> Notes...

“It is the giant African harvester ant queens, which are large and coloured red, that are most prized by international ant collectors – one can fetch up to £170 ($220) on the black market, which tends to operate online.”

I didn’t know ants were so desirable. It is mind blowing! It is also the first time I read about the environmental consequences for the areas from which the species are being taken, and not for the areas to which they are being introduced.

This is a sobering reality to witness, even secondhand. Everything has a cost in prison, it truly is dystopian. Want to treat an inmate to some food? Microwavable sandwiches and pizzas cost $7.95. Yoghurts parfait cost $4.50. Soda cost $3.50. All the food is of fairly rubbish quality, mind it. I don’t want to get into the price of food packages that can be send, up to four times a month. Families, of course, carry the financial burden.

I understand some people have done truly bad things; the degree of gravity varies from inmate to inmate. Yet, what I am describing is not correctional, it is pure profit-making at the expense of the innocent. Yes, nobody forces anyone to spend money while visiting, but as no outside food is allowed, it is almost impossible to avoid.

When watching movies, you ought to give them a try sometime, even when their title might not sound enticing. That was the case with “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” (★★★★☆) . At a little over 2 hours it was a long movie—by western standards. It has short stories making up for the entire movie, and while some were better than others, the movie was, overall, worth to watch.

Saw “The Ridiculous Six” (★★☆☆☆) last night because someone I care about quite a bit shed laughing tears while recounting portions of it. As you can tell by my rating I was unimpressed, yet, still a humorous movie to break away from the stresses of life.

The very first “Avatar” (★★★★☆) movie was the only one worth a lick in my opinion. Everything else in the franchise is beyond boring.

“Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.”

I guess someone we know is closer to the All Mighty than we thought:

“We’re going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We’re going to bring them back to the stone ages, where they belong.”

Oh yes. Certainly a religion of peace.

“Let’s run OpenClaw on the enterprise”, said no one. Until now. Oh dear, oh dear.

I took Ammu yesterday to buy a couple of chickens. This market place lets you select a live bird, and the vendor then kills and cleans it for you. It felt odd, especially for someone who eats chicken as much as I do, but I found it abhorrent.

It’s easier for me to accept the practice when I don’t see it happen or think about it too much. Instead, I like to picture the chickens we eat as dying of heart attacks after being pitted against one another in a marathon. Chickens are naturally competitive, often pushing themselves to their limits, and that can be the cause of their death. At least that’s the story I tell myself, and I will stick to it.

“When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.”

That quote from Futurama’s “Godfellas” episode resonates so true, specially after being asked for week’s accomplishments, or anything relevant, and otherwise noteworthy. More often than not “things worked, no complains were heard” is a supreme achievement.

Watched “The Thomas Crown Affair” (★★★★★) , for the, oh dear, I lost count how many times I have seeing that movie, over the weekend. Though I have watched it many times, I am sure I will again. Also watched “From the World of John Wick: Ballerina” (★★☆☆☆) which, on the other hand, I am sure to never see again.

Saw “Lady Snowblood” (★★★★☆) , on Tubi. It was a reminisce, kind of, of the Zatoichi movies I like so much, but with a female lead. If you are not used to old Japanese movies, they are bit of an acquired taste, but very rewarding. Their cinematography, specifically, is really, really good.

George is making the AI do coding wonders. And he is just starting, so I can’t imagine what the extremely advanced is doing with it. The times we live in!

Holy macaroni! Blue is back! I am glad to see them writing, and doing seemingly well. Let me pin this note, to see if they see it and reach out. I truly would like to know what happened!

I feel morally obligated to say I did not write the code in this repository myself. This project is an exploration of using LLMs to carry out tasks based on my direction. The majority of prompts I used to get here were derived using the socratic method, genuine curiosity, and a hunch that NVMe supporting inference is underutilized despite being a (slow but) perfectly valid form of memory.

Translation: I slopcoded this sh*t. Not that it is super bad, I just found funny the way it was written.

➝ Via Hacker News.

Several accounts on the online platform Polymarket laid bets on a US-Iran ceasefire over the weekend that appeared to show signs of insider knowledge, according to experts.

But of course there is insider trading. It has happened before, and it will happen again and again while the current regime is in power.

➝ Via Hacker News.

