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31 results for “Grubb”
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CW: description of how chickens are turned into food
“The video shows workers grabbing chickens and rapidly shoving their feet hard into shackles on an assembly line that then carries them upside down to their deaths. The operation is immensely loud and frenetic. Daniel said that it was difficult to tell if they were breaking the chickens’ legs but that some birds already had broken legs or wings from previous aggressive handling.”
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Russell Brand had ‘big grin’ as he grabbed woman’s breasts and dragged her into toilet and raped her, woman claims
Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Membership today.…
#London #Britain #UnitedKingdom #UK #GB #England #Headlines #News #Europe #EU #Southwark #arts #Crime #Culture #entertainment #Lawenforcement #TopPicture
https://www.europesays.com/gbr/london/42113/ -
heise+ | Desinfec't: Defekten Grub-Bootloader unter Linux wiederherstellen
Wenn Linux nicht mehr von selbst bootet, können Sie den Desinfec't-Bootloader benutzen oder mit Desinfec't Ihr installiertes Linux reparieren.
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… although those real ish pants could be the leggings with the printed skeleton hands grabbing my ass - because nobody would see them and it cracks me up.
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This weekend, attempting to install Proxmox on a spare desktop to run as a homelab server. The install was not successful. Something happened and the GRUB config file got borked.
Now it will not boot to USB at all. Instead of playing with Proxmox, I need to hack together a GRUB config file. Again...
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https://www.europesays.com/es/825639/ ‘All of a sudden’ y ‘Grobbendonk’ cautivan el Festival de Gáldar #Cine #Cultura #Entertainment #Entretenimiento #ES #España #galdar #Spain #ÚltimaHora
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https://www.laviezine.com/1665572/scores-of-women-teen-workers-were-groped-grabbed-at-this-restaurant-chain-feds-say/ Scores of women, teen workers were groped, grabbed at this restaurant chain, feds say ##case #Company #Complaint #eeoc #FemaleEmployee #IlFornaio #location #LosAngeles #LosAngelesTimes #manager #MultipleInstance #OldMaleEmployee #Pasadena #settlement #SexualHarassmentLawsuit #woman
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@ai6yr
Ubuntu installed in seconds on 2015 Intel P4 iMac. I was wandering around and looked at 2009 Dual Xeon tower and there was an SSD plugged into a USB port. Grabbed it and booted the old iMac with the alt key pressed and it booted Ubuntu. 🤣 Shutting down for the day and will go look for updates tomorrow. -
After my 2012 MacBook Air refused to boot from the internal disk just because I removed it to boot from USB (and then put it back how it was; I was updating the USB Linux install and removing every other possible disk is the only way to ensure GRUB doesn't scribble to the wrong disk), I'd gladly cosplay Hello Kitty with a sledgehammer
They're lucky I usually don't see any joy in destroying working things, no matter how cathartic.
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RE: https://wandering.shop/@aesthr/117470082684445346
This is _fantastic_. I wanted to include a quote that grabbed me, but the entire article is a rainbow of highlights for me now.
So I’ll stick with something short, and something that disturbs me on the regular:
"We had the modern Library of Alexandria, and we’re burning it down again right now.”
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20th of Owltober!
Lethargic and deeply bruised on admission, this owl quickly rebounded thanks to MARS Wildlife Rescue. "Her spiciness was revealed as she recovered--she became very angry and grabby!" To donate to MARS: https://marswildliferescue.com/donate Source: https://fb.com/1390476693112325 #owlsintowels 💛🦉 -
The Man in the Reflection
The whole day has gone by and I didn’t capture any photos during today’s trip. I grabbed the camera and documented what’s out there through the window. I saw my own reflection and the question came to mind: what am I doing all this for?https://diary.boeckli.net/2026/10/19/the-man-in-the-reflection/
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‘I don’t want to be known as a hero’: barber who rushed to help Helen Haines praised by PM
By Cait KellyRicky Jefferies says he had just finished cutting hair when he grabbed the driver who allegedly deliberately stuck the Indi MP and held him until police arrived
#HelenHaines #Victoria #Australianews #Australianpolitics #TheGuardian #CaitKelly
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Libreboot 26.10rev3 is out. Also read rev1, rev2 and rev3 changelogs here:
https://libreboot.org/news/libreboot2610.html#libreboot-26.10rev1-17-oct-2026
There were some minor stability issues on legacy hardware, where a bare GRUB payload was used on coreboot startup; the revision releases restore use of SeaGRUB on legacy hardware, to make use of SeaBIOS's PS/2 keyboard spinup timeout. This makes input work more reliably in GRUB. Press ESC in the SeaBIOS menu to boot the GRUB payload.
