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2024 is another good year for stone fruit: peaches and apricots have been flavourful and juicy, and our two plum trees are overflowing at the moment. I was surprised that I’ve never blogged about this crisp before, because it’s so good that I’ve made several over the past few weeks. The recipe is from an old Cook’s Illustrated (July/Aug 1998). Most crisp toppings have oatmeal, but this one recommends not-too-finely …

I love cemeteries, those museums not mentioned in guidebooks, which often tell a different kind of history than the official one. Their stones have often been written with different letters, in a different language, with different terms, and sacralized with religious symbols different from those customary in the city today. Their style and motifs follow a standardized set of forms, which are nevertheless almost made private and intimate, and tell …

One can choose to focus on the car crash, or the lessons learned from the car crash. Let’s do a little of both. The proposition of the Living Computer Museum was initially simple, and rather amusing in a Slashdot-baity sort of way: You could apply to get an account on a real, actual ancient Mainframe hooked up to the Internet, which meant you could literally connect into real, actual ancient …

Like your versioning scheme , your changelog is a vital and oft-overlooked method of communication to your users. Unfortunately, it's easy…

The Breaking IceNana (Zhou Dongyu) is a tour guide whose dropped off the face of the earth from her family, constantly dreaming about her previous life as a figure skater before an accident injured her body. Hao Feng (Liu Haoran) is a tourist in town for a wedding who seems to be enamored with dangling his body on the edges of tall places and almost daring himself to jump. Han …

This post is not about electric vehicles. Big providers are going downhill. At first they started to sell your data (duh), then there was cramming blockchain into everything, after that it was NFTs and now AI, and even worse, using your data to train it. Of course I don’t like this. Luckily, I do have my own domain name and paid attention to not get too locked in into any …

Never toured the inside of the Houses of Parliament before, seeing all the red and green colour coded areas (lords and commons – look at the benches next time you see debates in either place) and busts and statues of some of the shapers, for better or worse, of much … Click to continue reading this post → The post Westminster Wonders appeared first on Asymptotia.

A search engine is a vast mechanical Turk - a reinforcement learning engine that uses human activity to understand the web. PageRank used signal from links created by people, but once people started using Google at scale, that usage itself created far more signal: which results you clicked on, how you changed your searches to get better results, and what else you searched for before and after. That then applies …

After all my heart issues in May of 2023 I’ve been working hard to regain what I lost because of all of that. As the old saying goes “Dying really takes it out of you!” Having coded twice on Mother’s Day of last year it really has been a slog to get back! I’m happily back to where I can use my preferred and heavier system for my serous work …

In yesterday's post, we looked at a vintage photoshoot from the mid-'50s that featured some rather peculiar bikinis. Today, let's travel further back in time while staying on the same topic, as we explore a feature published in Life magazine in its July 9, 1945, issue. The cover model, 20-year-old Paddy Ellerton, sported a striped panung bathing suit with trunks that buttoned up the sides and the magazine included an …

A few stunners from a yearly delight – the Flower Exhibition at the Carbon County, Penna Fair. All shot with a fully manual TTArtisan 50mm f/1.2 on a Canon digital back (the TT is a $100 corker of a Chinese copy of a ZEISS Sonnar 50mm, amazing build quality & response. More here) Shooting fully manual was a joy that late afternoon – gold, creamy light soaked everything. Beyond exposure …

Another element often found in the wildcorners of South London are traces of 'Skippers'. This slang term was used by homeless communities of old London, meaning a temporary site used for rough sleeping. The word is derived from Skepper or Skypper; another name for a Barn. The term seems to appear often when referring to the barn as somewhere to sleep the night. It gradually widened to include all general …

A dataset of 187 thousand high resolution face images from movie trailers! Download it from huggingface. # Before the advent of giant web scale image datasets FFHQ used to be considered a big dataset full of images of faces on which many, many GANs were trained. One of the many issues with FFHQ (side note: don’t get me wrong there are lots of others, but I was focused on this …

This will be a talk at the Generalized Computability Theory workshop in Castro Urdiales, Spain, a beautiful setting on the sea near Bilbao, 19-23 August 2024. Abstract. I shall present infinite-time computable analogues of the universal algorithm, which can in … Continue reading →