They push “120B” without explaining active parameters. They advertise 80GB without clearly explaining the split pool. They quote impressive local compute numbers while avoiding the architectural bottleneck joining the two halves of the system. They lean on academic research they did not originate. They present as a U.S. startup while the visible technical and operational trail runs heavily through China and Hong Kong. And they ask backers to fund all of this without clearly naming the people responsible for delivering it.

Yeah, no, I will pass, thank you. I saw their Kickstarter a couple of weeks ago, and it read as an April Fool’s (not that it is, it just left me kind of feeling that way).

Ubuntu (or maybe this comes from Debian) has the most backward, annoying, exasperating package management, in my opinion. Imagine the following:

apt-get update
[...]
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
42 packages can be upgraded. Run 'apt list --upgradable' to see them.

Then we run upgrades:

apt-get upgrade -y
[...]
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
The following upgrades have been deferred due to phasing:
[ list of all 42 packages mentioned on the update ]

And, of course, Landscape will report all those machines with phasing packages as having “package upgrades available” and, often, as having “security upgrades available”, but there are none—or nothing can be done about it, “due to phasing”.

By submitting Your Content on or through the Services, you grant Vercel a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, fully paid, sublicensable and transferable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, reproduce, distribute, display, publish, store, perform, and create derivatives of Your Content to provide and improve the Services, develop new products and services, secure and protect the Services and third parties from fraud, abuse, malware, malicious files or content, viruses and the like.

Wow! I wonder why people still uses this, with such draconian terms.

We watched “One Battle After Another” (★★★★☆) over the weekend, or was it Monday night? Anyway, can’t recall. What I remember, though, is being a decent movie, and I am glad the kid brought it up. I learned after watching it that it was an Oscar winner as well. Recommended!

Tonight is the night and I kid you not: I am going to bring two bags of popcorn—one for me, one for Ashlii—to it. It is going to the a HOA to remember.

Update: 17 Mar 2026 @ 19:18:01

Well, the meeting went much better than expected with the caveat that I ended up becoming the president of the HOA. That’s good, and bad but, hey, as it is an unpaid job, if it starts harming me I can simply quit.

Let’s take a unilateral decision, boast we can end it in record time, then ask for help. Oh, and threaten if no help is offered or received. And that’s just explaining the whole thing to a kindergartener. One really can’t make this sh*t up.

This one was too funny, and too good to pass. “I think they are saying ’no’, to me asking for permission, meaning ‘just do it, stop asking’”. LOL. Too funny!

➝ Via Hacker News.

Available for: iPhone 6s (all models), iPhone 7 (all models), iPhone SE (1st generation), iPad Air 2, iPad mini (4th generation), and iPod touch (7th generation).

An 11 years old device still receives security updates from Apple. Meanwhile Google:

Nexus devices get security updates for at least 3 years from when the device first became available on the Google Store, or at least 18 months from when the Google Store last sold the device, whichever is longer. After that, we can’t guarantee more updates.

How do you like them apples?

These release notes are painstakingly and lovingly hand-crafted by human Ghostty maintainers, including the full changelog. They take a combined 16+ hours to write, so please enjoy. 🥰

Just upgraded to the very shiny Ghostty version 1.3.0. In a world where almost any application update boringly reads “bugs fixes and improvements”, Ghostty 1.3.0 release notes are something to appreciate, and admire.

We have VIP designations at work, specifically when fulfilling service requests. As the acronym implies, they are higher up management, considered “very important people”. Then there is the rest of us. My approach when serving anyone is, everyone is a VIP. Granted, for the originally labelled as such, all tasks get dropped to fulfil their requests. So, there is a sense of emergency, but other than that, I treat everyone as if they were VIP.

Some colleagues’ approach would follow the adage “give someone a fish, and you will feed them for one day; teach them to fish, and you will feed them for a lifetime”. So they encourage, or often require, a service request before any work is performed. Now, would they do the same to the VIPs? Absolutely not. Thus, if a service request comes to me, excellent. If it doesn’t, I create one on their behalf.

The Human Em Dash standard introduces a new Unicode code point and an associated Human Attestation Mark (HAM) that allows writers to signal that the dash in question originated from a human cognitive process involving hesitation, revision, or mild frustration.

LOL. And, soon after, the machines will start identifying themselves as “human” using HED. Problem solved, right? 🤭

It’s not even April 1st yet. This is retarded. Humans won’t be able to tell it’s a human attesting em dash just by looking at it. And LLMs will just use it to trick people.