This affected only a small number of mainboards: Intel D510MO, D945GCLF, ASUS KGPE-D16, KCMA-D8, Apple MacBook 2,1, 1,1, Q45T AM, Lenovo ThinkPad X60, T60. - probably most of them were fine anyway.
32-bit memtest86+ added as payload in SeaBIOS/GRUB menu, on older 32-bit machines.
The 64-bit-capable machines still use EDK2 as primary payload, with GRUB EFI and SeaBIOS CSM builds. NOTE: MacBook 2,1 is 64-bit but 2MB flash, edk2 can fit with some modifications but 1,1 is 32-bit so I just do legacy config on both.
Just small stability fixes from user input.
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https://www.europesays.com/unitedstates/49736/ Scores of women, teen workers were groped, grabbed at this restaurant chain, feds say #case #company #complaint #eeoc #FederalCourts #FemaleEmployee #IlFornaio #location #LosAngelesTimes #manager #MultipleInstance #OldMaleEmployee #Pasadena #settlement #SexualHarassmentLawsuit #woman
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Did you know you can grab enemy combatants in #Fallout4 during combat, the same way you can grab most inanimate objects and corpses?
I grabbed a Gunner and jumped off the edge of an overpass to get away from their Assaultron, dragging them with me, and successfully used them to cushion my fall. Broke both my legs, sure, but survived. They… did not.
PS: I’m not actually sure this works in vanilla, I pulled this stunt off while playtesting Rev. 3 of my mod-collection, Demon Core
#Fallout4AnniversaryEdition #Fallout4AE #SciFi #RPG #PostApocalyptic #Gaming
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Tutankham (2026) by LC-Games for Amiga OCS. Guide an explorer raiding King Tut's tomb, grabbing the golden mask and fending off its guardians across the catacombs 🏺
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Mercedes-AMG’s first ground-up SUV is a 1,150hp electric beast
Earlier this year, Mercedes’ AMG performance brand grabbed our attention with the GT four-door coupe, a souped-up sports…
#NewsBeep #News #Business #CA #Canada #Cars #ElectricCars #MercedesBenz #Transportation
https://www.newsbeep.com/ca/936968/ -
🐤 A Scrum by Example story: Martin, Doug and Ian approach ScrumMaster Steve two days before the end of the Sprint and say, "We won't be attending the Retrospective this week. We're working fast, we've finished this Sprint's work and have already started work on the next Sprint. We just don't have time for the retro, but we're getting stuff done, so that's okay."
Martin explains, "Well, we handed off all our stories to QA, so we had nothing to do. Instead of twiddling our thumbs, we grabbed more work."
Scenarios like this are a proverbial canary in the mineshaft. When Scrum team members lack time or interest in the Retrospective, that tells us there is a problem somewhere else in the system. A general working assumption when we see good people doing something strange is that we should examine the system to understand what it is telling us.
Don't solve the surface problem by canceling or replacing the retrospective or, much worse, forcing them to attend. Instead, dig into the why to find the deeper problem.
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I got an adapter so I could run a normal 2280 SATA SSD in there, and I was able to install another copy of Linux and have that boot fine.
Apple Inc. "UEFI" just got some hair up its ass about automatically booting from the shipped hardware (booting manually after using some GRUB rescue disk also worked)
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Day 1 of leadership retreat: DONE.
First, I am an *awesome* facilitator.
Yes, I brag.I got the team to go through a really difficult scenario planning convo with good results and without getting bogged down in wild blue sky theorizing based on vibes.
One team member grabbed the absolute worst case scenario and gave a sobering sketch of what we need and what we don't have as an organization in the face of a full-throated authoritarian assault. It was a super helpful process.
She used her personal experience as a refugee from El Salvador to give us a hard look into what really happens to orgs like ours. It was deep.
I'm going to pick up Benson from daycare and eat ice cream for dinner.
Tomorrow -- Day 2.
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I should note that those ASUS boards (kgpe d16, kcma d8) are 64-bit but native graphics init only works for txt mode on the onboard ast2050, so I don't bother with EDK2 on that board. There is an untested build target not in the release, enabling EDK2, e.g. kgpe_d16_uefi_16mb, that would only work with a graphics card, if it works.
