@emmatonkin@mstdn.social avatar

emmatonkin

@emmatonkin@mstdn.social

Engineer. Zombologiste à temps partiel. Citoyenne de nulle part. Franglaise. πόλλ’ ἠπίστατο ἔργα, κακῶς δ’ ἠπίστατο πάντα.

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craiggrannell, to random
@craiggrannell@mastodon.social avatar

Having trouble sleeping of late. Not sure why. Might be the light waking me. But I’m always awake around 5 and then I just doze for a bit until it’s time to get up. But I also have tinnitus that’s been quite bad of late and so have a quiet audio thing running on my iPhone every night.

Mrs G just send over a link to this: https://www.snoozeband.co.uk/products/snoozeband™-deluxe-sleep-mask-with-headphones

Tempting. Anyone tried one of these (or similar)? If so, any good?

emmatonkin,
@emmatonkin@mstdn.social avatar

@craiggrannell
I have a Bluetooth AccousticSheep and it's pretty good. Basically same principle but a bit thinner, though still thick enough to use as an eye mask. When I use it, I often play Max Richter's Sleep album on low volume.

Mind you there is a lot to be said for blackout curtains. In my opinion sleep masks and summer temperatures aren't always ideal companions :)

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

Hard to imagine a signal that a website is a rugpull more intense than banning users for trying to delete their own posts

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/stack-overflow-bans-users-en-masse-for-rebelling-against-openai-partnership-users-banned-for-deleting-answers-to-prevent-them-being-used-to-train-chatgpt

Like just incredible "burning the future to power the present" energy here

emmatonkin,
@emmatonkin@mstdn.social avatar

@rrwo @ocdtrekkie @mcc
While I'm not surprised if they do argue that, posts do often contain personal information. So if they want to argue that, it's on them to demonstrate that they have anonymised the data such that the individual is no longer identifiable. Sounds like a discussion that EU folks affected could usefully hand on to the relevant data protection regulator, along with some examples of posts that clearly don't meet that requirement.

cstross, to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

Question for election psephologists: is Elpicke likely to win re-election in her own constituency as a Labour candidate?

(Genuine Q, I have no idea how popular/unpopular she is locally.)

emmatonkin,
@emmatonkin@mstdn.social avatar

@cstross
I think they agreed to this specifically with the proviso that she won't be standing for re-election as a Labour candidate, but also Dover is apparently one of the seats that will have boundary changes for the next election, so it's probably quite a complicated question.

emmatonkin,
@emmatonkin@mstdn.social avatar

@rzeta0 @cstross
In the sense that Elphicke is apparently briefly counted as a Labour politician, presumably yes? Which would be one of many reasons why I personally would have been fending her off with a ten foot pole, not posing for photographs

AuldFoggerty, to random
@AuldFoggerty@mastodon.scot avatar

England, where politics and commentary is completely normal:

Reform got exactly zero seats, and the pundits can't stop talking about them.

the Greens got 159 seats, and no-one from the Greens is interviewed, and no-one on tv is talking about them or to them.

emmatonkin,
@emmatonkin@mstdn.social avatar

@Wen @AuldFoggerty @OorAndy
My favourite example of this broadcasting habit is this "was the moon landing faked" video from This Morning, with some loony flat earther who thought the moon was not a solid object, arguing against an observational cosmologist. https://youtu.be/cnc_X-oDWsE?si=f-vtV1Xighv43Wlr

atomicpoet, to random
@atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org avatar

In 1988, Echelon came out for DOS – it looked like the future!

I thought, “Wow! This is in actual 3D!”

And from my kid perspective living in the 80s, it was true. It had wireframe graphics and ultra-smooth scrolling. When I piloted the ship, it felt like I was completely in control.

We may snicker now at the EGA graphics but you got to understand that an NES couldn’t do this. Echelon really showed off what PCs at the time were capable of doing. It was revelatory.

Returning to it now, it’s amazing how far we’ve come in the past 36 years. However, playing this game is still fun – if only to stare at those wireframes!

Echelon screenshot (RTX 3080 Ti)
Echelon screenshot (RTX 3080 Ti)
Echelon screenshot (RTX 3080 Ti)

emmatonkin,
@emmatonkin@mstdn.social avatar

@ajlanes @goatsarah @atomicpoet @justinto
I think the Archimedes was a Thing People Maybe Had In School, whereas ST and Amiga were things people would more likely have at home. PC, on the other hand, would generally only show up if someone had one for work stuff, at which point possibly family might get to use it on the weekends.

