Rob Vaughan

Woah - just got the Meta offer to pay £3.99 per month for no ads. Read the stuff on what data they collect and realised there's more app locking down required! Tempted to delete tbh

Are Foreigners Draining the Welfare State? | Bearly Politics The Times turns data into dog whistles - here's what those numbers actually mean.

@bearlypolitics.co.uk:

~ Are Foreigners Draining the Welfare State? | Bearly Politics ~

https://www.bearlypolitics.co.uk/p/foreigners-are-claiming-benefits

Yes! eg the recent localhost + meta pixel browsing tracking that they got caught doing...

Updating my LEGO White House

😂🐈

Cat lying on a table on top of a pile of test papers being marked by an individual out of shot

Our cat, helping with some test marking, circa 2017

I mean, what could possibly go wrong? Just being paranoid, right...? I've left it on an old version of the dashboard software 'cos it sounds like the latest version has been de-featured.

Recently sold our car we'd had the past 11 years. Pretty sure it's still rocking the same software as when it left the factory 15 years ago. Whereas our "new" (used) car is internet connected...To AWS as I discovered this morning 🤪. So its geolocation is being tracked 24/7 on a server in the US 😭

Yes! I pride myself in the number of my knee-jerk social media replies I have deleted without ever posting.

But then the amount of wasted time implied by that is not something to be proud of, really!

My cat is fed on a fairly regular schedule by humans. But she generally starts complaining about late food arrival about 2 hours before each meal time, pretty much every day.

Part of me thinks that if a business could organise its data in a properly structured way (more suited to automation) they'd get most of the productivity benefits from that. I guess it depends what the true cost of the AI follow on step really was, to say if that part was worth it?

How does the LLM figure out whether to use policy.pptx, policy_2.pptx, policy_final.pptx, policy_final2.pptx, policy_final_2.pptx? Last saving date is not reliable.

Aero engines have improved hugely over time (that was a mid-1990s design) driven by stricter rules. But airliners stay in service for decades. The physics of birds hitting fan blade tips (usually traveling around M=1 at takeoff) is a really hard problem, given weight & performance constraints.

View of colourful painted wooden houses in Naantali, Finland. Houses are red and yellow with white details.

I haven't posted on here for several weeks. So here's a pic I took in Naantali back in the summer

View of a lone tree on top of a hill, looking out over the Bristol Channel towards Cardiff

Looking SW from Black Down over Burnham on Sea, towards the Quantock Hills

Wild pony in the grass and gorse up on Black Down in the Mendip Hills

Took the afternoon off yesterday and we walked up on Black Down in the Mendips. There was no-one else there apart from horses. Bliss.

Today the Church of England remembers Theodore of Tarsus, second Archbishop of Canterbury, who had never set foot in these isles before being appointed, and who had to learn the local tongue on the journey here.

There would be no British Christianity without immigrants.

When I wanted electricity supplied to an outbuilding on my property the electrician insisted I needed heavy duty cable that had a minimum bend radius of about 30cm, and then it had to be buried under about 10 miles deep of concrete. That installation appears to conform to neither.

Microsoft fixing things worse (that weren't broken):

I wrote "this experiment was a just concept deomstrator" & MS Word suggests I fix the typo by changing it to "protester" 🤪🤪🤪

Another AI benefit I guess

A row of metal beer barrels, with different colour codes, lined up on a sloping cobbled street outside a black and white half-timbered pub in Macclesfield UK. The pub is called The Castle and the street is called Back Wallgate

Macclesfield last weekend.

I am reading the pdf manual for a newish car. It's ridiculously complicated ~600 pages, covers features which are different depending on model.

I am having huge difficulty resisting the urge to click the Adobe AI button that says "explain this document to me" just for laughs

Led By Donkeys have got Fartrage's number.

What an absolute steaming load of tosh. The number of Euros cities with fantastic integrated public transport, good cycling infra etc. this is just shilling for US tech firms trying to sell a product that doesn't work as advertised, and which no-one wants

Hi viz is no use when the driver is looking down at their phone, for example

No photo of me exists which was not taken "when I was younger"

I invented the Space Shuttle before NASA had locked the concept down, and I was only 5 years old. I never get credit for that.

I was annoyed last year when I was forced to buy a front+back mudguard set to replace the rear one on my bike. So when the front mudguard broke last week I was perversely pleased.

Shame I can't budge the eccentric bottom bracket to fix the loose chain tho

Why A-levels don’t matter, by celebrities with careers based on luck and total crap buff.ly/SX03YQB

Linköping was brilliant. Tiny, only about 3 flights per day. Efficient. Friendly staff. Perfect.

Amazing! Huge bonus point for me was the involvement of Straker Squire which was an ancestor of what became Bristol Siddeley, before being taken over by Rolls-Royce in 1966. Located since about 1920 on a site where I have spent a great deal of time. Home of the Pegasus engine.

Spent some overnight time in an A&E waiting area recently. Elderly couple behind me kept up a constant no-holds-barred dialogue of observations & speculations about everyone (visitors, patients & staff alike). Was absolutely hilarious and made the time go much faster