If I may be permitted a small observation about British politics, I hugely enjoy the fact that MG appears to be perennially glum. A man whose access to joy has been severed by his own actions. The protagonist in an abandoned first draft of an early modern play.

This Revive Active™ has me feeling like a 24-year-old San Francisco “data scientist”. Have you guys heard of Nick Land?

Another enjoyable Dublin City Cycling Experience™ as I am almost run off the road *in a bus and bike lane* by a swerving driver. Angrily confronted they said they didn’t see me. Very good! I might have been annoyed had you admitted trying to kill me with your car.

Mistook this for something we were going to buy for the child on Vinted for €7. Apologies Jonathan, I was not familiar with your game.

Why isn’t the title of this paper “Failing to detect evidence of style transfer by frontier LLMs in scientific publications”? Do we just not want to talk about it?

“It was first published in 1926 […] as a method of constructing an efficient electricity network for Moravia.” yes, of course. Naturally.

More and more, I hear that if you wish to see the Aleph, you no longer have to go down into the cellar under the dining room, immerse yourself – immobile – in utter darkness, and perform a certain ocular adjustment, focusing on the nineteenth step. But Ed Zitron says that’s not true.

I have mixed feelings about the UCL settlement (I don’t work there, but I used to). On the one hand, academic and teaching staff worked very hard. On the other hand, we know that online teaching everywhere during the pandemic was generally mediocre in spite of this, for a variety of reasons.

Is it a bad sign that it hurts to stir the Lemsip

What is going on over at @csoireland.bsky.social

"their metaphysical commitments to an unbreachable depth of human meaning and volition opposed to a machinic non-sense leaves their project ill equipped to address the harms they accurately identify". 🤌

Could someone have a word with the “social data scientist with too many questions” and let her know that the dogs on the street can tell that Claude is writing her Substack posts? Dozens of instances of “It isn’t x. it’s y” and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Utter contempt for the reader.

Child’s outfit today – a gunmetal quilted judo Gi, but make it Petit Bateau (thank you, Vinted), striped polo neck underneath – is immeasurably more chic than anything I have ever worn, and not for lack of trying.

My daughter has begun walking and simultaneously decided that naps are to be treated as a rare delicacy henceforth, with the immediate consequence that her parents’ lives have fallen apart and chaos reigns.

Nobody show this to the more-than-human geographers or they’re going to have to spend the rest of the day breathing into paper bags.

@leaflet.pub Is there any reason I shouldn’t be able to publish a Looseleaf? I’ve finished editing my text but clicking the “Publish as Looseleaf” link doesn’t do anything (only a “Viewport argument key “interactive-widget” not recognized and ignored.” error in the console, on Safari).

Hello from Eurosky.

I think the Aer Lingus CTA ID rule change is the thing that is finally going to drive me to become as insane as the rest of the people on this site. They’re claiming that it’s because the CTA is just an “agreement” and not based on legislation? No, no. This won’t do. Something has gone on here.

I'd be interested to know which flood relief schemes Jack Chambers was referring to when he cited judicial review as a barrier to their delivery. Anyway, not to worry; the thousands of young people our research project has helped to educate about flooding will make their voices heard in a few years.

It’s that time again.

Cited in Lancet. You know what that means [I am about to be unmasked as a charlatan whose fraudulent research findings will directly contribute to the deaths of millions]

Open Science Guys: preregister your research to increase transparency and reduce bias in your findings! Jonathan Schooler [holding torch under chin]: but most importantly, to deter the moon ghosts OSG: why are you holding…? JS: moon ghosts

Having watched a few of the early episodes of The Crocodile Hunter over Christmas, the baby's bath-time growling routine now routinely prompts an enquiry as to whether she is a "salty" or a "freshy". She has yet to declare herself.

If you aren't totally confident about writing numerically-stable floating-point expressions in Rust, I've finally (after nearly 11 years) resurrected herbie-lint as a Dylint plugin: github.com/urschrei/her....

