My favorite albums from last year. Balkan brass, an acoustic favorite of 80s returns, Ethio-jazz, Guatemalan singer-guitarist, jazz-rock/Indian classical fusion, and a unique male vocalist. more… My favorite albums from last year. Balkan brass, an acoustic favorite of 80s returns, Ethio-jazz, Guatemalan singer-guitarist, jazz-rock/Indian classical fusion, and a unique male vocalist. more… My favorite albums from last year. Balkan brass, an acoustic ...

I didn't know what to put as a header so here are some iClouds (interesting clouds) in Maine I’ve had a lot of fun working with CKSyncEngine over the last month or so. I truly think it’s one of the best APIs Apple has built, and they’ve managed to take a very complex topic (cloud syncing) and make it very digestible and easy to integrate, without having to get into the weeds of CKOperation and whatnot like you had to in previous years. That being said, there’s a fair bit of wo...

Using a virtual environment is a well-known and important best practice for working on Python projects that use third-party dependencies, i.e. pretty much every Python project out there. But it’s a hassle to make sure you always have the right one activated, that you have one activated, and checking if there’s even one present. Maybe you haven’t created one for this project yet, yet where you’ve checked it out from source control. This post shares a simple shell script that will auto...

It’s been a while since we’ve had a featured bird post here. This delightful friend appeared on Wikipedia’s main page at the end of last year: The silver-breasted broadbill (Serilophus lunatus) is a species of bird in the broadbill family, Eurylaimidae that is found in parts of Southeast Asia. There are seven currently recognised subspecies; the other species in the genus Serilophus, the grey-lored broadbill, was also previously treated as being a subspecies of this species. With ...

I was recently asked by a fellow blogger how I would prefer to be credited in a blog post they were working on. This brought to mind an idea I have been thinking about for a while: how could I indicate the way I would prefer a post on my website to be cited? By having this information readily available, anyone who wants to link to my site would have the information they need to feel confident in their citation. After thinking about this question for a while, I now have a “ How to cite pages o...

The last time I wrote a year in review was in 2019. I ended it with “have a healthy 2020” and we all know how that went. Since it does feel like we’ve been living in hell since 2020 I somehow stopped writing yearly reviews. But I have been itching to capture more of my life and I did have an okay 2025 so here it is. The struggle is, I am a glass half empty person. I’d hate to sound like I am always moaning and complaining but with the current state of the world, I just can’t justify,...

Recently, Kev posted a survey on his site to figure out how people access his content. Big fan of asking people directly and the results are not at all surprising to me. As I said to him, RSS traffic on my server is VERY high. But it's fun to get more datapoints so I created a similar survey and I'd really appreciate it if you could take probably 10 seconds to answer it. It's literally 1 question. I'll keep the form live for a week and then publish the results. Thank you :) ...

2026 will be a year of AI disruption across all of academia. Let's start by talking about AI is changing how we write research papers. Not the research itself (another post), just about the dissemination thereof. Technology has changed research distribution since the invention of paper, and the printing press, typewriters, journals and conferences have all had dramatic effects. But we've already seen such dramatic changes just within my research career from authors doing their own formatting (Te...

You’ve probably seen this famous graph that breaks out various categories of inflation, showing labor-intensive services getting more expensive during the 21st century and manufactured goods getting less expensive. One of the standout items is TVs, which have fallen in price more than any other major category on the chart. TVs have gotten so cheap that they’re vastly cheaper than 25 years ago even before adjusting for inflation . In 2001, Best Buy was selling a 50 inch big screen TV on Bl...

Programming note: Happy New Year! Bits about Money is made possible—and freely accessible to all—by the generous support of professionals who find it useful. If you’re one of them, thank you—and consider purchasing a membership . The U.S. is often maligned as being customer-hostile compared to other comparable nations, particularly those in Europe. One striking counterexample is that the government, by regulation, outsources to the financial industry an effective, virtually comprehen...

Read a story about dogs, and you may remember it the next time you see one bounding through a park. That’s only possible because you have a unified concept of “dog” that isn’t tied to words or images alone. Bulldog or border collie, barking or getting its belly rubbed, a dog can be many things while still remaining a dog. Artificial intelligence systems aren’t always so lucky. Source Read a story about dogs, and you may remember it the next time you see one bounding through a park. ...

