I would be a hypocrite indeed to criticise the actions of Russia in Ukraine as I have, and to keep silent about the USA in Venezuela. This is pure realpolitik, and I shudder to think where it will end.

Four years ago you were shocked by our brutality. Now you have been desensitised into indifference.

Merry Xmas to all who celebrate!

"We want the media and politicians to recognise that there is a large number of women who are supportive of the trans+ community. We call on them to report truthfully about the sources of violence against women and to address the systems that perpetuate harm." notinourname.org.uk/petition/not...

I don’t mean to belittle those who dislike A Clockwork Orange. There is a significant debate to be had about art and treatment of extremely hurtful topics. Additionally, I must admit though, one thing that nags at me is that in a film about a Beethoven fanatic, the iconic opening music is Purcell.

TOP TIP: If you feel that you might be too romantically needy, either set up or upgrade Microsoft Windows for a free reminder that however bad you are, you’ve got absolutely nothing on how much they want you to either accept Edge as your default browser or fail to notice that it now is.

Never before have I known the rate of change in my profession (data science/software development) be even a tenth of what it is now.

Meeting Trump in Budapest is perfect. That's where we promised never to invade Ukraine in the first place.

Bluesky does for me what Mastadon, Threads and the others never did, and substitutes for The Platform Formerly Known As Twitter to the extent that, whilst I might miss elements of the network, I don’t miss it enough to go back.

OTD in 2006 journalist & activist Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead. Whoever is responsible for having her killed is still at large. And turns 73 today.

It really is a bit of a shame that AI is taking such a large chunk of the pie with regard to IT training, because I’m doing quite a bit of it at work at the moment and it is incredibly rewarding.

Just to put this out there, if you want me to vote for your political party: 1) Trans rights are non-negotiable. 2) Your party’s behaviour in government will be at best a significant factor in assessment, if not fully determining.

The mixture-of-recursions framework looks interesting (www.alphaxiv.org/abs/2507.10524). I wonder if it will be the “transformers killer” that some are claiming or just an improvement.

On the scale of what some of you are dealing with, this rates zero on the problem Richter scale, but I could really, solidly do with about double the waking hours I have. Which is why I am posting on social media, obviously.

I understand that the terrorist attack that killed 1000 people in Israel warranted action. I cannot understand how that action can be starving babies and bombing hospitals in hopes you might catch a terrorist. Trauma is not an excuse to magnify the horrors by exponentials. It's genocide.

I have said plenty about people dying in Ukraine and not enough about people dying in Gaza. The situation is complex. That does not justify bombing and starving civilians, because nothing does, ever.

In discussion with friends, something that should have been obvious has crystallised. The training of modern media has been successful in training me to despise all advertising. It could be an advert for a free luxury holiday open only to people with my name and I’d hit ‘skip’ as soon as I could.

To those of us educated during Section 28, they did not dare say a word about being gay.

Whenever I see a question asking about the capabilities of AI, I find myself adding the word “yet” just before the question mark.

You know that thing where you hope like hell that the degree to which you have no idea what you are doing is significantly less apparent to others than to yourself?

OTD in 2022 we bombed the crowded Amstor shopping mall in #Kremenchuk, killing 20 civilians. Hospitals Theatres Schools Kindergartens Holocaust memorials Apartment blocks Grain terminals Shopping centres But Russia wants peace

I’m no political expert. It seems to me, though, that when Trump falls, and barring sudden death he will, an awful lot of those who stand firmly with him now will fall on him and his people like hungry wolves. I say this mainly if not entirely for myself.

Walking meditation is more difficult than sitting for me, but so far it seems more helpful as well.

I’m not going to pretend that I like spinning up EC2s. I know that there’s no such thing as serverless, but I appreciate the illusion hugely.

I hope they destroy each other, but when elephants fight, ants die first.

Pyspark really is incredibly useful. For getting the data pipelines I want, it comes through again and again.

futurism.com/rfk-jr-make-... #AI #artificialintelligence

I have posted a lot less about Ukraine recently, mainly because of life stuff. My support for their struggle against tyranny (Russian or otherwise) and their right to decide their own fate without being a geopolitical football is undiminished. Slava Ukraini.

Trans women are women. Trans men are men. Non-binary identities are valid. When you say who you are, I believe you and support you.

No data is clean on arrival. No, not even that data. No, not even from that source. If you haven’t tested, it doesn’t work and if you haven’t checked and cleaned it, it’s dirty.

I think that declining to play Oblivion again because, amongst other things, I am so laughably beyond having time that it isn’t even funny is less personal growth and more grudgingly making peace with reality.

Trans rights are human rights

The week before, it was Divided We Fall, an amazing post-apocalyptic larp. Yup, comedown is truly horrible.

Back from Student Nationals (not a student, quite a few of us aren’t, especially the GMs, of which I am one). Comedown is a git.

Yesterday I heard a podcast where it was said, outside the context of machine learning, that learning is continuous error correction. Largely if not completely true, but at times rather painful.

I am reminded that I have never reached a point in any machine learning project where I knew too much about the data.

Excellent larping at the weekend at the CuPa Steppe event. There was a dragon!

LarpCon yesterday and today. Very glad to be here. Old friends, creative brilliance and a load of opportunities.

I am doing a natural language processing project. It is interesting in many ways, but I am struck in particular by the value of the right kind of dirty data in teaching the model to recognise clean on-target data.

Trans rights are human rights. No transphopic government or any other group change that.

No one ever thought that D.R. & Quinch would gain the presidency

I’m George Takei and I approve of this message.

Ukraine is being betrayed. It was attacked without provocation, and now the US and Russia are getting into bed together to plunder it. Slava Ukraini. You were and continue to be so brave. You deserve so much better than this.

So many interesting subjects and people. Not remotely enough time. Such fortunate, exquisite torture.

Another superb conclusion to a brilliant campaign from @criticalrole.bsky.social. I’m going to miss those characters.

I'm getting avoidant about following the news. I need to deal with that.

RIP David Lynch. He made some amazing art.

Attended a marvellous 60th birthday in Wirral yesterday. A lot of friendship, goodwill and happy history gathered under one roof.

Likely to make more use of this platform, given developments elsewhere.