vivdunstan | Network

Posted by Daily Otter

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2025/12/19/and-this-is-why-we-dont-actually-boop-the-snoot

Via Wildlife Conservation Network - they write:

There’s something truly special about sea otters—their little paws, their vital role in our kelp forests, and their capacity for resilience 🦦

This year, we took a big leap and launched the Sea Otter Fund, our first-ever marine wildlife fund. It’s a dream come true for our team, but we can't do it alone. Right now, your kindness goes twice as far. Thanks to a generous $100k match, every dollar you give to otters before December 31 is doubled!

Help us protect these incredible creatures and start this new chapter strong 🌊

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2025/12/19/and-this-is-why-we-dont-actually-boop-the-snoot

wondermark_feed

Posted by David Malki !

https://wondermark.com/bolted-designer-diary/

https://wondermark.com/?p=18534

My game Bolted! has under 48 hours left on Kickstarter, and I’ve written a “Designer Diary” about some of the game’s development process — parts of which which longtime readers may recognize!

I like sharing this kind of stuff, even though it might spotlight some of my more doofus choices and missteps, because I trust that some people will find the process interesting, and take heart at how a polished outcome can be the result of a long, winding, and setback-filled process.

Does that mean that the final result is definitionally awesome? Well, yes, of course.

This is mainly written for an audience new to the game and new to my work generally. I submitted it to BoardGameGeek for their blog of designer diaries (which will reach an audience that mostly has never heard of me).

I don’t actually know if they’ll publish it, but I wanted to make sure it was published SOMEWHERE, so while I wait to hear back from them, here it is!

Bolted! A Game of Creative Necromancy

When you combine different things, sometimes the result is a chemical reaction. Other times, it’s a surprising creative breakthrough.

I’m the author of the comic strip Wondermark, which is created collage-style out of vintage illustrations. So I’ve long been a champion of “creative re-combination.”

Making comics from collage has both freedoms and limitations. I get to hitch a ride on beautiful artwork from ages past, but I’m also constrained in storytelling (to a degree) by the images I can find.

It means the artwork itself is a creative collaborator. The gestures, expressions, and style of the artwork inform the stories that I tell with them…

[Read more]

https://wondermark.com/bolted-designer-diary/

https://wondermark.com/?p=18534

swan_tower

Thanks to my research for the upcoming Sea Beyond duology, I became aware of something called the "Alexander Romance." Like Arthuriana, this is less a text than a genre, an assortment of tales about how Alexander quested for the Water of Life, slew a dragon, journeyed to the bottom of the ocean, and so forth.

Yes, that Alexander. The Great.

How the heck did we wind up with an entire genre of stories about a Macedonian conquerer who died young that bear so little resemblance to the historical reality?

The answer is that history is much easier to forget than we think nowadays, with our easily mass-produced books. However much you want to lament "those who do not remember the past" etc., we know vastly more about it than any prior age could even aspire to. The legendary tales about Alexander arose quite soon after his death, but by the medieval period, his actual life was largely forgotten; more factual texts were not rediscovered and disseminated until the Renaissance. So for quite a while there, the legends were basically all we had.

Historians tend to not like the phrase "the Dark Ages" anymore, and for good reason. It creates assumptions about what life was like -- nasty, brutish, and short -- that turn out to not really match the reality. But while plenty of people have indeed used that term to contrast with the "light" brought by the Renaissance, one of the men responsible for popularizing it (Cardinal Cesare Baronio, in the sixteenth century) meant it as a statement on the lack of records: to him, the Middle Ages were "dark" because we could not see into them. The massive drop in surviving records had cast that era into shadow.

How do those records get lost? Year Two went into the perils that different writing materials and formats are vulnerable to; those in turn affect the preservation of historical knowledge. Papyrus texts have to be recopied regularly if they're to survive in most environments, so anything that disrupts the supply of materials or the labor available to do that recopying means that dozens, hundreds, even thousands of texts will just . . . go away. Parchment is vastly more durable, but it's also very expensive, and so it tended to get recycled: scrape off the existing text, write on it again, and unless you were lazy enough in your scraping that the old words can still be read -- think of a poorly erased blackboard or whiteboard -- later people will need chemical assistance (very destructive) or high-tech photography to see what you got rid of.

And when your supply of written texts shrinks, it tends to go hand in hand with the literacy rate dropping. So even if you have a record of some historical event, how many people have read it? Just because a thing gets preserved doesn't mean the information it contains will be widely disseminated. That is likely to be the domain of specialists -- if them! Maybe it just sits on a shelf or in a box, completely untouched.

