Just been with the wife to see https://the-rock-orchestra.com/ at The Royal in Castlebar. Great fun, including a thoroughly credible rendition of one of Page's great guitar solos on a fiddle.

(If you want to join the fun, they're touring the UK soon. They're in Cork tomorrow. Definitely recommended!)

That meant leaving my Sunday TTRPG in the capable hands of my youngest, who tortured them with time travel and left them on a cliffhanger.

Couldn't be more proud. :-)

Men only please (women, please boost)

A woman you've never met before is walking past you and suddenly complains of chest pain, clutches her chest, goes down, loses consciousness. You establish she has no pulse.

Someone has fetched the AED

It has two pads that you need to position on her chest - one on her right side below the collar bone, the other on her left, just below her breast

(Please boost for coverage)

You will

It's taken a while for this to get to the top of my RSS-long-reads stack, but I'm glad it has.

https://oliverkornetzke.substack.com/p/please-dont-let-them

#SF that is very #hamradio, and very #aipocalpyse too.

Linux GPIOs using Ioctl: In which I consider how to program GPIOs on a Raspberry Pi 500, and settle on using Linux kernel ioctl(2) calls directly. Example code is included that implements an Arduino-style Digital I/O interface.

https://ei3jdb.com/blog/20260927.html

Oh dear.

Tried to use libgpiod to access the GPIOs on my RPi 500 over the weekend. Talk about overcomplicated! Not made any easier by there being two incompatible versions and pot-luck which one you get.

So I wrote my drivers directly in ioctl(2) - so much easier.

I'll 'blog about it next weekend, because I just can't be the only one.

Sweet "Blind Date" feature in The Guardian today, but with one glaring error that I cannot let pass.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/sep/12/blind-date-joe-jade

"The Girl in the Fireplace" is a good Who episode, without a doubt, but the best episode of new Who is objectively "The Husbands of River Song." Best Doctor, best companion (even though she was not a companion of this Doctor) fantastic chemistry, great humour, plenty for the fans, no scenery left unchewed, and a surprising amount of romance.

@lnr Apparently so; e.g. it looks like it can be seen in this article: https://www.science.org/content/article/near-disaster-federal-nuclear-weapons-laboratory-takes-hidden-toll-america-s-arsenal

(I had heard of this incident, but had forgotten that this wasn't in the wild years of the 1950s but in 2011)
@chiffchaff

Governments need to start taking foreign agitation and interference on social media seriously. It's insane that foreign government psyops have carte blanche to do whatever they want. It's wrecking our country and making politics impossible.

The one thing no CEO will ever understand

https://justinpot.com/the-one-thing-no-ceo-will-ever-understand/

Using 30 months of panel data on 26,811 Chinese students in grades 7-12, it has been studied how generative AI affects homework productivity and learning.

● X-Axis: Homework scores
● Y-Axis: Exam scores

🔗 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6868618

#tech #BigTech #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #LLM #AISlop

Doing my hobbies more efficiently is insulting. That’s not what my hobbies are about.

Otherwise it’s just work you aren’t paid for.

I am very inefficient. That’s the point. I go down random rabbit holes. I have numerous side quests. That’s part of the joy.

Because this is Ireland, we had cloud.

Because we had cloud, the phone camera worked.

Waiting for the Sun

https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decision-making/

In a job interview I was asked what I'd like to be remembered for. I responded that I had no desire to be remembered. My main takeaway from a BA and MA in history is that people in history books are villains or victims and I didn't want to be either. Didn't get the job.

So I watched Rashomon, famous for the "Rashomon Effect." Only problem is, I didn't see the Rashomon Effect in Rashomon, I just saw people lying to save face.

The X-Files episode "Bad Blood" is a far better example.

The following is a valid DOS COM executable that prints "HELLO" in the lower right corner of the screen.

You can copy these emoji into a text editor, and save it as EMOJI.COM. it should be 141 bytes.

It will run in DosBox-X, with the following options:

cpu cputype=8086
machine cga

🐸☺️🐰🐎♐🗃️🧯🧯🧯🐮💗🦮🪏♐🐰🐹🗃️🧯🧯🧯🧯💗🪗🧯😗🧮🫪😗🧮😗🐮😪😔⭐

may god have mercy on my soul.

The sound of one bubble popping?

https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/08/03/the-ai-bubble-is-already-popping-we-just-dont-know-it-yet/5282004

In engineering we say "Good, Cheap, Fast. Pick 2"'. AI is when you pick Fast twice.