Observations on the world and its inhabitants
I had been working on slop. In previous work I found eleven patterns. Words, lists and stock phrases were caught by scripts. But something kept getting through. Text with no slop words still read like something delivered from a lectern, or as a report when none of that was required. This post will be of ...
It is 17 January 1998. President Bill Clinton sits in a deposition in the Paula Jones civil case. A written definition of “sexual relations” has been placed before him. As narrowed by the judge, it states that a person engages in sexual relations when that person knowingly engages in or causes contact with the genitalia, ...
It is a reasonable assumption that people who have been through university should not make basic errors of thinking. They have been selected for ability, trained in a subject, and surrounded for years by argument, evidence, and criticism. History does not support the assumption. This article follows from Critical Thinking 2.0, in 2023. Educated people ...
1. Purpose This brief governs the use of an AI language model to analyse documents and produce a faithful written account of it. It is designed for judgments, inquiry reports, and similar primary documents where accuracy of representation is paramount. There can be no guarantee that it will work for every situation or work with ...
In a reflective and uniquely structured article the narrative is told from the perspective of an artificial intelligence analysing its own interaction with a human user. The piece serves as a profound exploration of epistemology, cognitive blind spots, and the structural vulnerabilities inherent in human-AI collaboration. 1. The Opening Frame I am an AI model. ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
The High-Mileage Dilemma There is a specific kind of internal negotiation that happens when you own a car with 123,000 miles on the clock. My Citroën C4 Grand Picasso has been a faithful servant, but the years and the motorways haven’t been kind to its face. The bonnet was a constellation of stone chips, the ...
The Rotten lemon Back in 2022, when Elon Musk finally closed the deal on Twitter for a staggering $44 billion, the world didn’t just frown; it did a collective spit-take. Wall Street analysts were calling it the “overpayment of the century”, and honestly, they had a point. Musk was paying $54.20 per share for a ...
In December 2008, a minor archaeological excavation in Shangsi County, Guangxi, southern China, produced a mystery that should have been forgotten within a fortnight. Instead, it has lingered for nearly two decades—not because the mystery was solved, but because it was never properly resolved. In that unresolved space, something interesting happened to the human mind. ...
We’ve had a busy month in the business of measuring “Humanity.” Between the release of Humanity’s Last Exam (HLE) and the interactive bloodbath that was ARC-AGI-3, it’s becoming clear that we aren’t exactly building a new mind. We’re building a $600 billion filing cabinet that’s learned how to speak with a slight academic sneer. The ...
It is tempting to talk about COVID as if it were a chapter we have closed. A horrible few years, then a return to “normal”. But that framing feels increasingly wrong to me. The pandemic was not only an acute crisis; it was a forcing function that pushed institutions, companies, and individuals into rapid adaptation. ...
Digital newspaper pricing usually follows a race-to-the-bottom logic, with publishers vying for volume in a saturated attention economy. However, recent data from the Caribbean reveals a counter-intuitive trend: a high-margin, aggressive pricing strategy that appears to decouple local news from the domestic economy. This analysis examines the pricing trajectory of the Trinidad Express and compares ...
I undertook this because on trying to login to CPanel – a portal from where I manage my websites – I was getting logouts and messages saying “Your IP Address has changed” after a few seconds of logging in. There was actually no apparent change of my IP Address or one that I could see. ...
We have all been there. You are halfway through typing “I hope this email finds you well” for the fourteenth time since breakfast, and for a split second, you actually forget how to spell “well.” Like wut! It happens to people. Or perhaps you are staring at a blinking cursor, trying to remember if your ...
Espanso is a free, open-source text expander that works across Windows, macOS and Linux. Most guides cover the basics — type a trigger, get some text. This guide goes further, covering features that turn Espanso from a simple text replacer into a genuinely powerful productivity tool. For those to want to save the drudgery of ...
Most of us spend our lives fighting with our keyboards. We have these thoughts—medical observations, legal arguments, complex lines of code—but the physical act of typing it out over and over feels like a tax on our time. When I first looked at Espanso, I almost closed the window. It looked like a wall of ...
“One can’t save time if one does not invest time” Video narration for those who wish to avoid reading. There is a peculiar irony embedded in the modern pursuit of efficiency. The very act of trying to save time often demands that one first spend it. This is the meta-layer of time management that few ...
This post documents the transition from TextBlaze to Espanso on a BigLinux system, detailing the technical hurdles overcome and the final configuration logic. The plan is then to run Espanso on W11. 1. Espanso vs. TextBlaze: Key Differences While both tools serve the same goal, the philosophy of use is different: 2. The Critical First ...
Yes – it’s true. I don’t need to know how to write code for Macros, when I have paid geniuses who can do the work. BTW some people don’t even know what a ‘macro’ is and they’ll be thinking of microscopes. If you’re one of those types, you should save your time for Instagram or ...
Nobody dares to write anything negative on Russia? Why? Cuz you risk receiving a deadly dose of Polonium, Novichok, epibatidine, or some other ghastly poison. Well, I couldn’t give a flying banana! If Instagram is calling you, then fly down the page to ‘What it means‘. Summary of Russia’s aggression Source: Under Destruction – Munich ...
System Profile: BigLinux (Manjaro-based), KDE Plasma Wayland/X11 (on W11 dual-boot), Hardware: Desktop (NVIDIA 3080, Core i7, 32GB RAM), Target: On-demand OneDrive access (FUSE mount) without local storage mirroring. This document records the complete, sequential process used to install and configure OneDriver (specifically the jstaf/onedriver client) on a BigLinux system. The Context: Microsoft OneDrive is not ...
If you ask the next 100 people you meet what’s the risk of a nuke going off, expect the answer to be (with a smirk), “Calm down. No nuke is going to set off. Everybody knows that once nukes fly it’s the end of the world. Nobody wants that. So the risk , it’s very ...
For the better part of three decades, “personal computing” was synonymous with Windows. It wasn’t just an operating system; it was the foundation of digital life. Blue Screens of Death and endless updates were tolerated because, frankly, there were few alternatives. Apple was expensive and maintained by a cult. Linux was perceived as an obscure ...
This one follows from: Man vs. Machine (Spoiler: The Machine Lost). But on this occasion it was Man and Machine [AI] working together in harmony. The primary motivation for this migration was to reclaim the performance of a 2018 Dell Inspiron 7786. While the hardware remains capable, running Windows 11 felt increasingly sluggish and heavy. ...
The following exploration is not intended as financial or strategic advice for any specific individual or entity. Instead, it serves as a platter of food for thought regarding the mechanics of the digital landscape. Most people view advertising as a simple, static transaction: a result is purchased, or it is not. Nearly every business has ...
Most of the time, we think we’re reacting to the world as it is right now, but we’re usually just living out the consequences of a past that refused to fade. A single event—maybe a project that blew up or a warning heard in childhood—somehow stops being just a memory and hardens into a universal ...
Author’s Note: The following article provides an objective analysis of the legal and geopolitical framework surrounding the extraction of Nicolás Maduro, as presented in official indictments, court documents, and international reporting. The narrative details the legal arguments and strategic rationales employed by the US Department of Justice and military command as documented in the public ...
Humanity has always lived in the shadow of its own ingenuity. Every leap in technological power has widened the gap between what we can do and what we can wisely control. Today, that ancient asymmetry has become the defining tension of our age. We are accelerating into a future shaped by artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, ...
