I went out to dinner and a show with a friend the other day, enjoying some pizza and then wandering over to watch a mediocre blues/country/folk band. This friend was my first roommate from when I first moved out at 19. He lamented that being in his fifties, it was harder to develop new friendships.
Around those formative years of my early teens, I moved around quite a bit, from Calgary, to Toronto, to Ottawa. In under two years, I went to four different schools, needing to make new friends each time. It’s not easy being an awkward 13 year old, trying to fit in.
Perhaps trying to make friends can be difficult at any age.
For me, technology has always been a fruitful avenue for connection for much of my adult life. That roommate? I met him on a BBS. Many of the friends I’ve since met have been through technical avenues like work, conferences, and blogging.
Blogging throughout the aughts connected us to others around the world as we shared what we learned through our creative endeavours. Those connections led to employment, career advancement, and friendship.
As we rolled into the 2010s, much of that community had moved to social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. I say moved because while our sites may have continued to exist, the conversations were no longer happening there. We were blogging less and tweeting more. (E.g. in 2013, I only wrote two blog posts.)
In my head, I have associated social media to a form of advertising. They are a way of continuing to stay top of mind in each other’s lives. “Out of sight, out of mind,” as they say. [Perhaps that feels icky to hear. Nobody likes to be reduced to or thought of as advertising.] The connection isn’t formed by having an account. It’s not even in the follows. It’s the conversations that happen. Social media makes it easier because it allows for social (and parasocial) relationships to develop due to semi-regular volleys back and forth—like a public chatroom.
It’s been frustrating to see these platforms shift away from connecting people and optimize for an algorithm that puts random content in front of me. With the recent transition away from social media—by others and myself—I’ve wondered how to keep those connections and form new ones.
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I’ve realized that in simplifying this blog, I’ve made it harder to create and maintain connections. No comments means it is harder for people to quickly respond to a topic. Sending an email creates enough friction that many people avoid doing it. People don’t necessarily want a one-on-one conversation with someone they’ve never met. It also privatizes the conversation preventing others from joining in. No analytics or webmentions means that I don’t see when other people are responding to me, making it harder for me to reply in kind. No webrings or blog rolls makes it harder for people to discover other people. That hyperlink was and is a foundational part of the web and I’ve not taken advantage of one of the best tools to promote connectivity in this medium.
The simplicity I have created to maintain this blog has made it more difficult to maintain connectivity in the world.
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Is this blog about more than just being a loudmouth, voicing my own thoughts, stories, and opinions into a vacuum? Should I be doing more to build connections? And to be clear, these connections aren’t just for me; they are for you, too. You might find a new site to follow and eventually a new friend because of those links.
Knowing me, I’ll end up somewhere in the middle. I’m not starting a revolution or a movement. I’m not looking to raise my pitchfork and ensure everybody has a blog. There are easier things that can be done, though. I can spin out more tendrils, more links, more connections to others.
It’s about consideration—not in some attempt to recreate a nostalgic past that has been lost. It’s about consideration in how we curate and connect. There are many amazing people, a few of whom I’m grateful to call friends, and this blog (and yours, and others) is one of the ways in which we can build and maintain a space that feels genuine, authentic, and connecting.
Postscript: it’s interesting to see how my relationship with social media continues to seesaw over the years, as I’ve observed with others, as well. Like therapy, sometimes it takes me years of chewing on an idea before I can fully digest it. Or maybe it’s like advertising, where I need to see the same thing over and over again before I buy into it.
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Victorian court of appeal to consider whether triple murder and attempted murder guilty verdicts should be quashed
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Limited accomodation during sequestering ‘issues of convenience’, Patterson’s barrister says
Kidd says Patterson’s case must be considered in the context of other cases where jurors had unsupervised access to “outsiders”. He says in this case the jurors were under the supervision of the jury-keeper at all times.
They are not, in our submission, a principled response.
If there has been no breach, then where’s the fundamental irregularity?
There’s no evidence that that’s occurred here.
Continue reading...Murder trial of Duane ‘Keffe D’ Davis, 63, former South Side Compton Crips gang leader, opens in Las Vegas
For nearly 30 years, the unsolved murder of 25-year-old rapper Tupac Shakur has sparked lawsuits, theories and conspiracies.
Now, decades after his death in a September 1996 drive-by shooting in Las Vegas, local prosecutors are finally offering a detailed official account of Shakur’s killing, accusing Duane “Keffe D” Davis, a 63-year-old former South Side Compton Crips gang leader, of being the “on-the-ground, on-site commander of the effort to kill Tupac”.