This document curates the most common questions Shreya and I received while teaching 700+ engineers & PMs AI Evals. Warning: These are sharp opinions about what works in most cases. They are not universal truths. Use your judgment. 👉 Want to learn more about AI Evals? Check out our AI Evals course . It’s a live cohort with hands on exercises and office hours. Here is a 25% discount code for readers. 👈 Listen to the audio version of this FAQ If you prefer to listen ...

The Case for Blogging in the Ruins by Joan Westenberg Joan makes the case that the modern web, dominated by platforms and algorithms, has stripped away depth, ownership, and genuine thought. Blogging, she argues, is a quiet act of resistance that lets us think clearly, write freely, and leave something real behind. Read Post → I’m not sure where I first heard about Joan and her superb writing, but I’ve been following her for around a year or so now, I t...

Almost a year ago, I found that N100 Mini PCs were cheaper than a decked-out Raspberry Pi 5 . So comparing systems with: 16GB of RAM 512GB NVMe SSD Including case, cooler, and power adapter Back in March last year, a GMKtec Mini PC was $159, and a similar-spec Pi 5 was $208. Today? The same GMKtec Mini PC is $246.99, and the same Pi 5 is $246.95: Today, because of the wonderful RAM shortages 1 , the Mini PC is the same price as a fully kitted-out Raspberry Pi 5. Almost a...

“For man, or for a man, there can be no new beginnings.” — David Zindell, Shanidar Re: A Call for New Aesthetics . At some point in the 20th century, we filled out the last few basis vectors of humanity. We explored the whole game map. This is what it means to live at the end of history: every aesthetic movement, political and economic system you can imagine can be understood as a linear combination of things that have come before. Asking for a new aesthetics is like asking for a n...

As lunar exploration ramps up worldwide , our celestial companion is slated to be explored by increasingly advanced rovers of all sorts over the next 10 years. Not all of them will be successful, and so the reason for this post is not just to garner excitement about the possibilities of near future lunar exploration but also to archive in one place the promises being made so we can assess them in the future instead of only reporting, sharing, and amplifying grand plans. The same rationale is wh...

When I was younger, in my 20s, I assumed that everyone was working “hard,” meaning a solid 35 hours of work a week. Especially, say, university professors and professional engineers. I’d feel terribly guilty when I would be messing around, playing video games on a workday. Today I realize that most people become very adept at avoiding actual work. And the people you think are working really hard are often just very good at focusing on what is externally visible. They show up to the right...

0.0 Context Setting Wednesday, 7 January 2026 in Portland, Oregon where it is wet (but not too wet) and cold (but not too cold), merely a typical brisk dreary day that recalls the less tumultuous and blissfully ignorant late 2009s/early 2010s. I accidentally words this time -- started writing them yesterday as long-form versions of things that caught my attention and were shat out onto Bluesky. 0.1 Events Hallway Track I am rearranging my schedule and hope to bring Hallway Track back ...

The End of The Orbital Index Issue No. 350  | Jan 7, 2026 🚀 🌎 ✌️   ...

When the balloon goes up in time of war, history has shown strategically important fixed targets take a beating. Just ask the Iraqi Air Force about January 17, 1991, the Pakistani Air Force about May 7, 2025, or Admiral Kimmel about the morning of December 7, 1941. Breaking news! The enemy has the precise coordinates of every two-mile runway in the world, knows the location of a majority of our fuel farms, and possesses the stick to reach them. Carl von Clausewitz — a scary brilliant 18th-...

2025 was an interesting year in many ways. One way in which it was interesting for me is that I went from an AI hater to a pretty big user. And so I’ve had a few requests for a “using Claude” guide, so I figure new year, why not give it a shot? The lack of this kind of content was something that really frustrated me starting out, so feels like a good thing to contribute to the world. This post is going to be for software developers that are interested in learning about using these tools ...

I recently came across a cute game called https://enclose.horse. In this game, there is a horse in the middle of a field and a bunch of rivers surrounding it. You have to "enclose" the horse by cutting off its access to the boundaries of the map using a limited set of walls. The game is to create the largest possible space you can under those constraints. It's harder to explain in words than if you just go try the game. What the game is asking you to do, in graph theory terms, is to find a ve...

How to make a cigarette smoke effect using shaders and three.js. How to make a cigarette smoke effect using shaders and three.js.