Unfortunately, our university is discontinuing personal web pages for academics for incomprehensible reasons.
Fortunately, our department was allowed to set redirects to external web pages, so that the existing links still work.
My web page is now at gihub, accessible from the original links.
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this is neat
qcp: QUIC remote file copy for long distance high-bandwidth lossy links
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This is a brilliant take by Gianmarco Soresi on the absurdity of comparing any criticism of #Israel to antisemitism
Words should mean things.🎤 Check Out my Tour Dates! 🎤Tour Dates: https://beacons.ai/gianmarcosoresi📱 Get a text next time I'm performing in your city 📱ht...YouTube
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Advantage of intelligence: being able to catch up an OU unit and a Portuguese language unit in an evening
Disadvantages of procrastination: having to
Today's law study amusement. "Even taking into account that the bird had travelled from Leicester in a box on British Rail its condition was rough"
(Partridge v Crittenden [1968] 1 WLR 1204)
Janey Godley has died.She's been going to do so sometime soon for a while now, and very soon indeed for the last couple of weeks, and now she's gone.
She was always a proper ally, and the world is poorer for her absence.
Long may she be remembered and celebrated.
Trump is still a cunt.
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So I know it’s all very funny, ha ha, but here’s why the orcas don’t go after the boats of the ultra rich.
Two photos. One a multi million euro luxury yacht. Notice it has two props. They steer by vectoring the thrust. There is no rudder.
The other, my boat. It costs what a new car costs (like if you were buying a low end Tesla. Expensive, but not stupid money). It has a rudder because it’s a sailboat. It can’t rely on thrust being present.
No rudder - no orca attack. People who can afford sailboats, which the orcas are attacking, cannot afford luxury motor yachts, which they aren’t.
A sailboat is like a mouldy caravan, but floating, and slower.
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On my quasi-blog: "Separation of concerns in a bug tracker"
A thought about bug trackers I've used, how they make some kinds of database query difficult, and how one might be designed more sensibly.
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@transworld There’s evidence on Twitter that they actually added more ketchup to their shirt for the photo they put online.
Also, if they actually had any guts they would have tried that stunt in the Rutland Arms, and not the Benjamin Huntsman ‘Spoons.
Day 2 in Oxford for medical trial fun and games. Today was the infusion, 50% chance of ketamine vs placebo. After doing a variety of questionnaires and having blood and urine samples taken it was time to be infused. It was fairly relaxing. Maybe a bit boring. I idly let my mind wander. I think I either didn’t get ketamine or I did and it had nearly no effect on me. I felt maybe slightly lightheaded at one point, and now feel a bit weird, but nothing especially noteworthy.
After that there were more questionnaires and computer tasks. Rather cruelly one of these asked me to remember things from another task, which they hadn’t warned me about. Testing memory when you’ve not been asked to remember stuff is a valuable thing to do.
Tomorrow afternoon is an MRI session where I remember various things while in the machine and they look at what bits of my head light up.
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Horrifying/Fascinating thought:
Antivirus Vendors are already one of the richest sources of aggressive malware.
What if the false dichotomy was simply scrapped?
“Improve your corporate security with Phageware!”
“Self deploying”
“Eradicates all other malware undetectably”
“Attacks and cryptographically detains hostile actors on your network”
“Make the C&C seat YOUR seat for a change!”
DISCLAIMER: This is a fucking awful idea and under no circumstances should it be allowed to happen (as if we had any say in it)
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Clocks go back tonight in case anyone still has clocks to go back.
(In Europe, at least. No idea what other bits of the northern hemisphere do.)
Bluesky now owned by crypto-grifters.
My "we will not hyperfinancialize the social experience through tokens, crypto trading or NFTs" t-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my t-shirt.
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I propose writing IPv6 addresses as Unicode:
- take each segment
- convert it to a codepoint
- ???
- profit
For example: 2a01:4f8:c012:fb3::1 would become
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brb installing Arabic keyboard layout and language pack...
U+FE80 is the unicode hex value of the character Arabic Letter Hamza Isolated Form. Char U+FE80, Encodings, HTML Entitys:ﺀ,ﺀ, UTF-8 (hex), UTF-16 (hex), UTF-32 (hex)https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+FE80
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Israel's longest running paper, Haaretz, just confirmed that Netanyahu actively blocked every hostage deal since 10/7, Netanyahu meanwhile is openly planning to annex Gaza—& the conversation is still "why won't Hamas agree to a deal?"😐
This is how genocide perpetuates. Horrific.