Some X60/T60 are 64-bit but most are 32-bit. To avoid users accidentally bricking their machines, I don't even provide a separate EDK2 build on this (EDK2 is 64-bit in these setups).
I would like to, in a future release, adapt EDK2 to add a working 32-bit target, so that we can have EFI on 32-bit hardware as well, complete with 32-bit EFI GRUB - and presumably SeaBIOS.
Legacy means: 2MB flash or below, or 32-bit-only, or text-mode-only graphics setup. These bar EDK2 at present and are thus considered legacy as they then use legacy GRUB/SeaBIOS payloads.
2MB can fit EDK2 easily but with fewer features. 32bit EDK2 plus GRUB can probably fit into 2MB flash.
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Amid police brutality allegations, inquiry hears protesters against visit of Israeli president were ‘largely peaceful’
"An inquiry into a Sydney rally against the Israeli president’s visit has so far found protesters were “largely peaceful” and there is “limited evidence of physical violence on the part of the protesters”.
The Law Enforcement Conduct Commission (Lecc) kicked off its inquiry into the February protest at Sydney’s town hall against the visit of Isaac Herzog on Monday, outlining a number of issues it is examining, including police use of OC spray and “police boasting about gratuitous force”.
Lecc launched its investigation after widespread allegations of police brutality at the protest. Viral video footage showed police punching multiple protesters, and grabbing Muslim worshippers while they undertook sunset prayers."
#LaborFail #HumanRights #Activism #RightToProtest #BoycottIsrael #News #AUSPol #PoliceBrutality
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Meet my content editor, Obi Kay. She turned up at the food dish on my front porch at the end of May as a feral cat with three kittens in tow. I got her and the kittens fixed & vaxed in early July, and Obi became a fixture on the porch for a couple of months, getting more trusting and less feral over time. (The kittens were lost to coyotes, sadly.)
Three weeks ago, Obi showed up with an injured eye, so I grabbed her and got her to a vet. Luckily the injury wasn't as serious as it looked, and the treatment was eyedrops *and* being kept inside. Obi quickly decided she liked sleeping warm and getting fed regularly. Importantly, my other cats decided that Obi wasn't evil, which meant that she could be Cat #4.
Obi got more vaccines and a microchip a few days ago and I plan to start letting her go outside again soon. I'm not worried that she'll opt for a return to the street.
If you want to know how Obi Kay got her name, check my first comment.
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FFS, lobsters no longer allows even discussing if a project uses LLMs: https://lobste.rs/s/h0eate/updates_site_guidelines_ai_llm_tags#c_u67vbw
I agree the vibecoding tag was overloaded, but I liked how it did at least label slop. Now, the new stance is the 180 that you can't acknowledge or discuss it at all.
ISO a lobsters-esque site that just doesn't allow any contributions from LLMs (or contributions about things including the output of LLMs tbh, but I'll settle for a label).
I think recently, https://words.filippo.io/seeds-solved/, is a good example of my limit. It's a human-written blog post about a pseudo-cryptanalysis problem solved by Anthropic. I don't want LLMs doing research or building things, but I can tolerate their use for cryptanalysis (specific forms of review, I guess), because that's the insanity the world's at today and it's hard to say we have a choice against it.
Funnily enough, the author left lobsters after that post _because_ it was tagged vibecoding, and I even agree that's somewhat overzealous. I'm just almost completely no longer interested in lobsters due to their 180 which says 'LLM use is normal and not to be discussed, considered, or criticized'.
I know the point of Mastodon is the fediverse and I can follow accounts which share my views. I don't want to traverse Mastodon. I've tried. It hasn't grabbed me with sufficient momentum. If I have to ask to be spoonfed people to follow, the platform isn't for me, and why it's a such a shame everyone has scattered these past few years.
A forum, a single place for all on-topic submissions, solves that. I just wish there was a forum I wanted to be on right now...
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Economist Robin Hanson did not invent the Great Filter
Humanity seems to have a bright future, i.e., a non-trivial chance of expanding to fill the universe with lasting life. But the fact that space near us seems dead now tells us that any given piece of dead matter faces an astronomically low chance of begating (sic) such a future. There thus exists a great filter between death and expanding lasting life, and humanity faces the ominous question: how far along this filter are we?