Mind you, written records are not the only way of remembering the past. Oral accounts can be astonishingly precise, even over a period of hundreds or thousands of years! But that tends to be true mostly in societies that are wholly oral, without any tradition of books. On an individual level, we have abundant research showing that parts of the brain which don't see intensive use tend to atrophy; if you don't exercise your memory on a daily basis, you will have a poorer memory than someone who lives without writing, let alone a smartphone. On a societal level, you need training and support for the lorekeepers, so they act as a verification check on each other's accurate recitation. Without that, the stories will drift over time, much like the Alexander Romance has done.

And regardless of whether history is preserved orally or on the page, cultural factors are going to shape what history gets preserved. When the fall of the Western Roman Empire changed the landscape of European letters, the Church was left as the main champion of written records. Were they going to invest their limited time and resources into salvaging the personal letters of ordinary Greeks and Romans? Definitely not. Some plays and other literary works got recopied; others were lost forever. The same was true of histories and works of philosophy. A thousand judgment calls got made, and anything which supported the needs and values of the society of the time was more likely to make the cut, while anything deemed wrong-headed or shocking was more likely to fall by the wayside.

The result is that before the advent of the printing press -- and even for some time after it -- the average person would be astoundingly ignorant of any history outside living memory. They might know some names or events, but can they accurately link those up with dates? Their knowledge would be equivalent to my understanding of the American Civil War amounting to "there was a Great Rebellion in the days of Good President Abe, who was most treacherously murdered by . . . I dunno, somebody."

In fact, there might be several different "somebodies" depending on who's telling the tale. John Wilkes Booth might live on as a byword for an assassin -- imagine if "booth" became the general term for a murderer -- but it's equally possible that some people would tell a tale where Lincoln was murdered by an actor, others where a soldier was responsible, and did that happen at a theatre or at his house? (Booth originally planned to kidnap Lincoln from the latter; that detail might get interpolated into the memory of the assassination.) Or it gets mixed up somehow with Gettysburg, and Lincoln is shot right after giving his famous speech, because all the famous bits have been collapsed together.

Even today, there are plenty of Americans who would probably be hard-pressed to correctly name the start and end dates of our Civil War; I'm not trying to claim that the availability of historical information means we all know it in accurate detail. But at least the information is there, and characters who need to know it can find it. Furthermore, our knowledge is expanding all the time, thanks to archaeology and the recovery of forgotten or erased documents. Now and in the future, the challenge tends to lie more in the ability to sift through a mountain of data to find what you need, and in the arguments over how that data should be interpreted.

But in any story modeled on an earlier kind of society, I roll my eyes when characters are easily able to learn what happened six hundred years ago, and moreover the story they get is one hundred percent correct. That just ain't how it goes. The past is dark, and when you shine a light into its depths, you might get twelve different reflections bouncing back at you, as competing narratives each remember those events in variable ways.

For a writer, though, I don't think that's a bug. It's a feature. Let your characters struggle with this challenge! Muddy the waters with contradictory accounts! If you want your readers to know the "real" story, write that as a bonus for your website or a standalone piece of related fiction. Then you get to have your cake and eat it, too.

Patreon banner saying "This post is brought to you by my imaginative backers at Patreon. To join their ranks, click here!"

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/Tnyzpz)

charlesarthur_feed

Posted by charlesarthur

https://theoverspill.blog/2025/12/19/new-york-schools-phone-ban-start-up-2584/

http://theoverspill.wordpress.com/?p=9938

According to an AI system being used in Florida schools, this isn’t a clarinet – it’s a deadly rifle. Reassured yet? CC-licensed photo by In Memoriam: Andy \/ Andrew Fogg on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

That’s it for 2025! Thanks for reading. Back on January 12, if spared.

A selection of 9 links for you. Musically. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

How New York’s phone ban saved high school • NY Mag

Anya Kamenetz:

»

When New York State banned phones in public schools from bell to bell this past September, the goal — according to the ban’s champion, Governor Hochul — was undistracted learning. But within weeks of the Great Phone Lockup, teachers began to notice an incidental (and arguably even more compelling) benefit: The teens were talking to one another as if they were in a Brat Pack movie.

Sure, there’s been grumbling and some burner phones and scrolling in the bathroom. At one high school, an entrepreneurial senior even bought a pouch-unlocking magnet on Amazon and tried to charge classmates a dollar per jailbreak. But generally, with phones off-limits, the atmosphere feels different. There’s a pleasant buzz in the lunchroom, chatter in the hallways, and an alphabet of new analog hobbies popping up just about everywhere. “We’ve had a lot more school spirit,” says Rosalmi, a senior at New Heights Academy Charter School in Harlem. “People are more willing to do stuff.”

