Artikel

Writing for unfeeling machines - should ai automate our life away?

I can't go a day without unwillingly engaging with ai in some form. Yesterday, I left a meeting at work because we were being presented with ai generated pictures and being asked to come up with witty work-related captions for each one. Most tellingly, the guy who'd put it together had included the prompts he'd used on each slide. What a waste of time and resources! I had to leave. I read a thread about the use of ai in novel writing and that it could be a great tool if used correctly. I hear the same argument applied to ai music and art. But what does that mean? How is it to be used correctly

The Moody Warlock's Ember Keep · EN

A drawing: Yolgurgis of Thesh - The Vile Eater of Stars

Yolgurgis of Thesh - The Vile Eater of Stars . Graphite and oil pastel on Canson paper. I just free-wheeled this one and it turned into something - an abstraction of a dark God. Email me about this post . Subscribe to my blog via RSS feed . /

The Moody Warlock's Ember Keep · EN

Birding in the UK: British Birds of Village and Countryside, Field and Stream

While we began our trip across the UK last June in London, we certainly didn't stay there! Though the city offered a surprising amount of birds and other wildlife , and was a convenient base for a trip out to wetlands in the Thames estuary for even more encounters with nature, we were eager to travel north, where we would spend time rambling through the quiet countryside and impossibly picturesque villages of the Cotswolds and Yorkshire Dales. Mute Swan, an iconic British bird, in front of Bibury's idyllic Arlington Row. We stayed in a few different small villages as we made our way north to S

Natural History Journal · EN

A Bit of the Boreal Forest in Northern California

Earlier this January, we spent several days exploring the lush, ferny redwood groves and mossy Sitka spruce forests of northwestern California, and while hiking through this enchanting habitat, observing the plants, birds and other wildlife, it occurred to me that in a sense, winter in California's Humboldt and Del Norte counties is a little bit like summer in North America's vast boreal forests. Varied Thrush Also called taiga, the world's boreal forests form a lush, green ring around the top of our planet, covering much of Alaska, Canada, Scandinavia and Russia. These dense forests are compr

Natural History Journal · EN

Birding in the UK: British Moorland Birds on Grassington Moor

Last June, Eric and I had the opportunity to spend the month in the UK, taking in its incredible natural beauty and rich history. A few of our favorite days were spent in the Yorkshire Dales, where we enjoyed a cool, drizzly hike up onto bleak but beautiful Grassington Moor. Here, high above the verdant pastures, the rocky, heather-covered hills were wild and rugged, and the birds were both abundant and interesting! European Golden-Plover One of the most abundant species we saw on the moors (as well as in other habitats throughout the UK) was the Meadow Pipit, a close relative of our familiar

Natural History Journal · EN

North American Porcupine

Instantly recognizable by its prickly appearance and known for its [mistaken] reputation of throwing dangerous barbed quills toward would-be attackers, porcupines are perhaps simultaneously one of North America's most and least well-known mammals. How well do you actually know this large rodent of the forest? Read on to find out, and to learn the official term for baby porcupines (which is probably my favorite fun fact about this amazing creature)! Members of the order Rodentia, North American Porcupines ( Erethizon dorsatum ) are North America's second-largest rodent, after the American Beave

Natural History Journal · EN

American Beavers: Ecosystem Engineers Extraordinaire

While it's always fun to come across any indication of a beaver's presence in the landscape , without a doubt seeing one of these amazing creatures in the wild is much more exciting! Here in California's Central Valley, I've found those sightings to be rather rare - and therefore all the more special when they do occur. While I regularly come across signs of beaver activity , such as felled trees, gnawed branches, dams, lodges and tracks, it's less frequent that I get to spend time watching these critters go about their daily business. So, when I came across this beaver on a small reservoir in

Natural History Journal · EN

Birding in the UK: Scottish Birds in Edinburgh and Dunbar

Last year, Eric and I spent the month of June traveling through England and Scotland, visiting amazing historic sites, touring places connected with our favorite classic literature, rambling across the stunningly beautiful British countryside, and of course, birding. The last week of our trip was spent in Scotland, and I had the opportunity to see quite a few birds right in the heart of Edinburgh, in and around Holyrood Park. Eurasian Bullfinch I was incredibly excited to see this male Eurasian Bullfinch, sitting atop a fence one fine, mizzly morning on our way into Edinburgh. Though he looked

Natural History Journal · EN

The Gospel Through Nature: The Offer of New Life!

