Discworld QOTD, from Jingo

New NHTSA crash data, combined with Tesla’s new disclosure of robotaxi mileage, reveals Tesla’s autonomous vehicles are crashing at a rate much higher than human drivers, and that’s with a safety monitor in every car. Tesla has reported 9 crashes involving its robotaxi fleet in Austin, TX. /1

I've written another thing for the corporate blog - www.coeo.com/2026/01/azur... It's not quite what I originally submitted. You can read that on my personal blog at thelonedba.wordpress.com/2026/01/27/a... and play spot the difference... #Azure #CostManagement #GeoPolitics #InterestingTimes

Murder on the Leyton Orient Team Bus?

In other news, I have had to uninstall two apps as they're no longer supported on my phone - which isn't even ten years old. @theguardian.com and LinkedIn - shame on you both. OK, I can cope happily without the latter, but to not have the grauniad is a bore. No more khazi crosswords.

over 9 hours driving, over 400 miles driven, over 15 hours out of the house. I'm tired, broken, and have found another irritation with The Tank - it dares to beep at me if I drive more than 4h15 in one hit. Grr. HOW DARE IT! *ahem* And I've left my slippers downstairs and don't want to move.

A reproduction of some of this evening's agenda. Just one question - where do I breathe? #Oboe #CorAnglais #MustLearnCircularBreathing

This was posted by @mambarlife.bsky.social in the Other Place and it’s too good not to share it.

Refreshing my work-type blog. Well, attempting to explain why it's been so quiet there. Still gets traffic, though. thelonedba.wordpress.com/2026/01/21/i... #SQLServer #Coeo #ExcusesExcuses #Blogging

Oh, I get it now! It's the 250th anniversary of US independence, so yer man's doing a tribute act to George III!

LLMs are spam generators. That is all. They're designed to generate plausibly human-like text well enough to pass a generic Turing Test. That's why people believe they're "intelligent". But really, all they are is spam generators. We have hit the spamularity.

Can’t believe he said this, seems somewhat disrespectful

Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection. “This page contains a collection of small computer programs which implement one-player puzzle games.” [chiark.greenend.org.uk]

🚨FLASH : on a retrouvé une manette de l'âge de pierre, indiquant que nos ancêtres jouaient déjà aux jeux vidéos.

4th rehearsal of the week was cut short due to fear of impending snow, which has so far failed to materialise. The room, while still not as warm as hoped, was the warmest of the week - so far. I'm on oboe & cor anglais, and I'm going to have to practice both for this gig.

Third rehearsal of the week done. Major feature - something new to me. Sightreading an opera - great fun. Zanetto, by Mascagni. Unfortunately, no voices tonight, but they'll be there by the gig, and we know who they are, so it'll be a good one. @wyso-leeds.bsky.social #opera #ClassicalMusic

Second rehearsal venue for the week - a room in a social club - is, somehow, even colder than yesterday's church... ... And this rehearsal isn't even going to be a full rehearsal. For the first half, we have to do AGM things.

Home after the first rehearsal of the year - first time playing bass in three weeks. I'm broken. This does not bode well for the rest of the week - I've got another three rehearsals this week (luckily, two on oboe), and a full day of playing at the weekend. #Mahler6 #OriginalLSO #ClassicalMusic

Ex-Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun has Lunch with the FT and in one of those instances so rare that you know he didn't sign an NDA, says exactly why as.ft.com/r/e503690d-8...

Require ALL the LLM vendors to apply for medical device certification with the relevant medical regulatory authorities, ie. the FDA in the USA. It takes years, requires a mountain of paperwork, PROOF of no risk of harm, and costs fractional-to-integer billions. Penalty of jail time for evaders.

QOTD "Alchemists & Opera" - 8/10. quizoftheday.co.uk

The great 2025 Bylines Christmas Quiz centralbylines.co.uk/lifestyle/fu... 22/30. Which is depressingly high. Oh well.

