@deserterblog.bsky.social ChatGPT for bum dosser!

Rich people are weird, exhibit no. 746644

Hoshoryu was gifted a giant soy sauce after becoming Grand Champion in London.

Learned that an anonymous outside expert on submersibles did an interview with the OceanGate Titan investigation, and they released a transcript, with all the names redacted. The first line of his first answer? "I'm sure you're familiar with my film Titanic."

Respectable!? I'm old enough to remember when heavy metal bands didn't want to he respectable.

have finally watched kpop demon hunters and the children are correct - it's great

At an Octoberfest thing with an oompah band and badly need an oompah mode for Shazam.

Some of the most American Americans I've ever heard quoted in this article. Genuinely couldn't be more American.

A song to remind me of the most useful phrases I have learnt from Italian Duolingo. (Sound up)

@warmovietheatre.bsky.social they're doing a screening of Das Boot on The Belfast www.iwm.org.uk/events/the-u...

It got better once the creature turned up and starting killing off Victor's friends and family (which served him right for being a whiny little bitch). The line "I demand a creature of another sex, but as hideous as myself" will never not be hilarious though.

Having already been forced to learn who Charlie Kirk is this week, I now feel a great sense of despair that I am also going to have to learn what a Groyper is.

Algorithms have started giving me Warhammer 40K content (which I am not wholly against, but I don't get any of the memes) and when did Space Marines stop having pointy noses?!

My guess is this reflects a general disappointment with Starmer coupled with a lack of partisan loyalty in the UK (as opposed to the very partisan US where loyalty buoys Trumps numbers), but why did Starmer get almost no honeymoon at all?

This frontispiece in my book just made me laugh a lot. Is this Buddhist reincarnation, or some other form of afterlife?

I've a lot of trust in Del Toro, but I'm halfway through reading the source material and it's bunk.

A bunch of people talking about what bluesky is or isn't and... how do they know? What I experience on bsky is a personally curated list of people I chose to follow. Drawing lessons from it about "bluesky" would be like drawing lessons from my book shelf about all of western literature.

Spicy NikNaks for drunk people. Strong recommend.

Strange Google Maps directions yesterday. Travel through Cannon St, get off at Monument, walk back to Cannon St!?!

Not sure if the boys at @deserterblog.bsky.social have tried these. Long time since I've eaten the relish in question so can't comment on how similar they are, but I like them, bags of umami and a very satisfying crunch.

I am on what has been a regular holiday for possibly the last time, and while here have read a book set within an ongoing environmental collapse, and will soon have a birthday with a zero in it, and everyone keeps saying they can feel autumn in the air. The sense of things ending is overwhelming.

My theory on AI at the moment is that because it achieved one very very impressive thing (hold a conversation) a couple of years ago people are making the assumption that it will soon do other very impressive things (write code, act as a PA, run a small in office snack vending machine), but...

Today is the 47th anniversary of this clearly unimprovable photo, from a story so absurd that it shouldn’t be true, but is: the day a team of workers from British Waterways pulled the plug out of the Chesterfield Canal, and all the water emptied out

I feel there needs to be a piffy phrase for the practice of ordering pizza to the pub (something like 'the Yard Sale cheat' but good) and the young people are letting us down by not inventing one.

Come for my FIRST EVER conference paper, where I will be talking about M.R. James's 'Martin's Close' and supernatural justice in early modern England. It's going to be a brilliant weekend, and even better, it's recorded, so if you can't make the times, you don't miss a thing!

those were the options?!

One of the unintentionally impressive things about LLMs is that by dint of huge technical innovation, massive compute costs, and quite a lot of stolen data, they’ve managed to make computers bad at maths.

My new hobby is singing along extra enthusiastically whenever some in front of me is recording the band on their phone, in the full knowledge that my off-key wailing will ruin their video.

What perfect album came out when you were 16? Crowded field but I'm picking this

A MAGA hat waiting for the lionesses

Two very interesting things here I think. The extent they are absolutely and obviously kidding themselves that this is close to working. And the problem with the AI having no long term memory - what sort of a skilled job could you ever do with no long term memory? www.anthropic.com/research/pro...

How do I go about persuading St Vincent, Polly Harvey, and Flora Fishbach to form a supergroup?

Is he against Butlins or against the middle classes? Why does he think the middle classes shouldn't have a giant Butlins? Is he just a bitter ex-crusty?

The Ballad of Wallis Island and 28 Years Later make an excellent double bill of people on remote British islands regretting what happened in the early 2000s

Was personally appalled when my lecturer explained Schodringer's wave equation. Have never got over it.

I think one of the big issues with LLMs is that the one thing they're best at, the thing they're absolutely stunningly good at, is convincing us, dumb humans, that they understand the assignment. Which is why there is so much confusion about what they can and cannot do.

She was good, doing well, but now she's...

I am in Bavaria and have learned that Bavarians consider weissbier to be a breakfast beer, and my respect is unbounded.

Beechgrove is the support act for Gardener's World

I'm old enough to remember the previous Labour government being utterly credulous about anything to do with computers

Not laughing at the man on the radio talking about "doody rates" because that would be purile

Nick Clegg's new book is £25, but I'm sure he's okay with us stealing it.

It is interesting, from a software development perspective, that Musk's gutting of twitter hasn't really resulted in many outages or bugs (it was always a bit flaky), but has resulted in an unstoppable tsunami of spam.

Good news! The Douglas Fir still exists (for at least a few months) @deserterblog.bsky.social

The lads two doors down are watching the Crystal Palace game in their garden on a delay (iplayer I guess) so every time there is a goal I get to open the door and hear them cheer.

Annoyingly I have left the house without my book because I had a new Private Eye but it is not a new Private Eye, it is the Private Eye the postman failed to deliver 5 weeks ago and all the jokes are out of date.

Recipes for curry appear in 18th century British cookbooks. It's more British than America is American

A movie that takes place where you’re from (using birthplace rather than where I grew up because NOTHING is set there)

I feel seen

Three days after buying some degreaser and my brain is still singing 'I wanna buy, buy some degreaser.'