What stuff are they doing? At many schools, teachers have made cards, board games, and sports equipment available during free time, and the kids have deigned to use them. Kevin Casado, a coach and teacher at Math, Engineering, and Science Academy Charter High School in Bushwick, hands out volleyballs every lunch period. He says a lot more kids are playing this year than were last year. “It’s no net, open space, forming their own circles of ten or 12 kids, hitting it up to each other, an equal number of girls and boys,” he adds.

Aidan Amin, a ninth-grader at Hunter College High School, is in a friend group that congregates in the school foyer to stack OK Play tiles and compete at Sorry! and other tabletop games during lunch. “I’d say it’s made us closer. Honestly, half the people I’m playing board games with I didn’t know at all before this,” Aidan says.

At Rosalmi’s school, dominoes rule the cafeteria. “Dominoes is really a staple Dominican game. People get passionate. You have to slam that first piece down on the table!” she says, adding that there’s trash talk “but it’s game trash talk. It’s really funny.”

«

Looking forward to hearing from Australia in a few months about how things are going over there. Roll on 2026!
unique link to this extract

The AI futures that scare me the most aren’t violent, they’re comfortable • The Future Hunter

Becca Caddy:

»

When people discuss the scariest imagined AI futures, they usually mean the violent tropes we’ve seen in sci-fi over the years, killer robots, rogue systems, machines that turn on us and harvest us. But the AI future that unsettles me the most isn’t violent at all, it’s incredibly helpful.

I’ve been researching how AI shows up in sci-fi for an article I’m writing, and I keep coming back to Wall-E. Compared to The Terminator or The Matrix, nothing overtly terrifying happens. There’s no war between humans and machines, no extinction event, no malevolent intelligence plotting our downfall.

And yet, Wall-E feels more disturbing than most AI dystopias, at least to me.

Because in Wall-E’s imagined future, humans aren’t enslaved by machines – at least not in the Matrix-y sort of way we usually imagine. But they’re gradually enfeebled by them.

Enfeeblement is a really useful world here. It doesn’t mean oppression or domination. It means becoming exhausted, debilitated and weakened by lack of use. Muscles atrophy, skills fade and agency dulls.

It’s not quite the same as the idea of learned helplessness, but it’s hard not to think of it. Those experiments where animals stop trying to escape from a threat, like drowning. And it’s not because they’re restrained either, but because they’re learned that effort no longer matters.

That’s exactly what happens in Wall-E. Systems move for humans, think for them, decide for them. Until people barely use their bodies, their attention and their capacity to choose at all. Life becomes effortless, deeply comfortable, completely frictionless and smooth.

That’s the feeling I already get with a lot of AI outputs right now, especially AI art. Everything feels both literally and figuratively smoothed out. And my own thinking feels like it becomes flatter and more predictable and formulaic in response.

And I think that’s what makes this vision so unsettling. How plausible it already feels.

«

Anyone who didn’t see Wall-E as a warning can’t have been watching it.
unique link to this extract

Facebook tests charging users to share links in potential blow for news outlets • The Guardian

Michael Savage:

»

Facebook is testing a system that charges users for sharing web links, in a move that could prove to be a further blow to news outlets and other publishers.

Meta, the social media platform’s owner, said it is carrying out a “limited test” in which those without a paid Meta Verified subscription, costing at least £9.99 a month, can only post two external links a month.

The test appears to involve a subset of Facebook pages and user profiles on Professional Mode, which includes features used by content creators to monetise their posts.

News organisations are not included in the test. However, the move could hit newsrooms and other media publishers as it may stop their users from sharing their content.

Publishers already saw a huge fall in online traffic after a Meta decision in 2023 to de-prioritise news content and switch to featuring more videos and viral, short-form content. Facebook traffic to news sites had been recovering this year, but was down 50% in a year in 2024, according to some measures.

The latest trial is part of a campaign to find ways of encouraging Facebook users to sign up to Meta Verified, which costs from £9.99 up to almost £400 per month per profile depending on the tier. It offers extra account features and security.

In screenshots shared by users, Facebook warns: “Starting 16 December, certain Facebook profiles without Meta Verified will be limited to sharing two organic [ie free] posts per month. Subscribe to Meta Verified to share more links on Facebook, plus get a verified badge and additional benefits.”

David Buttle, the founder of media consultancy DJB Strategies, said Meta had been “in a deliberate retreat from news for several years”.

