thom

I don’t like being this person, but you can very easily beat a wall at tennis.

Yes. Note taking apps were very much the precursors of modern agentic coding.

Yeah, I've always had the problem in Emacs that I know some quality of life feature would be possible to implement, but it'd take me hours or days so I just end up going back to work. With gptel, I've been able to really take control of my environment. And what's great is the LLM can write better LLM-integration functions too so you really end up with the perfect harness for whatever you're doing.

Talking of being softlocked on a boat crossing:

https://www.kensblog.com/update-on-our-journey-through-the-n...

Still unclear what your point was. There was nothing politically unifying about Brexit. Individual politicians weren’t even consistent in their support or opposition to it. The closest we have to a unifier now is centrist and Left politicians degrading themselves in ever more desperate attempts to vilify immigrants and trans people in an attempt to placate the Right (which as yet hasn’t unified anybody, to everyone’s surprise).

Different cruise in the Bay of Biscay but hello!

The problem with sports betting is that if you really want an edge (at least in something like soccer) you could easily end up dropping six figures a year on data licenses to have a decent model and be able to find worthwhile bets across all competitions. That puts a lot of pressure on the amount of capital you need to deploy, which rules out a lot of bookmakers. As you graduate to markets with more liquidity (i.e. Asia) you’ll also find your edge shrinking. Still obviously very doable, but it’s hard to guarantee stress free passive income this way.

Cantona.

Amazed you’re continuing with this bit tbh.

Imagine, if you will, that it's a necessity for a healthy internet forum that people not be performatively obtuse in order to score points. That forum might continue to exist, but it would stop being a fun place to hang out.

You’re probably right, but I’d also bet some things that we’re about to sweep aside will turn out to have been necessities and we’ll find it very difficult to bring them back.

My first job out of university was with a large local news organization. It's the only place I've worked that had beer on tap in its cafeteria (from 11am). You haven't seen workplace alcoholism until you've worked with a county cricket correspondent.

Allowing bad actors to act badly against all but the most sophisticated users is exactly where lawmakers should be stepping in. Sorry you find that controversial.

A lot of UK sites (Reach local news stuff) now explicitly say take cookies or pay, which tbh I always thought was illegal.

Not everything is about taking information in?

Perhaps I am the only person well served by the modern music industry, but I absolutely love Apple Music. The new music playlist it gives me each week has introduced me to hundreds of new artists and dozens of songs that rank up there with my teenage heart songs. I think I mostly skipped the golden age of piracy as my formative music experiences were the Evening Session and John Peel on the BBC, coupled with lax parenting and a proximity to Camden.

There are still some CDs and MP3s I take special care of because I know they’re not in Apple’s catalogue, and I’ve no doubt I’m contributing to the death of the very thing I love by participating in capitalism, but until access to all my music is unilaterally rescinded I will continue to be a very happy (paying) customer.

Ah yes, the missing seventeenth way to validate function parameters.

Always loved this. There are still parts of the UK where you’ll have no data offline navigation is great, and the walking paths are better than you can get elsewhere.

I quit in June. No real absurdity, I'd just spent two years after we were acquired feeling bad about leaving and abandoning everybody, or that's what I'd tell myself to not feel like a coward. Either way, out now, trying to balance curing burnout with a dozen personal projects and lots of well-intentioned, interesting people talking about new opportunities. I told people (my wife most pertinently) that my plan was to walk the dog a lot and not have a plan, but no lack of a plan survives contact with boredom. So, behold my thundering herd of shaven yaks: three screenplays, two TTRPGs (one CMS for TTRPGs that will do data-driven print layout for you), one video game, one piece of consumer electronics, slowly going through Lingua Latina. And I still feel like I have a lot of unfinished business in football analytics, which was the day job.

I don't really know what the right balance is now, but I'm having fun and generally much happier.

I loved Bazzite for hardware compatibility out of the box but the necessity of flatpak made it enormously inconvenient as a general machine. CachyOS sounds worth checking out if I still want to game but also occasionally do real work.

Do we have a sense for what proportion of text is actually retrievable from these scrolls?

Sure as shit won't answer them without that though.

I agree that saying that they have now trained on lots of proprietary data allows them to muddy the legislative waters further than they already have. What a happy coincidence!

No, you just parroted an increasingly popular talking point, the entire purpose of which seems to be to absolve AI companies of the enormous theft that put them in the position to hire experts in the first place.

Happy father's day! Here's my dad on the front of the very first Dragon User magazine. It's been a bit of a bumpy ride but I loved growing up surrounded by every microcomputer under the sun.

https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/4201/Dragon-User-May...

Surely it’s called Candid Camera specifically because it reveals something that would otherwise be hidden?

How unfortunate that even the act of quitting the rat race of notoriety that comprises life in a modern online society requires the publishing of manifestos, books, newspaper profiles, viral photos of you holding up your non-smart phone published to every corner of the internet.

Couple of videos from the Roman Society recently, connecting landscapes and Latin epistolography, which may be of interest to those enjoying this map:

https://youtu.be/9aBxIRCGkl4?si=Dh5P6_NGzSasBG_1

https://youtu.be/nxCNrTYQ_ys?si=ngWa94p2KQdri_Fz

At least we agree “modern software development” is the root cause.

I personally think CSS animations are wonderful. I’ve recently returned to dabble in frontend stuff and was delighted with what you could achieve with purely declarative HTML and CSS. I’m finding that you can often match the feel of an SPA with just HTMX and some CSS and I’ve found that simultaneously very satisfying and productive.