Oh look, I'm bookmarking yet another laravel package with a note that "this will be useful for work in the near future". Because it will.

I've been dicing onions all wrong. And I finally understand why chefs make that horizontal cut into an onion, prior to dicing!

No. No we don't. This is a really good primer on the reality of working with LLMs – that we just don't really know how they work.

And here is that list of 102 cocktails. And being me, rather than setting out to go to bars and try them all, I wonder about setting out to make them all, at home. That could be fun.

So it turns out that the International Bartenders Association maintains a list of cocktails (presumably in an effort to standardise training a bit. While I've got books containing hundreds (if not thousands) more on my shelves, this is probably the closest thing the world has to an "official" list of cocktails, and this chap tells the story of his setting out to drink them all.

If this adds Gitlab integration (and there's already a PR for it, so here's hoping) then installing this is going to be a no-brainer for me.

Someone out there is writing a comprehensive quide to making software, stating from first principles. At present, there's only one chapter available, on how displays work (because almost all software invovles something being displayed to someone at some point, and without them, there'd be no software). If the rest of the book is up to this standard, it'll be amazing.

These are great. There are several in here I believed, and I'm probably going to start adding oil to pasta water again, if it really does stop it boiling over. And I'm going to stop worrying that I'm not drinknig enough water.

Fascinating set of insights into how far an AI agent can go, and how it breaks down. The other thing I find refreshingly honest, is the tone of the company who make the thing, openly saying "we have no idea why it did this". That bedrock fact underlies all LLM development, and any "AI" company who claims to truly, properly, understand their product is lying.

A little good news – thanks to dropping battery costs (with even cheaper to come) there are now parts of the world where there's absolutely no chance of non-renewable energy being remotely competative with solar power. Hell, per this article, event somewhere grey and miserable like Birmingham could meet 60% of it's needs, cheaply and cleanly.

A live breakdown of what most people one earth are doing right now, by reasonable guess at likely activity.

Exactly what it says on the tin. A delight.

This is taking a delibarately provocative stance, sure, but it's also true, and moderately funny reading. (Side note: it's also kind of why techbros are so certain AI is coming for everything *and* enthusiastic about it – it's a already taken away some of the parts of their job they find full, and they think it'll do that for every job – although this chap is a little clearer-eyed.)

There's not a lot in here I'd actively seek out – not a criticism, just that mass-market whiskies are what they are – but plenty in here is perfectly drinkable.

That said it's interesting how the global market has changed – there are whiskies in here I've never heard of, simple because they're not marketed in the UK. And in passing, I'd note that the couple of (non mass-market) Indian whiskies I've had have been quite good, so I might try and get a bottle of one of those just to try at some point.

I tend to agree with the author – it's worth making an effort to actively like things. Not every meal is a banquet, not every work of art is Citizen Kane or the the Mona Lisa, but most things have something that makes them enjoyable and worth spending a bit of time with. It's worth looking for that and appreciating that, rather than focusing on what you don't like about it.

As a pal put it – in the last couple of months Labour have: coped as well as could be asked with Trump's tariff madness, secured a trade deal with India, and now, made genuine progress on rectifying (some of) the damage of Brexit.

This does absolutely nothing to offset the damage of the transphobic shit going on, the anti-migrant rhetoric, and all the other things they're doing that I loathe, and I still don't know if I can vote for them at the next election, but I just wanted to take a moment to feel something that isn't total despair about my governement.

A sweary bird puppet talks about the typography of Star Wars. Either that sounds like fun to you, or you may be dead inside.

Interesting/terrifying (tiny, carefully chosen for sensationalism) glimpse into the world of the ultra-weathly. There's a line from a Gibson's Count Zero that it reminds me of "And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human."

I just cannot fathom raising one's kids like that. I can understand having a nanny to take the pressure off, and to enable the work-oriented lifestyle that made the family rich. But surely the point is then to also have the kids raised *right*?