Modern fantasy castle auction  in Oregon

Modern fantasy castle auction  in Oregon

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If you have the $2.5 million reserve, you can get into the estimated $6.5 mil DecaroAuctions.com auction for an Oregon fairy-tale castle.

Melissa McPhail was the author of the expansive epic-fantasy series A Pattern of Shadow & Light. She originally imagined a place where she could write and create, with the longer ambition of welcoming artists from around the world into a setting that offered the same freedom—a castle for creativity.

Sadly, she passed away in 2022 before it was completed in 2023. The estate is now being put up for auction by her surviving husband.

I find it interesting how many of these kinds of grand capstone projects are started by wealthy individuals that often never see them completed. Steve Jobs started his famous yacht. It’s a reminder to treasure each day because the plans of tomorrow may all come to nothing.

When their breath departs, they return to the earth;
on that very day their plans perish.

Psalm 146

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An increasing trend: conversion to Catholicism

An increasing trend: conversion to Catholicism

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Dr Gavin Ashenden was a pre-eminent Anglican academic, canon theologian, and member of the Anglican Synod. He was a rising star appointed as a chaplain to Queen Elizabeth II and later made a bishop.

He became deeply worry about the direction the Church was taking as he saw it departing from traditional Christian values – a position that has caused a complete split in the Anglican synod.

When he voiced his concerns publicly, the Lord Chamberlain gave him an ultimatum: remain silent or resign as chaplain to the Queen. Dr. Ashenden chose to resign and would eventually leave the Anglican Church to become Catholic.

Here he shares his story.

Quick overview of the 12 apostles

Quick overview of the 12 apostles

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In today’s gospel reading, Jesus gives the apostles authority over evil spirits, curing the sick, raising the dead, and tells them that “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few.” – Mt 9:37

It’s worthwhile knowing the backgrounds and humanity in the 12 apostles. They were certainly not picked because they were worthy, intelligent, or without serious failings. Quite the contrary – God again and again picks the most broken and flawed people to bring salvation to his people.

So, do any of the stories of these 12 ring true for you or sound familiar? Do not be afraid! God’s power is precisely in healing the most broken of us and despite our past actions. He simply asks us to come walk with Him every day. We do this by spending time in prayer and inviting Jesus to participate in all our daily activities. When we walk each day with Jesus, we build a relationship with God. A day-to-day walk with Him and in that walk we can experience the profound healing and trusting relationship each of these men did.

Today

Today

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How much better, and infinitely more needed, are people able to steward and encourage our souls – not in following base anger and constant outrages encouraged so readily today, but to turn and follow our better selves we know we can be.

Next Gen cyberpumk clothes

Next Gen cyberpumk clothes

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A robotics and animatronic cosplay enthusiast known as Zibartas has made a real-life NUSA Infiltrator jacket.

This is a cosplay recreation of the NUS Infiltrator bomber jacket from Cyberpunk 2077 that has a tall collar that houses a display. That feature collar alone packs in $1,200 worth of 4 flexible OLED displays driven by a pair of Raspberry Pi 4 SBCs.

I think this is a great example of new technological fashion that is becoming possible for designers. We’re already starting to see 3D printed clothes, spray on shoes and spray-on dresses, and the re-booted Tron franchise a few years ago introduced Oryon Technologies Elastolite EL Panels (tape) into real-world costumes.

I think we’re just scratching the surface of what will soon be very quickly possible in wearables.

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Quantum Computer hooked to AI

Quantum Computer hooked to AI

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“The results reported here constitute, to our knowledge, the first demonstration of end-to-end quantum enhancement of a production-scale, widely-deployed LLM on real superconducting quantum hardware for autoregressive language generation,” the scientists wrote in the study. “Their significance lies not in the magnitude of the perplexity improvements — which will grow with hardware fidelity and qubit count — but in the fact that they exist at all.”

IBM researchers have demonstrated a new way of using a quantum computer to fine-tune a pretrained large language models (LLM) and have achieved measurable improvements in the model’s ability to forecast text.

It did this by a quantum-assisted optimization technique that reduced the model’s “perplexity” (the metric for how well an AI predicts the next word). The model became more accurate at answering questions — including some it previously got wrong.

This is an amazing development not only for the possibility of quantum-enhanced LLM’s – but is probably the first real demonstration of quantum computing demonstrating a clear advantage of classical computing. Quantum computing has struggled to demonstrate its advantages in real-world applications. This appears to be the first real-world application that showed clear improvements.

It makes me wonder if this works so well because LLMs and AI rely on the fuzzy statistical domains that quantum computing’s big issue of stability matches well with. Perhaps it could even flip things on it’s head. Perhaps an specially trained AI system might turn out to be the perfect API (if you will) for determining outcomes from fuzzy quantum computations.

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Google Stitch for all your UI needs

Google Stitch for all your UI needs

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Is Figma dead?

Google Stitch is a prompt driven complete AI designer that allows you to develop full UI designs almost instantly. But it’s not some isolated tool. You can export your UI designs from the system into Claude Code, Cursor, and any other coding agent.

Does it work? Yes. I re-created most of the UI of an app I wrote in less than 15 minutes. It was so easy, I literally gasped when it generated almost a better version of my own app.

Have inspiration? Point Stitch at any website and it will create it’s own version for you as a starting point.

Then you can go in and change the color palette and automatically create light/dark modes.You can then use the editor to add and change individual elements: change images, logos, create animations, add and remove App Store, Web, Marketing Kit, and Accessibility assets.

With the Direct Edit pencil you can click any text or swap any images for fine control – all without charging credits.

If Figma and UI coders aren’t dead, they definitely need to up their game to use these kinds of tools or they soon will be.

Minigolf you can’t lose

Minigolf you can’t lose

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Constructive Chaos proves that geometry is powerful! His channel is full of fascinating builds like making square looking wheels that actually roll.

In this one, he creates increasingly complex minigolf courses that are nearly impossible not to get a hole in one. No really! They’re geometrically designed so that so long as you hit it hard enough to get to the hole – it will always go in.

Personally, this would be an absolutely amazing date night minigolf course. Nothing but good times no matter how much you drink.