within their Top 30 each year). …

For a few years now I've been using leger stems for my eel fishing. I know full well that when the line is tightened they don't stand upright, but once the line is out of the clip they do, which might help the line flow more freely. The way I've been making them is quite simple and so far has withstood casting using two ounce leads. I've tried pulling them …

An update on two projects I’ve been working on—one new and one old—based on some development oversights I’ve made in the past that I’d like to prevent going forward. Howdy folks! It’s been a little while since my last post. I think I gassed myself out a little bit after posting every day during May, but I’ve still been keeping busy working on a couple of projects. eleventy-cache-webmentions v2.1.0 Beta …

On Wednesday, July 24, Prof. Amanda Clarke and I will be appearing at the House of Commons Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates (OGGO) to discuss the research paper that we recently shared as a preprint. If you’d like to tune in you can watch via the ParlVU livestream starting at 11am Eastern Time (8am Yukon time). You can see recaps of our previous two OGGO appearances from Nov. …

Coming up for air. What happened is: I lined up the Next Thing (as mentioned at the end of last quarter’s worknotes), and then it promptly proceeded to entirely consume my time and brain for the next quarter. Which is good, from an income-and-labour perspective, but was somewhat to the detriment of the content strategy here, where I’d hoped to be able to write smaller, spikier pieces of content between …

After attending an Oberwolfach workshop with Kristin DeVleming and Anne-Sophie Kaloghiros where they helped me navigate the literature on K-stability for Fano 3-folds (thanks so much!), the current state of the art can now be found on the K-stability page. I will add more explanations to Fanography after my holidays, for the time being I'll just refer to the K-stability Wikipedia page. I am sure I have made mistakes, and …

A rare poster by Oskar Altherr For more about the extraordinary story of Oskar Altherr, click the links below. Part onehttps://mikedempsey.typepad.com/graphic_journey_blog/2010/02/mountain-man-part-one.htmlPart twohttps://mikedempsey.typepad.com/graphic_journey_blog/2010/03/mountain-man-part-two-.htmlPart threehttps://mikedempsey.typepad.com/graphic_journey_blog/2010/04/mountain-man-part-3.html