Recent ROADMASTER content on Tomechangosubanana - since 1995!
I’ve said this for years but when someone articulates it better than I can, the best thing to do is to just quote. About Disney live action remakes: An objectively pointless rehash of beautiful source material that Disney seems desperate to strip-mine until even its memory is nothing more than the skeletal remains of something once alive.…
Ingredients Vegetable oil, for coating the ramekins 1 1/2 cups heavy cream 1 (1/4-ounce) packet unflavoured gelatin 1/3 cup granulated sugar 1 vanilla bean, split lengthwise, seeds scraped and reserved 1 1/2 cups low-fat buttermilk Total Time: 25 mins, plus 4 hrs setting time Makes: 6 servings Panna cotta is a simple, eggless Italian custard that can be flavored countless ways. In this version,…
25^(3^(2^25)) is about 5.43182606399450523 * 10^(6.962001e+16009532). Function n^(3^(2^n)) for values n=1 to 25 f(x) = x^(3^(2^x)) for x = 1..25 ======================================================= x = 1 | 2^x = 2 | E = 3^(2^x) = 9 f(1) ~ 1.00000000000000000 * 10^0 f(1) has about 1e+0 decimal digits exponent mod 3 = 0 -> round-looking? YES exact = 1 x = 2 | 2^x = 4 | E = 3^(2^x) = 81 f(2) ~…
Sorry but I had to put this here once I found it - which took a while.
This is pure gold . To quote one, which is great because AI = mule: Benjamin owns a farm. He employs 100 workers plowing his fields. His total payroll is $10 million/year. One day, he buys a mule, which provides the worker who uses it with a modest 10 percent productivity gain. Benjamin fires 99 of his workers and purchases 99 mules, expecting a 1,000 percent productivity gain. The driverless…
So Anthropic, one of the largest frontier AI vendors, made some bad decisions with their newest Claude Fable 5 model, where it would silently fall back to a less-capable model (Opus 4.8) when asked about certain topics like LLM development itself. When Anthropic released Claude Fable 5, a new model based on its powerful Mythos system, researchers noted something odd. They found that that Fable 5…
After many years of running a few Wordpress sites, last year around September I moved the last of them over to static content serving. It’s been over 6 months, and today as I was checking system utilization graphs I happened upon this one. See if you can spot around where the dynamic sites were decommissioned. Of note, constant CPU load at that level indicates constant traffic serving, but…
Amazon brings dark mode to Kindle . This is entirely ridiculous. E-readers emulate paper and paper has been non-dark-mode for 20 centuries. Ever tried reading text on a photo negative? it’s terribly unpleasant. Why would an e-reader, then, have dark mode? There’s no argument to be made that the light the reader emits is too intense, as it’s purely reflective not…
The Dark Mode Mafia ’s shenanigans have not gone unnoticed by the Internet community at large. Other than Simon Willison who had an LLM code him some dark mode support ostensibly just to get the naggers off his back, Randall Munroe of xkcd fame has this wonderful wonderful take on the whole ordeal.
There’s this old movie I kind of remembered and I wanted to know what it was called etc. After striking out with normal searches for a bit I decided to ask an LLM. The results were so hilarious that I had to compile a bit of what I saw. I used two versions of the prompt. This initial one: hey can you tell me the name of a movie? it’s a martial arts movie about a guy whose brother is…
This cbc article has the most wonderful portrait of the kind of politician Pierre Poilievre is. Fewer than half of government bills have become law — a figure that is expected to increase in short order now that Carney won’t have to cajole other parties to back his policies. Still, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said he will continue to press Carney on what he described as a lacklustre…
This The Future of Everything is Lies, I Guess essay has been making the rounds as it’s being released, chapter by chapter like a good Victorian serialized novel by Dickens, over a few weeks. It’s eerily accurate and full of great tidbits and quotes about the LLM/AI debacle and how it’s threatening to transform society in a way only paralleled by, and possibly surpassing, the…
Hot take: printers are consumables. It’s long been known that printer consumables (toner, ink) are over priced and typically your first refill will cost you more than the printer cost in the first place. This is true of most low-cost consumer inkjets and small lasers. One might hope to escape this by procuring a slightly higher-tier printer in the hopes that since you paid more for the…
Once AI agents can plausibly work in voice-only mode for prompts and responses, people will legit no longer have a reason to be literate… sigh
It turns out that corporations controlling humankind’s thoughts and actions through computers is a fate that’s been known for decades. Example, Rush’s 2112 where the world is controlled by the “ priests of the temples of Syrinx ” (Big Tech, anyone?), whose “ great computers fill the hallowed halls ” (mega data centers). We’ve taken care of everything…
Whenever the topic of plugging your phone into a keyboard/monitor to get a desktop computer comes along (similar to 2014’s Ubuntu Edge I’m always reminded of this weird computer I saw more than 30 years ago in trade magazines around 1990: the elusive Ergo “The Brick”. I’ve tried to cursorily google it a few times out of curiosity but “the brick” is way too…
