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Notes on The Pole: A Novel by J.M. Coetzee (Liveright, 2023)1. "The decision to invite the Pole ... is arrived at only after some soul-searching." The Pole then is the soul being searched for. And reading The Pole by J.M. Coetzee is an attempt to find the soul in a human being. 2. If our searchee is Witold, the Pole, our searcher is Beatriz, a board member of a concert …

Last year I decided that I want to share my most important learnings about engineering, teams and quite frankly personal mental health. My hope is that those who want to learn from me find it useful. This is a continuation to this. Over the years, I've been asked countless times: “What advice would you give to young programmers or engineers?” For the longest time, I struggled to answer. I wasn't …

“I thought we were done with all the trippy science stuff” – Irey West In spite of Irey’s quote, this volume of THE FLASH continues to be more than a little trippy – but we do have at least one thing confirmed that explains some of the strange happenings. Wally battles Weather Wizard, while Wally continues to be in the Watchtower – and that’s not the strangest thing going on. …

It’s Boxing Day and I’m a small pile on the sofa. We successfully Did Christmas at ours this year, and I never want to see another mince pie (until next year). So, what better time than now to look back on the year? Skip to bits you care about: The year in... ...big life things ...conferences ...gardening ...travel ...books ...podcasts ...music ...video games ...blog posts ...Christmas dinner The year in... …

Lego Advent Calendar Every year, my lovely wife prepares a custom advent calendar for me. And, because I loved it as a kid and still do, she puts Lego in it. Everyday, I get a few more pieces and build a new model. At the last day I get the manual and build the actual set. It's great fun. This year's set was Set 60431: Space Explorer and Alien Life. …

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 …