PicoBlog

There’s a way we’ve been conditioned to talk about adoption in the United States. The main strain is one of gratitude — as in, the adoptee is so lucky, so fortunate, to have found a family that wanted them. The other strains are often deeply inflected with the language of evangelical Christianity, whose organizations fill the contemporary adoption space: this was all part of God’s plan, or the parents have been called to adopt.

Single-player RPGs are one of the most creative, fastest growing, and easily accessible types of tabletop gaming. The indie game marketplace, itchio, hosts almost 1000 games tagged as “physical” solo RPGs. With so much choice, how do you get started? I turned to some savvy game creators for suggestions. Their advice is to start simple, find something that captures your interest, then dive in. “Find something small and focused that intrigues you before jumping into something bigger and more complex,” advises Anna Blackwell, creator of DELVE, RISE, and other solo games.

Roughly a year ago, the Wayback Machine Chrome extension got a major update. The new version has useful customization features and the ability to connect it to your personal Wayback Machine account, making it an even more essential tool for journalists and investigators. (For the sake of efficiency, I’m going to use WM to refer to the Wayback Machine.) Here’s a rundown of the extension, a look at advice surfaced in a recent Medium post by cyb_detective (they also have a Substack you should subscribe to!

Cari amici, Before we get to the real topic of today’s letter, I have to tell you about one last mishap in my black-clouded (literally and figuratively) trip to Sardegna. Spoiler alert: this one ended well. Here in Europe I often do hand laundry in the bidet (and no, that’s not gross; the bowl is clean, okay?), so I set out to do just that in the bathroom in Sardegna. I had noticed that the gizmo that raises and lowers the stopper looked a bit, well, improvised, and maybe I even tried it out (which, if I had done, should have been fair warning to use the sink instead), but nevertheless, I ignored this minor fact.

Quantization of large language models (LLMs) with GPTQ and AWQ yields smaller LLMs while preserving most of their accuracy in downstream tasks. These quantized LLMs can also be fast during inference when using a GPU, especially with optimized CUDA kernels and an efficient backend, e.g., ExLlama for GPTQ. From 16-bit to 2-bit: Finding the Best Trade-off Between Memory-Efficiency and AccuracyHowever, GPTQ and AWQ implementations are not optimized for inference using a CPU.

Making pastry is typically one of my favorite things, but not in the summer. It doesn’t matter how much of a pro you are; heat is unforgiving to a delicate, laminated dough. That’s because the butter’s got to be this perfect magical temperature where it’s cold enough that you can handle it without melting but not so chilly it can’t bend and fold between sheets of dough. I’ve even noticed my favorite bakeries struggling this summer with over-proved dough and butter breaking out of their layered pastries.

Good Evening ladies and gents, I am writing this at the conclusion of the Georgia v Turkey game, and WOW what a game, the best of the tournament so far. It was end to end, there was some real quality on show and it was pure entertainment from start to finish, I was impressed with both sides and Turkey especially look a really decent side! I want to talk about Giorgi Mamardashvili and this being the 3rd time I have watched him play and each time I have been impressed more than the time before and today I was thoroughly impressed with him.

Style advice, shopping picks, pop culture, and opinion for over-40 women and the over-40-curious, from former Sassy staffer and Lucky Magazine founding editor in chief Kim France. By Kim France · Over 15,000 subscribersI'd like to read it first“I adore Kim France — her warmth, wit, wisdom (and wardrobe!). Every time she publishes a piece of writing or a podcast, I jump to consume it.” “It's Kim France! We'd follow her into a store full of sheer clothes -- THAT'S how much we love and respect her.

Recently, I listened to an interview by Guy Kawasaki on his Remarkable People podcast. He interviewed British Journalist Mehdi Hasan on his new book "Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking." While I consider myself an accomplished arguer, Hasan grabbed my attention with his description of one technique that is confounding. Hasan pointed out a rhetorical device  in debate called "The Gish Gallop." Under this form of argumentation, the arguer rapidly spouts a firehose of misinformation: half-truths, misrepresentations, and outright lies.