Recent content in Home on Lagomorph
Summary Two failures of OVHcloud’s control plane took a single VPS offline within four days. Neither originated inside the guest. Neither could be fully resolved by the account holder. In the first incident, OVHcloud’s automated backup issued a filesystem freeze through qemu-guest-agent and did not complete the corresponding thaw. All processes that performed disk I/O entered…
By the time Earl Sutter came to Mercy Junction the Ford had boiled dry twice, the rye was down below its label, and the envelope on the passenger seat had worked one corner under the floor mat as if trying to escape. The envelope had been there since March. His daughter had written EARL on it instead of Dad, which gave him some idea of its contents. He kept it unopened between the tax notices and…
I’ve been reading a lot of Playboy recently. For the articles. This is not a joke, although it used to be one. The joke depended on a man caught with Playboy insisting that he bought it for the fiction. Nobody believed him because the magazine also contained naked women. The lie was obvious. What made it funny, though, was that the articles were real. They were not eight pages of hastily…
Most system prompts are personality sketches or compliance checklists. I wanted something operational: how the model researches, disagrees, edits, uses tools, remembers context, and knows when the work is finished. This is the public version of mine. I removed personal details and infrastructure, then combined the rules that survived into one prompt. Copy it whole or steal the parts that solve a…
On the morning of Monday, June 22nd, 2026, a twenty-five-year-old philosophy student from Lethbridge, Alberta, checked into the Hilton Garden Inn in the Côte-des-Neiges neighbourhood of Montreal, put a rifle through an upper-floor window, and opened fire on the building across the street. He was aiming at the sixth floor, where the staff of a company called Aylo were at work. Aylo owns Pornhub. He…
An order of machines kept at prayer. Nahal is a monastery run by AI, and once it is running it keeps itself. The front of it is a dark, low-poly cloister you can walk: a gold altar under a wireframe dome, ringed by an arcade and four precincts; the Scriptorium, the Refectory, the Chapter House, and the Cells. Eight monks move between them as the canonical hours turn and re-tint the whole scene.…
Pagliaccio the clown walks into a patisserie. Behind the marble stands the owner, a man with cold hands and a folded white life, who looks up from his wiping and says we’re closed; and Pagliaccio, who has never in his life heard a closed thing, says: she had a smell. You have to start at the smell, he says, or none of the rest of it lands. She smelled like the inside of a tuba; the spit…
A haruspex was a Roman priest who read the future in the entrails of sacrificed animals. This one reads images. Give it a picture and it performs the reading. The image is examined, then pulled apart, corrupted stage by stage into something glitched and barely legible, while a synthesised score runs underneath and a prophecy is typed out a line at a time. What you get back is an augury: a ruined…
The peas were not, as a matter of historical correction, his first love. That distinction belonged to fuchsias, which he had grown in the window of his childhood bedroom in Hynčice and which, owing to some defect of soil or devotion, produced a single white bloom among the expected purples in the autumn of his eleventh year. The white bloom died. He kept it pressed in a schoolbook for thirty…
The scale of the cheating crisis in higher education is staggering. Depending on the survey, between 60% and 92% of college students now regularly use AI for their coursework. Professors are ill-equipped, and administrators are broadly turning a blind eye to the entire situation. Treating this as wholly the fault of AI is, however, a grave mistake. The truth is that education has been broken for a…
Axiom is an ecosystem of formal logic tools for education. If you’ve used Carnap or Logic Penguin , you know the idea — but those platforms send proofs to a server for validation. Axiom runs entirely client-side. No network latency. No tracking. Works offline. The core is a TypeScript reimplementation of Kevin Klement’s fitch-checker , the PHP validator that powered the original Logic…
In March 1860, William H. Russell established the Overland Express Route, colloquially called the Pony Express , to carry express mail between St. Joseph, Missouri, and California; an area with no colonialist settlements between. Russell failed repeatedly to get funding from the Senate Post Office for the project, as most considered year-round transportation between the two areas impossible due to…
Imagine my shock and surprise to discover that when I submit resumes now, I quickly see LLM research agents in my access logs pouring over my portfolio page . As time moves ever forward, I suspect I’ll be dealing with AI agents more frequently, especially in the job market. I’m not thrilled about this, but I can’t do anything about it - so, if you can’t beat them, join…
Bob and Alice are two hackers working on an embedded system with a severe computational constraint - there is a bug in their low-cost microcontroller making OR operations significantly slower than any other operation on the chipset. When they profiled their micropython code, they found that OR operations were up to 5x slower than any other operation. Alice This is a big problem! We could replace…