With Easter, perhaps my favorite holiday, on the way and new life bursting out in bud and bloom all around us, I wanted to share a piece written last year, in celebration of spring and the offer of New Life made available to us all! When first composing this piece, I considered titling it "The Gospel of Nature." But I want to be clear from the beginning: If the Gospel is defined as the Good News about the offer of salvation from sin and death, by grace through faith in the sacrificial death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, there is no gospel apart from that which is revealed in God's Word, th

Natural History Journal · EN

Birding in the UK: Scottish Seabirds in the Firth of Forth and North Sea

Before we ended our time in Scotland last summer, I just had to spend a little time with some of the many amazing seabirds that call the icy North Sea home. While visiting family in Dunbar, Scotland, we were conveniently close to the town of North Berwick, home of the Scottish Seabird Centre. From this delightful seaside village, visitors may embark on boat trips from the harbor at North Berwick out to several of the rocky islands that rise from the waves where the Firth of Forth meets the North Sea. While these wave-battered rocks look inhospitable to humans, they are critical breeding habita

Natural History Journal · EN

Using PKCS#11 on GNU/Linux

PKCS#11 is a standard API to interface with HSMs, Smart Cards, or other types of random hardware backed crypto. On my travel laptop, I use a few Yubikeys in PKCS#11 mode using OpenSC to handle system login. libpam-pkcs11 is a pretty easy to use module that will let you log into your system locally using a PKCS#11 token locally. One of the least documented things, though, was how to use an OpenSC PKCS#11 token in Chrome. First, close all web browsers you have open. sudo apt-get install libnss3-tools certutil -U -d sql:$HOME/.pki/nssdb modutil -add "OpenSC" -libfile /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ope

Paul's Notes · EN

Domo Arigato, Mr. debugfs

Years ago, at what I think I remember was DebConf 15, I hacked for a while on debhelper to write build-ids to debian binary control files , so that the build-id (more specifically, the ELF note .note.gnu.build-id ) wound up in the Debian apt archive metadata. I’ve always thought this was super cool, and seeing as how Michael Stapelberg blogged some great pointers around the ecosystem, including the fancy new debuginfod service, and the find-dbgsym-packages helper, which uses these same headers, I don’t think I’m the only one. At work I’ve been using a lot of rust , spec

Paul's Notes · EN

Complex for Whom?

In basically every engineering organization I’ve ever regarded as particularly high functioning, I’ve sat through one specific recurring conversation which is not – a conversation about “complexity”. Things are good or bad because they are or aren’t complex, architectures needs to be redone because it’s too complex – some refactor of whatever it is won’t work because it’s too complex. You may have even been a part of some of these conversations – or even been the one advocating for simple light-weight solutions. I’ve done

Paul's Notes · EN

boot2kier

I can’t remember exactly the joke I was making at the time in my work’s slack instance (I’m sure it wasn’t particularly funny, though; and not even worth re-reading the thread to work out), but it wound up with me writing a UEFI binary for the punchline. Not to spoil the ending but it worked - no pesky kernel, no messing around with “userland”. I guess the only part of this you really need to know for the setup here is that it was a Severance joke, which is some fantastic TV. If you haven’t seen it, this post will seem perhaps weirder than it actually

Paul's Notes · EN

The Promised LAN

The Internet has changed a lot in the last 40+ years. Fads have come and gone. Network protocols have been designed, deployed, adopted, and abandoned. Industries have come and gone. The types of people on the internet have changed a lot. The number of people on the internet has changed a lot, creating an information medium unlike anything ever seen before in human history. There’s a lot of good things about the Internet as of 2025, but there’s also an inescapable hole in what it used to be, for me . I miss being able to throw a site up to send around to friends to play with without

Paul's Notes · EN

It's NOT always DNS.

