PicoBlog

“My brake pedal went to the floor with no warning and there was nothing I could do.” Sorry, but I don’t buy that; I don’t agree that your brakes never gave you any warning. They always do… if you’re paying attention. Think of this as brake fade, and not brake failure. The only time your brakes won’t give you some kind of warning is when the actual hose or hard line carrying brake fluid to the calipers breaks or is cut (or possibly a problem within the brake master cylinder).

As I work on a new lineup of delicious gluten-free recipes to send out in the coming weeks, I’m going to do write on a slightly different topic today: ordering GF meals in restaurants. Specifically, I’m going to explain how to order a GF meal at an Ethiopian restaurant, because it’s not obvious what you need to ask for. I recently “discovered” what is probably the best Ethiopian restaurant in the Washington, DC, area (Nazret, which has been around for years and featured in “best of” lists), and I realized that, if someone on a GF diet doesn’t know how to order a meal at an Ethiopian restaurant, they’ll never get to experience all the warm, subtle flavors the recipes from that part of the world offer.

Recently, I’ve found myself humming James Taylor’s 1975 song Mexico a lot. It’s filled with so many hooks that both satisfy and surprise, especially when you dig in and start to figure out the guitar parts. I decided to listen more closely to figure out what’s going on, and found a few things that caught my ear. The song is in the key of E major, but the guitar part is played with a capo on the 2nd fret.

A slow ramp lets you figure it out. “It” being the amount of load you can tolerate without breaking down. Breakdown is what limits progress: Not protocol. Not willpower. Not pain tolerance. I’m going to share five concepts to speed your running progression. Run Stress Minimum Effective Dose Cross Training Compounding Compression Applying these concepts, over multiple 1000-day time horizons, is what it takes. The fastest way to improve your running is to use an approach that lets you keep running.

Got a burning desire to read more books this year? Here’s how, reader. One of the things about me is I read. I read and I read and I read and then I don’t stop reading. Somewhere, somebody who knows me has made a joke about how my house will be burning down as the first verified extraterrestrials are landing and an armed rodent is making off with my fav…

Of all the questions I get on my Instagram, the High Republic reading order is by far the most common ask. I’m not sure why reading order is so important to fans since release order makes the most sense to me, but I suppose I am here to serve. I’ve posted several photos indicating the “ideal” order, and figured it was finally time to publish a comprehensive guide to the books.

The multimedia author Alan Moore once said something that sharply shaped my thoughts on character development. Since I can’t find the interview where he said this I can’t quote him perfectly, so I’ll have to paraphrase him.  “Since most people have a sexual side, if you don’t explore this side of a character, you arguably have a character who isn’t fully fleshed out.” Please ignore the pun at the end there.

At this point, I hope most of my audience have had experience with the publicly available large language models - either running the software yourself, investing in a subscription to one of the many online services, or any of the free and beta solutions currently out there. For the most part, these large language models are by definition large - billions of parameters, often trained on lots of unstructured language data.

It’s the pre-eminent question of our times: how the hell do we spell zhuzh? You know the word: to fluff things up, prettify, to add a little…spice. As the perfect middle of the Venn diagram for this investigation — linguist, lover of a deep internet rabbithole, serial zhuzher — I thought I’d collate some of the options. (Maybe this can be my Mona Lisa; maybe one day it’ll end up on