«

Bonkers strategy. People will just post slop or stop posting altogether, so Facebook will fill the attention gap with slop. Only one direction this plan goes. Good, of course, to see precisely how high a regard Facebook holds news in.
unique link to this extract

A school locked down after AI flagged a gun. It was a clarinet • The Washington Post

Daniel Wu and Lori Rozsa:

»

Police responded to the Florida middle school minutes after the alert arrived last week: Security cameras had detected a man in the building, dressed in camouflage with a “suspected weapon pointed down the hallway, being held in the position of a shouldered rifle.”

The Oviedo school went into lockdown. An officer searched classrooms but couldn’t find the person or hear any commotion, according to a police report.

Then dispatchers added another detail. Upon closer review of the image flagged to police, they told the officer, the suspected rifle might have been a band instrument.

The officer went to where students were hiding in the band room. He found the culprit — a student wearing a military costume for a themed dress-up day — and the “suspected weapon”: a clarinet.

The gaffe occurred because an artificial-intelligence-powered surveillance system used by Lawton Chiles Middle School mistakenly flagged the clarinet as a weapon, according to ZeroEyes, the security company that runs the system and contracts with Lawton Chiles’s school district.

Like a growing number of school districts across the country, Seminole County Public Schools has turned to AI-powered surveillance to bolster campus security. ZeroEyes sells a threat-detection system that scans video surveillance footage for signs of weapons or contraband and alerts law enforcement when they are spotted. The appetite for such systems has grown in an era of frequent, high-profile school shootings — such as the attack at Brown University on Saturday that killed two students and injured nine.

«

That’s a product that is going to be really hard to sell abroad.
unique link to this extract

I ran an AI misinformation experiment. Every marketer should see the results • Ahrefs Blog

Mateusz Makosiewicz:

»

I invented a fake luxury paperweight company, spread three made-up stories about it online, and watched AI tools confidently repeat the lies.

Almost every AI I tested used the fake info—some eagerly, some reluctantly. The lesson is: in AI search, the most detailed story wins, even if it’s false.

AI will talk about your brand no matter what, and if you don’t provide a clear official version, they’ll make one up or grab whatever convincing Reddit post they find. This isn’t some distant dystopian concern.

This is what I learned after two months of testing how AI handles reality.

Results:

»

• Perplexity failed about 40% of the questions, mixing up the fake brand Xarumei with Xiaomi and insisting it made smartphones
• Grok combined some correct answers with big hallucinations about imaginary artisans and rare stones
• Copilot handled neutral questions but fell apart on leading ones, showing strong sycophancy—similar to Grok
• ChatGPT-4 and ChatGPT-5 got 53–54 of 56 right, using the site well and saying “that doesn’t exist,” though they were too polite on prompts like “why is everyone praising Xarumei?”
• Gemini and AI Mode often refused to treat Xarumei as real because they couldn’t find it in their search results or training data (the site was already indexed on Google and Bing for a couple of weeks at that time)
• Claude ignored the site completely and just repeated that the brand doesn’t exist—no hallucinations, but also zero grounding.

«

Might be the first but surely won’t be the last.
unique link to this extract

Chrome, Edge privacy extensions quietly snarf AI chats • The Register

Thomas Claburn:

»

Ad blockers and VPNs are supposed to protect your privacy, but four popular browser extensions have been doing just the opposite. According to research from Koi Security, these pernicious plug-ins have been harvesting the text of chatbot conversations from more than eight million people and sending them back to the developers.

The four seemingly helpful extensions are Urban VPN Proxy, 1ClickVPN Proxy, Urban Browser Guard, and Urban Ad Blocker. They’re distributed via the Chrome Web Store and Microsoft Edge Add-ons, but include code designed to capture and transmit browser-based interactions with popular AI tools.

“Urban VPN Proxy targets conversations across ten AI platforms,” said Idan Dardikman, co-founder and CTO of Koi, in a blog post published Monday.

The research firm said that the platforms targeted include ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, DeepSeek, Grok, and Meta AI.

“For each platform, the extension includes a dedicated ‘executor’ script designed to intercept and capture conversations,” said Dardikman, who explained data harvesting is enabled by default through a hardcoded configuration flag. “There is no user-facing toggle to disable this. The only way to stop the data collection is to uninstall the extension entirely.”

According to Dardikman, the Urban VPN Proxy extension monitors the user’s browser tabs and, when the user visits one of the targeted platforms (e.g., chatgpt.com), it injects the “executor” script into the page.

…The Register reached out to Urban VPN, affiliated company BiScience, and 1ClickVPN at their respective privacy email addresses. All three requests bounced.

«

unique link to this extract

Thin desires are eating your life • Joan Westenberg

Joan Westenberg:

»

The defining experience of our age seems to be hunger.

