Scary Mary Branscombe

This was a great show tonight in London and someone in the queue was the source of a phrase I expect to treasure for *years*: emotional support hatchet

even harder to ignore than someone wrong on the internet: someone wrong in the literature

Jamvent is wonderful and in five years I haven’t had a problem getting the jams out, you just open the cardboard door and pull them out? The Virgin Wines gin advent calendar doesn’t ship to the US I believe but it’s great. If I was in the US I’d get the Dandelion chocolate one.

I can get to Turing in 3, Jobs in 2, so I can get to an awful lot of people from there

Microplane in a format that means you can’t keep your fingers away from the sharp bits? NOPE

You know, I always thought when I got my first “why are you wearing a mask” jerk I’d use my trusty “when are you going to stop using toilet paper and toothpaste” but I jumped straight to “did you know long covid can cause erectile dysfunction that stops you getting an erection” 🤷‍♀️

Didn't want to press them to the grindstone

What code was it running locally and was it remote updateable, do you know? The plan with space edge is to rent out the compute to third parties

Thanks!

Indeed!

BELT?

You know you're in the right queue when the nice people behind you are talking about their friend with the emotional support hatchet

🤷‍♀️

Why not just make massive changes when the whole reason for pulling the feature is lack of development and maintenance resources…

I’m trying to find the specific software stack Nokia and JEWL were using to prototype spacesuit 4G

So the JWT runs local JavaScript to task the telescope rather than sending remote control commands, Planet’s Dove satellite has an NVIDIA GPU to run AI models on imagery locally to eg track forest fires or missiles real time…

Edge compute means about 36 different things but it’s basically putting computing power at the furthest edge of the network- on the moon, in the satellite, so you analyse data/compress images/run control programs at source rather than remotely and increasingly do it with mainstream tools

No, they very much do it by trying, failing, iterating and taking notes. “Waterfall”planning and comprehensive design documents are anathema and ESA is mainly mentioned as a whole nother lot of regulations they don’t like (see the recent FCC space race 2 default to yes approach)

Absolutely encourage you to try wading through all the arguments on both sides in the article, word count in skeets doesn’t let me easily recapitulate what folks like @doriantaylor.com told me about universal utility

I can’t remember what the site actually said when it was live, all the descriptions are a bit jokey in the image - sometimes being playful works but not always and I suspect not here

There are always an almost infinite number of things browser engineers could be working on; I’ve written a lot about how they try to prioritise and how commercial pressures mean some of that discussion still stays confidential

I understand the intensity, it’s sad we’re losing XSLT and it’s not good that the discussion fragmented and got into conspiracy theories and shouting so much that the technical discussions retreated to the more closed spaces

Apart from the “don’t want to” that’s very much what they do say, at least in the WHATNOT minutes but literally none of the big three browser teams were able to get on the phone with me and talk this through; the situation got very polarised very quickly and that blocks discussions

There is no easy solution here because teaching literature and getting kids to pass exams are two entirely orthogonal processes

Which is what you really want, you show kids the set books and hope it makes them want to read more like them - but then you teach the books so they can pass the exam and in many cases that drives out all desire to read books like that ever again! Maybe fragments are better, more intriguing?

I ended up reading twice as much German literature because I changed schools and exam boards so I read the set books for two different exams. because of a timetable accident I actually read the books for 3 different German A levels which was great and ended up with me reading way more for pleasure

of Cicero’s letters, one volume of Thucydides… at least at university we were encouraged to read around the set books.

We were taught by fragments because that’s what exams covered. One book of Orwell, one Shakespeare play or a selection of poems; one book of Böll or one Durrenmatt play. Even at university- one book of Ovid (out of the 15 volumes of Metamorphoses), one book of Plato, one Aristophanes, one selection

literally in the last fifteen years we have gone from "yeah you can just copy someone's Facebook cookie from being on the same wifi" to "end to end encryption that's resilient against all but a small number of very determined nation-states is table stakes"