circadian

Best. Comment. Ever

I once abseiled into a crevasse while in Antarctica. The colours I saw in there were utterly breathtaking and I never knew why. Now I do, and this also tells mewhy the photos don't even remotely do it justice (aside from not being as big and three dimensional!)

Thanks for such a beautiful article about not looking at a screen: I'm off outside... :)

A wonderfully written article. I think Musk is simply a singular example of how the broligarchy has managed to overwhelmingly influence the very fabric of political and economic institutions: he's not the only one and certainly not the originator.

I wonder if the underlying principle of Ponzi schemes have been wielded in western democracies a lot more than most realise, amplifying (through greed rather than direct maliciousness) wealth disparities that have been growing since long before Musk started Paypal. The sad point isn't that this mentality exists, but that many who can ill afford such an atrocious investment don't have the opportunity to do much about it: how many people really can do much about where their low-grade investments are really placed?

It says more about the state of transparency in economies and politics in the 21st century than it does about the man himself. Symptom of the system is what I think Musk and Trump really are.

Kudos to the author, really thought provoking.

Kudos to signal for coming out on side with this, and quickly. I only hope that this stance is quickly picked up as a counterpoint to the ever-so-strong narrative that more hastily concocted sledge-hammer legislation is the best step forward.

This step forward is instead of building understanding of, and solutions for, the erosion of communities, trust and empathy for others. I feel these things might (MIGHT!) be overlooked symptoms of poor investment, policies and governance for healthy society. Crikey, perhaps I shouldn't try and call that into account, it sounds like I might be cynical about politics. Oh dear...

I can certainly appreciate the frustrations with newer elements of the language that introduce functionality, I was the same with typing in particular. That said, I came to realise two things: firstly the new elements in the language are not required to write idiosyncratic python the way I like and, secondly, they haven't fundamentally changed anything in the way Python operates as a language.

Python has been around a long time. It's no surprise that it's getting more bloated as an ecosystem. I was anti uv for a time as well, as well as annoyed at the plethora of tools for linting that seemed to ALL get introduced into some projects, conflicting with one another.

I became happier when I remembered to just ignore the things I didn't need or wasn't interested in. uv became a friend, linting I ignore as something I forget about in a pre-commit hook that is configured once across my projects if I use it at all. Typing I've actually realised can be helpful now it's becoming more natively implemented (e.g. no more "import typing"), because I'm getting more forgetful!

The pessimism is justified, so you're not being too pessimistic, but you might want to remember why you love python and ask whether or not it's still able to fundamentally achieve that thing...

Life gets more distracting as we get older, and I suspect BoC care more about the art and less about the need to keep their brand alive.

Another before 13 years is up would be lush, I'm getting old! If they don't I won't be surprised, but hopefully they'll make sure more of their non-album works make it out and about. Like you, I love what they do and how they do it, and they've been in my life for a similar amount of time.

It's nice that BoC leave the art to speak for itself! As such, it's good to look at those inspired by them too methinks :)

I really liked it, but still need to give it a full straight through listen.

What I love more than anything else, is it's an ALBUM. Not a 45 minute jumble of tracks, but a proper 70 minute sonic tour de force with a narrative. Don't know what it is, but it feels like it's there.

Good day today

I wouldn't say conclusively, but certainly they're an indicator for things like what you mention. Nimbostratus are typically associated with rain, cumulonimbus for thunderstorms: both of these are indicators for the atmospheric conditions and thermal upwellings that will cause sudden precipitation and / or electrostatic discharge.

We also did air observations for pilots. If you saw certain types of cumulus near peaks, called lenticulars, pilots wouldn't go near them because they're caused by pretty dangerous winds dynamics.

It's all connected, which is why it gets so fascinating. Sadly, I never pursued meteorology beyond hobbyist, but I'd love to!

Hear hear :)

Sadly the website is offline, but if you like a hard copy cloud book I can heartily recommend the following. During my spell in Antarctica, I had to act as a meteorological observer (clouds are still manually encoded into METOBS that are entered in by WMO stations). This required learning the 10 types and being able to characterise the full picture of the sky.

It made me a total cloud addict, and spurred a far deeper interest in the role of the atmosphere in environmental science which has persisted ever since.

I heartily recommend looking up at the sky, dividing into oktas (eighths) and trying to classify how much of the low, medium and high clouds there are. If you do it regularly enough, the changes begin to astound. Getting your kids to do it too is also wonderful, because it's always there as an activity... :)

Really hoping this site comes online again soon!

https://www.worldofbooks.com/en-gb/products/met-office-cloud...

I would suggest that the default to enrolling people in supplying such information is the issue. In a world driven by surveillance capitalism, even "anonymous" data can be used for much broader purposes (think, for example, of when and where people are using tools geographically and at what times: you can start to track the behaviour of people in this way).

Users should never be opted in through usage alone of free or paid-for tooling to supply information that isn't part of the function of the tool. Where that is required for a service or product, you should opt-in explicitly, not implicitly.

Lush, perfect to take my mind off existing for a few minutes. Always a strong sign of a winning concept. Kudos :)

There's some funny comments going on in this thread. Understandably so. What could be more divisive an issue than AI on a silicon valley forum!?

As a brit, I found it to be a really great documentary about the fact that you can be idealistic and still make it. There are, for sure, numerous reasons to give Deepmind shit: Alphabet, potential arms usage, "we're doing research, we're not responsible". The Oppenheimer aspect is not to be lost, we all have to take responsibility for wielding technology.