My father bought and installed some kind of 8086 board thingy in his Atari ST (PC-Speed?) which made for an interesting frankenexperience. Iirc it ran pretty hot.

emmatonkin,
@emmatonkin@mstdn.social avatar

@goatsarah @ajlanes @atomicpoet @justinto
Hm. Probably wasn't a very Radio 4 area, so maybe that's why I didn't see Archimedes in the wild, but I don't think there was a lot of software for them tbh despite their potential as a platform - people seemed pretty unsure what they were for in school, even. So I'd have thought they wouldn't be widely appealing beyond particular professional and educational use cases for that reason.

emmatonkin, to random
@emmatonkin@mstdn.social avatar

For some reason when I try to type 'Netflix' my fingers usually produce the word 'Newtflix'. The fun thing about this is that newtflix.com actually exists - but on Gussie Fink-Nottle's behalf I am sorely disappointed that it just redirects you to Netflix.

histoftech, to random
@histoftech@mastodon.social avatar

They're bulldozing established neighborhoods right outside Chicago to put up data centers. Hope all the AI hype is worth this infrastructural shift because once there’s extra capacity, they’re going to use it even if the technology doesn’t work as intended🙃

https://therealdeal.com/chicago/2023/09/14/stream-data-center-finalizes-elk-cove-land-assemblage/

emmatonkin,
@emmatonkin@mstdn.social avatar

@histoftech
Ah yes, 2024, clearly the ideal time to massively expand our usage of the most incredibly wasteful power-hungry technologies available in the field. Pity the poor chumps in IoT world who spend ages trying to figure out how to get infrastructural things to run for years on a single battery.

For some reason it really bothers me that despite the whole waves at global climate thing, there seems to be very little interest in strongly encouraging efficient low-power computing.

jmaris, to random
@jmaris@eupolicy.social avatar

ChatGPT is an incredibly good bullshit generator

emmatonkin,
@emmatonkin@mstdn.social avatar

@jmaris
In the formal sense described in Harry Frankfurt's On Bullshit, I'd agree that it absolutely is - it produces "speech intended to persuade without regard for truth", where the intention to persuade comes from the engineer who built/deployed it. The persuasion element is simply to persuade the reader that the thing knows what it's talking about, so it's also without regard for any particular stance. Sort of the zero cal version of a politician...

18+ dgar, (edited ) to random
@dgar@aus.social avatar

has a naive take on technology, politics, and the future. A thread.

1/3
I really want to be optimistic about the current technology revolution, but it’s difficult. There’s a lot of negativity surrounding artificial intelligence here on Mastodon, but AI takes many forms, and can be incredibly useful. Recently, I’ve actively been looking for genuinely positive stories about AI, because let’s face it, you can hate on AI all you like, it’s here now, it’s not going away, and it’s being developed at a phenomenal rate. I’d say that Pandora’s box has already been opened and it’s too late, but that would suggest that there was a box, and let’s be honest - no one was working on containment!
So I’m trying to see an optimistic future, and the positive possibilities of AI. But I also have thoughts about where I think it’s likely to take us.
Full disclosure, I’m a high-school dropout with no formal education on the things I’m about to ramble on about. So!
Google’s GNoME project is fascinating, discovering millions of new crystal structures, several of which may lead to more efficient batteries and solar panels, stronger and lighter building materials, and stuff we probably won’t think of for years yet.
AI is being used to analyse the mind-numbingly enormous amounts of data coming in from astronomical observatories, and bring anomalies and points of interest to astronomers, saving literal decades of mind-numbing scanning through reams of pages of data.
Some say Apple has been slack when it comes to AI, but I think they’re just being careful about how they implement it. I mean, I can search my iPhotos for “dogs” and I’m pretty sure it’s machine learning is behind those tricks.
The number of companies that are, right now, working on humanoid robots to be general-purpose household helpers really surprised me.
The language from supporters of AGI seems to try and covey the idea that technological advancements in machine learning and robotics will make everything cheaper, to the point where we can raise the standard of living for everyone on the planet, and that energy will be practically free in the future. While I understand what they’re trying to say, I’m also aware that it’s mostly billionaires and CEOs of AI companies saying it.
The biggest concern I have with this idea, is that no-one is laying out the plan to get from here, in our current reality, to this magical utopia of plenty for all. From where I’m standing now, the companies that are developing these technologies are some of the richest in the world, and they stand to only get richer as they sell their products to those who can afford them, usually to replace their own workers, and improve their own profits. So people lose their source of income, and food still needs to be bought, rent and utilities still need to be paid, and strangely enough, none of those are actually getting cheaper.