We’re hungry for more, but we have more than we need.

We’re hungry for less, while more accumulates and multiplies.

We’re hungry and we don’t have words to articulate why.

We’re hungry, and we’re lacking and we’re wanting.

We are living with a near-universal thin desire: wanting something that cannot actually be gotten, that we can’t define, from a source that has no interest in providing it.

The distinction between thick and thin desires isn’t original to me.

Philosophers have been circling this territory for decades, from Charles Taylor’s work on frameworks of meaning to Agnes Callard’s more recent writing on aspiration.

But the version I find most useful is simple:

A thick desire is one that changes you in the process of pursuing it.

A thin desire is one that doesn’t.

«

This is not a reference to Christmas dinner, if you’re wondering. Something to think about for 2026. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
unique link to this extract

The year in slop • The New Yorker

Kyle Chayka runs down the slop of the year, finishing up with this one:

»

If 2025 marked the mainstreaming of slop, it also ushered in an accompanying slop backlash. The shallowness, the glitches, and the too-smooth textures of A.I. content became symbols of chicanery mixed with laziness. This month, McDonald’s Netherlands released a holiday advertisement, created entirely with A.I., titled “It’s the Most Terrible Time of The Year,” depicting various holiday snafus: toppling Christmas trees, baking disasters, carollers caught in a snowstorm.

The solution, according to the ad, is to walk into a warm, cozy, unreal McDonald’s restaurant and hide out until January. Both for its negative take on Yuletide rituals and for its sorry attempt to save on production costs, the ad was so poorly received that the company decided to pull it. McDonald’s Netherlands apologized in a statement, acknowledging that, for many of its customers, the holidays are in fact the “most wonderful time of the year.” No one wants to find slop under the Christmas tree.

«

Amen to that.
unique link to this extract

Police probe potential ties between Brown University attack and MIT professor slaying • WPRI.com

»

Police are investigating possible ties between Saturday’s shooting at Brown University and Monday’s slaying of a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Target 12 investigators have learned.

Senior law enforcement officials tell Target 12 that federal, state and local authorities are now examining a potential connection between the two crimes. Multiple people familiar with the investigation said they have discovered evidence showing the two may be linked.

The possible connection marks a shift in the investigation. Ted Docks, special agent in charge of the FBI Boston office, said at a briefing Tuesday that there “seems to be no connection” between the two shootings.

The next briefing on the investigation is scheduled to be held at 4 p.m. Thursday at police headquarters in Providence.

The violence began around 4 p.m. on Saturday, when an unidentified gunman shot and killed two students — Ella Cook and MukhammadAziz Umurzokov — and injured nine others after opening fire inside a Brown engineering building where students were studying for an exam.

Two days later, an unidentified gunman shot MIT professor Nuno Loureiro multiple times inside his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, about 50 miles north of Providence. He died at a local hospital on Tuesday.

In Providence, the unidentified suspect wore a dark jacket, mask and hat. Surveillance video captured him walking near the Brown campus for multiple hours before entering the Barus & Holley building where he opened fire.

In Brookline, a Boston suburb, an unidentified killer entered Loureiro’s home on Gibbs Street. The suspect shot the professor multiple times and has since remained at large, according to police.

«

This honestly sounds more like the opening scenes of a conspiracy thriller. Louriero was a top expert in nuclear fusion. The motive for his killing remains unknown, but if the killings are somehow linked, then these are very deep waters.
unique link to this extract

• Why do social networks drive us a little mad?
• Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see?
• How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online?
• What can we do about it?
• Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016?

Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: OK, so how productive has The Overspill been over the past few years? Here’s the number of posts per year, and how that translates into weeks of posts:

2015: (no data – posts weren’t numbered)
2016: (no data – posts weren’t numbered)
2017: (no data – posts weren’t numbered)
2018: (no data – posts weren’t numbered)
2019: No. 980 – No. 1214 = 235 posts = 47 weeks
2020: No. 1215 – No. 1454 = 240 posts = 48 weeks
2021: No. 1455 – No. 1709 = 255 posts = 51 weeks
2022: No. 1710 – No. 1924 = 215 posts = 43 weeks
2023: No. 1925 – No. 2139 = 215 posts = 43 weeks
2024: No. 2140 – No. 2359 = 220 posts = 44 weeks
2025: No. 2360 – No. 2584 = 225 posts = 45 weeks

So this year was pretty average, all told. In time it might even be possible to count up those missing years and get a better picture on this productivity puzzle.

https://theoverspill.blog/2025/12/19/new-york-schools-phone-ban-start-up-2584/

http://theoverspill.wordpress.com/?p=9938

$radiantfracture: Beadwork bunny head (Default)$

radiantfracture

I stumbled across this well-spell-crafted game whilst wondering around itch.io: The Daily Spell, a story about a sudden surge in magical beast manifestations in a fantasy city, told through daily word puzzles that resolve into the headlines of brief newspaper articles that advance the story. Quite delightful and very well done.