Continue reading...
Cursor has launched Origin, a GitHub-style code hosting platform built directly into its AI coding environment. The company is initially positioning Origin as a low-risk layer on top of GitHub, keeping GitHub as the "source of truth," but the launch landed just as a major GitHub outage highlighted growing concerns about reliability in the age of AI-generated code. VentureBeat reports: Cursor began rolling out Origin, its own code hosting platform, to paid users on Monday morning. Roughly three and a half hours later, GitHub's status page lit up with what became a six-hour-and-forty-two-minute global degradation -- error rates near 20% across pull requests, issues and the API, and near 50% on archive and raw file downloads, according to GitHub's incident log. Enterprise single sign-on went down with it: SAML, OIDC, SCIM provisioning and Team Sync all failed. So did Copilot.
The developer internet did what the developer internet does. "You can now host your repos in Cursor Origin and deploy to Vercel via Cursor Origin which is itself hosted on Vercel," Vercel chief executive Guillermo Rauch posted on X. "And unlike GitHub, it's online [smile emoji]" Asked why he was smiling, Rauch replied: "trying to make light of the situation. We ourselves are stuck because of github rn!" Matt Palmer, who works at Cursor, quote-tweeted his own company's launch with the day's best line: "We were going to ship this earlier, but GitHub was down." A GitHub outage, in other words, delayed the launch of a GitHub competitor.
Product launches get locked weeks in advance, and no evidence suggests Cursor timed this one. But the coincidence did the company an enormous favor, because it dramatized the argument Origin exists to make. For eighteen years, choosing where to host your team's source code has been the least interesting decision an engineering organization makes. Cursor is betting that AI agents have made it interesting again -- and for technical decision makers, that is the real news here. Not a new product, but a new procurement question with a governance problem attached.
The developer internet did what the developer internet does. "You can now host your repos in Cursor Origin and deploy to Vercel via Cursor Origin which is itself hosted on Vercel," Vercel chief executive Guillermo Rauch posted on X. "And unlike GitHub, it's online [smile emoji]" Asked why he was smiling, Rauch replied: "trying to make light of the situation. We ourselves are stuck because of github rn!" Matt Palmer, who works at Cursor, quote-tweeted his own company's launch with the day's best line: "We were going to ship this earlier, but GitHub was down." A GitHub outage, in other words, delayed the launch of a GitHub competitor.
Product launches get locked weeks in advance, and no evidence suggests Cursor timed this one. But the coincidence did the company an enormous favor, because it dramatized the argument Origin exists to make. For eighteen years, choosing where to host your team's source code has been the least interesting decision an engineering organization makes. Cursor is betting that AI agents have made it interesting again -- and for technical decision makers, that is the real news here. Not a new product, but a new procurement question with a governance problem attached.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Comcast is activating Wi-Fi motion sensing on millions of compatible Xfinity gateways, allowing the routers to detect movement by measuring disruptions in signals between the gateway and connected devices. The free feature, part of Xfinity Shield, can send activity alerts through the Xfinity app and offers Home, Away, and nighttime monitoring modes without requiring separate motion sensors. The Verge reports: Wi-Fi motion sensing is a technology that has been around for a while, but it's only recently that it's become accurate and reliable enough to catch on. Linksys launched a similar service in 2021, but discontinued it a few years later. Lighting company Wiz launched a line of Wi-Fi-sensing smart bulbs in 2023, and more recently Philips Hue deployed a similar radio-frequency sensing technology in its products (using Zigbee rather than Wi-Fi). Comcast's motion sensing pairs with new modes in the Xfinity app -- Home Watch, Away Watch, and Dark Watch (a night/sleep mode) -- allowing you to turn sensing on or off based on your activities.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
iain.davidson100 has added a photo to the pool:
iain.davidson100 has added a photo to the pool:
iain.davidson100 has added a photo to the pool:
We look at the betting markets to see who bookmakers expect to win at Circuit Zandvoort.
Robert Kendall has added a photo to the pool:
The Tokyo Skytree opened in 2012, while the Five-Story Pagoda on the grounds of Senso-ji traces its history back to 942.
SEOUL (ANP) - De geplande militaire oefeningen van de Verenigde Staten en Zuid-Korea in Zuid-Korea worden naar verwachting met ongeveer de helft teruggebracht. Dat meldden Zuid-Koreaanse media dinsdag en woensdag.
