contingencies

As an Australian aware of Chicago's Irish heritage and the implied weight balancing our antipodean clime, I'd suggest "Tip O'Dea".

PS. If visiting Chicago check out the Lincoln Park Conservatory, an amazing historic plant collection with one of the world's best ferneries, very close to downtown. https://www.lincolnparkconservancy.org/projects/conservatory...

In period relativistic perspective it's worth keeping in mind that there are many 20th century plague outbreaks that were severe yet are not discussed in the history books. I am aware of some in Asia. These were just as horrifying, with large portions of the population dying simultaneously.

So we should just cede management to the AI and get about solely in personal transport that is tracked and logged and authorized at every turn?

Yes, this is classic gentoo: recover using some massive hassle technique then tell everyone about it, incrementally growing your knowledge of system failure modes. But once you'd done that a few times you realised keeping your system cleanly structured and doing a clean reinstall was probably a far better strategy for personal time and sanity preservation if you actually wanted to get anything done...

once? You obviously weren't using it long! All sorts of portage tree screwups would affect you periodically that weren't your fault. Details escape me, it just happened, my recollection is circa annually to 24 months. Usually accompanied by some tacit admission of guilt in an enews item. Longer installs were a rarity without a combination of paranoia and luck or a working snapshot setup.

One thing Gentoo would also let you do, unlike any other distro I'm aware of, was install managed cross-compilation toolchains with deep control preserved. An awesome feature if you are building images for variant embedded devices at any frequency.

Looked in to ZFS snapshots and pretty sure I had it working for awhile, the challenge was the boot sequence required for a custom kernel and rootfs was pretty non-transparent when you wanted to combine the snapshots with encryption and GPT disk label support. Or that's my recollection, anyway. I think a lot of gentoo users these days probably just use genkernel and run scripts for initial root fs generation, ceding control, but that's sort of against the mentality that brought me to gentoo IMHO. Also, stick with openrc...

I used it on an off as my daily machine for around 15-20 years I think. It is fast in terms of execution-on-hardware speed, and genuinely puts you in control. For a certain kind of user this is more important than anything.

These days I'm on OSX mostly because of the frequency of business trips meant I needed something small and portable a few years ago, and now the hardware is so much better than what you can get for the PC world. Plus, I am hyper-conscious of my time and can't really afford to be fiddling with new system libraries, kernel configurations and so forth.

Frankly Gentoo was never polished, at some point the system state would break and you'd have to reinstall, and after enough iterations I'd started to err to Ubuntu at some point. But it was by far the most fun of any Linux I used, save perhaps Slackware which was my first.

I think in a few years' time the next machine I build will be a non-Apple ARM custom portable, hopefully running Gentoo, with a lot of custom machining and hardware features.

So... Multi-target = {chat, web, markdown}; Audience = {human, bot}; USPs = {speed, unified model}

Since I don't believe the maintenance challenges of a non-unified model are particularly high-friction in the LLM era (even if they may be error-prone, since that is usually solved with CI/CD or TDD), the nominal utility of this angle of architectural enhancement is considered dubious.

With regard to speed, there is no hardware shortage at present for any of these simple rendering tasks.

Overall, a nice efficient codebase but suffering a bit from NIH syndrome solving no particularly acute problem. Unless a community forms rapidly, this will probably die.

I'd like to see the benchmark compared to, eg. static files served with binserve.

Also don't forget changing anything is a great opportunity for grift and politicking. Test. Evaluate. Plan. Consult. Pilot. Source. Phase out. Phase in. Maintain. A lot of public money to distribute! A lot of project credit-taking and future-progress-aligning to be image-jacked!

I'm partial to both quince and cedrate.

FUTURIST! Love your style. I hope you also adopt YYYY-MM-DD ISO dating.

Nice job. There's a group here in Australia who pass around crazy shirts with 'this is a conversation starter' aimed at men's suicide prevention. Neat marketing gimmick, maybe you can partner with them and use it. https://trademutt.com/pages/this-is-a-conversation-starter

Sounds like your semi-rural location isn't helping. FWIW I have recruiters in Sydney in my network who are hitting me up on a semi-weekly basis because they are dry. I think the situation macro-economically is just really bad. Based on the stock market situation this week, I'd guess it's going to get a whole lot worse. First, be thankful you have a clean, safe place to live with a healthy family and just do stuff. So many people don't have those boxes checked and would kill for your position. Maybe try another money generating exhausting activity like woodwork or something. Worst case you do it for a bit and it's not for you. Generally, trades in rural areas in Australia are in constant demand. I knew a guy who used to work for flying doctors who got in to construction management and is happy as larry and making bank, so it does happen that transitioning in from non-tradie areas can be a winning move.

Try going to somewhere overseas within the same timezone with lower living expenses. This will be easier than living in a vehicle and more interesting and does not preclude flying back for jobs.