I was more anti-Deepmind than pro before this, but the truth is as I get older it's nicer to see someone embodying the aspiration of wanton benevolence (for whatever reason) based on scientific reasoning, than to not. To keep it away from the US and acknowledge the benefits of spreading the proverbial "love" to the benefit of all (US included) shows a level of consideration that should not be under-acknowledged.

I like this documentary. Does AGI and the search for it scare me? Hell yes. So do killer mutant spiders descending on earth post nuclear holocaust. It's all about probabilities. To be honest: disease X freaks me out more than a superintelligence built by an organisation willing to donate the research to solve the problems of disease X. Google are assbiscuits, but Deepmind point in the right direction (I know more about their weather and climate forecasting efforts). This at least gave me reason to think some heart is involved...

Honestly I've got so much respect for the candour of this video. Quite rightly there's a lot of brilliant nuggets here to perhaps one of the best things about Windows throughout the ages!

BGP (again)?

I think the face they fundamentally don't look after you is where my resistance comes from. Will try and evaluate some newer code that uses them and see how I get on a bit more :)

I really love Python for it's expedience, but type hints still feel like they don't belong in the language. They don't seem to come with the benefits of optimisation that you get with static typed languages. As someone who uses C and Julia (and wishes they had time for Rust), introducing solid typing yields better end results at a minimum, or is a requirement at the other end of the scale.

The extra typing clarification in python makes the code harder to read. I liked python because it was easy to do something quickly and without that cognitive overhead. Type hints, and they feel like they're just hints, don't yield enough of a benefit for me to really embrace them yet.

Perhaps that's just because I don't use advanced features of IDEs. But then I am getting old :P

EDIT: also, this massively depends on what you're doing with the language! I don't have huge customer workloads to consider any longer..!

I'm in my 40s now, but when I was very young I had quite a rough time living in shared accommodation. It was people reaching out and asking me if I wanted to go out, whether or not I could, that in the same way stuck with me as helping to deal with being lonely. I still have the memory of peoples kindness and this story reminded me of those kindnesses. It's kind of a beautiful memory to have, even when the times were dark.

My interpretation is that Alexei might well have understood that Anna felt lonely / homesick. The reaching out could well have been simply sympathetic and well thought through to help include someone. That's what people did for me when I was young and out of my depth. Those people probably helped steer me into a good place when it could've gone bad.

It's always nice to reflect on the kindness of others. :)

This is really lush. Instantly it brightened up my evening. This kind of experimentation is always amazing to see.

As many seem to have mentioned below, it brings back memories of Rebirth in some ways. What it also reminds me of is the beautiful results you could have by plugging some simple modules together to create soundscapes. The limits are the things that provide some semblance of freedom and this is no different. Greetings from a fellow UK acid (techno) head! :P

Worth noting I stated "my feeling that the docs are inaccessible", not that I didn't think they're excellent docs.

I'm slightly lazy, so relish having something quick to get into :)

Very glad to see a tutorial like this. Make is something I've used relentlessly because it just works, but I know I'm missing out a lot more that it can help with because of my feeling that the docs are inaccessible. Knowing that this is here waiting for the day when a project calls for something just a little more means I won't bloat out my development workflow. Something a little more friendly than the make docs themselves lowers the barrier for me, nice one! :)

A long running draft of some rambling thoughts, but this term is used relentless. What does it really MEAN!?

Hopefully something of interest from a software engineer... would like to write more but interested in the discussion and feedback of others.

I love posts like this. As a software engineer slowly gaining confidence in the analytical side of physical modelling, it really helps to see insights like this. Thanks for sharing! :)

Kudos for writing this, it's always worth flagging up the utility of a format that just is what it is, for the benefit of all. Commas can also create fun ambiguity, as that last sentence demonstrates. :P

CSV is lovely. It isn't trying to be cool or legendary. It works for the reasons the author proposes, but isn't trying to go further.

I work in a work of VERY low power devices and CSV sometimes is all you need for a good time.

If it doesn't need to be complicated, it shouldn't be. There are always times when I think to myself CSV fits and that is what makes it a legend. Are those times when I want to parallelise or deal with gigs of data in one sitting. Nope. There are more complex formats for that. CSV has a place in my heart too.

Thanks for reminding me of the beauty of this legendary format... :)

Got a new laptop and had to dust off some investigatory skills for the new year.

I had a massive "discussion" (argument) with a friend the other day, they were convinced that the internet is just a place full of trolling and nasty commentary and social media was the thing likely to ruin things for our children. My position was that if you spend your life looking at X, Facebook or whatever then, sure, it can seem a bit of a hellish landscape, but the Internet is and can be so much more than that.

This article is perhaps one of the finest examples of this and I applaud you massively for writing the site, looking at how people used it and then taking the time to share the experience.

It's made me really happy reading it and I'll be sharing it lots. A wonderful experiment, well played and much respect. :)

Definitely agree with this comment. I've been in my position for a long time and this approach does work, to give yourself somewhere to filter the noise into, where it at least isn't present in your mind.

It's not just about working out if things are valid, as I'm finding it's about being able to let things go.

As someone working in this area, it's interesting how LLMs have been focused on as the reason the UK has "lagged behind" in the AI race. What are peoples opinions? Though LLMs have an important place, there are numerous other AI fields that are progressing through UK research and I sometimes feel we massively oversimplify things by measuring the industry purely against the leading edge of the "AI arms race"...

Amazing, thank you for taking the time to make the site :)