It is a linkblog and digital garden for the weird, wonderful, and unexpectedly useful things I find on the internet. Read what I have kept below, wander through a subject, or visit Small Web, my directory of independent blogs.
The bulk of my vibe-coding experiments over the last few months have involved audio and video, or rather audio and vision, and I’ve been experimenting pretty heavily with multimodal models. So this is just a small guide based on what I’ve used. If you have some project where you need vision capabilities for text…
keep reading — 14 min ↗keep reading — 1 min ↗The Japanese government bond market is among the world’s largest and deepest and remains an important safe haven for investors when conditions deteriorate. Combined with Japan’s open capital account, sizable international investments, and growing foreign participation—including in mutual funds and hedge funds—this makes for strong global financial ties. As a result, developments in the Japanese debt market can affect other…
keep reading — 1 min ↗One of India's biggest digital vulnerabilities sits on a six-kilometre stretch of Mumbai's Arabian Sea coast. Around Versova, a densely populated neighbourhood on the city's northwest, at least 13 of ++India's 18 intercontinental submarine cables++ come ashore within six kilometres of one another. Together they carry as much as 95% of India's international bandwidth to Europe, Africa and West Asia. "This network faces a…
keep reading — 2 min ↗Iranian officials have said the war won’t end and shipping routes won’t reopen until all of the conflicts in the region are resolved. Gulf states that had hoped for a quick end to the war are now grappling with the realization that the U.S. has pulled them into a conflict that could run for years with no clear strategy for ending it.“This isn’t just a Yemen story,” said H.A. Hellyer, a senior fellow at the Royal United…
keep reading — 12 min ↗“GDP per capita turns out to be a handy and available proxy.”
keep reading — 1 min ↗If we want humans at all to be in charge in any way over the world, we need them to continue exercising their intellect and gaining mastery over intellectual domains. If we deplete the institutional and cultural resources that underpin that, in a generation or two our minds will atrophy and no human will be in charge of anything (or the world will be horrendous).
One older leaf, brought back into the light.
keep reading — 1 min ↗They became upright and taught themselves the use of tools, domesticated other animals, plants and fire, and devised language. The ash of stellar alchemy was now emerging into consciousness. At an ever-accelerating pace, it invented writing, cities, art and science, and sent spaceships to the planets and the stars. These are some of the things that hydrogen atoms do, given fifteen billion years of cosmic evolution. Carl Sagan