I’ve written down a new rule (no name, sorry) that I’ll be repeating to myself and those around me. “If you can replace ‘DNS’ with ‘key value store mapping a name to an ip’ and it still makes sense, it was not, in fact, DNS.” Feel free to repeat it along with me. Sure, the “It’s always DNS” meme is funny the first few hundred times you see it – but what’s less funny is when critical thinking ends because a DNS query is involved. DNS failures are often the first observable problem because it’s one of the first t

Paul's Notes · EN

DESFire EV3

I’ve long been interested in hardware key material storage devices. I’ve been a fan of yubikeys (I still remember when my fancy new NEO-N showed up), PIV (and its associated smattering of additional fields ), SaaS HSMs , the kernel keyring , some tooling I’ve fairly satisfied with the design of at prior companies, and of course, our dear friend, the TPM. All that is not even to mention the scores of exotic hardware security modules one generally comes across from time to time when you’re keeping a sharp eye out that you wind up playing with. I have not used any LLMs in

Paul's Notes · EN

Why Write?

As a graduate of a liberal arts university, I wound up, unsurprisingly, taking a lot of classes in every possible academic discipline. Thinking back to the person that I was going into university, I don’t think I would have chosen to take them – after all, my degree was in the sciences; I’d have been stoked to do nothing more than wall-to-wall computer science until I ran out of coursework and filled the rest of my hours with research and independent studies with my professors (which, I guess I did actually do, just not as much as I would have otherwise). Even this blog&rsquo

Paul's Notes · EN

[TJ's notes]

I just realised how unusual British politics is. One day you have elections and the very next day you have a new prime minister. And that's it. In many countries (mine included) there would be negotations going on after the elections that can take weeks if not months and only then a new goverment is formed. I still believe coallition goverments are better, though 🙃. #politics , #uk

WebNest of Tomas Jakl · EN

[TJ's notes]

Follow-up to my previous post , the Haskell GHC compiler on top of the Foreign Function Interface now also supports the REPL and Template Haskell in its WASM/JavaScript backend! This makes it now viable for real-world usage! For details see the announcement blog post by Cheng Shao: https://www.tweag.io/blog/2024-11-21-ghc-wasm-th-ghci/ #haskell

WebNest of Tomas Jakl · EN

[TJ's notes]

Some years ago Tom Leinster wrote a wonderful explanation of what makes a (mathematical) definition 'natural' : It’s a matter of aesthetics, and obviously there’s no precise answer, but here’s my stab at it. When you meet a new definition, there are two questions you might ask: where does it come from? and why is the definition exactly that, not something slightly different? If there’s a satisfactory answer to both, you can call the definition ‘natural’. I've not been as careful about my definitions in the same way but I've been very careful about the notions and theories that I tend to study.

WebNest of Tomas Jakl · EN

[TJ's notes]

So according to the recent talk Reflections on Haskell@Meta by Simon Marlow, Haskell is no longer used in Meta (Facebook, Instagram, ...) as the main language to specify automated moderation tools. Instead, they use Hack, their version of PHP. As Simon explains in the talk, the decision to drop Haskell was made whilst knowing that many of Haskell safety guarantees will have to be dropped in the new system. I wonder if we should now expect to see many more unexpected moderation missteps in the coming years 🙂. #facebook , #haskell

WebNest of Tomas Jakl · EN

[TJ's reposts]

Reshared https://calnewport.com/on-charlie-kirk-and-saving-civil-society/ Fully agree with Cal Newport's message. I quote his final paragraphs (but encourage you to read the rest): After troubling national events, there’s often a public conversation about the appropriate way to respond. Here’s one option to consider: Quit using these social platforms . Find other ways to keep up with the news, or spread ideas, or be entertained. Be a responsible grown-up who does useful things; someone who serves real people in the real world. To save civil society, we need to end our decade-long experiment wi

WebNest of Tomas Jakl · EN

[TJ's notes]

Loved this A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator video by the Norwegian Consumer Council ! Related references: Consumer Rights Wiki #internet , #enshittification

WebNest of Tomas Jakl · EN