Recently updated blogs

The end of the year is already here. A quick recap of 2024, and hopes for 2025.

Image credit: https://unsplash.com/@cathrynlavery It’s been a busy year, so here is a round up of the non-academic writing and podcasts I did in 2024:Writing“Who’s afraid of “killer robots”? Why human decision making remains the central concern of ethical warfare”, article written for the ABC. “Meta now allows military agencies to access its AI software. It poses a moral dilemma for everybody who uses it”, article written for the Conversation. “The …

# Enjoying: Games and Media I recently received my new copy of The Encyclopedia of Radical Helping, and it's so delightful. I wish I had the budget to gift it to all my most caring friends who are part of movement & activism spaces - the two I have gifted it to so far have enjoyed it, too! # Games I've still been greatly enjoying Fallen London, a web-based game …

In December 2023, a minor miracle happened: async fn in traits shipped. As of Rust 1.39, we already had free-standing async functions: pub async fn read_hosts() -> eyre::Result<Vec<u8>> { // etc. } ...and async functions in impl blocks: impl HostReader { pub async fn read_hosts(&self) -> eyre::Result<Vec<u8>> { // etc. } } But we did not have async functions in traits:

I wanted to know how large the deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3-Base repo on Hugging Face was without actually downloading all of the files. With some help from Claude, here's the recipe that worked. First, clone the repo without having Git LFS download the files: GIT_LFS_SKIP_SMUDGE=1 git clone https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3-Base cd DeepSeek-V3-Base The git lfs ls-files -s command lists the files along with their sizes: git lfs ls-files -s 3f4e5fcec2 - model-00001-of-000163.safetensors (5.2 GB) 4fb0c2abdd …

The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast (which I recommend for fans of SNL history!) has been recapping each digital short the comedy…

His'n'hers Christmas presents (oh, there was also a soldering iron and mat, but they're not books...)

Make my easy Yuzu Cha (Citron Tea) with fresh yuzu. This Japanese preserved yuzu syrup makes an invigorating hot drink on cold winter days! READ: Yuzu Cha (Citron Tea) ゆず茶

As I write, Voyager 1 is almost 166 AU from the Sun, moving at 17 kilometers per second. With its Voyager 2 counterpart, the mission represents the first spacecraft to operate in interstellar space, continuing to send data with the help of skilled juggling of onboard systems not deemed essential. Despite communications glitches, the mission continues, and it seems a good time to reprise a piece I wrote on the …

Last season's SeeStar shot...Muchachos, your old Uncle had been keeping a weather eye peeled—literally. The forecasts for Christmas Eve had been gyrating wildly: “clear” to “partly cloudy” to “mostly cloudy.” Then, back to “clear,” but segueing to “RAIN” as the 24th of December approached. So what? If you’re a veteran reader of the Little Old Blog from Possum Swamp, you’ll recall one of my yearly astronomy rituals is taking a …

♪ You better watch out,You better not cry,Better not pout,I’m telling you why:History is coming to town. ♪ These days, it’s not hard to make Santa’s “nice list,” especially with a spy, er, elf always looking over your shoulder. But in centuries past, the holiday season could bring worse fates than coal in your stocking. Read More

(Ark of Time)GM: Matt MorrisonType: RPGSystem: D&D/Arduin GrimoireEdition: 5e (2024)Players: 7Provided: Characters may be provided by GMPower Level: Levels 9-12Variations: If you bring your own PC, 2014 5th edition characters are acceptable.Rules Knowledge: UsefulGame Content: MainstreamThe Ark of Time, a metropolis-sized object, traverses hyperspace paths coterminous with the intra-planar locations of your adventurers. Byproduct from hyper-relativistic passage of this vastly powerful deific-level being, force, or mag-tech forms a Rabbit Hole …

From Opus Unranked, in more or less the order I saw them. If reviewed, I linked. If not, trust me. Happy New Year! Origin (Du Vernay) Richard Brody is right on about this one. About Dry Grasses (Ceylan) Limbo (Sen) Pictures of Ghosts (Filho) Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus (Sora) The Beast (Bonello) Last Summer (Breillat) All You Need Is Death (Duane) Kidnapped (Bellochio) In Our Day (Hong) What You Wish For …

The blog is about building a small fictitious terminus based on a location in Oberfranken, it is merely an amalgam of features of existing locations in Fränkische Schweiz, in short, a plausible fiction. It is presumed that there was a further extension beyond the existing terminus at Behringersmuhle to line known as the Dampfbahn Fränkische Schweiz. The map below shows its route. A short description The facts The line, also …

Dumb tax, bad tax… It’s September 2005; towards the end of the Blair era, a few months into his third term, long after the thrill of the great millennial project has faded, spavined by a series of shockingly bad decisions. The Labour government, re-elected with a much-reduced majority, is unpopular but, somehow, the Tory opposition is even more unpopular. The Conservative party’s leadership campaign is about to begin. One of …