@mike@sauropods.win
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

mike

@mike@sauropods.win

By day I am a computer programmer with Index Data, where I have been happily and gainfully employed for 20 years.

By night, I am a vertebrate palaeontologist with the University of Bristol, specialising in sauropods: the biggest and best of all dinosaurs.

I am an advocate for open access, open data and open source, and also for open peer-review though I'm beginning to think pre-publication peer-review might be a mistake. I support #LFC.

Email: dino@miketaylor.org.uk
ORCiD: 0000-0002-1003-5675

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

drmambobob, to random
@drmambobob@ecoevo.social avatar

So I get that you should use password managers but are there any good ones out there? All those top lists only mention paid services and their free versions are severely limited. I don't want to pay for more things than I am already.

mike,
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

@drmambobob The one built right into Firefox works pretty well. Otherwise I keep passwords in a local text-file encrypted using ccrypt.

mike,
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

@claudius @drmambobob All useful stuff, thank you!

But is there anything wrong with just letting Firefox itself remember my passwords?

mike, to random
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

If at first you don't succeed ...

Here's ChatGPL opining confidently and being wrong wrong, wrong and wrong.
sigh

Still, I'm sure the LLMs that advise doctors and lawyers will be 100% reliable.

mike, to random
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

Harvey Elliott is well on my way to becoming my favourite player. His readiness to actually take a shot is part of this.

mike, to random
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

Jurgen Klopp already looks five years younger.

john, to art
@john@sauropods.win avatar

A random artwork from my gallery:

"Crashed Zeppelins" — 2006

The dream of the giant Zeppelins came crashing down in a lonely ocean... but no one seemed to care.

https://johnconway.art/crashed_zeppelins

#Art #Beaches #CrashedZeppelins #Photomanipulation #Surreal

mike,
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

@john I love this one. I also loved the image of the crashed Death Star in the ocean in the second Star Wars sequel. Very similar energy.

30yrdscreamer, to random
@30yrdscreamer@mastodon.me.uk avatar

has been a brilliant free transfer under , plagued by injury yet I've loved watching how he plays football.

Times they are a changing

https://sportsfeed.me/

mike,
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

@30yrdscreamer I'm sad about both, but can't deny that it makes a certain amount of sense given their ages.

Yet I think Matip has been first-choice (alongside VVD) this season — when fit.

futurebird, to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

The company that's contracted to do security education has these little multiple choice tests, and it annoys me that they are confusing on purpose ... or they require you to listen to the wording of their videos carefully. eg:

Which URL is suspicious?

a. http : //www.gmail.com
b. https : //www.google.com/email

Um. The domain is valid for both. https is nice, but the later is a google 404... the former will re-load as https:

They wanted you to say the second one? Bad question.

mike,
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

@futurebird @mkb If this is a pattern, that is exactly why you SHOULD call them out. Why let others walk into the same trap you did?

mike, to random
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

… pray we do not update it further.

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

Dear Google,

When I search, I am not looking for The Answer. I am looking for sources. A search that generates only answers will be useless personally, and worse than useless professionally for me.

What I would really like is an internet search engine that works. Google did that once. Then they focused on other things and used it for ad revenue and it became the new Craigslist.

It would sure be nice if Google would reinvent an actual internet search engine.

mike,
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

@UncivilServant Lord, yes. The infuriating thing is that they still have all the crawler infrastructure that allowed them to make Google circa 2010 just the best thing ever. But they don't want to provide that service any more.

mike,
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

@_L1vY_ @UncivilServant Oh, I hate that. And, wretchedly, DuckDuckGo is even worse in that respect.

mike, to random
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

Is there a stupider error in the world than "The document XYZ.jpg can't be opened because it's in the Bin"?

How the heck is it the OS's prerogative to tell me I can't look inside the bin?

mike, to random
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

"This of course is the whole purpose of scholarly communication. It’s why we have academic publishers: to make it possible for us to progress our fields by standing on each other’s shoulders.

Unfortunately, the publishers are mostly standing on our toes."

https://svpow.com/2016/04/12/moral-dimensions-of-open-part-4-on-the-shoulders-of-giants/

mike, to random
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

Well, what a deeply disappointing match for . The thing is, Villa didn't have to do anything special to score three goals. We just handed the goals to them. Talk about self-destruction.

mike, to random
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

Minor programming-in-2024 irritant #3,456: remember which of the many many git repos I interact with daily have a master branch and which have main.

TheDinosaurDave, (edited ) to Wyoming
@TheDinosaurDave@sauropods.win avatar

in , who would have guessed...
Lets take a look at what they show, and break down what we can see.
They say they are 150m years in the past, in

In this image we can clearly see a .
As far as I know, its been found in which is close enough for it to migrate there.

It also looks fairly accurate for a adjacent species.

In the background, although harder to see are probably , or .

Over all 10/10

mike,
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

@TheDinosaurDave Woah! Massive spoiler!

Oh well. There was little chance of my not finding out somehow.

mike,
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

@TheDinosaurDave Oh, fair enough!

mike,
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

@llewelly @TheDinosaurDave And a metacarpal referred to Brachiosaurus comes from Oklahoma: https://sauroposeidon.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/bonnan-wedel-2004-oklahoma-brachiosaurus.pdf

john, to Trains
@john@sauropods.win avatar

This thread mirrors my experience of in Europe and the UK. Pleasant when it's working, but very expensive, unreliable, and confusing as hell.

I'd love to know what's wrong and if the situation can be meaningfully improved.

https://mathstodon.xyz/@albertcardona/112407848484071304

mike,
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

@john Obvious, innit? The whole thing needs to be nationalized and run in a coherent way for the benefit of citizens — not (as it is now) split into a dozen separate little isolated fiefdoms, each run for the beneft of shareholders.

mike, to stackoverflow
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

"I don’t know why anyone would willingly submit more unpaid answers (or questions!) to Stack Exchange forums under these conditions. After all, huge pools of people in Africa and South America are being paid to write code examples for model-training companies right this minute. Why should I do it for free?"
https://newsletter.goodtechthings.com/p/closed-as-unhelpful-an-elegy-for
#StackOverflow

mike,
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

@john I hate this, because despite its pedantic culture, Stack Overflow had build something amazing and useful. Now they're going to burn it all down.

mike,
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

@john I don't really agree. LLM are much better at making an attempt to answer your question rather than coming back at you with gatekeeping. But they're not as good at actually giving correct answers.

mike, to random
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

I like Neil Young's album After The Gold Rush, and I like the song Oh Lonesome Me from that album. But there is absolutely no excuse to rhyme "arms" with "charms" in any song later than the Gershwins.

mike,
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

@john It's just such a cliché. Old-timey songwriters were obsession with "hold you in my arms" and suchlike, and the ONLY rhyme they ever came up with for it was "charms". Always sounds contrived.

mike,
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

@john Yep. Not a whole lot of choices, I admit, but it's just so lazy to always go the same way.

mike, to random
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

It seems my University of Bristol account for some reason doesn't have access to The Paleontological Society Special Publications. Can anyone please email me a PDF of this one?

https://doi.org/10.1017/S2475262200009436

dino@miketaylor.org.uk

mike,
@mike@sauropods.win avatar

@gay_ornithischians If they cut off its head, seven more will spring up.

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