Last weekend my wife called me over to show me something on her phone. She was going through her old emails and came across some emails we had passed back and forth, from when we first met. She and I met in a club and went on a couple of dates, but then I deployed to Afghanistan with the Army. We continued to converse via email mostly, and phone where possible - this was before the days of FaceTime etc. - and the rest is history. That was in 2006, and 20 years later we're still very happily…

I’ve been away so missed this until today. I’ve read a few posts from this blog in the past few months. Originally I thought they were just being written to deliberately provoke. A low level trolling kinda thing. The consistency of it all has me thinking though, and I think their kind of constant criticism is less interesting than the writer seems to believe it is. We’ve all come across them before, that a particular kind of internet critic who seems to derive status from being the person who…

There is a particular feeling some old software has that is hard to explain without sounding sentimental. You open it, it appears almost immediately, and it does the job it was built to do. The menus are where you expect them. The file is yours. The program is not asking you to sign in, sync, subscribe, accept a new policy, dismiss a promotion, or wait while it talks to six remote services before showing a blank document. That does not mean old software was always better. Plenty of it crashed.…

the other day i accidentally ran over a duck while listening to a meditation tape in my car. of course i felt dreadful. the last thing i want to do is kill a duck. i want to kill nothing. i like birds and the duck is my favourite. the situation was very unfair. i was driving home from uni at midnight on a quiet unlit road, listening to a mediation tape for self development and Boom. duck walked right in front of my car. i pulled over 100 metres down the road and followed the prints which were…

I drove my son to school this morning. Not something I do often since he catches the bus. But as part of class, they are going fishing and he wanted to bring his fishing rod.1 After dropping him off, I made my way home. Thirty seconds later, I was off the road, forced off by a mom in a white minivan in a school zone.2Not exactly something I had on my bingo card to start my morning. The most ridiculous part of this entire story is the fact this all took place in slow motion basically, at 25 MPH.…

I want to give a Matilda update in case people are worried or wondering how she is. I managed to find a vet who would treat her yesterday. I’m very happy to now recommend Ashgrove Vets to anyone in Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire with a similar issue. They know how to treat birds and are generally accommodating of exotics. The vet never once mentioned the “e” word. The foot was hanging by a thread when I went and I don’t mean metaphorically but literally. It probably didn’t require much medical…

Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s chief executive, on his personal website: But over the last few months, I have become convinced that fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence — not just investing in risk prevention, but pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up. We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain. Two things have convinced me. My…

When I was a wee lad -- before I grew gray and wizened in my third decade of life -- people would make shitposts using photoshop. But, every year, it seems I see fewer and fewer of them. Most visual shitposts now seem to be made by Midjourney or ChatGPT.1 And this makes me sad. It makes sense. The barrier to entry is far lower, and high-effort shitposts have always been a rare breed. I'm not sure whether AI shitposting is even wrong. I think it's scummy to have AI make art for you or to pass of…

The Oceanic Niño Index (ONI) jumped 0.4 points, from +1.4 to 1.8, in July, the greatest total in a rising El Nino since that particular index began in 1950. While the effect of ENSO is possibly very little in our latitude a look back at previous events, I think, can provide some guidance about what we might expect later in the year. The best fit in terms of where we are now and where we were in past Super El Niños is 1997 – though I would guess we’re about at month ahead of that period. Like…

Spinning by blackle mori is a short story told in the form of an archived forum thread. I read it in less than half an hour (using my PC). It's a very neat experience! You should check it out. I won't give too much away but I'll say that the page does contain information about how the story was created. I found this behind the scenes process information almost as interesting as the story itself! I love it when people make this kind of work visible to their audience!

I realised something when I woke up in a panic last night about my hospital visit today (update: the results were perfect): fear only works in absolutes. You either die right away of the disease or you live. Fear doesn’t do in between, and boy, it’s good at doom scenarios. Every time I walk out of the hospital after my quarterly visits I decide not to let my anxieties take over for the next visit in three months. Every time, it sneaks up on me, and I wake up after dreams of horrible deaths and…

After climbing Mt Yotei on our recent Hokkaido roadtrip, our plan had been to continue to camp in the surrounding area and hike more mountains - but it ended up being a fairly rainy week, and my husband and I had both wanted to visit Hakodate at some point, so we made a bit of an impromptu trip down to Hokkaido’s third-largest city. Since we weren’t travelling during a major holiday period, it was super easy to get a last-minute booking for two nights at a cheap business hotel. Now, what is…

When I first joined Medium.com, I thought I was late to the party. Little did I know I would be one of the platform's most veteran members still writing and publishing here after over ten years. One of my first-ever posts was about getting into the discourse about what Medium should be. It's a rather embarrassing read a decade later, but it's important to note I've always been interested in the longevity of this place while also not shying away from being critical when necessary. For my first…

Back in May, I blogged about the Kill Yr Substack web browser extension. If you install it in your web browser, when you visit a Substack site it will redirect you to an archived version. That way neither Substack nor the author gets the benefit of the clicks. As I discussed in my previous post, I – and many other people – don’t want to support Substack because they fund hate influencers. (Hatefluencer?) I’ve been using the extension since May and it’s worked great. If I accidentally stumble on…

Machine learning represents words as vectors and measures the similarity of words by the angles between the vectors. For vectors x and y, where θ is the angle between the vectors, and so This is the cosine similarity between the words represented by x and y. Small angles have large cosines, and so words with larger cosine similarities are closer together than words with smaller cosine similarities. The cosine similarity between a word and itself equals 1, and we’d expect unrelated words to have…