Can someone explain why ~1200 lines of code and an aggressive IP policy that comprise a product that doesn't do what it's supposed to needs a big office in central London. I feel like I'm on drugs. Who are those people? What do they do?

Inspired by a nameless mutual's post, key texts for understanding two of the major topics in this place are: Eco's 1995 "Ur-Fascism" (subject obvious) (theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umbe...), and James Hague's 2012 "The Silent Majority of Experts (prog21.dadgum.com/143.html) (LLM use).

If you use Claude Code, you've been able to use it to search your local Zotero library and analyse the results using my pyzotero API client and a skill I wrote for it. Now, that skill can also query Semantic Scholar for gap analysis and related papers. github.com/urschrei/zot...

[desperately trying to rile up everyone on Bluesky] This is how every white-collar job is going to end up.

The new office affords an excellent view of the apparently spectral tour guides. The living are but the latest casualty of university cost savings.

If you see something, say something. Be constructive and polite about it. You can always get snippy later if that doesn’t work.

My child points approvingly at art, an occasional series.

@aodhbc.bsky.social in answer to your question: they are very much still at it, and in new and “creative” ways.

Magical in Leitrim this morning

Forthcoming paper in Journal of Housing Economics concludes that - Institutional investors reduce rent + consumption inequality, while increasing wealth inequality thru lower home ownership - Higher housing supply reduces inequality and increases home ownership www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

A pleasing regional dish-washing programme variation.

The hostile-vehicle barriers do suck some of the festive magic out of the winter market.

Now this is living

Modern computers are fast. I've just finished a first pass of the geo crate's new Voronoi module: it can read and process 2.69+ million valid UK postal address code centroids to generate a Voronoi diagram, and write the resulting geometries to disk in under 10s. tangled.org/strings/did:...

Simon and Garfunkel

POV: the organ on Folkjul kicked in, is much louder than expected, and may have woken the baby

Charlie is too modest to say so, but potato is (in my opinion) a significant step forward in this area of image processing. If you have a requirement for high-quality remotely-sensed images for human consumption, try it out immediately.

In the summer of ‘82, a bored teen playing on GRETEL, an early Minitel pilot in Alsace, unlocked the engineer messaging function on the service. Going under “Big Panther”, the kid shared the hack w/ friends, created chat, trash-talked locals using smutty names, and et voila, pink chat was born. 1/2

The baby loves Simon and Garfunkel (The Boxer is her favourite; none of that maudlin warbling. But I digress) so I had occasion to pay attention to the lyrics of "At the Zoo" this morning. Elephants are not "dumb", gentlemen. Nor are giraffes "insincere". Why are there hamsters in Central Park Zoo?

George Civeris making a raglan mock turtleneck look good. Is there anything he can't do?

If anyone has been wailing and rending their garments for the past two years over the broken Zotero plugin that downloaded PDFs from Sci-Hub for you: I fixed it, and it works on the new Zotero 8 beta. You're all very welcome.

Essential thinking by @kevinbaker.bsky.social on attempts to integrate LLMs into scientific processes: artificialbureaucracy.substack.com/p/context-wi.... Read it instantly.

“Yes, quite spirited” I remark pleasantly as my daughter roars at the neighbouring table like a tiny dinosaur, in the unmistakable register of an underslept toddler. “A wonderful roast, isn’t it?”

Using literature to explain the baby’s essential nature at the development check-up. “You are familiar with the seminal work of Dr Seuss, ‘The Cat in the Hat’? Good! Now, you will of course recall the characters Thing Two and Thing One? Excellent. Imagine if they somehow fused. Yes. Very tired.”

Glad tidings: I was stopped in the street this morning and informed that a missing local cat has been found (welcome home Chutney!). Seeing what may have been a cat-related conversation an elderly man walking his elderly dog then asked "Is it true? Did they find Chutney?". Yes, the rumours are true.