emmatonkin,
@emmatonkin@mstdn.social avatar

@dgar
I think this stuff is going to prove to just be too darned expensive for most, principally because of the energy costs. So will a lot of stuff that we all take for granted - things that have been 'free' for years. I mean, at this stage the main argument for how this stuff is going to be affordably powered in the future is 'oh it's fine, stop worrying about it, we're about to develop practical data-centre level nuclear fusion, honest'.

emmatonkin,
@emmatonkin@mstdn.social avatar

@dgar
Yeah - I think we're all pretty sure it's happening. NIF broke even years ago, so at this stage it's 'just' an engineering problem. That said, I'm just not convinced that fusion is the answer to the question of 'how do we power using wildly inefficient processes to replace human input?' so much as, 'woah woah woah, hang on there, exactly why are we doing that and when exactly is this a good idea, also are we sure it has to be this inefficient?'

emmatonkin,
@emmatonkin@mstdn.social avatar

@dgar
And in general and entirely separately, I have the impression that the arguments that used to be used to fuel the ad-supported model of the internet have lost some of their strength. So it is my impression that we are left with a) wildly expensive technology b) relying on increasingly expensive resources also c) nobody has any money, which makes me suspect that something has to give.

ErikJonker, to ai Dutch
@ErikJonker@mastodon.social avatar

This is the big risk in the debate around copyright and AI trainingsdata.
"Requiring model-building organizations to purchase the rights to their training data would inevitably leave generative AI in the hands of a small number of unassailable monopolies"
https://www.oreilly.com/radar/the-openai-endgame/

emmatonkin,
@emmatonkin@mstdn.social avatar

@Ultraverified @ErikJonker
Honestly not too keen on what it currently does to power use either. So far it seems there is a strong argument for taxing the socks off 'em for unnecessarily doing tasks that are often straightforward for humans via ridiculously convoluted, unsustainable mechanisms.

ajsadauskas, to fuckcars
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

What can you get to within a 15-minute walk of your house?

A recent YouGov survey asked Americans what they think they should be able to get to within a 15-minute walk of their house.

Of these choices, I can currently walk to all of them from my apartment, aside from a university (no biggie, I'm not currently studying, although there is a Tafe within walking distance), a hospital, and a sports arena.

How many can you get to with a 15 minute walk from your house?

@fuck_cars

emmatonkin,
@emmatonkin@mstdn.social avatar

@kagan @ajsadauskas @fuck_cars
Back when I attended library science conferences regularly I would do Web searches for bookshops before I got on the plane and then my first act after waking up from my jetlag would be to go and visit one. Over time this got more and more difficult. In my last trip to Atlanta the only bookshops even vaguely in walking distance seemed, according to Google, to be the small bookshop at the uni/conf venue, and the national park shop at the MLK museum.

SmudgeTheInsultCat, to random
@SmudgeTheInsultCat@mas.to avatar
emmatonkin,
@emmatonkin@mstdn.social avatar

@SmudgeTheInsultCat
I often wonder about this sort of thing, especially when walking past Bath Spa (aka bath bath) on my way to the river Avon (aka river river), or most transparently of all when planning a trip to the thermal spas at Baden-Baden (aka the baths at baths-baths).

emmatonkin,
@emmatonkin@mstdn.social avatar

@VieilOgre @SmudgeTheInsultCat
Looking at the map, you can't help but wonder whether Bains-les-Bains owes a great deal of its bath-engineering success to the knowhow available at nearby Plombières-les-Bains (Female-plumbers-the-baths).

Faintdreams, to random
@Faintdreams@dice.camp avatar

Fucksticks, just went to order from one of my favourite stationary companies and they went bankrupt.. in 2016 !

So of course any old stock is unfathomably expensive on the second hand market and they made the only fibre calligraphy chisel tip I liked.
:(

Any reccs for good fibre calligraphy chisel tipped pens - that are available to buy in the UK?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berol

emmatonkin,
@emmatonkin@mstdn.social avatar

@Faintdreams Cultpens do something called a Manuscript Callicreative italic that might be worth a try? I haven't specifically tried them though, mostly I just see them when I'm on Cultpens buying stuff for inktober. But they aren't very expensive, so at least there's that.