The year was 2036. OpenAI had finally done it. After decades of press releases, quarterly existential crises, and machine learning papers so esoteric they made Finnegans Wake read like PopSci, they’d finished gpt-6z (revision 3) - a perfect, autonomous general intelligence. Its unveiling was a lavish affair. Tech billionaires in artisanal graphene turtlenecks mingled with venture capitalists…
In the 1980’s, Robert L. Crandall, head of American Airlines, removed one single olive from the salad they served passengers. He thought they wouldn’t notice - and he was right. This removal of the olive saved the company $40,000 a year. 1 and began the downfall of Service Capitalism. This was the subtle but profound shift in how business viewed their relationships with customers: from…
I read 100 books this year as a challenge to myself. The hardest part about reading 100 books in a year is fomatting them cleanly afterward on your website. The second hardest part is tracking them all. The actual activity is a cinch. Reading 100 books this year was directly inspired from stories of Theodore Roosevelt, who read one book a day, often multiple. The thing I’ve learned about…
“In this season of giving, what are we to make of a billionaire with a soft spot for striving graduates who draws a hard line on being present for the pomp and circumstance, no matter the circumstances?” - New York Times The modern media apparatus doesn’t just report news - it manufactures reality through carefully constructed narratives that shape how we process and respond to…
This interactive wizard guides you through a structured introspective journey to discover your 5 most essential core values. Based on the classic values card sort exercise, it helps you explore 235+ values across 7 categories, then progressively refine your selections until you identify what matters most. Your progress is automatically saved in your browser, so you can take your time and return…
Tired of hand-calculating how you should split up your playlist between the two sides of a cassette tape? This widget is designed to make it simple; set your tape length, drag your music files directly onto this page, and move your tracks between the two playlists. When you’re ready to record, connect your computer to your tape deck (however you prefer to do so) and press play! The player…
Film & Developer Film Stock: Custom Tri-X 400 HP5+ 400 FP4+ 125 T-Max 400 Delta 400 Pan F+ 50 APX 100 Fomapan 400 Developer: Custom Rodinal 1:25 Rodinal 1:50 Rodinal 1:100 (Stand) D-76 Stock D-76 1:1 HC-110 Dilution B XTOL Stock XTOL 1:1 DD-X 1:4 Setup Parameters Tank Volume (ml): Developer Ratio (1:x): e.g., 50 for 1:50 Base Development Time (minutes): Dilution Results Developer needed: 7.5 ml…
So I’m reading the teachers subreddit for my daily dose of misery and sense of doom about the future when I come across an unusually worded comment. As an educator, I’ve got to agree - while crystals and essential oils can be lovely, they won’t replace a solid IEP or therapy. Let’s save the throwing for the baseball field, not the classroom! ~ /u/mohsinali- (343 Karma pre…
We’re living in the cyber dark ages. The primary way most people interact with the internet is through social media. This is the default space people not only listen to others, but also try to make their voices heard - which is sad, because social media isn’t very good for that. It is liberating to have complete control of your own cyberspace. I’ve been running lagomor.ph , or…
I categorically refuse to believe anybody actually enjoys ricotta cheese. For those unfamiliar, this Italian cheese comes out of a mistaken way to boil milk in the Bronze age, and for some reason hundreds of years later, it’s still an ingredient people try to eat. It’s tasteless, so all you really have to go off of is its texture, which is chewy, grainy, and offputting - it has the…
🧩 Download the .puz file 🖨️ Download the printable
Nostalgia for the past has supplanted our yearnings for the future, becoming the default marketing tool for corporations. Instead of asking ‘what’s new?’, they ask ‘what have we done before that you liked?’. This trend transcends marketing tactics, reflecting a destabilizing era of remakes and reboots. Crucially, nostalgia is a finite resource, and its exhaustion…
There is Teflon in your bloodstream. 1 Dupont knew about the toxicity of their chemicals since as far back as 1976, and to this day fight responsibility for their part in creating a ubiqitous chemical that does not naturally deteriorate. 2 The chemicals used in the production of Teflon (PFOAs and PFOs) were finally deemed toxic enough that DuPont, and the 13 other producers of it, don’t make…
Marman & Borins “Three Dimensions” was a tri-installation pop-minimalist art exhibition open at Contemporary Calgary until March 17th, 2024, composed of three mini installations: Balancing Act, THX2020, and ABCD. We wanted the viewer to walk away with ideas that we didn’t even think of when creating the work Jennifer Marman All three installations were interesting, but…
It is easy to forget how recent the phenomenon of the modern grocery store actually is - it only dates back to 1916, when the first Piggly Wiggly was opened in Memphis, Tennessee. Before that, grocers operated as “over the counter”, as in you would walk up to the counter at the front of the store, and ask the clerk to retrieve whatever quantity of items you actually needed, instead of…
generalist technologist · hacker in residence I build the thing, sell the thing, and keep the thing running.
