If you follow any path of ancestry back far enough, you’ll reach the same single point. Whether you begin with gorillas or ginkgo trees or bacteria that live deep in the bowels of the Earth — or yourself, for that matter — all roads lead to LUCA, the “last universal common ancestor.” This ancient, single-celled organism (or, possibly, population of single-celled organisms) was the progenitor of… Source If you follow any path of ancestry back far enough, you’ll reach the same sin...

How to fix jaggies the analytical way with some juicy secrets How to fix jaggies the analytical way with some juicy secrets

Things I love to see in my product include how certain users make use of the data structures, forms, tables, etc., to perform actions that aren’t originally possible within the product itself. For example, imagine I have a data structure for categories, where there is a table of categories and a form to create a new category. These categories can be associated with products, where a product belongs to a category, and a category can have many products. This data structure can also be used fo...

Ready to geek out? In this episode of Podcast Awesome's Nerd Show and Tell, Matt sits down with none other than Zach Leatherman, the tech dynamo and creator behind Eleventy — the static site generator that’s got web devs buzzing. Zach’s tech-world experience is a wild ride of innovation, grit, and love for the open web. With a little help from our team here at Font Awesome, Zach’s pushing to make open-source sustainable and bring back the glory days of personal websites, free from algori...

It’s time to play another game! We haven’t done one of these for a while. I was shopping for a new laundry appliance last week—like a gentleman—when I saw this incredible public answer posted on a seller’s website. Your challenge, should you wish to accept, is to determine what the person asked based on this answer: Hello Annie, We appreciate your product inquiry. The information you’re seeking is readily accessible on our website, specifically listed under the $REDACTED se...

My website search engine uses text search to identify documents relevant to a given term. Up until recently, the search engine treated every word in a term independently. For example, consider the query “all too well”. Documents would be found that contain any of the words in the query. Then, the results would be ordered according to their lexical relevance, as measured by TF/IDF (which I replaced with BM25). TF/IDF and BM25 do not account for the proximety of words in documents. This me...

0.0 Context Setting Sunday, 17 November 2024 in Portland, Oregon where it is cold and not raining and I have eaten half an orange scone. But it’s an American scone, and it doesn’t come from the scone region of England, so it doesn’t count and is an example of really bad appropriation. 0.1 Events Nothing to report at this time. 1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention 1.1 Fine, Social Networks OK, so part of what my bit of the internet is talking and excited about lately is Bl...

Why such a weird but hopefully funny headline, I hear you ask. Because I write for you , not social media or SEO. 🌝 I’m honored to welcome space writer and author Gurbir Singh as an individual sponsor of both my Moon Monday and Indian Space Progress newsletters for another year! Not sponsored: Among his many books, I quite liked The Atlas of Space Rocket Launch Sites and the overview of India’s Space Programme . 🚀 Dating volcanic samples from the Moon’s farside The Moon...

Energy self-reliance is frequently categorized as a philosophical or political position and sometimes as a one-size-fits-all solution to the energy issues we face. After all, even the "we" here is only meaningful for action if we're talking about specific situations. While I can't speak for all conditions, I'm sharing in today's newsletter some of my key lessons learned from nearly a decade of residential energy analysis, combined with several years running solar at net-negative. I'll share m...

I participated in an Ars Live conversation with Benj Edwards of Ars Technica today, talking about that wild period of LLM history last year when Microsoft launched Bing Chat and it instantly started misbehaving, gaslighting and defaming people. Here's the video of our conversation. I ran the video through MacWhisper, extracted a transcript and used Claude to identify relevant articles I should link to. Here's that background information to accompany the talk. A rough timeline of ...

A very powerful new coding assistance feature made its way into GitHub Copilot at the end of October. This new “multi-file editing” capability expands the scope of AI assistance from small, localized suggestions to larger implementations across multiple files. Birgitta Böckeler tries out this new capability and finds out how useful its changes tend to be, and wonders about what feedback loops are needed with them. more… A very powerful new ...

Save the date: FEBRUARY 28, 2025 . That’s the day that Vertical Entertainment will release IN THE LOST LANDS   in theaters nationwide.   Milla Jovovich stars as Gray Alys, with Dave Bautista as the hunter Boyce. Paul W.S. Anderson, whose previous work includes HUNTER HUNTER, EVENT HORIZON, and the RESIDENT EVIL series, directed the film.   Anderson and Constantin Werner wrote the adaptation, based on my short story.  “In the Lost Lands” was one of my earliest fantasies, first p...