Edent, to random
@Edent@mastodon.social avatar

I'm reading a book which mentions the Daily Mail's campaign against psychometrists in the early 20th Century.

It says:

> The Occult Defence League protested that there were towns in Britain where it had to advise occultists not to practise.

Does anyone have any information on the "Occult Defence League"?

emmatonkin,
@emmatonkin@mstdn.social avatar

@Edent

From a quick google, the phrase "Occult Defence League" produces no search matches at all. Seems so unlikely that nobody's ever put those three words together before, and yet. If you spell 'defence' with an 's', you find one American redditor talking about steampunk corsets.

Anyway, Google Books does mention an Occultists' Defense League, founded in 1890 by one Joseph Dodson, https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Racialization_of_the_Occult_in_Ninet/ldPPEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=occult+defence+league&pg=PA198&printsec=frontcover

Also, an 'Occult Practitioners' Defence League', https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Light/TvX0yunvURkC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=occult+defence+league&pg=PA440&printsec=frontcover

emmatonkin,
@emmatonkin@mstdn.social avatar

@Edent
The book Witchcraft, magic and culture, 1736-1951 by Owen Davies seems to have an explanation, but annoyingly, the start of that explanation doesn't seem to be available online https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Witchcraft_Magic_and_Culture_1736_1951/ImX_21SScc8C?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=occult+defence+league&pg=PA254&printsec=frontcover

Almost tempted to see if I can drop into the Arts & Soc Sciences library at Bristol sometime - they have a copy of the book and it looks super interesting. There is a section about the relationship between fortune-telling and the law...

image/png
image/png

emmatonkin, to random
@emmatonkin@mstdn.social avatar

In case anyone feels like chucking a little cash in the direction of a spinal cord injury charity, my family and I have been doing the Aspire Channel Swim, which involves swimming 22 miles in 12 weeks. For myself, I arrived in metaphorical Calais earlier this weekend, though I'm adding a couple more miles to accompany Greg.

We picked this charity because a family member passed away recently after a long illness, following spinal cord injury.
https://www.aspirechannelswim.co.uk/teams/the-lido-layabouts

llamasoft_ox, to random
@llamasoft_ox@toot.wales avatar

another thing that happened shopping yesterday:

  • My glasses are a bit loose and sometimes fall off my head when I look down.
  • The opticians are good and will usually perform slight adjustments to the fit if you ask
  • I go into the opticians and a nice lady offers to perform said adjustments
  • she starts twisting and bending quite vigorously
  • my glasses snap clean in half haha
  • that's me booked in for an eye test and new glasses on Tuesday morning haha 🐂
emmatonkin,
@emmatonkin@mstdn.social avatar

@llamasoft_ox
I've seen this happen too! Supposedly the flexible bits can get more brittle over time. A right pain in the nose-bridge.

emmatonkin,
@emmatonkin@mstdn.social avatar

@llamasoft_ox oh noooo! It never occurred to me that could happen.

mloxton, to random
@mloxton@med-mastodon.com avatar

Does optimism vs pessimism have any effect on outcomes and prognosis?

emmatonkin,
@emmatonkin@mstdn.social avatar

@mloxton
Fwiw (not being medical) the impression I have gained is that attitude does not change the outcome but does affect apparent quality of life. This topic was a whole thing some years ago, iirc?

fkamiah17, to UKpolitics
@fkamiah17@toot.wales avatar

"Boris hates confrontation, he doesn't like upsetting people, he's too soft, and that sometimes means he leaves two people who have advocated different courses of action thinking he agrees with both of them. The situation (Covid) must have been torture for him personally. What we saw today (at the Inquiry) was not just betrayal (of Johnson) but the dysfunctionality was down to the three core people who are there to guard his back."
Guto Harri, Sky News

emmatonkin,
@emmatonkin@mstdn.social avatar

@fkamiah17 with apologies for the link destination, but then Wyatt is inseparable from the tabloid press, here's one from 2016 in which, if you can get past all the self delusional bullshit about the specialness of their relayshunship, she expresses much the same:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3510848/My-amitie-amoureuse-boris-johnson-Boris-loner-actually-rates-Dave-personal-close-friend.html

She's been running around for about the last decade telling anyone who will listen that, in short, the guy is weak and feckless and full of sh*t. Presumably nobody listened. Idk.

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