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mathieuhon Ugandan runner Jacob Kiplimo completes first ever sub-57 minute half marathon

I think it’s the same for all endurance sports. I think there’s about a month of pain that you have to get through when you first start but then you realise you’re actually enjoying it.

For me it’s cycling, I do 300-400 km per week now and I absolutely love everything about it. The feeling you get when you find a smooth bit of road on a still day and you can feel is the wind in your face and all you can hear is the swish, swish, swish of your tyres is unmatched. It feels like you’re flying.

mathieuhon I Paid $70 for an AI Boyfriend. It Was So Worth It

Already there are stories of these AI companions encouraging people to kill themselves, sometimes to the point of actually doing it

https://apnews.com/article/chatbot-ai-lawsuit-suicide-teen-a...

mathieuhon What if Eye...?

Well, from a philosophical point of view you might say that it's impossible. The idea of laws that can apply to e.g. mathematics might not apply to organisms because organisms are described in terms of teleology. The heart doesn't just happen to circulate blood, it beats in order to circulate blood to oxygenate the body and so on.

And just because, for example, organisms that live in cold climates generally have thick hair, having thick hair doesn't imply cold climates. Some mammals fill niches filled by birds in other ecosystem, or by fish in others. Likewise in New Zealand they have birds filling niches that in other ecosystems are filled by mammals.

I'm not sure biology can be a purely inductive science.

mathieuhon Google Maps now shows the 'Gulf of America'

It's only Londonderry to a minority of loyalists who aren't actually even from the place. Everyone else calls it Derry, even the loyalists in Derry.

I think it's actually a rule in BBC articles that the first mention has to be "Londonderry" and thereafter "Derry".

mathieuhon Surnames from nicknames nobody has any more

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_nominals

It comes from the Indo-European genitive.

mathieuhon To buy a Tesla Model 3, only to end up in hell

I don't think they were doubting you, they were expressing surprise that it could lose that much charge so quickly

mathieuhon L.A. power utility found irregularities on equipment where wildfire broke out

It is simply part of the neoliberal ethos. It stems from a circular belief that the private sector (the much-vaunted “Market”) is by definition better than having things run publicly. Even if selling things into the private sector results in bad outcomes which everyone could see coming a mile off it’s not the fault of the Market, it’s the fault of not applying the Market deeply enough.

mathieuhon No AI December Reflections

If you use something like Copilot a lot of the time you don’t explicitly have to tell it to do anything, you just start typing the signature and it autocompletes it. In my use I almost never use the conversation feature of Copilot, I’m just typing e.g. function signatures or the start of a for loop or switch statement etc.

mathieuhon U.K. orders Apple to let it spy on users’ encrypted accounts

Yes “collude” contains exactly the right connotations. Slimy, sneaky, against the interests of the public.

mathieuhon The Forbidden Garden of Leningrad: Science and Sacrifice in a City Under Siege

Would it not have been the people besieging the city who were responsible?

mathieuhon Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

I think it's a lot more complicated than that. I think it can be used as a tool for people who already have knowledge and skills, but I do worry how it will affect people growing up with it.

Personally I see it more like going to someone who (claims) to know what they're doing and asking them to do it for me. I might be able to watch them at work and maybe get a very general idea of what they're doing but will I actually learn something? I don't think so.

Now, we may point to the fact that previous generations railed at the degeneration of youth through things like pocket calculators or mobile phones but I think there is a massive difference between these things and so-called AI. Where those things were tools obligatorily (if you give a calculator to someone who doesn't know any formulae it will be useless to them), I think so-called AI can just jump straight to giving you the answer.

I personally believe that there are necessary steps that must be passed through to really obtain knowledge and I don't think so-called AI takes you through those steps. I think it will result in a generation of people with markedly fewer and shallower skills than the generations that came before.

mathieuhon Everyone knows your location: tracking myself down through in-app ads

To use a line sometimes attributed to Beria, “give me the man and I will give you the case against him”. By which I mean that I’m sure they will find some means of making you sorry.

mathieuhon GarminDB

Yeah, Garmin’s own software isn’t great but it very easily syncs directly to loads of other services, and there are “interlocutor” (not sure what the right term is) apps like Rungapp on iOS that will let you sync it to even more.

I personally highly recommend intervals.icu

mathieuhon OpenAI O3-Mini

Hah, I was trying it the other day in a Go project and it did exactly the same thing. I couldn’t believe my eyes, it basically rewrote all the functions back out in the test file but modified slightly so the thing that was failing wouldn’t even run.

mathieuhon Ear muscle we thought humans didn't use activates when people listen hard

Whenever I hear a noise behind me this muscle reflexively flexes quite hard, especially if it's a sudden noise that makes me jump.

mathieuhon The story of my home made pipe organ (2000)

Here is another series of two men building an organ into the back of a truck

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNE6DEIclzg3WYK2Sqz2x...

mathieuhon IOC long shot Watanabe hopes 'crazy' Olympic idea sparks debate

It's the same with football. FIFA is so ridiculously corrupt it's actually jarring. Hosting World Cups in Qatar and now Saudi Arabia, running players into the ground by continuously adding more fixtures to the season, awash with gambling money, football clubs owned by nation states.