Yes, I am on Reddit every day... I think I am addicted. But honestly, I think it is time for a detox program. There is still good content there, but it is getting harder to find, and the reasons why are worth talking about. Years ago, Reddit used to be something I heard about, saw in search results, and then one day found myself scrolling thinking that's interesting or finding something I agreed with (or disagreed with) vehemently and jumping in. I always thought there were so many subreddits…

I occasionally read my own blog. I’m not sure why. It’s either a perfectly reasonable act of reflection or a deeply questionable way to spend an afternoon. There are few things quite like stumbling across something you wrote twenty-two years ago and thinking, with genuine confusion, who the fuck was that? The annoying thing is that I know who it was. There are my words, sitting there on the screen, confidently explaining what I thought, what I believed, what annoyed me, what mattered to me. The…

There’s nothing like waking up to find people telling me about proposed new legislation which, if passed, would geoblock people in the UK from so many online services, end numerous services in the UK, and criminalise myriad people in the UK. Today’s proposal is the Social Media Platforms (Ofcom Licensing) Bill. The gist of the proposal is that anyone who “operate[s] a social media platform that is available to users in the United Kingdom” commits a criminal offence unless that obtain a licence…

It's exactly one year since my first post, ArmA Appreciation Post. I feel it's both suprising and obvious that I've made it this far. On one hand, most blogs usually die around this age, on the other hand, blogging is really fulfilling. It's quite fun to just write about whatever shows up in my mind, and making those arguments in my head public. It helps me keep my opinions grounded and improves my argumentation skills. Also, since most of my posts go without interactions, and I conciously…

When I recently whined about modal editing feeling clunky, I think I was being impatient, as I’ve been hitting Vim and Neovim pretty hard lately and have not been feeling that way. That’s also because I’m learning some more stuff and getting more efficient. Scenario: I’m dashing out a sentence, I typo something or change my mind about wording, and then want delete the last one or two words. I do this all the time because I’m a fast-but-sloppy typist. With the macOS defaults, I use Option-Delete…

Here we see, some 85 years ago this month, a Finnish dragoon (Rakuuna) on horseback, 12th of September 1941, near Tsalkki-Suojärvi on the Russo-Finnish border during the Continuation War between the two countries, which saw Finland allied with Germany. Photo by Heikki Aho, SA Kuva Image number 47915 Photo by Heikki Aho, SA Kuva Image number 47916 The above dragoon was likely from Finland’s oldest cavalry regiment, the Nyland Regiment of Dragoons, or the Uudenmaan rakuunarykmentti (URR). While…

I don't like social media. I haven't been on it for decades. I tried Mastodon recently, but that didn't go too well. I do enjoy YouTube Shorts though - they're a good way to kill some time here and there. The algorithm has recently churned up some videos of auditors. These are people who appear to hang around outside of government buildings "auditing" them (read: taking photo's of staff and their vehicles). This is so the "auditor" can get a rise out of the staff, the puff out their chest and…

In short: from my experience, people like map and filter, but not reduce. I use functions like map and filter all the time. When I put that code up for review, my peers rarely complain. I get plenty of feedback about other decisions, but not about my use of map and filter. I cannot say the same for reduce. Often, when I’ve submitted a patch with reduce inside, I get a comment like, “this part is hard to read.” And I see reduce way less than map, filter, some, and so on. Anecdotally, I have come…

This is a very though-provoking that applies much wider than just AI. In fact, its origins go back to long before AI was even around. It is applicable to whenever automation is involved with humans. The problem with humans is they get lazy, and they lose muscle memory over time, and it is even worse if they never gained the muscle memory in the first place. Examples given are a nuclear power station where, despite the possibility of fully automated processes, humans are deliberately kept in the…

Photo by Bermix Studio on Unsplash Introduction Sorry if I seem to be going off on this topic, but there were a few items I wasn’t aware of before posting IndieWeb Blog Audit Follow-Up1. There is, in fact, one topic that I intended to mention in that post, and a few things that I’ve learned about since posting that article. I’d like to say that this will be the last post on blogging for a while, but it won’t. I will be following it up with an update to another article I posted a few months ago…

Last week, on 9 September, Donald Trump promised that, if the Republicans retained their Congressional majorities in the November elections, he would send $5000 to every adult American citizen. The cost has been estimated at around $1.2 trillion. The announcement received cursory coverage in the mainstream press the following day. A few retired Republicans protested. The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial criticising the proposal as bribery, and the New York Times put it way down the front…

Because they're spying on us, that's why.

Unfortunately my son learned the hard way not to hand over auth codes to a stranger in what felt like a friendly Discord server.As far as I’ve been able to tell from Microsoft Support, the account is gone and we can’t get it back. Which sucks as it is. But it's more frustrating because his Minecraft account (and a license our family uses to play Minecraft) is tied to that account. Also gone. And without providing too much information to potential hackers out there, it was also used to log in to…

I’m intrigued about the opening of a new library wing at Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art (MONA). It has a world-first, tech enabled cataloguing system, called The O, which means you can just put a book down anywhere and the system will find it for the next reader. “Phrontisterion is animated by technology that allows us to organise books however we want, while keeping track of everything—and thus does away with the in-many-ways-inadequate Dewey cataloguing system. It’s also a lot bigger than…