Indeed. Come on, really, what are we thinking?

➝ Via Hacker News.

I recently came across Donohoe photo albums, and have since gone through all their photos with delight, and a bit of jealousy. Such beautiful photos, so many interesting places, and all so well presented! I am certainly a fan, I can say. Oh, and you could run a similar site too!

I left my Mac’s volume too loud last night, so today while working the hourly time announcement was bothering me. It turns out you can control the volume from the CLI. It was as easy as connecting to the Mac via SSH, then:

osascript -e "set volume output volume 10"

Where 10 is the volume you want to set. Setting it to 0, well, very similar to mutting it (which can also be done, but I didn’t bother).

Sent an abuse report to AWS, and, even thought I provided the offending IP, and correct timezone from get go, they made me repeat it three times, on three different emails. 🤯

Three maiko named Takegawa (right, covering eyes), Tomeko (center, covering ears), and Satogiku (left, covering mouth), circa 1928. This photo has been posted several times on Reddit, but almost nothing else about it. Apparently these photos weren’t candid snapshots, but carefully choreographed studio sessions meant to highlight the charm and wit of the geisha apprentices. See some more examples to get a better idea of what I am talking about.

The Met, who keeps sending us expensive mail aiming to gain our support through a membership—which I am entertaining to get, actually—has expanded its collections by offering high definition 3D scans of many of their artifacts. Very, very cool! Hopefully that 3D collection will grow.

Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Sunday night the kid and I watched “Skyfall” (★★★★☆) , I figure for the fourth time? It was the first, though, that I paid closed attention to remember some of the poem that Q recited (above), “Ulysses”, by Lord Tennyson.

Defuddle extracts the main content from web pages. It cleans up web pages by removing clutter like comments, sidebars, headers, footers, and other non-essential elements, leaving only the primary content.

Kepano’s defuddle is a handy little thing that I am going to be using often when saving knowledge as Markdown. It really does a very good job at bypassing sidebars, leaving only the main content.

As I finished washing Horsie’s wagon, and was about to apply tyre shine, it started to rain. Had to rush to move the car into the garage, where I finished the cleaning just now. From 16:00 to almost 19:00, and I didn’t even have time to apply a ceramic coating. I am tired now, boss. Dog tired.

This person took a few photos on a blizzard in New York, and they look like something out of a game. I like them very much!

My Ghostty configuration under macOS, in case it is handy as a starter point for anyone. As you can see, it has one macOS specific line, and my font of choice, Hermit.

# Theme
theme = iTerm2 Pastel Dark Background

# Mouse and cursor
cursor-style-blink = true
cursor-color = #33FF33
mouse-hide-while-typing = true
shell-integration-features = no-cursor

# Key bindings (tmux pane ALT arrow left/right)
# Unbind the default word-navigation behaviour
keybind = alt+left=unbind
keybind = alt+right=unbind

# Font
font-family = Hermit
font-size = 17

# Window and colours
background-opacity = 0.85
background-blur = 10
foreground = #33FF33
maximize = true
macos-titlebar-style = tabs
split-divider-color = #505050
unfocused-split-opacity = 0.5
window-padding-x = 20
window-padding-y = 20

Fitness, with its time to stand up nagging truly needs to back off. I mean, I am sitting on the toilet, trying to do what we all do, you know, and not even there it gives up. Next I know, “Time to stand up” comes up, like, really?! Bugger off!

While I still prefer using the OS default applications, I have decided, for the time being, to use Ghostty as my default terminal application on macOS (maybe on Linux too, we’ll see). I find it fast, highly configurable—but not as cumbersome to configure as iTerm2—, and simple. Having used iTerm2 in the past, it was relatively easy for me to break my vanillist vow on this one.

Karl Marx was resurrected and came to the USSR. He was shown factories, hospitals, cities and villages, etc. Finally, he requested to be allowed to make a speech on TV. The Politburo hesitated as they were afraid he might say something they wouldn’t approve. Marx promised he would say only one sentence. Under this condition, the Politburo agreed. Karl Marx uttered the following sentence: “Workers of all countries, forgive me.”

From “One Hundred Russian Jokes”. Quite a few good ones in there. I dare you to see if you can understand them all (I don’t).

A lot of what I am seeing on the tubes as of late isn’t vibe coding. There isn’t any vibing in it. It is full slop coding. So much that I think is going to become a problem; a big one.