Robin Hanson, 1996 or 1998During the Cold War, it was a commonplace that we might make ourselves extinct or end industrial civilization. After all, humans were lighting navigable rivers on fire, producing mountains of waste with no good plans to dispose of it, and putting weapons more terrible than the Sun into hands with the self-control of an ornery chimpanzee. It seemed very plausible that the Third World War might start, some junior officer would drop a nuclear warhead on an armoured division in Bavaria or Thuringia, and a few days later there would be mushroom clouds over every city in the Northern Hemisphere with more than 10,000 people. The main thing to debate was whether some remote parts of the world might survive more or less intact to repopulate the Northern Hemisphere (Brazil, South Africa, and New Zealand were among the more realistic choices). Science fiction fans extended this idea to other hypothetical civilizations and suggested that any species like humans would be in danger of starting devastating wars just as it became capable of reaching space. Let’s look at some examples:
- In 1963, Fred Saberhagen wrote the first story featuring the Berserkers, self-reproducing artificial intelligences programmed to destroy all life. The Berserkers have eliminated all intelligent life in the Milky Way which they have encountered (including their creators) until they encounter humanity. The very next story in the same issue of Worlds of If has a throwaway paragraph about “A galaxywide game, played for planets, using local cultures. And always according to the rules. No new technologies. No new weapons. Use what you have at hand. Play it fair. Because if you do not, neither will we — and together we will eliminate the universe.” (Gary Wright, “Captain of the Kali,” Worlds of If (January 1963), p. 113 archive.org / isfdb). The main debate among worldbuilders at the time was whether the future would be cyclical rises and falls (Asimov’s Foundation, Piper’s Future History) or a choice between galactic expansion and destruction. In Saberhagen’s setting, almost all spacefaring civilizations are annihilated by Berserkers, but not every civilization builds its own Berserkers.
- In 1972, Freeman Dyson gave a talk at the Institute for Advanced Study where he warned that unleashing robotic von Neumann probes or comets laden with trees (!) across the galaxy could end badly. Reporters recorded part of it as follows: “I have a feeling we’re going to discover things that are not so pleasant, particularly since the activities we’re likely to discover first are highly technological activities. We’re more likely to discover first the species in which technology has gone out of control, a technological cancer spreading throughout the galaxy. We should be suitably scared if we discover it, and take our precautions.” (Israel Shenkers, Will Galaxy Reveal a Technological Cancer? A Physicist Wonders, The New York Times 27 Nov 1972 p. 37) Dyson did not say that this was the most likely outcome, but that humans were more likely to notice alien technology which was reproducing out of control than technology which quietly grabbed a few small asteroids or comets and scooped some gas from Saturn. This talk was alluded to by futurists interested in John von Neumann’s robotic probes.1
- Carl Sagan’s Cosmos (1980 TV series with accompanying book) contains a rhapsody imagining aliens receiving radio transmissions from Earth. “There was our region of the galaxy; there was our world. I had found the entry for earth: HUMANITY: THIRD FROM THE SUN. They had heard our television broadcasts and thought them an application for cosmic citizenship. Our technology had been growing enormously (they got that right). Two hundred nation states, about six global powers, the potential to become one planet. Probability of survival over a century — here, also, less than one percent.” Sagan postulated that if a species developed nuclear weapons, it would probably wipe itself out, and imagined alien scientists estimating humanity’s chance of survival based on observing many civilizations.2
With more time I could add many more examples of science fiction which uses aliens to talk about the Cold War and the possibility that humanity or industrialized civilization would annihilate itself, such as Piper’s First Cycle from around 1960 or Murray Leinster’s “Second Landing” from 1954. Most of these do not explicitly say that destruction is the most likely outcome, because they were written for people who understand subtext and can generalize. A science-fiction story is not an academic treatise, but ideas flow back and forth between science fiction and academic futurism.
In 1996 or 19983 a PhD student named Robin Hanson called this the Great Filter. He acknowledged that this idea was not new:
A devastation scenario is implicit in the usual formulation of the Drake equation. For prior evolutionary steps the equation asks for the probability that the system will reach the next step, but at our level of evolution, the equation asks for the expected time until the civilization disappears, and once gone it is assumed to never return.
…
I personally think that most of the Great Filter is most likely to be explained by the steps I think we understand the least about: the steps in the biological evolution of life and intelligence. However, many physical scientists focus on explaining the filter via the area they seem to think we understand the least: social science.