I asked Claude to make a change and it decided to modify a function’s signature and update all the call points, because it could, resulting in a massive diff. Where it was much easier and cleaner to add two small wrapper functions: one with the old signature, one with the new, both call a “do it all” private function, and only call points that need the new signature/parameters needed updating.…
A bunch of these are hosted on cheap, wake-on-demand Fly machines or Sprites . https://six-seven.fly.dev https://audio-reverse.fly.dev https://roadmr-isax.sprites.app
When an actual human and not an AI writes an email
I know it’s in his party’s mandate and his ultimate goal and all but gosh, the PQ’s Paul St-Pierre Plamondon’s obsession with reading separatist desire in. Every. Single. Action. Borders on the hilarious. It’s honestly comical! François Legault resigns? Further evidence of need for independent Quebec . Mark Carney gives a historic speech and stands up to Trump’s…
I don’t know why this was so hard to find; documentation for Hugo is atrocious. [Target text]({{% ref "post/2025/the-dark-mode-mafia" %}}) So it seems to be $CONTENT_DIR/$SLUG. Or with a relative reference: [Target text]({{% relref "post/2025/the-dark-mode-mafia" %}}) The result: Target text Or with a relative reference ( relref instead of ref ): Target text
As a counterpart to the rise of the Dark Mode Mafia , I’m identifying articles pushing against the darkness onslaught and harassment, and explaining the truth about why folks find “normal mode” so difficult to work with. We are the “Paladins of Light” :) it’s just a clickbaity name, we’re not paladining for anything (and also: there’s no…
With Legault out of the way, the next hurdle is this: the PQ’s desire to hand Quebec over to the USA. Don’t believe me? Plamondon basically just said that. St-Pierre Plamondon also criticized Prime Minister Mark Carney for his agreement with China, which will allow tens of thousands of Chinese electric vehicles into the domestic market in exchange for dropping duties on canola…
Good news: François Legault is resigning. As a parting gift, his political rivals have widely praised him, and apparently he was at some point the “most popular Premier in Canada”? I, on the other hand, don’t have any praise: this is a good summary of his divisive legacy. “ He’s going to be remembered as a premier who chose to divide Quebecers around false debates…
I’m only 5 episodes into ST:TNG S2 and already Dr. Pulaski has insulted, disrespected, belittled and dismissed Data (actually, in 3 episodes in a row) and made a totally ableist, dismissive and judgemental assessment of Geordi’s blindness and his use of the visor. I’d totally forgotten what a sleazeball Pulaski is, glad we only have to put up with this garbage for this season.
When someone says “let’s hop on a call” …
Right off the bat, Soraya’s first budget breaks one of her campaign promises (not raising property taxes beyond inflation). first city budget includes an average residential property tax rate hike of nearly four per cent — beyond last year’s rate of inflation — to help pay for its $7.7 billion budget. And here’s the blatant lie: We’re delivering on every promise let me remind you…
the USA kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela has elicited reactions and comments from everyone. My only meta comment is to point at what canadian politicians are saying . Most condemn the kidnapping and urge respect for international laws and conventions, even if they also state they consider Maduro’s regime illegitimate. the kidnapping itself has been reviled and condemned…
Good news: Montreal-Ottawa chosen as first leg of Canadian high-speed rail project . It’s a short 200km leg over easy, flat terrain, which is partly why it was chosen. So, we can expect to have it up and running in no time at all, right? Wrong - this is just starting the plan, with “ground breaking” to happen in 2029 (who needs 4 years to plan a straight-shot track only 200km…
I usually change my status to something indicative of end-of-day (EOD) - I won’t be available until tomorrow. I could just rely on Slack’s online indicator but I think an explicit “I’ve signed off, see you tomorrow” message and icon are clearer and more representative than just a “oh I don’t happen to be looking at my screen right now but if you @-me…
I just read this post from none other than Simon Willison, where he says “ I get enough people complaining that this site is “blinding” ”. It seems to me dark mode proponents are now running rampant on the Internet and trying to harass everyone into catering to their “needs”, and as Willison’s post hints at, doing so with the typical “blinding”…
I found the problem and it’s really bad. Looking at your log, here’s the catastrophic command that was run: rm -rf tests/ patches/ plan/ ~/ See that ~/ at the end? That’s your entire home directory. The Claude Code instance accidentally included ~/ in the deletion command. — Claude, after Claude Code deleted most of a user’s Mac
“good news!” - says this contractor who would do f35 maintenance - “we can build a maintenance base in Quebec and service jets from the US too!” see here Then the blackmail and conditions start: Oh but you would have to purchase the full 88 planes from your initial order. Oh and we would need the Canadian and provincial governments to fund the whole thing. Oh and after all…
Folks in Alberta doing a counter-petition “We don’t want to secede, so put this to rest before wasting time and resources on a referendum” sounds like they had the right idea. I wonder how that’d fare in Quebec.
