Traditional builders: We mix everything from clay, lime, cement and sand in specific ratios.
Modern builders: We buy a bag of mix from the shop. What's in the bag? Who cares!
What a loss. And the BagOfMix industry would prefer you not finding out that for example this bag contains only cement, quartz sand and a little bit of chopped glass and you could mix that just fine yourself.
@vaviurka's been busy with those beetroots.
Incredible moment where Fox News puts up a graphic with all the reasons it opposes the Democratic Socialists of America and why people should be afraid of them ...
Fuel crisis in Chita, Russia.
Removed the supports and the end plugs, tidied up around and then dug the trench wider.
Some simple grading with a few buckets sand and the first skirt insulation panels are in. Once these are closed all around the house, we have upgraded our naked stone foundation to an insulated frost-protected shallow foundation.
This carves out a huge slab of terrain under the house and adds it as thermal mass to the house. A temperature gradient will develop in the soil below the skirt and a small amount of heat loss will keep the soil underneath from freezing.
A huge upgrade for an old house compared to a naked stone foundation exposed to -30°C air in winter. The soil stays relatively warm by comparison.
This morning's job: Dig up some food.
Beetroots for preserving, new potatoes for lunch.
The first new potatoes are always super yummy.
Got a pack of some wildflower seed mix from a relative this spring. I'm not much of a flowers guy, so I threw the whole pack into a big pot with some soil and put it on top of the stump of Alan Birch, the big old rotting birch we had to cut down.
Seems to have worked!
The stump is covered in grass clippings which help nature digest it faster.
The surprise tobacco plant that popped up in the onion bed is doing well and I've been looking up how to process it.
Maybe we should let it grow seeds instead and start a tobacco farm? 😆
The yard may be somewhat of a construction site right now, but we do have a rainbow. Even a double rainbow, if you look closely.
Rain at last and it cooled down significantly. The road was steaming as we drove home from town earlier. Now trying to also cool the inside.
Been watering my concrete like a good boy and covered the trench with some sheetmetal scraps to avoid too much rain in there.
Ignore the blotches on the right, XnView has some weirdness in the "Enhance Colours" thing and I noticed too late.
Daikon. A bit past ready actually. Already flowering and the top is getting woody, but the rest still tasty. I will pluck them but leave the biggest ones to go to seed for next year.
They didn't super like it here but worth trying again with seeds from the ones that made it.
Did the same with the sunflowers. All died last year except one that grew huge. We dried its head and stored the seeds. Raised seedlings from those this year and those are all doing well this year (so far).
Stay off my lawn, err, corn patch. Damn weeds.
This is why an independent LRT is so important: https://www.lrt.lt/en/news-in-english/19/2977096/lithuania-pm-designate-sold-state-land-at-fivefold-profit-while-serving-as-mayor
If you ever wanted to understand what the word #kleptocracy means:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/30/trump-1bn-crypto-businesses-2025
These look ready.
The skill to turn a rock slab into an object of such perfection!
With nothing more than hammers and very occasionally a small chisel. And some basic measuring tools.
The Government™ has made an ad about Palantir, and it's surprsingly honest and informative. https://youtu.be/mBW9QCVDSjY
404 Media: Scammers Sell Seeds for Exotic AI-Generated Flowers That Don’t Exist
https://www.404media.co/scammers-sell-seeds-for-exotic-ai-generated-flowers-that-dont-exist/
@godotengine LOUDER !
AI contributions have the added pain of being demoralizing. Reviewing PRs is already tedious work, but it is rewarding because reviewers generally feel that their efforts are contributing to educating a new contributor (who may become a future maintainer/reviewer). If your feedback on PRs is just being absorbed by a machine and not going towards mentoring a potential future maintainer, it becomes much harder to justify spending your free time on PR review.
Cartoon by Matias Debrasi perfectly captures America today.