Belief that the Eucharist at Mass is the actual body and blood of Christ is one of the biggest differences between Catholic belief and all major Protestant sects. So who’s right? How do we decide?
This is a great summary of the doctrine of the true presence of Christ in the Eucharist. It’s not something that was made up – it was something we have well documented proof of from the earliest life of the Church.
Sadly, a large number of ‘True Facts’ on Snapple caps are somewhat to completely wrong. Here’s two that I ran into that I knew were wrong:
Snapple True Fact: “The word “purple” does not rhyme with any other word in the English language.”
Wrong: ‘Circle’ rhymes with the word purple
Snapple True Fact: “There is no English word that rhymes with the word ‘machete'”
Wrong: The words confetti, spaghetti, and sweaty all rhyme with the word machete
What a treasure when I stumbled upon this! I was pulling my hair out trying to get a working copy of Flash Attention compiled for Qwen-TTS agent I was trying to run locally on Windows.
Compiling some AI packages for Windows systems can be notoriously horrible experiences (looking at you flash-attn). Here you can tell it which version of CUDA, Pytorch, and Python and then find a pre-compiled wheel for that configuration.
Get the versions of your tools by using these command lines:
Playing games today is much more balanced and focuses on the ‘fun’ parts. Adventures in video games and D&D are often crafted so that a prepared team of the right skill level will be given everything they need to beat the scenario with minimal frustration.
Old D&D was played much differently. It was much easier for party members to die – especially magic users who often started with less than 10 hit points and almost no spells. Traveling through dungeons required careful management of the number of torches and arrows you have. You literally burned through equipment and use up your food/water – meaning you could only go so far into dungeons at a time. Monsters could easily overwhelm your characters so you have to manage and avoid encounters. Lower level magic users could only cast one spell a DAY. This meant inventory management and risk management was a much bigger factor.
It kind of reminds me of the old Sierra Kings Quest games. The early days of adventures were brutal, unfair, and often arbitrary. People would never play that style of game today; but it’s a great snapshot into the past.
Daddy Rolled a 1 describes how players play games from that era differently than today. Was it more fun?Not sure. But it is very different kind of play. But maybe we want that again in which games have more cookie cutter mechanics? Dark Souls games with brutal enemies and instant deaths show that maybe there is room in the world for games with unforgiving mechanics.
It’s becoming more and more common to use AI to help you understand what AI is doing. Task decomposition has been around a long time with asking AI to break things into steps to implement. This is kind of a new technique I had not seen: prompt decomposition. The idea is to use AI to help generate a good prompt that will get you want you want.
This could be used on cheaper local models you run for free to generate the prompts you use on expensive models.
The query goes something like this:
I want to create a high-quality prompt for this task:
[TASK]
Before writing the prompt, identify the 5–7 high-leverage prompt dimensions for this task — the core variables, constraints, context, output requirements, or stylistic choices that will most determine the quality of the result.
For each dimension, briefly explain:
1. Why it matters
2. What tradeoff or decision it controls
3. How it should influence the final prompt
Then turn those dimensions into a polished, copy-ready prompt.
The final prompt should be clear, specific, and structured. It should include the necessary context, role, task instructions, constraints, output format, quality criteria, and guidance for handling ambiguity.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
In historical context, particularly regarding WW II, this phrase is used to emphasize that atrocities did not happen overnight but began with seemingly small, ideological steps.
The massive advancements of the early 1900’s had filled the world with optimism that we could finally solve the world’s problems. Humanity had gained enough mastery over nature that it could cure diseases at rates never before seen, feed massive numbers of people, and improve lives with electricity, automobiles, airplanes, safe water, and vaccines. Academics, philosophers, artists, and politicians were swept up in this Modernist movement. This however, lead to ideas like eugenics that sought to elevating the human race by deciding who was worth living and which people should be reduced. Social and economic policies like Socialism that ended up killing more people in 70 years than all other political systems in history.
The point is, good intentions and ‘compassion’ can often end up creating a hell on earth. The 20th century witnessed 2 World Wars and the most disastrous forms of government in the history of the world.
Portland Oregon is now re-learning that lesson. This chart is from the 2025 Drug Overdose Crisis report. Can you tell where Oregon legalized drug use and when it ended the practice? Despite offering completely free drug rehab programs to anyone, free narcan, and every possible free support system to get clean – deaths skyrocketed.
And the unpopular part: the history of putting people in jail for drug offenses clearly saved more lives than allowing free drug use in the streets. That’s a policy failure that free drug advocates continue to ignore. A policy failure that cost literally thousands of people their lives in just 5 years.
Compassion is a road to hell if there is no wisdom behind it.
Driverless autonomous trucks are becoming a thing in remote areas of Texas used to feed an endless sand supply to fracking wells. AI and fracking. How could that go wrong? 😀
DB13W3
Jon Obst attempts to hook up a most unusual Apple Macintosh Portrait Display monitor to his Macintosh II si. But it’s not easy. The display uses a most unusual DB13W3 to Apple DB-15 connection. Not only that, but the display uses a non-standard 640 x 870 fixed resolution at 75hz.
More info on the cable itself (which you’ll likely need to make yourself), can be found here.
The TeamPCP hacker group on the Breached cybercrime forum claimed it had gained access to nearly 4,000 private GitHub repositories via the breach.
GitHub has officially confirmed, via an X post today, that thousands of its internal repositories were breached after an employee’s device was compromised through a malicious Visual Studio Code extension.
The group alleged that it had exfiltrated internal source code and other private data, and stated that it was seeking at least $50,000 from potential buyers for the stolen material. “This is not a ransom,” the group wrote in its post, adding that it intended to sell the data rather than extort GitHub directly, and threatening to leak the repositories publicly if no buyer emerged.
TeamPCP has previously been linked to several high-profile campaigns involving platforms such as GitHub, PyPI, npm, and Docker. At the same time, malicious VS Code extensions have repeatedly surfaced in recent years as an increasingly effective vector for breaches and malware delivery.
Not a bad little display in downtown over the last weekend.