Jon Massey

Ah shame, still looks cool tho

Performing desirable behaviour and "virtue signalling" is also absolutely core to human society.

It's why we tell kids that stealing is wrong, rather than just that it's illegal and punishable by law.

Living in a place where people only treat each other well when forced to by rules would be AWFUL.

Absolutely Dan. Do those of us who think, for example, the Iraq was was foolhardy, unjust, and illegal think any less of the men and women who put life at limb at risk in its commission? No. That's the point of military service, its value sits apart from moral judgement of those who direct it

Hippo play sculpture going on public display at Poole Musuem (2025)

Hippo play sculpture by Peter Hand (1969), Arndale Shopping Centre, Poole

🦛 🐋 🐢 The Poole play sculptures have come out of hibernation!

Originally installed in the town’s Dolphin Centre (formerly the Arndale Centre) in 1969, the wooden Hippo, Turtle, and Whale sculptures were by renowned artist Peter Hand (1929-2024). 🧵

What does it look like on a TT? Does it all just fling to the outside?

YouTube video by Medlife Crisis Screening Saves Lives! Right??

Trying to bring a bit of old fashioned classic twitter-era medical discussion to Bluesky!

Made a short video about the huge Prostate Cancer Screening study just published in @nejm.org. Regular media and social media docs have, predictably, made a hash of the results #medsky
youtu.be/OQ7g1lQ26s0?...

The Joiners and The Croft now under community ownership - hell yeah

Not that anyone cares anymore but here's the source: youtube.com/shorts/ak_gb... . Schmoyoho "some tiktok dj" ?! Get off my lawn etc.

La Chouffe, Eccles cakes, and a couple of very playful ferrets - what a great way of spending the evening

So yeah, even for quickie one-off prototypey type things of sufficient complexity, good test driven development practices can make your life miles easier in the end. (fin)

But you know what? For this bit of work I ended up writing a bunch of tests because in many cases I could tell the end result was wrong but without lots of stepping through the debugger I couldn't tell where/why, and couldn't tell if my fixes broke something else. 10/n

The other thing is for the past couple of months I've moved into a "research innovation" team where we move fast, make prototypes with low expectations of reliability and initially I thought "yay, I don't have to write as many comprehensive tests/be beholden to coverage reports" 9/n

Painful, but ultimately throwing it all away and starting again armed with the knowledge gained by doing it wrong at least once was the right decision and resulted in code that was far easier to reason about. Not sure I could yet say for sure how to detect when that decision point arrives though 8/n

I rewrote the two main modules of this (scraping/parsing, applying rulesets) completely from scratch at different points in the past week or so. In both cases, the difficulty of trying to write tests, or address test failures made me realise I'd taken a fundamentally wrong approach. 7/n

At several points my colleagues suggested just throwing an LLM at it, but in this instance I just fancied the challenge and because there was no "gold standard* to test against it would be hard to know the correctness of either my or the LLM's code I felt hesitant. A couple of stray reflections: 6/n

The dataset as presented on this site is designed for a human to read and interpret and make decisions based on a set of categories in the dataset and rules in (inline, or in linked mass of pdfs) guidance notes. I needed a full set of all possible categorisations, having applied all these rules 5/n

Through lots of iterations managed to get all of the types of weirdness accounted for, initially trying to make polymorphic parsers but then eventually just making a bunch of transformers to put everything into the most regular form html provided and then parsing that. More pain followed ... 4/n

So decided to "just" scrape their website - probably quite brittle ultimately but only gets updated about once a year so can deal with breakage as and when. 20/22 "chapters" follow broadly regular structure with relatively easy to infer semantics, the rest is just a shit show (hand edited html?) 3/n

Had similar woes trying to get data out of the VMD/DEFRA/EMA during my PhD. In all cases my polite pleas were met with a "computer says no". My boss suggested FOIing it (which we've done before) but that felt a bit nuclear and might just end up with a malicious compliance result. 2/n

Been on a real slog lately at work, trying to get access to important data from public body which only makes it available via a badly structured website. I'd be surprised if this website isn't driven by some sort of structured data source (although with the wonkiness of the website maybe not) 1/n

You've clearly never met his brother, Steve Degrees of Parallelism

Train pricing insanity:
SRD <-> OXF (change BRI) arr 1024 £83
BRI <-> OXF dep 0900 arr 1024 £33
SRD <-> BRI dep 0835 arr 0846 £1.50

£48.50 more expensive to do the same journey on one ticket instead of two

Inspired by The Jase's video, I realised that the Mr Blobby song also works quite well with the John Lewis advert. But then it took a dark turn...

CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE - Mailing Cheney's Heart - Funranium Labs With the exception of the old Pu-238 pacemaker, as hospitals & mortuaries prefer FedEx for some reason, all of these things have been sent through the mail by the USPS. Whether they should have is the...

To celebrate the earlier occasion.

This is something I worry about for myself, as alluring as the convenience is. I've used it a couple of times to get over the "activation energy" but have rewritten for clarity/style/functionality/belligerence reasons

Id love to speak to anyone who wants to put in a PhD application to this call and might want me as a supervisor?? Get in touch!

Was called HowsMyCow. Used a top down depth map of the cow to get a body condition score (how fat the cow is) using an algorithm first developed for sorting gravel & a mobility score - how curved their spine and symmetrical their gait is. Really miss being out in the field with friendly cows!

Used them as part of a semi-automated dairy cow health monitoring/ detection system. Got 3 prototypes out in to farms, was working well, then the company got bought out and the new owners pulled the plug. Fun project tho and eventually led into me doing my PhD so can't complain too much

Anyway, we need some joy, so here's the Egyptian foreign minister being given a Lego Pyramid by the Danish foreign minister.