Astronomers Sagan and Newman, for example, claim that either we will destroy ourselves with nuclear weapons, or learn to “live with other groups in mutual respect” by losing “our own predispositions to territoriality and aggression. … This adaptation must apply … with very high precision, to … every individual within the civilization”, so that we become the “least likely to engage in aggressive galactic imperialism” [Sagan & Newman].
Similarly, Papagiannis claims that “those that manage to overcome their innate tendencies toward continuous material growth and replace them with non-material goals will be the only ones to survive this crisis,” implying a galaxy “populated by stable highly ethical and spiritual civilizations” [Papagiannis 84]. And Stephenson claims that “for a truly advanced intelligence the drive for quality rather than redundant quantity would be paramount” [Stephenson 82].
The early Internet was scholarly, and it was hard not to know in 1996 that many educated people thought humanity had almost extinguished itself or civilization had almost ended itself. So Robin Hanson naturally cited earlier versions of his idea. However, time passed, and people got distracted from nuclear war by other dangers. Hanson and his friends like Eric Drexler and Toby Ord are still around and promoting themselves, while writers from the 1960s and 1970s are not. And so I meet people online, and read Wikipedia pages, which say things like “The concept originates in Robin Hanson’s argument …”
This is clearly incorrect. The idea that a civilization able to build radios and travel into space would likely destroy itself was common in the 1960s and 1970s, and featured in an extremely popular TV series in 1980. Therefore, the idea existed long before Robin Hanson gave it a catchy name in 1996 or 1998.
I am not as amusing as those old science-fiction writers and futurists, and I would much prefer to be writing about ancient roads and medieval doublets. But someone was wrong on the internet, and dreams of yesterday’s tomorrows seem more important than zombie ideas about ancient Greek cleavers. If you can, please support this site. If not, continue as I point to some other context for Hanson’s ideas.
What we have forgotten and what we have learned
Hanson’s post has some curious ideas, like the idea that a “bright future” for humanity requires filling the universe with life, and perhaps disassembling Jupiter or Sol for spare parts. When he shared it, I think most readers ignored them and went back to arguing about whether Captain Picard could beat Darth Vader or which operating system to use. This was a mistake, just as the magazine article a few years earlier which called some similar ideas the California Ideology. His ideas came from places much older than California, and some of them could first be found in monasteries not think-tanks.
Sagan and Hanson and Hanson’s disciples like to contrast light with darkness. That is theological language out of Zoroastrianism via Jewish and Christian thought. If you tell yourself that all that matters is whether eternity is filled with life and light or death and darkness, you can screw yourself to the sticking point and do terrible things to actually existing human beings today. Elsewhere Hanson envisions a future of countless simulated humans working themselves to exhaustion for a bare minimum subsistence while biological humans live in luxury (The Age of Em, 2016), and in 2023 he was still concerned about fertility decline even though the world population was the highest it had ever been and still growing.4 The same righteousness that comes out of dualistic theology is the righteousness that might let someone launch the A-bombs or unleash the Berserkers. Words have power and these are dangerous visions.
I am a scholar of ancient Iran, not of apocalyptic religions. I don’t want to explore all the places that Hanson’s ‘s ideas come from here. But for now, I will leave you with two questions. If you think that expanding across the universe is the most sacred of all causes, and machines seem better suited to doing that than humans, do you really love life? And what if the interests of life as we know it clash with what would be required to launch that first von Neumann probe? Bertolt Brecht saw what happens when men who love ideas more than people find that the ideas lose their stark beauty when human beings are ordered to carry them out.
Wäre es da / Nicht doch einfacher, der Philosoph / Löste Menschheit auf und / Schäfte etwas neues?
Further Reading
Charlie Stross, We’re sorry we created the Torment Nexus, speech at Next Frontiers Applied Fiction Day, Stuttgart (2023)
And did you notice that I wrote this post as a truth sandwich?