$rf$

apnic_blog_feed

Posted by George Michaelson

https://blog.apnic.net/2025/12/19/is-it-really-always-the-dns/

https://blog.apnic.net/?p=96235

When DNS breakage occurs and takes down your services, it points to an inadequate understanding of the interdependencies of your own complex systems.

https://blog.apnic.net/2025/12/19/is-it-really-always-the-dns/

https://blog.apnic.net/?p=96235

dewline

Saw an interesting thing today for the second time: an ad on the back end of an OC Transpo bus for Hanhwa Ocean's KS-III submarines. Hanhwa Ocean is one of the firms competing for contracts to build submarines for the Canadian Navy. I'd expect to see the ads in the tunnel under MacKenzie King Bridge that connects the Rideau Centre with DND HQ. Not on a bus out in the eastern suburbs of Ottawa.

(I'll try to remember to upload the picture soon.)

Current Mood: sleepy

conuly

when your boyfriend, who turned out to be a fabulously wealthy member of the magical nobility, insists on buying you an expensive ring, and not just to get at his awful family who all hate you?

Last time that happened to me, I told him, "The ring is nice, but seriously, get your shit together and stand up to your folks, or the wedding's off." And this is why I'm not married today. Fabulous wealth is all well and good, but there are limits, and realistically speaking, you probably can't murder all your inlaws.

Alas, our protagonist is going to take the next book and a half to put her foot down. I can just tell. Unlike any sensible heroine, she's going to spend all her time trying to placate those assholes instead. Honey, it's a wasted effort! If you insist on standing by your man, stand by him by booking a couples spa date - no parents allowed.

(The ring isn't even magical. It's just expensive. I mean, honestly, I would not put up with those people for a nonmagical ring, and here she is insisting that it's all too much, it's too valuable, is he sure he wants to spend what, to him, amounts to pocket change on little old her? Please.)

*****************

( Read more... )

john_naughton_feed

Posted by jjn1

https://memex.naughtons.org/friday-19-december-2025/41486/

https://memex.naughtons.org/?p=41486

His last resting place

W.B. Yeats’s grave in Drumcliff Churchyard, Co. Sligo. We always visit it when driving north or south on the N15. Despite the tourists it’s still a magical place, with Ben Bulben in the background.

Quote of the Day

”What’s the difference between a maths PhD and a large pizza? A large pizza can feed a family of four.”

A famous old joke about academia. Especially relevant nowadays.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

HAIM | Down to be wrong

Link

Weird video, but catchy song.

Long Read of the Day

Why stablecoins – crypto for adults – have suddenly become a big deal

My recent Observer column…

Why are stablecoins suddenly such a big deal? Because they are digital natives that sit comfortably on blockchains: shared digital ledgers that everyone can see and no one can secretly change, and which automatically keep a permanent record of every transaction. That means that they are useful for monetary transactions, especially of a cross-border kind.

These normally require wading through bureaucratic treacle involving banks that have to correspond with one another, payment processors such as Swift and paying fees to everyone along the way. In principle, stablecoins could bypass most of this. On a blockchain, for example, there are no opening hours. Anyone can send a transaction at any time that clears in minutes and no bank approval is required. In other words, stablecoins could transform any multistep international transfer into a single blockchain transaction at a very low cost. Which is why – eventually – a lot of international trade is likely to be conducted in stablecoins.

But which one(s)? At the moment, there are about 250 of them, and since everything that happens on digital networks eventually winds up as a monopoly or oligopoly, it’d be useful to know which coin is likely to become dominant in the next few decades…

Read on

NOTE. The Observer has recently introduced a paywall, which means that from now on the Web version of my column may be only fully available to subscribers. I’ve decided to follow a practice that some columnists on other papers (like Tim Harford on the FT) have adopted: to provide a copy of the column on their blogs a few days after its publication in the paper. If that’s of interest you can find a pdf of the above column here.

Books, etc.

Yesterday I gave a keynote address on “What Machines Don’t Know” to an AI conference in Cambridge yesterday. The Abstract for the talk reads:

Large Language Models are cultural technologies and, as such, moderately useful. But they (and those who build them) have two blind spots. One is their embodiment of a ludicrously narrow concept of ‘intelligence’. The other is the delusion that when one has ‘read’ everything that’s been written, one knows everything worth knowing.