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@AlliFlowers @crouton the headline at least seems to match what Rashid posted.
(his use of the word "just" at the top of the thread might have been accidental)
If you have a choice between littering an open tin of train gin or carrying it in contravention of TfL byelaws, which should you do?
Where is the boundary at Paddington between the applicability of TfL’s railway byelaws and anyone else’s?
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ok. That's very cool.
I regret I have but one like to give.
Thank you for sharing
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Link to: https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=saqachfaDaring Fireball
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Apple did the research; LLMs cannot do formal reasoning. Results change by as much as 10% if something as basic as the names change.
garymarcus.substack.com/p/llms…
Important new study from AppleGary Marcus (Marcus on AI)
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@anderspuck @dalias
LLMs are NOT doing *speech to text* translation -- doing transcripts from audio (podcast). That's a different set of AI technologies.
The industry has been developing "AI" technologies since before I was born. Some are quite useful.
It's the "Generative AI" subset (which includes LLMs, chatbots) that is so misleading, mostly useless, and incredibly wasteful.
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The payroll calculation service I use for the pub company is closing down at the end of the tax year.
I'm looking for recommendations for a replacement. It needs to have a decent API that isn't gated behind "become a partner and put your app in our store" (so that rules out Xero).
Pricing that's transparent and would work for a company of ~50 people would also be nice! I'm currently paying about £55/month.
SO many companies in this space seem to be "call us for pricing"! Really puts me off...
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@mrmonkington Ah. I think the Demo Company is special in this respect.
It's documented that the Xero Payroll API is only available to developers with "partner permissions", unlike the Accounting API.
Two years ago I painted anthracnose lesions on apples, strawberries and mango. The symptoms are caused by related fungi within the genus Colletotrichum.
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“Non passibus aequis” was my mother’s favourite phrase from Virgil’s Aeneid. Literally “not with equal paces”, it describes Aeneas’ son Iulus as he escapes Troy with his father, and immediately brings the scene to life. Who hasn’t seen a parent hurrying with a small child, after all?
Thought brought to you by a section of Travis Baldree’s “Bookshops and Bonedust” where our protagonist’s dwarf friend is walking “two strides to every one of Viv’s”
John Carlos Baez
in reply to Martin Escardo • • •- I can imagine a university being scared of personal web pages because of legal liability: someone could say something nasty on their web page. But a university that doesn't have personal web pages seems to be treating the faculty as mere employees rather than members. In end, having your own separate web page will make you seem more like your own independent entity. A lot of young academics I know have their own independent web pages:
epatters.org
Evan Patterson
www.epatters.orgMartin Escardo
in reply to John Carlos Baez • • •The same argument I gave to them. Originally they agreed and paused the discontinuing. But now IT services decide everything, regardless of impact on research visibility or student experience, or anything academic.
For people in the UK, discontinuing academic web pages is REF suicide.
Martin Escardo
in reply to Martin Escardo • • •In Computer Science at the University of Birmingham we are currently 3rd in REF in the UK.
I can see us easily going to 33rd after this move.
Conor Titania Mc Bride
in reply to Martin Escardo • • •Alexandra Lanes likes this.
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Leon P Smith
in reply to Conor Titania Mc Bride • • •@pigworker @johncarlosbaez
Honestly I remember one university who's main IT help desk was comically incompetent, and incredibly user hostile. For example, you could customize parts of your user experience on lab computers, but the settings would never stay.
The CS department handled their own IT at the time, and it was a _much_ more tolerable situation.
I've yet to understand why IT departments are typically so incredibly user-hostile, like they forget what purpose they actually serve.
Conor Titania Mc Bride
in reply to Leon P Smith • • •Conor Titania Mc Bride
in reply to Conor Titania Mc Bride • • •Leon P Smith
in reply to Conor Titania Mc Bride • • •@pigworker @johncarlosbaez
> I used to specialise in manufacturing specific needs. In fact, I still do.
Nice quote. That's certainly true of myself as well, to greater or lesser extent depending on whatever tends to capture my attention at that moment in time.
That's probably also why I found it pretty easy to get a bit crosswise with IT departments of all stripes.