(scheduled 18 October 2026)
- Robert A. Freitas Jr., A Self-Reproducing Interstellar Probe, Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, Vol. 33 (1980), pp. 251-264 ↩︎
- Next time I visit a library I will check the printed version of Cosmos but i am posting this on Sunday between two elections. ↩︎
- Hanson’s own page says 1998 at the top and 1996 at the bottom. Perhaps he posted several versions at different dates, or perhaps he lost track since he was busy with a PhD at the time and soon got a tenure-track job. ↩︎
- Or the fertility of specific people who can “ensure the continuation of something like our dominant world culture.” Hanson is an economist, so shouldn’t he ask whether a declining population would make it more beneficial to have children, as people saw that their neighbours’ children could easily get good jobs and homes? Economics is about costs and benefits and dynamic equilibria. ↩︎
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Sad and Busy
Hello friends!
It’s been sad and busy here these last weeks. In early September James’s mom went into hospital and shortly after that into hospice. She passed away in the middle of the month. James flew out to New Mexico to be with his dad and elder brother and sister for a few days.
During that time my mom went into the hospital for something that didn’t seem all that serious, but turned into something serious and she died October 3rd, a day after my sister and I decided to move her to hospice. My dad died five years ago and so it’s just me and my sister who lives in Los Angeles. She had been in San Diego at the hospital for a little over two weeks, with a short break for her to return to LA for cataract surgery. I flew out to San Diego on the 3rd and spent a week cleaning and sorting through papers.
My parents lived in the house for over 50 years and have a huge accumulation of stuff. My mom also died without a will. My sister has rheumatoid arthritis and physical limitations, so it was a hard, exhausting week physically and emotionally. There is still much house cleaning that needs to be done before we can even think of hiring someone to clear things out and possibly have an estate sale. Pulling papers from drawers and closets and cabinets and piled on table tops, I managed to gather what I hope is all of the documentation we need for the probate attorney.
Of course in the process of all of this, I found a treasure trove of photos and elementary school art projects, report cards, and letters home from university. My sister and I giggled as we compared our 2nd grade report cards and the teacher comments. My sister is two years younger than I am and had many of the same teachers I did. She complained through the years that I made things really hard for her because teachers expected her to be just like me. Not fair to her at all, and of course nothing I had control over. We both got similar grades, but are very different people. I got comments like, “needs to speak up more,” and she got comments like, “needs to not talk so much.” Heh.
Easter, 1974. I was 6 and my sister 4. My mom made our dresses.My mom had a rescue cat that we were thankfully able to have the rescue place take back for re-homing. She’s also been caring for a bunch of feral cats living on her patio and my sister has been working with the rescue place to trap them and make sure they are all spayed and neutered. We are donating a bunch of food my mom had bought for the cats to them as well as towels and blankets. And a bunch of my mom’s friends have made donations in lieu of flowers.
Probate takes about a year in California. The attorney will be dealing with the court, but my sister and I in the meantime have lots of calls and meetings to figure out how to manage paying utility bills and property taxes and all that.
Here is a public service announcement: Write a will! It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, you don’t even need a lawyer to write one for you. You can write one by hand on a piece of scrap paper and as long as you have two witnesses, you are good. Better yet, if you have children, hire an estate attorney to create a trust for your assets which will save your loved ones time, money, and headaches sorting everything out.
The Garden
The weather has been weeks of warmer than “normal.” We still have not had frost, though Friday night/Saturday morning it came close. In anticipation of possible frost, I picked all the tomatoes Friday evening. So many green tomatoes. Some of them have been sitting out there for a couple weeks and not even beginning to blush. In spite of the warmth, the daylight hours are waning and they just weren’t getting ripe. So now we are trying to ripen them on the windowsill. If they persist in their greenness, we will be making some green tomato salsa.
I covered the jalapenos and cayenne peppers, which still have fruit on them, figuring those had a better chance of ripening outdoors than the tomatoes did. The temperatures are warming up again as the week goes along with no additional chance of frost in the forecast at the moment. We’ll see what happens.
I’ve been waiting to plant garlic and decided to plant it today, fearing that if I waited any longer the weather would take a fast turn to the cold side and I will have missed the planting window. I put a thick layer of leaf mulch over them. Hopefully that will be enough to keep them from sprouting, and if they do, the mulch will at least protect them from winter damage.
I’ve been growing rosemary, lemon grass and ginger in pots on the deck all summer and they have all been doing well. Today I did some trimming of the lemon grass to prepare for bringing it indoors for the winter. I snipped off all the dead blades and tips. I noticed the leaves are “sticky” but didn’t connect to “serrated” until I saw a big blob of red on one of the blades. What in tarnation? Then I looked at my hands and saw I was bleeding from a whole bunch of tiny cuts. Oops. It’s like I have paper cuts all over the backs of both my hands. I won’t be making that mistake again!
