Did some fun stuff this past week. I made my favorite fall dessert, a caramel apple cake: https://cookingbythebook.com/cookbook-reviews/caramel-apple-cake-baked-explorations/
I made them as cupcakes because that makes them easier to share at work etc. Delicious as always, even if I screwed up the frosting a tad.
Photo
I made caramel! It turned out a little too firm for what I needed it for, though.
Projects
I worked on my audio book converter a little bit. I realized I could easily add transcription via whisper, and that was pretty easy to set up. This then let me build an EPUB file, which was ALSO really cool.
However, whisper doesn’t handle things like paragraph breaks or quotation marks (which is how it’s supposed to work, so fair), which made the resulting EPUB file not really readable. I played around with pumping the output into an LLM to update the text, but the results were unreliable enough for me to think it’s not really a viable path forward. Still fun to play with.
What I’ve been reading
https://jacobin.com/2025/10/bankification-financialization-debt-interest-credit
Hooray! More banks and less regulation! I can’t think of any way this can go poorly!
https://bigthink.com/the-future/the-great-progression-china/?ref=feedle.world
This is another good post in an interesting series. I appreciate the optimism, even if I don’t 100% share it.
https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/something-extraordinary-just-happened
Good news for a change! Mostly!
https://buttondown.com/blog/rss-vs-ice
Great deep dive into some RSS history that I was unaware of.
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/7/vibe-engineering
Interesting definition. We’re still too early along to have much of a shared vocabulary, and trying to define things is good. That lets us have meaningful conversations about the topic.
https://www.theverge.com/column/798159/age-gating-internet
Sad to see this spreading.
An interesting look at two of the best whole home audio setups. I’m in too deep with Sonos to seriously consider switching. Plus they integrate pretty seamlessly with Home Assistant, which is always nice.
What I’ve been watching
It’s an interesting look at how people define and judge “the economy”. I don’t think I know anyone who would say they’re better off than they were a year ago, but the economy is “up”!
Looks really cool and I definitely noticed some significant speed improvements. I looked for a little bit and didn’t see an easy way to hook it into my Ollama instance though. I’m probably missing something, but if so it could definitely be clearer.
Hey a Primeagen video where he’s not just reading something!
Practical effects! Reminds me of just how well the first few Harry Potter movies have held up (LOTR too of course) because they used more practical effects.
Pretty good outlay of all the way AI is currently failing us, without us needing to worry about Basilisks and paperclips.
What I’ve been playing
I started up Axiom Verge, and man are the SNES vibes strong. Enjoying it so far.
I also played through the demo for:
It ran fine on linux, which with a demo of an unreleased game is a good sign. All in all the game was reasonably fun. I have two main concerns going into it:
- The demo focuses on the first few episodes of Voyager and pretty much puts you on rails. I’d be happier if the game lets you go waaaay off script. What if Tuvok dies on the first mission, etc. It’s still early and it was just a demo so I don’t think this is a big concern but it’s worth mentioning.
- I found the space combat unengaging. I didn’t feel like I had a lot of control over what was happening and I didn’t have any indicators as to how well or poorly I was doing. Then at some point I won, and I was never clear if any of the buttons I pressed had much of an impact. Hoping they retool this before release, but I doubt it.
What I’ve been listening to
Continuing the post rock theme, for the most part.
I also took the time to set up lastfm scrobbling for Navidrome, so that should help with keeping this populated.
Cool use of vocals and audio clips from the game Control.