“Every adult in the UK is eligible to take free, newly benchmarked courses to gain practical AI skills for work” uh provided they work in one of a surprisingly small set of industries

Can confirm they are soft

Man I love it when people find this out

Genuinely fascinating watching a pub transition from “West Ham game” to “Heated Rivalry watchalong”

An entertainingly weird interview with Nam June Paik in which amongst other things he predicts the modern internet, back in April 1980

Every time I have to use one of the terms “vega”, “vanna”, or “volga” I die a little bit inside. I once worked somewhere that insisted on calling vega “kappa” which was great but made talking to new hires or anyone else very confusing.

“A giant nuclear reactor has been set up in space, for free. All you have to pay is a one-off charge for the receiver dish”

Is it unreasonable of me to expect departure boards to be sorted by time?

I still think we should rebrand solar power as "space-based nuclear" to make it sound more macho

Signs you were a science grad student in the late 90s-early 00s: any time you use a stick blender, the phrase “soup-like homogenate” springs unbidden to mind

A few days ago, I stood in the graveyard of an 1100 year old church, getting damper and damper in the drizzling rain. A woman walked into the graveyard, waved, said hello, and, as we had previously arranged, handed me a paper bag full of human bones. The life of a churchwarden is a strange one...

At bangface this year someone had a t-shirt saying “the horrible music is called breakcore” but I’m currently listening to a hitech/darkpsy set and it’s easily as horrible (complimentary) if not more so

Any time Bentham comes up people are all about the panopticon and never enough about his Standardised Ass-Kicking Machine www.laits.utexas.edu/poltheory/be...

sorry to keep hamming on about this but there are some tickets left for this if you would like to COME TO THE COTTAGE also I am throwing a load of West Ham fans out for this so pls bring your friends, lovers, secret situationships, etc www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/heated-riv...

YEEEEAAAAAHHHH

mods are asleep post rob hubbards

telnet sapporo.sensemedia.net 9030

I am increasingly of the view that we should be teaching and testing basic opsec in nursery school

every month features a headline saying "Boost/Blow to Rachel Reeves as GDP SURGES/COLLAPSES 0.1%" and then you read on and it's entirely dependent on whether Jaguar Land Rover have managed to turn on their computers

Actually, thinking about it, I would probably quite enjoy it if someone made this game.

logical evolution of the long-exposure video-to-image processing i was doing a while back, now doing video-to-video processing with a decay factor here's about 10 minutes of haneda airport (tokyo) sped up and processed to produce these delightful light trails

who’s the necromancer and who’s the cavalier

brb designing a wifi router which blocks fb/linkedin/twitter/most news sites unless you constantly hold down a button marked “I WANT MY LIFE TO SUCK FOR A BIT” or maybe put a coin in a meter to save up for therapy bills (yes i am subtweeting multiple people here including myself)

At some point during last night’s festivities someone appears to have found and consumed the wine in the fridge that’s been open since Boxing Day which I was using for cooking. Well done whoever you are! 🫡

One of my all time favourite MeFi comments, behind perhaps only “It is time now to talk about The Wheel” and “First, be smart from the very beginning”.

I needed a physical copy of a broadsheet today (because reasons) and of the six places I tried, all had the Telegraph if they sold newspapers at all, and only one had the FT. We used to be a country, etc

Can Sadiq Khan please set up a podium on the junction of Lower Road just by Surrey Quays tube and make a stirring speech about reinstating the box junction there before doing so, that would be awesome

excellent work from the FT here

For all that floating-point arithmetic is annoying and full of sharp edges and weird behaviour, it’s worth bearing in mind that the alternatives are often even harder to work with iquilezles.org/articles/flo...

when i was in the lovely water i felt the lovely sensation of every single blood vessel in my body clenching in the lovely cold

I have had a new year’s dip in the sea and I am confident that things can only get better from here

Some time in the early 00s my sister and I were flicking through TV late at night and we found this and ever since I’ve been trying to get her to once again find the secret Ninja Channel which is just 24h musical martial arts youtu.be/cYXI344Siew?...

Aww man tfw you think “what a great story” then realise why it got posted

People moan about family tech support but I have just installed a shelf and USB dongle so The Teenager can hook up his laptop and position it on the right spot by the MIDI keyboard, and listening to him noodle around with new ease is lovely

the club scene was awesome but the bisexual lighting was perfection, just impossibly good, we love it

…ok so the hockey yaoi is actually quite good isn’t it?

Never quite sure how to respond when the blood donation people are all “Ohh you’ve got good veins! You’re a great bleeder!” …thanks?!? i guess?

Common mistake but O Brother Where Art Thou was actually a remake of the original

Cole Hawlings is a queer ally for freeing the Waterfall Twink.

Ok for all I grumble about iOS, “are you really sure you want to be woken up at that time on Christmas morning?” is a pretty good feature, well done there

I have only just discovered that you can use a neodymium magnet as a stud finder and it’s way better than the inscrutable beepy thing

🚩Marked safe from: amateur hour at Borough Market

I've just realised that throughout that whole damn film nobody actually makes a margin call

I am currently struggling with the hardest part of making mince pies (not eating them all the moment they come out of the oven)

The sky above the Shard was the color of television tuned to a dead HDMI port

I finally upgraded to iOS 26 and I hate the UI a little less now that I’ve convinced myself that there’s just a thin layer of plastic over my phone with cutouts where the widgets live, but some of the details are insanely impressive - it has chromatic aberration when you drag transparent things!!!

The Christmas lights at Kew were lovely as always but I fear that my standard for these things was set by the magnificent laser lake installed by @yagfox.bsky.social at the last EMF, and it’s a very hard one to measure up to

Champignon Sound at the Kew Project

Always enjoy the sparks and weird eerie flashes you can see whenever you’re on the tube and encounter another train underground, like you’ve met up in hyperspace or something

“Sorry but if you’re posting to Northern Ireland you need to fill out a customs form” - on one level it’s no big deal, on another it’s a pretty stark reminder of just how profoundly we have fucked things up in the last ten years.