drmikepj

drmikepj, 8 days ago to random

Another busy day at EastGRIP’s skiway: a Hercules has arrived with cargo for the American GreenDrill project. They have a Twin Otter aircraft here too, which is shuttling their cargo and staff to their field site

drmikepj, 8 days ago to random

Lovely sunny morning today! I’ve been moving some of my equipment around - here’s my ride for this morning!

drmikepj, 10 days ago to random

It’s quite cold outside. -19C with a brisk 11kt wind, so it feels like -29C.

Selfie with tents and a snowfield behind

drmikepj, 10 days ago to random

We have arrived! Flight was nice and smooth.

C130 and snowmobile, with people milling about
View out of the porthole of the plane, you can see a brown landscape with snow patches

ianRobinson, 15 days ago to random

The OpenAI ChatGPT-4o voice assistant servers are overloaded this morning.

They need to throw some more of those Azure credits on the fire…

I don’t understand how they can make ChatGPT-4o free for everyone (even in a restricted way) and make enough money from other sources. API access, corporate payments, ChatGPT Plus subscriptions etc.

They are probably more interested in building market share and mind share right now. History suggests that there will be advertisements at some point.

whitequark, 24 days ago to random

please tell me the most obscure joke you know

(feel free to explain or not explain it, depending on what you find more amusing to think of me reading it)

stevenjgibbons, 29 days ago to random

The obligatory train window view of the #JodrellBank radio telescope. When I was a child I always assumed I would end up working somewhere like that. I guess I wasn’t far off :)

drmikepj, 2 months ago to random

As a 15-year-old schoolboy, I was given the option to do community service instead of sport. I went to help in an infant school in urban Portsmouth. The school was doing its best, but the neighbourhood was poor. At the time, this song was in the charts: https://youtu.be/ZDjdHe6U3Mo?si=2hZm6ttNE7PFNvV_

“Every day I look at you, dressed up in your ties of blue / saying there’s not much that you can do / to help the kids on Hope Street”

This article makes me realise that things are far worse now. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/mar/16/desperate-neglect-teachers-washing-clothes-and-finding-beds-as-poverty-grips-englands-schools?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

timonsku, 2 months ago to random

He is just happy to be here

ZachWeinersmith, 2 months ago to random

This is from a long list, mostly UK, compiled mid 20th century by the Opies. It's words kids use to stop a game/fight/chase in progress without surrendering. Did you have a word like this growing up? Phrases like "let's stop a minute" or "let me catch my breath" don't count. It needs to be a kind of magic term that invokes the response.

I talked to my 9-year-old last night and after a lot of thought, the closest we came up with was "pause!"

ianbetteridge, 3 months ago to random

I accidentally revealed I was learning Welsh on Duolingo and now Welsh people are talking at me and all I know is how to read when Dewi is saying good morning to Gareth and that Mrs Jones feels terrible and HALP

drmikepj, 3 months ago to random

TIL: pneumatically-synchronised public clocks used to be a thing in Paris and Vienna. I particularly love the photos and drawings on this webpage, especially the one entitled “THE PNEUMATIC DISTRIBUTION OF TIME”! http://www.douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/COMMS/airclock/airclock.htm

drmikepj, 3 months ago to random

@jonny you may also enjoy Hillel Wayne’s series comparing software engineering with other engineering disciplines. I was one of the engineers he interviewed. https://www.hillelwayne.com/tags/crossover-project/

jonny, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago) to random

Is there a term (English or not) for when people make something work for them in a way that is busted as hell but charmingly effective and doesnt need to be improved? Im thinking of dragging windows around in a screen recording frame as a way of editing videos rn, but also stuff like idk using a keychain ring on a pants zipper to loop around a button and keep it up, etc. The emphasis is more on the unexpectedness or laterality of approaches than them being "bad."

"Hack" or "kludge" implies too much jankiness and is usually negative, "macgyvering" or "Jerry rigging" is too specific to using only what is on hand to do something, there is a Brazilian word "gambiarra" that I think is quite close but I don't have the cultural context to tell.

Edit: I think gambiarra is what im looking for here, thanks @catzilla !

jonny, 3 months ago to random

I love the academic perception of time. We dont have enough time to spend a month writing tests and docs to make a project maintainable, but its no problem to throw 5 years of labor into the trash when someone leaves the lab and nobody understands what they did

Edent, 4 months ago to random

I've never had my own office.
My first proper job was as a white-van man.
Every subsequent job was in an open plan.
An American office I briefly worked in was a literal cubical farm.
I can't quite image what it would be like to have a private space in a big building.
Was it nice?

jonny, 5 months ago to random

looking at an allen institute openscope dataset where all the stimulus presentation times as measured by the reported "start" and "end" times are actually 230ms as opposed to the expected 250ms in an experiment where that would actually matter, and while the data is available, the analysis code isn't (github repo linked from the paper doesn't exist) and neither is the code that generated the dataset (didn't even try even tho i personally gave a talk to them about why this was important) so i actually have no idea if the results are correct, or incorrect due to the analysis code or the experimental code. i am yet again saying that open data without open tooling is only marginally better than no data at all, even tho nobody seems to care about open tooling lmao

Edent, 4 years ago to random

Getting Interview Questions In Advance

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/03/getting-interview-questions-in-advance/

#interview