Archives for October, 2026
Pangram: The Atlantic’s Vauhini Vara is a complete retard
The mediocre piece of fiction discussed by Vauhini Vara—a writer herself, but mostly a journalist for The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine—might as well be…
Tiny update regarding Ubuntu 26.10 flavors—Post-release update!
As I mentioned nearly two weeks ago, my Debian 13 XFCE remains rock-solid, while my old Acer serves as a testbed for various distros. What I did was to install…
La subraț, în și pe supat, în sunas
Am hotărât să scriu această postare în ciuda silei pe care o am față de problema apărută din neant a unui „supat”. Viralizarea discuției este tipică imbecilizării contemporane, iar gogoașa…
China, China, China! Including Taiwan…
Excerpts from the South China Morning Post’s “Beijing’s policy advisers map out how post-reunification Taiwan could be governed”: In 2019, President Xi Jinping became the first Chinese leader to publicly…
Welcome to post-literacy!
These are excerpts from an NYT “Interesting Times” podcast episode where the guest was the Times of London columnist James Marriott, and the host was Mary Harrington. The full video…
Someone is using Claude to kill software development
A couple of days ago, I nearly fell off my chair when I read Joey Sneddon’s report. Then, Futurism mentioned the news. I expected global hysteria, yet no such thing…
Claude Haiku 5.5: a diligent, dumb workhorse?
As people who follow my blog might know, I fell out of love with Claude at some point, despite it being one of my favorite chatbots for a long time.…
Hugh Howey’s NEO: vibecoding, what else?
Hugh Howey is the author of the Silo Saga (Wool, Shift, and Dust), the science fiction series Silo (Apple TV) is based on. Not such a huge author until Apple…
Now I am even more perplexed!
In my previous post, in a nutshell, I expressed my disappointment with Gemini (especially for coding, but also as an all-purpose chatbot) and, among other things, my surprise that ChatGPT’s…
Gemini is increasingly bad, but ChatGPT surprised me
Using LLMs is as unpredictable as the weather. One day a model seems decent; the next day its next version (or even the same version!) disappoints completely. I keep giving…
ComicStripBrowser 3.1.1: Know when and why GoComics flips you off!
The release of ComicStripBrowser 3 left a few situations uncovered, and GoComics’ increasingly strict limitations likely frustrated some users who didn’t know why the app started showing them errors on…
From noatime to Wayland: more Linux mysteries
I just added to my Small polish touches to Debian 13 installed via Xebian the 21st suggestion, Taking inspiration from MX: noatime,lazytime, so I wanted to make the same changes…
Of Mice and Men: Redragon, Mon Amour?
When I wrote in 2021 about mice and keyboards, I left the topic without a clear message. At the time, I praised the simple but reliable Logitech M180 (the successor,…