It is amazing how many people I see claiming that AI has one good use. No one seems to agree on what that one good use is, and there's always a hell of a lot of goalpost shifting and special pleading involved. For some reason a lot of folks quite …

If you have an existing database - for example from an older application, or a dataset you downloaded - and want to use it with Python, you might want to have SQLAlchemy ORM models for it for easier querying. Enter sqlacodegen: This is a tool that reads the structure of an existing …

Google AI Overview Sales tool, image by HouseFresh But are AI Overviews leading you to the best results on the web? Or is this just a new prime spot for selling you products you will regret buying? And how does this change affect the websites that made Google’s AI …

If you - like me - regularly check out sourcecode (read: Git) repositories of projects that you stumble across or use in a hobby project/product or at work, you will now and then find one or more issues in their tracker with a title similar to the above, often with remarks …

Housefresh - an independent publisher and reviewer of air purifiers for your home - recently published a well-researched and damning article about how big media companies game the system by flooding Google with useless listicles of 'best product for X' without actually testing and reviewing them; 'content' is mostly based on Amazon …

Dan Janes writes: Spam is nothing new, spam on GitHub is also not particularly new. Any site that accepts user-generated content will need to figure out how to prevent people from submitting spam, whether that is for scams, malicious software, or X-rated material. I have been getting tagged in Crypto …

Remember Free Public WiFi? Once, many years ago, I stayed on the 62nd floor of the Westin Peachtree Plaza in Atlanta, Georgia. This was in the age when the price of a hotel room was directly correlated with the price of the WiFi service, and as a high school student …

Why I have zero interest in trying Threads, even read-only. Mosseri’s take here is strange and fairly alarming for a few reasons. For one, it echoes some of the anodyne ways that Facebook has described itself over the years: just a big, friendly, neutral place where people could “connect …

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a …

I'm worried that this is going to be seen as a reason to not take "CRITICAL" disclosures seriously at first glance like we should. A "CRITICAL" bug MUST be treated as if it was critically bad. From a community health perspective, people have been told that something really bad is …

Good piece on how a (hardware) supply chain is something completely different from the software stack what we tend to call a 'software supply chain', but which really is not. The problem is mostly that the providers of the moving parts that people (read: companies) are so dependent on and …

Interesting research to the Fermi Paradox and how fast settlement of our Galaxy can be done in various scenario's. Also, animations! The simulation shows a significant fraction of a galaxy can be settled in a relatively short period of time, even with ships traveling no faster than the Voyager spacecraft …

According to manpage, the column command “columnate lists”. In simple words, the column is a simple utility that can format your output into a column format (rows and fields) based on the structure of your source file. The column command is part of the util-linux package.

Building and testing a LEGO machine for making domino runs. Each 'domino' is a stack of 5 1x3 LEGO bricks. Turn on captions for some insight into the design and build process. Skip to 5:14​ to see the machine being used to set up a domino run.

Gerald Foos bought a motel in order to watch his guests having sex. He saw a lot more than that. Fascinating story, lots of (un?)expected things happening, and the author having to consider multiple times whether to intervene, contrary to his long-standing agreement with the owner. (Might need some …

Tips and thoughts on preparing and giving engaging presentations. As a person who does not give presentations often (lots of reasons), the points and pointers in this article sound really helpful. Also, one of the better explanations about why a full, information dense slide is unhelpful: Now imagine the audience …

I do not endorse piracy and stealing. On the other hand, I always found it odd to have so much scientific results locked away behind paywalls, that are even prohibitive even for 'wealthy' western students/scientists, let alone people from third-world countries and such that could benefit greatly from, and …

After my piece on projectM last year, I installed it on several computers, not really thinking about extra .milk preset files (which contain the animations). Today, after some short searching thinking there might be more out there, I found this little gem of a collection: Presets Collection – Cream of the …

3D printed, retro-futuristic looking computer terminals. Not all as practical as the other, but inspiring and great looking at the least. I now kind of want an ultrawidescreen terminal on our table now.

There's this Martin Molin guy that is a wonderful nerdy musician. He build the original Marble Machine and has been building a Marble Machine X ever since. His channel is a really nice documentary of the process and progress of this project, and provides a lot of detail of the …