Meta note: follow me on Bluesky if you are so inclined. I've been going through some historical stuff lately. Been on a history kick. We went to see the Robert Caro Power Broker exhibit at The New York Historical and it really got me in a mood to be digging through some old musty documents. The paper SEQUEL: A STRUCTURED ENGLISH QUERY LANGUAGE by Don Chamberlin and Ray Boyce is as old and as musty as they come and describes the first real incarnation of what would later become SQL. App...

You may be familiar with an oft-repeated factoid about the word bear , referring to mammals of the family Ursidae. It typically goes something like this: Did you know that “bear” doesn’t derive from the creature’s original name? It was feared that speaking its true name would summon one, and over time the original name fell out of favor as people adopted “the brown one” or similar as a euphemism, which eventually evolved into the “bear” that we know today. The historical tru...

https://austinhenley.com/blog/mirrorlang.html https://austinhenley.com/blog/mirrorlang.html https://austinhenley.com/blog/mirrorlang.html

I like writing Javascript without a build system and for the millionth time yesterday I ran into a problem where I needed to figure out how to import a Javascript library in my code without using a build system, and it took FOREVER to figure out how to import it because the library’s setup instructions assume that you’re using a build system. Luckily at this point I’ve mostly learned how to navigate this situation and either successfully use the library or decide it’s too difficult a...

I watched this video last night and I was utterly enthralled throughout the entire thing. In this video, a nun answers random questions all about her life, religion and a all kinds of other stuff. I'm a proud atheist, but I'm not a bigot - I'm happy to talk about things like religion, and I enjoy hearing other people's perspectives. Especially when it's something I have little knowledge of, like the inner-workings of a nun's life. I would love to sit down with Sister Gabriel over a bottle (o...

For the WeblogPoMoAMA challenge created by  Annie . I’m answering a question from  Stéphane :  Are you always as tongue in cheek as your blog makes us believe? Whatever would make you ask that question? Okay, so the real answer is I’m often quite serious and earnest. And when people speak to me with seriousness or deep emotion, I try to meet the tone or situation appropriately. I do not always succeed. 😬 Not too long ago my youngest daughter was upset about something and w...

In my last post (see here) I invited you to work on the following question: Find a \(d\) such that --There is a 2-coloring of \(R^d\) with no mono unit square. --For all 2-colorings of \(R^{d+1}\) there is a mono unit square.  Actually I should have phrased my question as What do we know about d?    Here is what we know a) \(d \ge 2\).  There is a 2-coloring of  \(R^2\) with no mono unit square. This is easy and I leave to you.  b) \(d\le 5\). For all 2-colorings of \(R^6\) there is a mon...

LLMs accelerated with eGPU on a Raspberry Pi 5 After a long journey getting AMD graphics cards working on the Raspberry Pi 5 , we finally have a stable patch for the amdgpu Linux kernel driver, and it works on AMD RX 400, 500, 6000, and (current-generation) 7000-series GPUs. With that, we also have stable Vulkan graphics and compute API support. When I wrote about getting a Radeon Pro W7700 running on the Pi , I also mentioned AMD is not planning on supporting Arm with...

Over at Talk Python, I just finished converting our existing web app from Pyramid to Quart and from synchronous to asynchronous web code. And I did a big write up in case it helps anyone on similar journeys: From the Talk Python blog : The code powering talkpython.fm is highly modern and leverages many new Python concepts. It makes extensive use of Pydantic with its entire data access layer powered the Beanie ODM. It has type hints at all the architectural boundaries (e.g. data access lay...

👋 You are reading Maker Stations — your Sunday newsletter, where we feature desk tours with makers and creators. Name: Kristina Fostovets Location: Spain Occupation: Illustrator, Content Creator Room size: 13 m² (140 ft²) Social media: Instagram , LinkedIn Website: Buntarke Hello! Tell us a bit about yourself Hi, I’m Kris, but most people know me by my alias, “Buntarke.” I’m an independent illustrator and content creator currently based in Spain. As a freelance illustra...

While redesigning my photography website , I've looked into the Open Graph (OG) images, which are displayed when sharing a link on social media or messaging apps. Here's an example from WhatsApp: For each photo that I publish, I create a WebP thumbnail for the gallery. I wanted to use those as OG images, but the WebP support was lacking , so I've been creating an additional JPG variant just for Open Graph. I was interested in seeing how things have changed in the last 2.5 years. I've t...