I fear Greeks bearing gifts, that's why I always look a gift-horse in the mouth

A lot of people think a cheese burger is simply a hamburger with cheese. But that's a common misconception. It's actually a culinary innovation from the town of Cheeseburg

What I used to think of when I read the phrase 'Accountancy AI': Oh cool using pattern recognition to detect fraud What I now think of when I read the phrase 'Accountancy AI': My apologies, you are absolutely right. 9.9 is in fact bigger than 9.11

CAD adventures, 2025-10-12: The numerical instability makes it look more organic

My two favourite exercises are the goblin squat and the horse dance.

#nlpol Racists be like, "Nah we ain't interested in good governance; we just want an excuse to be racist"

Today I learned that Cleopatra's grandfather was Ptolemy the Chickpea, son of Ptolemy the Fat

The year is 2050. There have been 13 failed cabinets in the last 25 years. The longest-running cabinet was a VVD/GL-PvdA cabinet that lasted 3.5 years until the VVD left because GL-PvdA wanted to fund the building of a million houses with a temporary 0.1% corporate tax rate hike. The […]

Why do Dutch people think their language is difficult? The spelling is more consistent than English, the grammar is less complex than German, and the pronunciation is less weird than French

"start wandows ngrmadly" Did you mean: "start windows normally"? No, I meant "start wandows ngrmadly" because I needed a lol

3I/ATLAS will make its closest approach to Mars in the next few days. If it is aliens, they're looking for the Martians, not us

How do I convince my producer to let me rap over a Dillinger Escape Plan type beat

The Japanese knotweed outside my house has started blooming. Oh no

You're only a champion if you've defended your liege lord in single combat. Otherwise you're just a sparkling winner

New Between the Buried and Me album first thoughts: I think Dan Briggs saw how much people were listening to his side-projects and brought some of that energy over to the main project

#nlpol hot take: I'm not too bothered if the hypotheekrenteaftrek goes away, because if it does go away, that just gives me more of a reason to pay off my mortgage early. Debt is a sin

Growing up there were a few black wattle trees in my yard. I used to love climbing the biggest of them, and I would look forward to September when the flowers would bloom and I could smell their sweet scent. I would later learn that the black wattle is an invasive species in South Africa, and we […]

Today I learned there's a plant whose scientific name is Coprosma foetidissima. From the name itself I can glean a lot of info about the plant.

The one Dutch-language thing that still gets me is that there are two words for 'earlier', and I can never remember which one to use in what situation

'Rituitval' still sounds to my Anglo ass like the tram fell off the tracks and rolled out of the way

'Rituitval' still sounds to my Anglo ass like the tram fell off the tracks and out of the way

As someone whose favourite type of chocolate is white chocolate, I find this to be a personal attack

I think the 2030s are gonna be really weird. “What up biochem fam, so great to see you guys, today we are back at it again with another video, this one’s about making your own mRNA SARS-nCoV-2029 vaccine precursors with a Bambu Lab Crispy CRISPR kit. As you all know my university research […]

It's wild being a regular-old commuter during a mass tourism event

Wild to think that if anyone had paid attention to this we’d have photos of napoleon and jane austen

Hi-fi beats to relax and fly through space to https://soundcloud.com/elektragaaz/soundscape-for-an-imaginary-2

Vert n'est pas une couleur créative

Building Bambu Studio from source because I'm apparently that person

Come work with me at the City of #capetown - https://uct.ac.za/sites/default/files/2025-08/com-e25810-datascientist-jpal-saldru-soe.pdf The job says data scientist, but really this is a #dataengineering position. We run a decent Open Source, modern data stack, but what sets us apart is our […]

Back to school brainrot

An alternate universe where the only difference is that the capital of Italy was founded by Remus instead of Romulus

Whenever I see a car on the highway carrying an abnormal load in the back, my first thought is that I'm about to witness a scene from Final Destination.

Buy cheap angle grinder Use it a bunch Blade explodes and the device no longer switches on I guess this means I need to shell out for a quality one

Jan van Riebeeck and Baruch Spinoza were active in Dutch society around the same time. I wonder how many degrees of separation there were between them.

Can someone who knows more physics than me explain this, because I do not understand how it happened.

Washing machines in the 2020s be like

I wonder if future historians will think we actually worshipped The Algorithm

When you want to buy a pair of scissors but they're locked away and there appear to be three staff members in the entire shop

Writing a screenplay titled Sarbanes and Oxley are Dead

What does a classicist who specialises in Punic history name their dog? Hannibal Barker

This bus-only road should have been a railway

Why did they call it 'prompt engineer' and not 'slop whisperer'

The interesting things about generative AI are not ChatGPT or 'ooh I can make a picture with just a prompt'. The questions I would like answered are "what is the minimal corpus needed to produce grammatically correct sentences?" and "how does grammar get encoded in the model" and "can […]

I think about xkcd.com/2030 a lot—in particular this panel. It feels as though we as a society are in the finding-out phase.

The funny thing about the whole gravy social media scraper thing is that it's impossible to use Google to get more information about it. The top AI result is "gravy is not a social media scraper". The jury is still out, though, about whether mayonnaise is an instrument.

On a hot summer day, seeing a helicopter fly by, my first thought is that it must be collecting water to put out a forest fire

About a kilometre from my house there's an infestation of Japanese knotweed. I so badly want to cut it down and put it in a pressure-cooker to kill it dead, but I am also concerned that I might drop a stray seed and spread it further

Visit the Nether Lands! We have great cities like The Count's Hedge, The Duke's Bush, and Mr Hugo Worth It.

> On November 28th, 2012, Randall Munroe published an xkcd comic that was a calendar in which the size of each date was proportional to how often each date is referenced by its ordinal name (…) "In months other than September, the 11th is mentioned substantially less often than any other date […]

Hush little baby, don't say a word Mama's gonna buy you a mockingbird He'll insult your enemies every day And talk back at bullies till they go away