Worldpay just blocked a purchase I was trying to make because I was on the Mullvad VPN. When I switched off the VPN, the purchase went through. Weird how that's exactly what I'd be doing if I was in their place and trying to suppress individual privacy.

I'm in the UK and helping an 87-year-old set up a SIM for her first smartphone, and first thing tomorrow I'm going to be burning a hole in O2's support phone lines and writing a letter to Ofcom [telecoms regulator] about obstructive and deceptive marketing.

Huh. My textbook says the g-forces imparted by vertical wind shear increase linearly with aircraft speed. If you think "how aeroplanes don't fall down" is a simple question, I shall stare at you beseechingly.

by viewing this post, your cache has downloaded the accompanying image and thus constitutes the possession of an image of strangulation. this is a crime under uk law. repost to be guilty of publishing an image of strangulation and make your friends guilty of possession too! 🤗

Nicholas Hoult (seen here in "Juror #2") is a preposterously, ridiculously beautiful man.

There's a certain age threshold where more than 50% of your exercise comes from trotting up and down the stairs repeatedly and forgetting why each time you get there.

Wow, Tai Lung can really sing. (Chance streaming-music pick.)

Writing Python code for a tiny SBC attached to a USB2 HDD is an interesting reminder that efficiency still matters. Even though the SBC has a couple of orders of magnitude more CPU power and RAM than the computer I first learned C++ and Perl on.

Bought indigestion tables from the supermarket. Got home and found the packet was empty. Mondo pissed off. Then thought about it a while, and reconsidered: if I see someone shoplifting bloody *indigestion tablets*, I'm going to accidentally stray between them and the CCTV camera. I mean, Jesus.

Happy Halloween. Let's talk about the scariest thing in your career: the fear that stops you from starting. Not spooky ghosts. The real fear that causes procrastination. In my experience, this breaks down into two types: Intimidation & Discouragement

An astonishing gift from @6skeleton9man.bsky.social, as a thank-you for support rendered during tough times.

Sitting in a fast train, slightly stoned on an espresso*, trying to read a flight manual and realising I absolutely do not fucking understand the first fucking thing about Bernoulli's Principle where does all that normal-vector-component particle motion GO? * I'm a very cheap date

God I love French. It's an almost physical pleasure to sit in a cafe in Brussels* and listen to the flow of it and feel my brain and tongue readapting to that half-forgotten form. * apologies to my French friends, but it's the closest I can get today ❤️

I would be far happier if generative AI wasn't drowning our nöosphere in slop, but now that that genie is out of the bottle and shitting all over the carpet, I don't see why I shouldn't make careful and circumscribed use of LLMs for code support. But I half expect to be dogpiled for saying so.

chats in squirrel are limited to a sort of Roman salute foreleg extended then folded open paw on breast as if to say Look I take you in my open paw and hold you to my heart… —William Bonar, “SQRL” published in OFFERING (Red Squirrel Press, 2015) www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/sqrl/

It's the 28th October. The rhododendron outside our door has flowered and there's a bumblebee visiting the flowers. Somebody please explain to me what season it is.

I'm reading E. E. Doc Smith's "Skylark" series, some of the oldest space opera written around 1930, and it's such a glorious riot of narrative hyperbole that neither you, I nor anyone else should ever feel bad about writing anything overblown ever again.

That little pause and earlift while he's suckling on his finger. Outrageous. Disney, we see you seeing us seeing you.

Visited ophthalmologist and ear-nose-throat doctors for flight checks. ENT doc seemed startled by my hearing: apparently I have ears like a German Shepherd. Which would be great if I didn't also have the nose of a pug. It's okay, but the doc sternly told me to ground myself any time I have a cold.

I've never seen Haitian Creole before and I think it may be the most charming language I've ever seen.

Sigh. Made the mistake of weighing in on a bad take (from someone whose general good sense I have no reason to doubt) and promptly got the usual object lesson in not engaging in discourse on social media. Angry apes. All of us, angry apes.

A pleasant day spent rearchitecting a Python script which previously took 1.5 seconds so it's much cleaner and smoother and it now runs in 1.5 seconds. I'm okay with this if I learned something from the exercise but I'm not sure I did.

"The love of a good dog is as binding as the ties of this earth can ever be." — Konrad Lorenz

And tumbleweed.