We picked the green striped cushaw squash a couple of weeks ago. We ended up with four squashes. The big one that grew on top of the wire arch and bowed it down weighed in at 9 pounds/4 kg. Not bad, though I was expecting it would be a little heavier. The other three range in weight from 3 pounds/1.4 kg to 6 pounds/2.7 kg. We plan on roasting the smaller one in the next week or so. I will let you know how it tastes!
Cushaw squash, two volunteer pumpkins, and a citron melonBookish Stuff
In my rush to fly out to San Diego I didn’t completely think through what sort of reading material to take with me, I just grabbed the book I was in the middle of and would have to return to the public library a couple days after coming home, and the book I planned to start reading next.
The book from the library was Seven, Or How to Play a Game Without Rules by Joanna Kavenna. I enjoyed the it very much. It has a sort of quirkiness to it and a style that reminded me of Yoko Towada. I finished it on the plane, not in flight, but because there were issues with gates at the San Diego airport when I landed and my plane sat on the tarmac for two hours waiting for a gate to open.
The next up book I took with me was The Rouse by China Mieville. I am a Mieville fan and have read a number of his books, so bought this in hardcover because I would never be able to finish it in three weeks if I borrowed it from the library. It is 1200 pages. Yup, I brought along a 1200 page hardcover. Part of me was worried I wouldn’t have enough to read. But it turned out I didn’t have any time to read the entire week. I also had my laptop along with me. Carrying a laptop and a 1200 page book in a tote bag around the airport along with my backpack of clothes because I didn’t check a bag, is not a light load! I got a good workout to say the least.
I started reading the book on the plane back to Minneapolis and just like every Mieville book, it is nothing like any of his others. It was good to have something chunky and engaging to read because, once again, the San Diego airport had issues. My plane taxied to take off and then we got a message to delay takeoff because the wind had changed directions. So we sat on the tarmac for half an hour before we got the go ahead. Once airborne, the flight was rather bumpy, and, sitting on the aisle, I had to stand up and balance with my chunkster while the guy in the middle seat got up to use the restroom. I’m proud to say I managed not to injure anyone with my book!
And in a bit of exciting news, I am now a volunteer copyeditor for Ancillary Review of Books. They are a nonprofit online speculative fiction magazine. They put out a call for editors and copyeditors in early September. I sent in my information and was selected. Just had my onboarding meeting the other day. Now I need to read their style guide and other documents and then I can jump in. I am only required to do one article a month, but of course if I am able to do more they will not complain. I am looking forward to the whole experience since I have never done anything like this before.
In Conclusion
So there you have it. I have a lot on my plate, but I hope to make my way back to regular posting or a semblance thereof. It might not be next weekend because it is my 35th wedding anniversary. Golly, how did that happen? James and I have plans to celebrate with a museum visit to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. We have two different sets of friends who have invited us for get togethers, one on Friday night and the other for brunch on Saturday. It’s a lot to cram into a weekend along with all the housekeeping things that need to be taken care off too. But barring the unforeseen, there shouldn’t be a big gap between posts like these last weeks.
I hope you all are doing well and enjoying some fine fall (or spring depending on your hemisphere) weather!
#AncillaryReviewOfBooks #ChinaMieville #cushawSquash #JoannaKavenna #lemonGrass #mom #probate #SanDiego -
TL;DR — Columnar engines like Arrow, DuckDB, Polars, and GPU dataframes are built for scan-heavy, amortized access — ideal for building training sets, terrible for single-row inference lookups. The real value of Arrow in AI systems isn't query speed, it's zero-copy interchange between the offline columnar world and the online row-oriented world. Teams that try to make one engine do both pay for it in p99 latency.
Every few months another benchmark lands showing DuckDB or Polars or a GPU dataframe engine crushing some TPC-H-style workload. The numbers are real. The conclusion people draw from them — that the columnar engine is now the obvious backbone for AI data infrastructure, end to end — is where things go wrong.Columnar engines are extraordinary at one thing: scanning a lot of rows to compute a few aggregates. They are structurally bad at the thing most AI inference paths actually need, which is fetching one row, fast, under load. Those are not the same problem, and the industry keeps building systems that quietly assume they are.