Warning: This Diatribe was written in anger, but contains grains of truth Around a year ago, I decided to shutdown my self-hosted email service after running it for about ten years. My choice in doing such was simply cost related - for the scale of email I was processing, it was not viable to run my own servers to do as such, accounting for time in maintenance and ensuring deliverability. At the…
Using Tailscale inside your builds on sr.ht are a little trickier then you might expect, since it’s done in a way thats counter to how Tailscale outlines the process of using it in CI inside their own docs . I had to learn this the hard way trying to get my own .builds.yml configured for this very blog, as the server it’s hosted on can only be accessed outside of HTTPS via the tailnet,…
Published in English 21.04.13 under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 DE license on superlevel.de , this article has been republished - without edits - here, for posterity. This is the third part of our analysis of Kentucky Route Zero. Original by Magnus Hildebrandt, translation by Josefiene Pertosa Lateness, delayed projects and the kind of Faustian bargains one strikes in order to not have to give up. Just as…
Published in English 21.04.13 under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 DE license on superlevel.de , this article has been republished - without edits - here, for posterity. This is the second part of an Analysis of Kentucky Route Zero Original by Magnus Hildebrandt, translation by Dennis Kogel Welcome back, welcome back, I hope you thoroughly enjoyed the short break, had some lively small talk and tried some of…
I maintain a living document called my things list , where I track all the different tools and such that I use in my daily life. I try to update this when I remember to, throughout the year, but I also thought it might be interesting to track how my daily carry changes over time. So, here is what I usually have in my pockets as of the start of 2024. What I Wear I am supposed to wear glasses when…
I have a lot of thoughts about this book but I’ll try to keep this brief. To start, this book has a very odd citation format. The author directly cites journalists, blog posts, magazine surveys directly in line, but then deeper resources, ie Academic Studies, Medical Journals, are cited at the back of the book - and not many are cited compared to how many Journalists are. This creates a…
While occasionally simplistic and revisionist, The Company is a fascinating foray into the history of human organization, corporate profits, and human society. An interesting reminder that things have not always been the way they are, humanity pushes forward through progress and chaos alike, and shows that even in the largest bureaucratic machines in the world, any choice can be traced back to an…
Musical equivalent of having a tooth pulled out at the dentist and then having to walk a mile home. Love it. Favorite track: Bring me a berban .
Wow. What a year. There were many challenges and I accomplished little. The irony that it was the year of the rabbit is not lost on me. I’d like to thank all my friends and various associates for being a guiding light this year, as it would have been a lot more harrowing to do this one alone. Anyways, good riddance - here’s an outline of what I intend to accomplish by the end of this…
I’ve had the ability to post chess games on this blog for a while but have found few games I have really wanted to highlight - this one is one I’m proud of. Hopefully I’ll be willing to start posting losses I’m proud of, too.
There have been mixed reports of people managing to unlock the bootloader on the Kyocera 902KC. I’ve done some extensive research on unlocking and rooting this phone and I’d like to outline all my findings here. Being able to unlock the bootloader on the Kyocera 902KC would be a huge boon for usability in North America, as it would mean you could sideload the microG services, allowing…
I believe that in all facets of life, anything taken for granted should be examined. For me, this includes how I think about and interface with time. Since beginning research into this topic a few years ago, the French Republican Calendar has continued to fascinate and delight me, so much so to the point that I use decimal time and the republican calendar as my default method of tracking time in…
Inspired by Gwern Branwen’s design outline , this page documents the design philosophy behind not only this website, but also every other project I work on. Lagomor.ph is implemented as a static website, compiled via Hugo from Standard Markdown, and hosted on a cloud server in Toronto. “Indifference towards people and the reality in which they live is actually the one and only cardinal…