µblog 🏳️‍🌈

🔗 [Falcon 9] Upper stage impacting the moon on 2026 August 5

On 2026 August 5, within a few minutes of 06:35 UTC, an upper stage (section) of a rocket used for a lunar mission will hit the moon. This may be of some (probably minor) scientific interest, and we may learn some things from it. It doesn’t present any danger to anyone, though it does highlight a certain carelessness about how leftover space hardware (space junk) is disposed of.

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🔗 Pivot to AI – Sam Altman: Guys, we’re in the Singularity now

If there’s a singularity here, it’s that OpenAI is a black hole that all the money falls into. And you’ll never see it again.

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In retrospect, my interest in photography was on the wane when my first D700 and my beloved 45mm f/2.8 was stolen in 2020. Covid dealt it a death blow.

However an overseas holiday did rekindle some interest, and in a mad dash of proglifacy I got a used Nikon Z6 hoping to keep it up. High summer really isn’t good photo season but I’m going out in the evenings trying to capture good light.

I just might start paying for Flickr again, too. We will see. In the meantime I’m playing with Nikon’s Image Space, which is amazingly janky: https://img.gg/jD5nc9I

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🔗 Time Station Emulator

Web page which will play sounds through a speaker to emulate radio time signals.

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today’s wikidive: Mandolin

contains such nuggets as it being described as “an obscure instrument of romance” (I’ve got your obscure instrument of romance RIGHT HERE); Giovanni Vailati, the “blind mandolinist of Cremona”; and links to the mandobass

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🔗 Pivot to AI: AI vendors are destroying rare books to feed the chatbot

ISBNdb loudly advocates strip-mining the world’s old books, scanning them for AI training, and then pulping them — and leaving the only remainder of the original text as some weights in a large language model. And all this for an unnamed large AI company that’s going broke in a year.

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📺🇬🇧 Frauds (2025)

A by-the-numbers heist show. Forgettable.

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🔗 Foreign Policy: The Western Myth of Russian Greatness

[…] an implicit racism sometimes seems to be in play: Many Russians “look European” (i.e., white), and Russian Orthodoxy is still recognizably Christian, prompting Westerners to make assumptions about the country that they would never dare to apply to other authoritarian societies in East Asia or the Middle East, whose political traditions are arguably far closer to Russia’s.

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I probably should have done some research before buying this new used camera.

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Back home after bumming around Flanders. Good food, good beer, good chocolate. Bad temperatures.

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🔗🇲🇾 An Ode to Coliseum Cafe (1921 - 2021)

Legendary KL eatery closed just shy of 100 years.

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🇪🇸 — 🇦🇷 1–0

¡Viva España!

Oh and everyone hates Argentina, who knew.

Refused to watch giant shitstain try to keep the trophy for himself.

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