What "columnar" is actually optimizing for
Column stores exist because analytical queries touch a small number of columns across a huge number of rows. Storing data column-wise means you only read the bytes you need, you compress similar values together, and you can vectorize operations across contiguous memory with almost no branching. This is why Arrow's columnar memory format, DuckDB's execution engine, and GPU dataframe libraries all converge on the same core bet: amortize a fixed overhead over millions of values.That bet is exactly right for building a training set. You're joining a fact table of events against a dimension table of user attributes, computing rolling aggregates, filtering, deduplicating — all scan-and-reduce operations over large batches. A columnar engine will do this an order of magnitude faster than a row-oriented database, and GPU-accelerated columnar execution pushes that further by parallelizing the same vectorized operations across thousands of cores.
None of this has anything to do with what happens at inference time.
Where the model breaks
An inference request — a chat turn, an agent step, a ranking call — needs a handful of specific rows: this user's current feature vector, this document's embedding, this session's running state. That's a point lookup, not a scan. In a column store, reconstructing a single logical row means touching N separate column chunks, each potentially compressed, each potentially on a different page or file. You pay that reconstruction cost whether you need one row or a million. Over a million rows, it disappears into the vectorized throughput. Over one row, at p99, under concurrent load, it's pure latency with no amortization to hide behind.This is why nobody serves a production recommendation feature store out of a Parquet file scanned fresh every request. It's why vector databases don't store vectors in a generic columnar table and brute-force scan them — they build HNSW or IVF indexes specifically because the access pattern is "find me the nearest neighbors to this one query vector right now," which is the opposite of what columnar layouts are good at. The vector database world already learned this lesson. A lot of the broader AI data stack hasn't internalized it yet.
You see the same mistake show up in agent systems. An agent step that needs to read conversation state, tool outputs, and a slice of long-term memory is doing dozens of small, latency-sensitive point reads per turn. Bolt a columnar analytics engine underneath that and you've built a system that is blazingly fast at answering "how many agent runs happened last week" and painfully slow at answering "what did this specific agent remember five turns ago."
Arrow's real contribution isn't the query engine
This is where Arrow actually earns its place, and it's not the part most benchmarks celebrate. Arrow's contribution to AI infrastructure is a shared, zero-copy, in-memory columnar layout that multiple engines can read and write without serializing between them. Pandas, Polars, DuckDB, Spark, a PyTorch dataloader, a GPU dataframe — all of them can hand off the same block of memory without a conversion tax at every boundary.That matters enormously for the offline side of an AI pipeline, where data moves through five or six tools on its way from raw logs to a training batch. Every serialization boundary you remove is real wall-clock time and real infrastructure cost returned to you, independent of how fast any single engine's query planner is. The headline-grabbing part of the Arrow ecosystem is "look how fast this SQL query runs." The quietly load-bearing part is "look how many copy operations this eliminated between tools nobody thought to combine."
Conflating those two contributions is the mistake. Teams read "Arrow is fast" and "DuckDB is fast" and conclude the columnar stack should extend all the way to the serving boundary. It shouldn't, and trying to force it there is how you end up with an inference path that's fast in a load test with batch size 10,000 and falls apart in production where real traffic looks like batch size one, repeated constantly, with a latency budget measured in milliseconds.
Designing for two speeds, not one
The architecture that actually works treats this as two distinct problems joined at a well-defined seam. Offline, use the columnar, GPU-accelerated stack for exactly what it's good at: building and refreshing training datasets, computing batch feature transforms, backfilling, running analytical evaluation over logged inference traffic. This is where Arrow-based engines and GPU dataframes deliver real, repeatable wins, because the workload genuinely is scan-and-reduce over large volumes.Online, use a row-oriented store, a key-value layer, or a purpose-built index — whatever gives you single-digit-millisecond point lookups at your concurrency target. The feature store pattern of an offline columnar warehouse paired with a low-latency online store isn't legacy cruft to be modernized away by a faster columnar engine; it's the correct shape of the problem, and GPU acceleration on the columnar side doesn't change which side of the seam a given workload belongs on.
The seam itself is where Arrow should live — as the interchange format that lets your offline columnar pipeline hand off a batch of freshly computed features to whatever is populating the online store, without a serialization detour through JSON or a bespoke binary format. That's a real, meaningful win. It's just a different win than "#ai #llm #python #agents #software #coding #development #engineering #inclusive #community
DuckDB and Arrow Win AI Data Prep, Then Hit a Wall at Serving