Oh, those Swiss. As a Swiss citizen, I'm supposed to keep the government informed of where I live, including if it's abroad. Belatedly doing the forms, I found that they include optional fields for latitude, longitude, and altitude. I wonder who fills that last one out, and with what values.

Apparently I've ended up on a blocklist called "AI enjoyers". I can only guess it's because of this post. Use blocklists if you must; just be aware that most of them are irresponsibly curated (I know, I've checked a bunch) and they're as likely to cost you friends as spare you enemies.

My sister's trying to bootstrap a small artisan business after leaving her husband with barely a penny to her name. And no matter what I do, Google consistently refuses to index her business website. No reason, no hints, no clue. I'm at my wits' end.

how in the name of Bill can the CLI for a cloud drive be 112 MB

Finally found a flossing tool I can use. At my next visit, dentist positively enthused over the state of my gums. Wow. I didn't know flossing matters *that* much.

Quick artistic-freedom commish of some wolf or other from your friendly @locallycan.bsky.social. ♥

I wonder what the gross economic product of furry art is at this point.

Fuck cancer.

Cory Doctorow has an article (actually an excerpt from his book "Enshittification") in the Guardian explaining why Amazon is shit. You know this. Do you fully appreciate HOW shit? www.theguardian.com/technology/2... Shop elsewhere. Seriously.

I'm experimenting with a thing called CP-SAT. Roughly speaking, it's a programming tool to solve a certain kind of "impossible" programming problems. Stuff like this really brings home just how paltry my intelligence is, and how meager the boundaries of my knowledge.

A reliable source informs me that today is International Maned Wolf Day.

Huh. Never seen this cute animation short before, even though it's apparently seven years old. If you haven't either, I suggest that it's worth three and a half minutes of your time. www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4-9...

I could have gotten up but a very large dog came and got into bed with me and held his face against mine for a little while before curling up beside me and now I am not going anywhere for approximately the length of a dog nap.

@waggerycos.com Sorry for the irritation: petty scammer trying to leech off your work here. A reportfest may be in order. bsky.app/profile/mega...

If I'm coding for someone else, I have two goals: the code, and what I learn through making it. They get their code, I get faster and smarter. LLMs can accelerate both code and learning, but it has to be both. "Vibe coding" gives bad code, but the deeper problem is that the coder doesn't grow.

I figure it's worth pointing out that falling to tag NSFW also means that some poor sod in a developing country on a dollar a day has to review it

Meredith's definition of "wank" seems to me to map impressively well to the small subset of moralistic drama-monger actors in the furry community. That's good for us if it helps us understand how to react, and good for the idea if it shows explanatory power outside its initial domain.

I previously thought that anonymous community callout docs were the prerogative of hysterical adolescents, but I must say that the 591-page, 43000-word, 1000-image exemplar that just crossed my timeline is a real landmark of the genre. It's either heroic or psychotic and I'm really not sure which.

Cursed anagrams. Apparently "hwoer" is the Cornish for "sister", which doesn't really help matters.

#politics You may have heard the President of the US today went on about something called "medbeds", but you may not have appreciated the full baroque, byzantine, rococo depths of fractal insanity this means he's sinking to. So here's what's being sold. Enjoy. web.archive.org/web/20240528...

Village "Dorftrödel", which is like a collective flea-market with people setting out their spare stuff in front of their garages. Got a Raspberry Pi 3B with case and SD card for €12. I don't need it, but you can't turn down a Raspberry Pi for €12.

The recently announced digital "Brit Card" fills me with disquiet but most of the discourse against it strikes me as somewhere between unrealistic and hysterical. It's not *absolutely* a bad idea; the problem is that it needs competent implementation and robust constitutional protections. Which… uh…

The older I get, the more I value the virtue of uncomprehending curiosity.

Sitting down for a programming sesh with a two kilogramme box of plums next to me was a Dumb Life Choice™.

Given my life situation, I hypothetically have the freedom to refuse this by renouncing my British citizenship. I'm not gonna, frankly, but I'm still startled because it's the first time the notion ever crossed my mind.

I'll never really *get* computational complexity. It still catches me off guard when I replace O(n²) with O(log n) and the runtime drops from minutes to milliseconds.