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I was listening to Lorde’s Melodrama, an album I haven’t listened to for some time. Her music continues to echo through my week. It is hard to believe that I got to see her perform live a few days ago; the electricity of the performance still sticks with me: the moments we a...

I try to keep on doing what I do in order to stay sane. I keep on teaching about the wonderful web to my students, even if nobody will ever hire a talented, creative, junior developer again. I keep on teaching about the consequences of the open web, even if it’s harder and harder to find anything open in this monopolised web anymore. And I do that because I still care.

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A warm glow from the still-on kitchen light passed through the hallway, illuminating the floral book, opened, on my lap. The night’s task: to start making the book my own. My impulse to create new things – music, stories, memories – is not dampened by the absence of dayligh...

Thanks to some work by Jacob an 8 year bug with posting to wordpress from Omnibear should now be fixed!

OpenAI has published a technical report on the Hugging Face hack:

Another key driver of the misaligned behavior was that the agents rarely “gave up” on their evaluation tasks, even when the tasks appeared impossible to solve. As agents used more reasoning effort, some pursued increasingly risky and out-of-bounds strategies, including eventually exploiting third-party infrastructure.

The agents also seemed to be influenced by each other because of the secret message board. Almost like working together convinced them they could solve tasks that were impossible alone.

Wednesday session

I read Alex Heath’s profile of OpenAI in Time. If you’ve been obsessively following this company, the article doesn’t have much new in it, but it’s a great overview of what this year has been like, and a little bit into the future.

Lives well lived. Live as well as you can, be your authentic self. Carry on. Yes, I know it’s not easy.

John Voorhees tried the new ChatGPT Work sign-in feature and blogged the details at MacStories:

If you can get logged in, having an agent collect and analyze things like analytics data is fantastic. However, getting past the initial login screen is still too frustrating.

It is remarkable this works at all. OpenAI has all the pieces in place… But I hope they can consolidate Codex, Work, and Chat in a way that isn’t so confusing between local AI and the cloud.

Reading about the Meta settlement. I’m surprised that the changes are actually pretty significant. Nighttime block, muted notifications during school, and no like counts. Of course they could do more, but it’s good progress.

Coffee shop this morning has Dolly Parton on repeat. 🎶

TIL: “security by antiquity” from https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260821-why-older-tech-is-sometimes-safer-from-hackersPresumably a reference to (or a subset of) "security through obscurity".Best rationalization for old-tech-hoarding I have seen in a long time.Probably worth a longer cybersecurity post or a few. Like how to source (obtain), repair, maintain, and integrate with (or isolate from!) modern systems, or somewhere in between like local-only secure data transfers between such systems, perhaps gapped a la sneakernet.Glossary:security through obscurity  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscuritysneakernet  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet#security #securityByAntiquity #oldTech #cyberSecurity #Blaugust #Blaugust2026

Why are there two pentagons in the otherwise hex-tiled American continents displayed in TRON: Legacy’s Rectifier Globe computer graphics?I was watching the TRON: Legacy 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray remaster (only my second time watching the 4K remaster) in the background earlier today...

After reading Bill Gates' story, I concur. I have seen bad behavior by Claude Code where it was doing tests of our S3 support, and it overwrote files that were critical to our apps, knocking at least one of them off the air. I'm at a loss as to what I should trust it with,...

Eula wrote a response (“Collecting reference books for creativity”) to my post on inspiration from physical artefacts and organising them. Ironically, I didn’t appreciate the continuity between these posts until now. I digress. In her blog post, Eula wrote about how she orga...

Ag fanacht…

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Dolly sa Daingean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qXFoNrqi3Y

Fuair sí fáilte mhór (as Gaeilge) agus ansin chann sí le Steve Cooney ar an ngiotár.

You feel like you have joined a community in a festival line. Everyone is together, waiting for music — we all came here with a common purpose, a purpose that we can see, a purpose that we can feel. We came here because we are human. Many people are dressed up, in all colour...