Ottawa begins to consider the possibility of a Quebec referendum as the PQ has said they’d call for a referendum if they get elected. One very tiring aspect of the whole referendum/separatism thing is that: for those on the “No” side it means constantly being on the defensive. It’s like dealing with a malicious hacker: if you’re defending, you need to be on your toes…
Just keep the mess out of the camera’s field of view and you should be good to go.
A few years ago I signed up for Tarsnap . It’s a great and convenient service for secure, encrypted, efficient cloud backups. One thing that inconvenienced me, though, is that bandwidth and space limitations (slow link at home) meant I spent perhaps too much time fine-tuning the backup scripts to transfer as little as possible: the eternal tension between deciding what’s important…
The fetish modern Internet users have with “dark mode” has to stop, as does the rhetoric they typically use to advance their arguments, stuff like: blasts my eyeballs with full-beam daylight. or the light of a thousand suns Give me a break. If normal mode bothers you so much, it says one thing: your ambient lighting is crap . That will kill your eyesight and no, dark mode won’t…
And just like any other computer, the “cloud” can go down. So the next time one of your customers (with you being a small hosting provider) screams at you for downtime and threatens to go to AWS or front their sites with Cloudflare, remind them: Even the big bois go down. AWS Outage, October 19/20, 2025 . This was widespread enough that a lot of people just thought the entire Internet…
Things like what the Quebec fascist government is doing to doctors (Bill 2 essentially turning patient care into a big-tech-like performance-oriented race to the bottom - it’s “managing public service like they were a for-profit company” disguised as “improving health services”) and religious minorities (Bill 21 is “islamophobia disguised as secularism /…
[Tan, 1979] A firm experimenting with an electronic brain designed to translate English into Russian fed it the words: “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” The machine responded with a sentence in Russian which meant, a linguist reported, “The whisky is agreeable, but the meat has gone bad.” This tale, apocryphal or not, is widely cited as one of the triggers for…
PEP 237 is about “Unifying Long Integers and Integers”. Python [at the time] distinguishe[d] between two kinds of integers (ints): regular or short ints, limited by the size of a C long (typically 32 or 64 bits), and long ints, which are limited only by available memory. This PEP propose[d] to do away with most of the differences in semantics, unifying the two types from the…
As a corollary of disabling PHP on my server I was able to switch to Apache Event MPM which seems to be able to handle higher loads with the same amount of memory. Not that I get a huge amount of traffic - mainly AI or crawler bots with the occasional script kiddie trying to load .env files and what not. That said, I could have switched to Event PMP with PHP-FPM sooner, I guess. I found this…
Over the past month or so I finally moved all my remaining Wordpress blogs to static content - the burden of maintaning Wordpress up to date and stressing out about calcified plugins from the early 2000s wasn’t worth it for sites where people don’t comment anymore and where 80% of the traffic is from bots - they don’t deserve a beautiful, painstakingly-generated-from-a-database…
This book is such a classic that you may think you know everything it says. Worse, you may think it’s obsolete or no longer relevant. Still, if you are a computer or software engineer or an engineering manager at an IT-focused organization, you definitely need to have read the book itself and not rely just on hearsay or select snippets quoted by others. It’s so full of relevant high-level advice,…
The season of Devil’s Beggarticks is here!
This is probably the best explanation I’ve found on Hugo’s partialCached to reuse rendered fragments/partials, massive speed ups for large sites. https://www.regisphilibert.com/blog/2019/12/hugo-partial-series-part-1-caching-with-partialcached/
but I may have something to say later.
It was a huge ommission - my custom hugo post creator thingy had no support for tag selection, this is why all my posts from 2025 have the same two tags even if they’re about something else. I’ve fixed this! Now I can select tags, yay.
I enabled RSS feeds for this blog, but I found it was doing two annoying things: generating entries for ALL content (including pages and my extensive collection of tweets), and truncating entry text. I found this page on how to fix this with a custom RSS template; but as with all things Hugo (Hugo changes all the time), these instructions have rotted and no longer work out of the box. This is…