De Amerikaanse president Donald Trump gaf zondag opdracht aan het Pentagon om de Amerikaanse deelname aan de oefeningen "substantieel" te verminderen. Hij voerde aan dat hij een "zeer goede relatie" heeft met de Noord-Koreaanse leider Kim Jong-un.
Volgens The Wall Street Journal dringt Trump bij zijn naaste medewerkers aan op een ontmoeting met Kim Jong-un deze herfst.
Op de berichten van de Zuid-Koreaanse media over de halvering van de oefeningen gaven de Amerikaanse en Zuid-Koreaanse ministeries van Defensie geen reactie.
De jaarlijkse oefeningen zijn maandag begonnen en Noord-Korea heeft zoals gebruikelijk protest aangetekend vanwege de "zeer onmiddellijke en uitgesproken dreiging", aldus staatsmedium KCNA.
BAGDAD (ANP) - De Iraakse regering heeft contracten goedgekeurd om via alternatieve routes olie te exporteren, zo maakte de regering dinsdag bekend.
De contracten gaan 1 september in en hebben een looptijd van drie maanden. Irak zal gebruikmaken van gespecialiseerde bedrijven en routes door onder andere Turkije en Syrië om de olie te exporteren.
De Iraakse handelwijze heeft te maken met de sluiting van de Straat van Hormuz. De meeste export ging van oudsher vanuit het zuiden door de Perzische Golf en de Straat van Hormuz.
Over de bedrijven waarmee het land in zee gaat en de hoeveelheden olie die via de nieuwe routes worden geëxporteerd is nog niets bekendgemaakt.
Irak is de op een na grootste producent van de OPEC-landen en is voor zijn economie sterk van olie afhankelijk.
AMSTERDAM (ANP) - Nederlandse huishoudens beleefden in de afgelopen drie maanden een "uitzonderlijk goed" beurskwartaal, meldt De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB). De totale waarde van hun beleggingen steeg met ruim 12 procent, de sterkste stijging in jaren.
Bij elkaar opgeteld bezaten huishoudens eind juni 234,2 miljard euro aan aandelen, beleggingsfondsen en obligaties. Dat is ruim 12 procent meer dan drie maanden daarvoor. Dit is de grootste stijging in een enkel kwartaal sinds DNB deze cijfers in 2018 is gaan bijhouden.
"Aanjager van deze uitzonderlijke stijging zijn de beurskoersen: deze zijn de afgelopen maanden sterk gestegen en huishoudens profiteerden daarvan", stelt de centrale bank.
Het tweede kwartaal werd eerder al het beste kwartaal op de beurzen in jaren genoemd. Beleggers lieten zich vooral leiden door enthousiasme over de opmars van kunstmatige intelligentie, wat chipaandelen enorm gewild maakte. Ook ebden zorgen over de economie en de inflatie wat weg door een daling van de olieprijzen na de pieken van eerder dit jaar. De Iranoorlog bleef wel voor aanhoudende onzekerheid zorgen.
Volgens DNB viel onder de individuele aandelen de waardestijging van beleggingen van huishoudens in ASML op. Inmiddels hebben huishoudens voor 6,1 miljard euro belegd in het aandeel van de chipmachinefabrikant uit Veldhoven. Dat is vooral te danken aan de flinke koersstijging van het aandeel. ASML hernam zo ook de koppositie in de top 25 van grootste beleggingen van Nederlandse huishoudens.
Shell zakte naar de tweede plaats. In het olie- en gasconcern zitten Nederlandse huishoudens voor 4,1 miljard euro. Nummer 3 op de lijst blijft Rabobank, waarvan huishoudens meer dan 4 miljard euro aan certificaten bezitten. Andere populaire beleggingen zijn ING, de chipbedrijven ASMI, Nvidia en Besi, Google-moeder Alphabet, betaalbedrijf Adyen, Microsoft en Unilever. Daarvan bezitten huishoudens allemaal minstens 1 miljard euro aan aandelen.
Hoewel huishoudens dus grote bedragen beleggen, staat er nog altijd aanzienlijk meer geld op spaarrekeningen bij Nederlandse banken: in totaal bijna 553 miljard euro. Ook staat er nog ruim 113 miljard op betaalrekeningen bij banken. Daarnaast hebben huishoudens volgens DNB nog "omvangrijke vermogens" bij pensioenfondsen en verzekeraars, in eigen ondernemingen en in de huizenmarkt.