Christmas time is here, by golly Disapproval would be folly Deck the halls with hunks of holly Fill the cup and don’t say “when” Kill the turkeys, ducks and chickens Mix the punch, drag out the Dickens Even though the prospect sickens Brother, here we go again

Now this could be useful... not thinking of any clients in particular, goodness me, no...

Twas the night before Christmas, and throughout the land The sleeping arrangements were carefully planned Down in the kitchen, a picturesque scene A mattress, a pillow, a washing machine

This is the 15th year of #DuvetKnowItsChristmas, which is preposterous. Rules: if you find yourself dealing with unusual / claustrophobic / gaudy sleeping arrangements this Christmas Eve, share a picture with the world. Use the hashtag (with capitalisation) and cc me if you can be bothered.

Tomorrow evening it’ll be my annual duty to vaguely shepherd the activity on the #duvetknowitschristmas hashtag and urge people to give small sums to charity. 7.30pm? Something like that?

Crikey. A blog post I wrote in 2018 has been picked up by the one and only Aaron Bertrand, who has used what I wrote to update his definitive list of the causes of #SQLServer #Error 18456. My post: thelonedba.wordpress.com/2018/05/14/s... His: sqlblog.org/2020/07/28/t...

Rare footage of St Paul’s Cathedral testing its giant flamethrower

any time now

My eyes! WHY?

Just so I'm clear on this, computer memory has tripled in price because a bunch of it that hasn't been produced yet has been ordered to populate GPUs that aren't installed in data centers that aren't built yet in order to service a demand that doesn't exist to make profits that don't happen.

Bit of a long shot, but are there any medievalists in Cambridge at the moment who might be able to take pictures of a MS in the UL? Massive gratitude and thanks on offer ...

Hot on the heels of last weekend's Leeds Symphony Orchestra concert, we begin rehearsing for the next one... No rest for us! #OriginalLSO #LeedsSymphonyOrchestra #Mahler

🎵Allons enfants de la Pastry-y-y, le jour de gloire est arrivé

My view of tomorrow night's music. Concert at 7:30pm, at The Cryer, GSAL, Leeds. It's a new venue for us (it's a new-ish venue anyway, only been there a couple of years) Tickets at www.ticketsource.co.uk/whats-on/lee... #LiveMusic #Leeds #OriginalLSO #Loud #BattlingTimpanists

Today's view.

Today's view

MANAGEMENT: We want something that's going to be forced on you, steal your data, intrude everywhere it's not wanted, lie to you, and try to take your job. PRODUCT: On it! Project Vampire Weasel is underway... MARKETING: Eh, how about call it Copilot instead?

I absolutely snorted out loud in an important, quiet historic reading room. And then had the giggles for 5 minutes. Fingle rows of tentaculated fuckers!

WORD OF THE DAY. Excellent. To give up spreadsheets for forty days.

Time to re-watch Outbreak?

🎶 Cinque… Otto… Tredici… Ventuno… Trentaquattro… Cinquantacinque… 🎵 (Le Nozze di Fibonacci)

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Renowned cryptologist Robert Langdon waited by his phone. Surely, the French authorities would call him, a renowned cryptologist, to solve this mystery he thought in italics.

"Everyone is a sysadmin" Hmm. Not quite horrific enough. "Backups? What backups?" Damn, only three words.

The passion held by the author of A Passion for Passion - one @alicefraser.bsky.social - is audible in the latest @realmsunknown.bsky.social episode. Listen. And get angry - not just for her, but for the other authors who have also been so afflicted.

A lot of us have spent ages making sure computers give correct answers and it’s honestly pretty annoying that no one actually seemed to want that.

Oh go on then. It's not as if I haven't just taken delivery of 11 novels by the one and only @cstross.bsky.social oh wait. (Laundry files vols 1-11, if anyone is that interested...) John Who?

Imagine my surprise...