Observations on the world and its inhabitants
Do you need to know exactly how the electronics in your car works – or how the transmission works – before you drive your car? Hover your mouse over these these 3 dots just in case. That’s the point. It is about how I did that 3 dots thing. I don’t know – I did ...
For years, Generation Z has been spoken of as the newest arrival: the generation of smartphones, social media, and identity politics . Gen Z is no longer the youngest generation. Behind it comes Generation Alpha, a name still unfamiliar to many adults, although its oldest members are already entering adolescence. That discovery opens a larger ...
The word ‘code’ is enough to send people into sudden panic attacks. If you had one, or are about to, please act in your own best interests and leave now. What is presented is a pathway and method for analysing documents, creating diagrams and gaining insights into their contents. It’s reusable, and tweakable. If you ...
Section 1: The Challenge of Interpretive Texts Policy documents, legal texts, and regulatory instruments share a common feature: they are dense, layered, and conditional. A single provision may depend on a definition found elsewhere. That definition may itself contain exceptions or cross-references. The result is a text that is difficult to hold in working memory ...
Imagine it is 1989. I am sitting before an Amstrad PCW, a cream-coloured machine with a small green screen, a substantial keyboard and a three-inch floppy disk drive. When the disk is accessed, the machine whirs. When the printer begins, it clatters with mechanical determination. I do not think of it as a computer. People ...
I’ve been running most of my AI work through DeepSeek V4 Pro’s API for a while now. On heavy days it’s about three large documents attached, a long conversation, drafted outputs at the end. It felt cheap. I wanted to know whether it actually was, or whether I’d just got used to a low number ...
I. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Not everyone knows that Marco Rubio has vowed to dismantle the International Criminal Court. The process has been on the way for about the last year. This article provides a comprehensive analysis of the legal framework, historical context, and ongoing litigation arising from the United States’ coordinated campaign to dismantle the International ...
The following is entirely fictional, including all names and the status of every person depicted. Caution: The arguments presented are not necessarily legally correct nor entirely wrong. They do not represent cogent arguments. Proposition: “The House proposes to the parties that unjust law is still law, and that is the foundation of order.” Venue: The ...
You will probably read a few thousand words today if you’re surfing websites for news, opinion, advice, or reviews. Like you, most people will assume that a person wrote those articles. Until recently that assumption was safe. “Be very, very careful what you put in that head, because you will never, ever get it out.” ...
Meld is a free, open-source comparison tool. It runs on Windows, Linux and Mac. Its job is simple to state: put two versions of a document side by side and show you exactly where they differ. Programmers have used it for years to compare code. But nothing about it is limited to code. Any plain ...
Day 2 — Friday He woke to the sound of a cockerel. The cry cut through the last thin layers of sleep from somewhere out beyond the heath. Walker lay still for a moment. It came again and he found himself smiling at the ceiling. The morning light was already strong through the east-facing window. ...
A question landed in a WhatsApp group the other day. Simple enough. What is one divided by zero? One person answered at once. Undefined. That is the textbook answer. It is what a calculator, mathematician or the internet tells you. Clean, final, no fuss. Someone else paused. They looked at the question a different way. ...
Mono no aware o shiru hito (物の哀れを知る人) means, literally, “a person who knows the poignancy of things” — but the knowing it encapsulates is of a different kind. It is not knowledge from books or doctrine; it is knowing the way one knows grief, or a friend’s face — by acquaintance, not by information. Nor ...
Day 1 — Thursday The drive down from Northampton took the better part of three hours. Walker could have made it in two hours and thirty, but he was in no rush. He was saving the planet just a bit. He kept the car at a steady sixty, the kind of speed that lets the ...
The Tobacco and Vapes Act 2026 makes it a crime, punishable by two years’ imprisonment, to sell a product that Sweden used to achieve Europe’s lowest smoking mortality rate TVA2026, s.7-9. It simultaneously protects the sale of combustible cigarettes to every adult who already smokes them. Those two facts, side by side, tell you something ...