I get it, but most of the world will find that annoying. Hence, intelligent default.

This is cool. I have a friend getting in to furniture making and forwarded this, however: (1) You need a metric default outside of the US. (2) >4 shelves does not work. (3) 'Other' hardwood type not possible. (4) Could not find a way to get chamfer to render on slab top.

Came to post this. These things are frigging amazing and like $20. Absolutely everyone should have one. Really you can floss and brush and it still gets stuff. I wish they existed when I was younger! Buy one! Thank me later!

On the 'dentists don't really know what they're doing' front, my kid's orthodontist ($$$$) describes himself as a "fencing contractor". Conversely, I got the water flosser tip from an Indonesian dentist who I hired opportunistically on holiday for a clean; he turned up in flip-flops but decanted to bare feet during operating and gave the most sage advice I've ever had in 40+ years of dentists: BUY A WATER FLOSSER. Terimakasih, Doktor!

Seconded. I have two copies of this book, love it, and just lent one out last week. In exchange, I received Master and Commander, which is an awesome reminder of the bygone floridity of educated English. Currently also working through Mumford's Technics and Civilization (1934) in connection with a pan-cultural inquiry in to machine tool evolution stemming from workshop-based inspiration in my robotics lab.

The stick charts are generally not 'charts' in the normal English sense but rather more like memory palaces for not-to-scale directed graphs. I have a big interest in Pacific cultural artifacts as I started a collection some years ago and live amongst it. Nothing like a giant jungle-struck hardwood oar or a primitive giant balanced hafted axe to make buttering your croissant with illicit Iranian jam an enhanced pleasure at breakfast.

Defence media can't really talk politics, so who can try to read between the lines? There must be a lot of money riding on Trump's political career for Musk to do this, as it's bad for his image and his company's image.

The future is already here it's just not evenly distributed.

You got further than I did. I checked them out and went back to manual prompting. Just don't have a need for codegen that much, and when I do I'd prefer to be in control.

In the image, the plate reads as La douche.

I grew up with a Citroën DS. It wasn't very practical but it was interesting.

If I were in western car manufacturers' position and needed to design a new vehicle today I'd make it a folding ebike, possibly with a cover option, with a good integrated lock and baggage/lifestyle hooks to an ecosystem. I'd sell subscriptions and proactively handle maintenance. I'd buy high density high value autonomous parking sites in major city centers and manage them exclusively through auto-valet.

There are two transit modes: long distance and short distance. For the second, bikes are already ideal. For the former, you want higher speed without compromising safety and some weather protection. This could match a recumbent ebike using specific routes.

Which inherent limitations did you recognize in the metaphor before commencing this research?

So many of these scripts basically derive from Brahmi which was famously rock-cut (Ashoka monuments). That type of medium is well suited to angles. Major scripts including Tamil were also enscribed on to metal .. this image shows an evolution directly away from angular toward rounded. https://www.instagram.com/p/CpB1ygEPwJt/

Presumably this reflects a shift from courtly scribe closed-door literacy toward more popular literacy specifically including temple-trained monks who presumably could not have afforded either stonemasons or metal plates for general use.

I am fairly sure this is because, in many abugida scripts, the dominant writing material was palm leaf and the tool was a sharpened point or curved scalpel-like knife rather than a pen. If you curve inward from both sides, you don't have to contort your hand in a 180 degree pattern, which runs the risk of tearing the palm leaf. This is also why the shapes are all curves instead of hard 90 degree angles.

In the words of a Scottish comedian, "The average person is Chinese." https://youtu.be/LsEhNMy8svo?t=98

More concretely DwarfStar M5 128GB Deepseek 4.1 flash 1K tokens @ 29s, 5K tokens + reasoning @ 147s, 10k token prompt @ 463 tokens/s = 22s. Hardware buy-in USD$7K / AUD$8.5K / EUR€6.8K. At typical workloads, ROI is still poor vs. current-era subsidies, but owning hardware is good for privacy/longevity/connectivity independence. Whether you actually consider Apple hardware 'owned' is a valid and thought provoking question.

Don't forget LLMs can now design efficient high speed hardware systems, a traditional slow-down for many attackers which represents a significant barrier to scalable next-gen attacks falling. Unfortunately memory prices are through the roof, but that isn't always significant.

For speech to text UX I currently use https://handy.computer/ as it's cross platform and open source. With that I am currently using Parakeet Unified EN 0.6B and finding it excellent. Often I use it to talk to AIs without giving them audio, which works very well. Honestly, I would never go back to typing now. Promised since ~Y2K, the tech is finally here. You really notice it when you wake up at 2AM and don't want to wake people ... it can get really annoying reverting to key-tapping. My long-gnawing fear of losing my hands to RSI is no longer a thing, and I can focus on losing them to another hobby: like sailing or machining! Just bought a band saw...