I stopped watching football when the World Cup went to Qatar and I haven't watched any since, it turns my stomach now.

mathieuhon Google Maps in the US Will Change to Gulf of America and Mount McKinley

The endonym and exonym in English were the same previously (Gulf of Mexico). The endonym is now is changing to Gulf of America while the exonym is remaining Gulf of Mexico.

I'm not aware of any other places where there is the case in English but looking at places in India it seems the exonym just appears on a different line above the endonym.

So I would expect to see

Gulf of Mexico

Gulf of America

over the body of water when this is updated.

mathieuhon The protester's guide to smartphone security

“If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear” right? That’s the same logic politicians are using to make spying on populations legal.

mathieuhon Guitar chord karaoke with Vamp, Chordino, and FFmpeg (2022)

I'm not very familiar with Songsterr but from what I can see at that link I would recommend downloading Guitar Pro files from ultimate-guitar.com and displaying them in Tuxguitar (https://www.tuxguitar.app/) which is free and open source

mathieuhon Garmin's –$40B Pivot

I don't know if their other product lines are better but the software and user experience of their Edge 1040 cycling computer is atrocious. It has every feature you could think of and some you couldn't but I swear it was designed by someone who has never ridden a bike.

Even the navigation isn't great. Most of the time when I get to a roundabout it wants me to exit at the first exit, then immediately perform a u-turn, rejoin the roundabout, and take the actual exit. Not even sure what's going wrong here, the same routes on a Wahoo unit work fine.

It would put me off buying another Garmin product to be honest.

mathieuhon Bunkers in Albania

Plus the current state of North Korea owes a lot of its conditions to the Americans. Before someone accuses me of being a Tankie I do think the Kim dynasty is absolutely deranged and I obviously think that the average North Korean would be better off if they were toppled and I am an anarchist not an auth-communist.

But let's not forget that the Americans completely levelled the territory, including destroying dams that provided people's drinking water (a war crime then and now), and then gloated about it, and have then proceeded to consistently act in bad faith.

So when the comment above talks about "liberating" I do wonder exactly what they mean and how it would be different to the first time they tried it and how might the average North Korean react.

Maybe they would install a new dictator more amenable to the "rules-based international order" (i.e. the US and people who agree with them) like they did in South Korea or countless other countries across Latin America.

mathieuhon Bunkers in Albania

Unique how? It's an Indo-European language, like many of the other languages spoken in Europe. There is also a proposal that Albanian is closely related to Greek and Armenian.

mathieuhon GM parks claims driver location data was given to insurers, pushing up premiums

It's a poor choice of words considering GM makes cars, yes in other contexts I would read "parks" as "shelves" or "puts on hold" but even with your explanatory note it took me a couple of reads to figure out what the title actually means

mathieuhon Backdooring Your Backdoors – Another $20 Domain, More Governments

I'm aware, I was quoting Rousseau because the person I was replying to mentioned the social contract which was an area of particular concern for Rousseau. I would recommend reading Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality if you're interested, it's very accessible.

mathieuhon Apple asks investors to block proposal to scrap diversity programmes

The UK stayed basically the same and I think that was due to the fact that the previous government was already the centre-right wing party–and although they tried to move further right–the fact that they had done such a terrible job in government basically meant their goose was cooked no matter how many punitive policies they tried to enact or wars on wokeness they prosecuted.

The right-wing party of the traditional two (the tories) was absolutely slaughtered in the election and they've now elected as the party leader (although not without some controversy–apparently tactical voting gone wrong) a fairly standard right-wing populist in Badenoch.

There is also the increasingly substantial spectre of the far-right, with race riots taking place over summer and Musk's pet favourite Reform party gaining ground.

It seems very possible to me right now that at the next general election the UK will swing seriously to the right. If this does happen it will the fault of Labour as far as I'm concerned. Of course that's still a long way away and we can always live in hope.

mathieuhon Backdooring Your Backdoors – Another $20 Domain, More Governments

Well, Rousseau himself would say property is theft in not exactly those words

From his discourse on inequality

> The first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying "this is mine" and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders; how much misery and horror the human race would have been spared if someone had pulled up the stakes and filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: "beware of listening to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to everyone and that the earth itself belongs to no one!"

mathieuhon A web app to read Latin texts with inline translations

People might find it interesting to know that English still has remnants of its case system in its personal pronouns, for example I/me/my/mine, he/him/his, she/her/her, who/whom/whose.

Some people struggle with who/whom but in fact it’s the same as “he” versus “him”: if you replace “who” with “he” in the sentence and it sounds wrong then you should be using “whom”.

mathieuhon I automated my job application process

It’s the same for me. When I read people say they send hundreds of job applications I don’t understand how that’s even possible. Any time I’ve been looking for a job I usually find maybe five jobs that actually interest me and I think I would be a good fit for, and then another five that I maybe don’t quite meet the all the requirements or don’t seem that interesting but it’s near enough that I might as well give it a go. I usually don’t make all those applications at once because I find managing more than about three applications to be a hassle.

As far as I can recall I’ve never not had an interview from an application.

I do generally use recruitment agencies so maybe that’s a factor.