From the computer of Peter Clark

Pascal contends that a rational person should adopt a lifestyle consistent with the existence of God and should strive to believe in God. The reasoning for this stance involves the potential outcomes: if God does not exist, the believer incurs only finite losses, potentially sacrificing certain pleasures and luxuries; if God does exist, the believer stands to gain immeasurably, as represented for example by an eternity in Heaven in Abrahamic tradition, while simultaneously avoiding boundless losses associated with an eternity in Hell.

I’ve always wondered about this, how funny that this wasn’t a unique thought of mine or anything but something thought about since ~1650s

Sometimes I open my copy of Richard Scarry’s classic children’s book Busy, Busy Town just to remind myself how the world ought to function. One of over 300 books Scarry published, Busy, Busy Town is about the world of work, depicting all of the animals going about their jobs. Everything is refreshingly straightforward. At the garage, “when something is wrong with the motor, the mechanic fixes it.” The painter paints the walls. “On Main Street you can buy medicine, tools, apples, and oranges.” When there is a pothole, workers from the city come and fill it.

Brodsky advised his listeners to give up trying to evade the feeling, and start respecting it. Boredom exists “to teach you the most valuable lesson in your life,” he said, “the lesson of your utter insignificance.” Boredom puts us in our tiny, fragile, finite place—and thank goodness for that, for “the more finite a thing is, the more it is charged with life,” with love, pain, excitement, and fear.

I really like this MCP — it basically acts as middleware between LLMs and Plaid, allowing you to connect your bank accounts to Era, and then have LLMs connect to Era via MCP to access those bank accounts.

Now, sure, there’s a lot of risks to doing this in terms of giving LLMs access to your financial data, but if you did want to give Claude your financials, this is the way to do it!

The service also has a lot of pretty clever functionality such as categorizing transactions that then gets applied across whatever LLMs you have connected.

I’ve always had a soft spot for soothsayers and energy healers. Like most writers, I have a yoga teaching certification. I have dabbled in astrology, tarot, acupuncture, cupping, Rolfing, the Alexander Technique, craniosacral massage, hypnotherapy, and herbal medicine. (My children are vaccinated, I hasten to assure you.) I dipped back into familiar territory: yin-yoga classes where I opened my hip-flexor muscles to their fullest because, as every yoga teacher loves to remind you, the hips store a lot of emotions. Then I did a session with my favorite psychic, who encouraged me to ask my ancestors for help when I needed it. They did not oblige. So, weeks later, I took the logical next step: I called a shaman.
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She took out a box that looked like something children would be invited to explore at a nature center, and it was full of twigs, rocks, bark, shells, and bones with a few polished crystals thrown in. She told me to pick whichever ones I wanted, and as I selected each, she said, “Oh, that’s a good one for you,” in a serious tone that made me believe she really meant it. Then I lay down on a long padded bench and closed my eyes. E. arranged the stones I’d chosen on my stomach and chest.

From this month, it will be expanded to A&E units. It means patients, loved ones and staff in busy emergency departments will be able to call a dedicated phone number to trigger an urgent review if a patient’s condition is deteriorating and they think their concerns are not being listened to.

One of the most comprehensive assessments of factors affecting well-being is the World Values Survey. Initiated in 1981, the survey asks nationally representative sample populations in nearly 100 countries about their beliefs and values.
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The top five factors, ranked in order of impact, were romantic and familial relationships, financial situation, work, community and friends, and health. Romance, family, friends, and community are tightly bound up with concepts of relationship, as is work. There is no doubt that relationships constitute the backbone of lives well lived.

An unfortunate bug with GitHub is that when creating a personal access token you can specify granular permissions for just about anything except the ability to create and manage GitHub Projects.

The only way to create a Personal Access Token for GitHub projects is to move the repo into its own organisation, and then you have the ability to specify these permissions.

I find this a truly bizarre omission to the point that I assume its a bug: I can create a PAT for issues but not projects?

Hopefully this gets resolved, although I have been asking for this for all of 2026.

First, consider words. The vocabulary that bots overuse has changed: they no longer “delve” and there are not as many “tapestries”. Instead they offer a significant number of polysyllables like “significant”, “increasingly” and “consequences”. They use more rare words (“interdependence”, “reindustrialisation”) and scientific lingo (“parameter”, “methodology”) than humans, and are fond of nominalisations (making nouns from verbs, such as “expansion” from “expand”). All the llms in our study use such words, but particularly Gemini and Claude.

Launched in 2004, Oink’s Pink Palace was created by a 21-year-old computer science student in England in response to legal action being taken against users of public file sharing services like Napster and The Pirate Bay. In a few short years, Oink grew into a massive community of like-minded music enthusiasts, offering high-quality downloads of virtually every album in existence. “It was like opening a secret door to this incredible world,” Sheridan reflects. “File sharing was everywhere, but you'd never seen this level of care and detail. You see those videos now where they bring film people into the Criterion Collection—it felt like that—being invited to the ultimate music collector’s den, the private club where they show you all these records you never thought you'd have. Most people didn't have the same kind of experience, they got the LimeWire version which was the equivalent of wading through a dollar store that’s just been ransacked and shit’s all over the floor.”