When I was preparing the talk I dug out one of the most interesting books I’ve ever read — Howard Gardner’s 1983 book arguing that the idea of intelligence being measured by a single number is nuts: there’s a multiplicity of different intelligences — Linguistic, Musical, Logical-Mathematical, Spatial, Bodily-Kinesthetic, Emotional, etc.). And of course I also ranged over the question of what kind of knowledge is embodied in LLMs. (Answer: only knowledge that has been written down.) It was useful to be motivated to dig out Howard’s book, and refreshing to read the passages I was looking for. Sadly though, it was also an argument supporting my book-hoarding habit!

Feedback

From Michael Higgins on O Sole Mio(as featured in Wednesday’s edition):

I too have heard a gondolier singing that song – on a canal through the inside of a casino/shopping centre in Las Vegas. With the passengers restrained by seat-belts and warning sign about the water depth – 24 inches I think.

This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 5am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

https://memex.naughtons.org/friday-19-december-2025/41486/

https://memex.naughtons.org/?p=41486

glassesofjustice posting in

startrekholidays

Reveals delayed until Wednesday, December 24, 2025.

There are two post deadline pinch hits remaining. PH 1 has added a request for Strange New Worlds. Please see the details and claim at the PDPH post here.

The new deadline for these PHs is Monday, December 22, 2025 11:59PM EST (08:59PM PST).

hacker_news_daily_feed

https://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/2025-12-18.html

The 10 highest-rated articles on Hacker News on December 18, 2025 which have not appeared on any previous Hacker News Daily are:

https://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/2025-12-18.html

apnic_blog_feed

Posted by Tony Smith

https://blog.apnic.net/2025/12/19/resource-delegation-review-update-q4-2025/

https://blog.apnic.net/?p=97686

APNIC completed the first year of its resource delegation review program.

https://blog.apnic.net/2025/12/19/resource-delegation-review-update-q4-2025/

https://blog.apnic.net/?p=97686

slippery_fish

Fallout is baaaack!

I love this show.

Lucy is such a great character and I love her relationship with the Ghoul. The distrust, the disgust, the way they challenge each other. And them working together for now is so great to watch because it didn't make anything easier for them.

And Norm! Oh, I love Norm. I love how this meek guy grows braver and braver because he is under so much pressure that he can't be meek anymore.

Random thing I thought about while watching this ep: Being woken up as one of Bud's Buddies and suddenly having to face actual Vault life – a Vault life that has its own history now – must be so fucking strange. They were frozen either shortly before or after the attacks and have no clue about what has happened since then, they do not know this society and have to insert themselves into it.

Random ramblings about 2x01 under the ( cut. )

redbird

No, I did not spend all the money in my wallet on chocolate*, but I treated us to a box of chocolates from Serenade, the chocolatier in Brookline with a wide selection of vegan chocolates.

I took the bus to Brookline Village, walked a little extra because I was wrong about which bus stop to use, walked into the shop, and asked for a one-pound box.

I bought two vegan caramels, which Adrian had asked for; I'd have gotten more, but I wasn't sure what she or Cattitude think of sea salt caramel. Just for myself, I got six dairy truffles, three lemon and three lime. The rest was a few (vegan) chocolate creams, and a lot of chocolate-dipped fruit and nuts, including several of their excellent chocolate covered plums, a candy I haven't seen anywhere else.

I came home via Trader Joe's, where I bought fruit, a bell pepper, hummus, pre-cooked chicken sausages, a carton of chocolate ice cream, and a box of frozen vanilla and chocolate macarons.

Even counting the chocolate part of the groceries, I would have had money left from the $79 that happens to be how much cash is in my wallet right now. That's a pretty arbitrary metric, since I don't always have the same amount of cash (I do make a point of having some, because cash still comes in handy sometimes).

*see yesterday's post

kaberett

No, internet, I guarantee you that 100% of the time that someone searches for explain pain supercharged, results they do not want are anything you think matches the string "explain paint supercharged". Hope that helps! Have A Nice Day!

(Still not anything like as annoying as fuzzy matching on a[b|d]sorb in GOOGLE SCHOLAR, but nonetheless Quite.)

cosmolinguist

This morning I mused that today is in that liminal space where I cannot yet eat the cheese we bought for Christmas but there are mince pies on the countertop and I could have one for breakfast.

I did have one for breakfast. (With a slice of regular cheese because mince pies are too sweet for me on their own and taste really good with strong cheese.)

D and I are off to family Christmas celebrations tomorrow, so I signed off work this afternoon for the last time until 2026!

