Recently updated blogs

I I’ve mentioned before that I take a few walks a day; I have two dogs, one of which is a fairly high energy beast. Normally, we head up to the river in the morning, crossing the French Quarter. At the start of the year, some asshole plowed into a crowd and killed people, and as a result, parts of the French Quarter were blocked off. It was largely re-opened …

Aviation Book Reviews Vought F7U-3 Cutlass Hardcover –2024, Crecy Tommy H Thomason and Alfred C Casby FIVE STARS When this popped up on a Facebook page (I think it was The Aviation Enthusiast Book Club), the aviation writer Bill Sweetman wryly replied that 384 pages devoted to the Cutlass were rather too generous a treatment and […]

Last night we spontaneously decided to go see A Complete Unknown, the new Bob Dylan biopic, and ended up at a cinema-plex in the Montreal suburb of Cote-St-Luc. The parking lot was empty, the shops in the dimly lit mall already shuttered; fake plants, vibrating recliners and plastic carnival horses on springs had been pushed into the center of the atrium to accommodate the brooms and mops of the late …

Book review by George S: Death at the Opera is Gladys Mitchell’s fifth novel featuring Mrs Bradley, her ferocious reptilian detective. It was first published by Grayson in 1934, and appeared as Penguin number 217 in 1939 (price 6d.) Cover of the first edition, 1934 The title might seem misleading, since the setting is not an opera house but a school, and the key event is the murder of an …

I tried reading this with an open mind, but then I came across this: This is a very easy fix. If I paste the error back into the LLM it will correct it. Though in this case, as I’m reading the code, it’s quite clear to me that I can just delete the line myself, so I do. Via Lobsters, How I program with LLMs My initial reaction to this …

new theory

When I last wrote about AI on this blog three years ago, I spoke of it being a tool with the potential to transform scientific discovery, but the application I described was primarily theoretical. For AI to be a meaningful tool in R&D, I argued, we needed better sources of “truth” – better data sets that AI tools could query and learn from over time – and technology capable of …

When haters deny HTML’s status as a programming language, they’re showing they don’t understand what a language really is. Language is not instructing an interlocutor what to do in a way that leaves no room for other interpretations; it is better and richer than that. Like human language, HTML is conversational. It is remarkably adept at adapting to context. It can take a different shape on any machine, from a …

Normally I don’t write book reviews, because I do not have much to add to the thousands of reviews already out there, and would rather spend my time in the next book than typing words about what I just read. Still. Recently I finally was able to break my dry spell of reading and enjoyed a collection of books that have some themes in common yet are very different in …

And we’re off, into 2025. Before we get too far, it’s time to take stock (pardon the pun) of 2024. I’ll follow the 7 point approach I’ve used for the last few years, starting with the wider market context. Q1 How did markets do? December saw falls across most asset classes – arguably reverting to the mean after the November gyrations caused by the Trump election win. The Australian dollar …

A forthcoming paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics (QJE), "A Cognitive View of Policing" (htm), reports results from a field experiment showing that teaching police officers to "consider different ways of interpreting situations they encounter" led to "reductions in use of force, [and] discretionary arrests" (abstract). In this post I explain why, having spent... The post [122] Arresting Flexibility: A QJE field experiment on police behavior with about 40 …

We love a classic (tomato-based) chili, but a CREAMY chili? It’s hard to say no to! Mix up your chili rotation with this creamy vegan white bean chili with spicy green chiles, sweet corn, and nutrient-packed spinach or kale. It’s a cozy, subtly spiced, nourishing meal that comes together in just 30 minutes. Let us show you how it’s done! This EASY vegan white bean chili starts with a simple …

I wish Slack would spend half as much time on improving core functionality as they do on these obnoxious, enterprise-grade notifications for features I don’t need. This one is particularly dumb: It’s from a Slack workspace with exactly two users – me included. All our communication there happens in channels.

Searching for VictoriaLogs on search.nixos.org gave me no results, so I ran victorialogs from Docker. But at some point I did search for victorialogs on nixpkgs and realized that the binary is built with victoriametrics.

Back to H.L. Mencken and his book The American Language, he says in Supplement One (1945) that one of the Britishisms “that deserve American adoption” is “‘pub-crawl’ (a tour of saloons).” I’m pretty sure my readers don’t need that definition, so familiar has the phrase become on this side of the Atlantic. But it definitely had British origins. It sprang from more more specific sorts of alcoholic “crawls.” The OED‘s …