There are few things more unsettling than the idea that something unwanted has taken up residence inside your body. Microplastics have crossed from environmental concern to deeply personal intrusion, and the headlines have followed. Fragments in lung tissue. Particles in blood. Traces in the placenta. The reporting oscillates between quiet alarm and outright panic, and ...
Do I care if you or 99% of people don’t know anything about this, or couldn’t care less? I do not! Open WebUI offered me version 0.10.2 this morning. I was on 0.9.6. A small number, a small hop, or so it looks. It isn’t. I have been burned before. An earlier upgrade almost wiped ...
This article examines a brief, everyday exchange on a WhatsApp to identify a common cognitive pattern: the treatment of internal, subjective states as if they were objective, external facts, and the use of that false equivalence to justify decisions or behaviours. The analysis draws out key points about the gap between perception and reality, a ...
An eight‑year‑old child was referred to hospital by his GP with fever, tachycardia, vomiting, and abdominal pain and a concern about a serious underlying cause, including appendicitis. At the hospital he was assessed not by a doctor but by an Advanced Nurse Practitioner, who did not carry out blood tests, urine testing, repeat observations, or ...
Previously, I showed the setup for Windows 11. As my laptop is fully run by BigLinux it was important to setup there as well. This is running well. For long form text-based analyses. DSV4Pro is the one. See: DSV4 Pro on W11. Step 1: Update your system sudo pacman -Syu Step 2: Install Docker and ...
This document serves as a direct, verbatim record of the conversation between myself and Google’s Gemini. I detail a most basic failure. The model failed to know it’s own the workspace (canvas) capability correctly, and subsequently hallucinated confabulated its technical limitation. It was confident. You might think that I’m generalising from one single failure. I ...
The death of thirteen‑month‑old Preston Davey, murdered just four months after his adoption, has prompted one of the most searching safeguarding reviews in recent years. In the weeks leading up to his death, Preston was seen repeatedly by health professionals and social workers, and was taken to hospital on several occasions with injuries that should ...
The free DeepSeek chat platform at chat.deepseek.com is useful for general purposes, but it has limitations — rate limits, occasional capacity restrictions, and response quality that does not match what the paid API models can deliver. This guide explains how to access DeepSeek’s more capable models using OpenWebUI, a locally hosted chat interface that runs ...
On 13 May 1997, just two weeks after the general election that swept Tony Blair into power, Jeremy Paxman interviewed the former Home Secretary Michael Howard on BBC Newsnight. The subject was the dismissal of Derek Lewis, the Director General of the Prison Service, following a security breach at Parkhurst prison. The central allegation: that ...
You need to thank one man for your current existence – a Russian. On September 26, 1983, Stanislav Petrov was the duty officer at Serpukhov-15, the Soviet command bunker for early warning satellites. Just weeks after serious NATO actions, his Oko satellite system reported that the United States had launched five intercontinental ballistic missiles from ...
I used Microsoft Word for decades. Same with Google Docs. They worked fine. I never thought about changing. Then, about six months ago, I stumbled into Markdown. Not because I was looking for it, but because I got fed up, about formatting that never stayed put and with files that bloated to megabytes. Turns out, ...
My Downloads folder has a reputation. It starts each day as a convenient holding pen for files I need briefly. By the end of the week, it becomes a digital landfill of installers, PDFs, screenshots, ZIP files, videos, and documents I meant to file but never did. Clicking through hundreds of files trying to remember ...
The survey has been live for about 24 hours. No responses yet. That may change. One person saw the link to the blog post. Whether they clicked and read it, I would not know. Subsequently, that same person was in conversation by text messages. The following sequenced flowed: When asked how could I know what ...
You are a senior executive. You warn the board that the company is taking risks that could break it. You are ignored. You warn again. Then you are dismissed. A document is placed before you: a Settlement Agreement. It offers you a payment. In exchange, you must waive your right to bring any employment tribunal ...
An update to “Apparently — I’m supposed to keep a database [April 2024]”. A while back I grumbled here about being led to create a database of preferences. The problem was simple; I couldn’t remember how to please each of my 20 or so contacts. Each one has preferences on what I should and shouldn’t ...