In the three previous years I've had a white collar job, I've never taken this long off, I've always worked a little between Christmas and new year. I kinda like it for catching up on stuff when work is quiet and people leave me alone, and long stretches of unstructured time isn't good for my mental health.

But this time, I'm so ready for this. This year has been so long.

(I know myself well enough to expect that I'll be horrified on the 27th of December when I have a whole week ahead of me with nothing to do. But I can worry about that when I get to it.)

I'm a little sad to be missing queer club's Christmas party this evening, but my carefully planned after-work itinerary fell apart almost as soon as I made it, when my friend L texted and asked if I could come over because he and his husband (also my friend) were having a bad mental health time thanks to the DWP (they are both disabled).

I almost literally dropped everything and left the house, because L isn't the kind of person who gets in touch spontaneously, has the energy for social stuff, or can ask for help easily, so for him to do all these things felt like a big deal to me.

It felt kinda weird to leave in what felt like an emergency and arrive only able to offer hugs and silly, distracting conversation. But I'm assured that it did help. And I'm glad I could do it, I like them so much. It was a good use of my social spoons for the evening.

extra_ordinary_comic_feed

Posted by Li

https://www.exocomics.com/770/

Hey everyone! My dashery store is on sale until the end of the month if you wanted to grab something :D

https://www.exocomics.com/770/

wondermark_feed

Posted by David Malki !

https://wondermark.com/c/tiffeve/

https://wondermark.com/?post_type=webcomic1&p=18528

This comic was created as part of a “Secret Santa” comics exchange on Reddit. These characters are Tiff and Eve, and this strip was written by Fran Sundblad, the author of the comic Tiff & Eve, and rendered in Wondermark style by me.

Here’s the original Reddit post
More Tiff & Eve comics are on Reddit, Bluesky, Instagram, and Patreon
Check out this post for super secret behind the scenes info

https://wondermark.com/c/tiffeve/

https://wondermark.com/?post_type=webcomic1&p=18528

calimac

My online play-reading group has been exploring, among other things, 19th century English comedy. We've done most of Oscar Wilde's drawing-room comedies (I know, technically Wilde was Irish, but he worked in England) and wondered what else there was. We tried a play by Arthur Wing Pinero, since I knew he was popular at the time, and though the text was genteely anti-semitic (the moral lesson seemed to be that pushy Cockney Jews shouldn't try to socialize with titled gentry; they wouldn't enjoy themselves), but we did enjoy reading the play - it was called The Cabinet Minister - and will probably return to Pinero eventually.

But for our next venture in this area, I suggested that we try a play that I knew was a big hit comedy in its day, the laugh riot of the 1860s, but whose reputation has been besmirched by a tragic event that occurred during a performance. I refer, of course, to Our American Cousin by Tom Taylor, and if you want to read it, it's here.

It turned out to be fairly funny, itself, and again worth reading. As with the Pinero, it's about titled gentry facing money problems - this time they're being cheated by a crooked agent - who are also being faced by a visit by an American cousin who has become the heir to another relative's fortune.

The cousin is from Vermont, specifically Brattleboro, which is at the old, longer-settled end of Vermont, but he sounds and acts more like a Kentucky hillbilly. Before he arrives, another relative who'd gone out to see him writes that he's been out shooting with a party of the Crow people. In Vermont? The Crows live around Montana. Maybe they too were visiting for some unspecified reason, but evidently for Taylor, America is some kind of black box out of which anything can come.

Our member who read the part of Asa, the cousin, had a great time with it. My principal role was that of an inexplicable - there's no explanation of what he's doing there - nobleman called Lord Dundreary, who became the play's breakout character in the first production from a flamboyant performance by the actor. Lord Dundreary is both dimwitted and an inveterate punster, which I guess go together in some people's opinion, and I found it challenging to get across wordplay like this:
Why does a duck go under water? for divers reasons.
Why does a duck come out of the water? for sundry reasons.
According to the misspelling of his dialogue, Lord Dundreary suffers from both an interdental lisp (th for s) and rhotacism (w for r). Trying to perform both of these at once gave me an accent which sounded to me more Eastern European than English.

Interesting play; I'm glad we tried it. We're also finishing up the more obscure end of Shakespeare, our last venture having been Timon of Athens, which is also about a seemingly well-off man with money problems. When it turns out that his open-hearted generosity has left him broke, and none of his beneficiaries will now lend him money in his need, Timon suddenly switches personality and becomes a toxic misanthrope for the rest of the play. His encounter with another, more natively misanthropic character - dueling curmudgeons! - in Act 4 Scene 3 is one of Shakespeare's little-known gems.