Viewing profile — Peteragain

Some friends and I are having a conversation about "caring" - not necessarily for others but care in what you do. Wim Wenders 2023 film "Perfect Days" is relevant here.

I'm not sure the situation has changed for AI. For a real scientific agenda we need to at least attend to the things a demo can't do, not just what they can. The trouble with such …

Economy of scale is an engineer's wet dream: the biggest of everything (And a fit with the bureaucrat's dream of a bigger budget). Move fast and break things says the opposite. Set…

.. and soon to be dependent on US military funding? Controlled by someone who has run-ins with universities? This'll end in tears.

The government funds some libraries, and for some publicly acceptable reason. That reason should apply to web infrastructure, and indeed the small web. Other libraries are communit…

More how they exist.

I'm very keen on public libraries. I'm fortunate in that our village has a community run one, there is the county one, and I can get to The British Library. Why do these entities e…

There is indeed something beautiful about traditional boats but this is a different kind of beauty. And 40 knots in 3 metre waves? Wow! Like F1 cars don't drive like road cars the …

I love some of the crystal clear poetic expressions Pinyin speakers come out with. When Charles was a prince he was called "number one son belong missus queen". I certainly don't w…

I think they missed a trick. This phone could be replaced - I think it might be time - but it works fine. I won't replace it now, but if I could use it for something else then I wo…

I'm going to use that stat. Even if 78.4% of quoted stats are made up.

From a linguistics perspective "environmentalists worry" is a phrase designed to trigger a certain response. It sets up an us versus them scenario with "us" being anti environmenta…

I suspect we focus too much here with good old Methodist values around improvement and work. I seem to recall a study in Arnemland (North (wet) Australia) where the indigenous popu…

Nice. I was once accused of having Tourette's Syndrome for "speaking my mind". I was young then and think I am better now but this is the advice I needed :-)

I used gopher before mosaic! And yes the issue is not the tech, but the social engineering of a community. Git(hub) has a community; IMHO GitHub users need to put more cool things …

The original idea was there with html 1.0. The lesson we needed to learn was that some think you can't sell stuff to do things if doing them is simple. https://en.wikipedia.org/wik…

Did people here see the Cory Doctorow thing a few days back about DMCA and "Article 6 of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive"? https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalitio…

The point is the opportunity created by trump's tariff policy. Saying do what I want or I'll burn your house down, and then burning your house down - you no longer need to do what …

My great, great grand dad carted telegraph poles for the construction of the southern half of that! Family oral history.

And the Chomskybot analysis is quite enlightening..

Fair. The background reading is the EMCA stuff - conversation analysis cf Sacks etc at, and Ethnomethods (Garfunkel). And Vygotsky cf Kozulin. People such as Robert Moore at IBM an…

There are two things happening here. A really small LLM mechanism which is useful for thinking about how the big ones work, and a reference to the well known phenomenon, commonly d…

I think it will absorb at least as many hours as doom scrolling, and be much better for me.

Programming languages were originally designed by mathematicians based on a Turing machine. A modern language for FPGAs is a challenge for theoretical computer science, but we shou…

The real reason it won't end up in a park is not the engineering. The problem is the same one as NPCs in computer games: synthetic characters are, to date, just really transparent …