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Projects
Here’s the stuff I’ve made that I’m most proud of.
Interactive VR Sci-Fi Story
30 minute cartoon
Diary
Here’s my latest posts to the free fediverse, some rambling, some ranting, mostly just commenting on stuff I’ve read lately. Some of it gets syndicated to Twitter but mostly not. The best of it reaches my monthly digest email.
Thu, 12 Sep 2024 17:17:51 +0000
ukpol nhs
Starmer is right that the NHS is broken. My dad's been in hospital this week. I've seen it second hand. It's also actually impossible to get an appointment at my GP. I'm glad I'm not currently really proper sick.
It was always the Tory plan to defund the national health system until it collapsed and then present privatization as the only possible reform.
It's not even surprising that it's the red half of the Tory Party that is in power to do it.
It was Labour that first started to privatize the NHS, that first started the ruinous PFI projects to ensure private capital owned the infrastructure.
Starmer reckons the only possible ways to fix the broken health service is to tax workers, or sell it to capital. He won't tax workers so it's sell to capital or death!
Not even a single thought given to taxing capital to fund a nationally owned NHS of course. Such a thing is unthinkable.
And that is what makes this Labour party actually as Tory as the conservatives are. They believe that the state infrastructure should be privately owned by monopoly capital and the workers can rent it back with borrowed money.
I still maintain they are better: 10% less support for genocide is indeed better.
But they are the same. At least the lot in charge of the party right now.
Sun, 08 Sep 2024 09:58:08 +0000
ukpol racism
Starmer reckons the UK is not a racist country?
Well, the institutions of state are structurally racist such that they would have racist outcomes even if nobody in them had racist beliefs.
Plus about a third of the people do indeed have those racist beliefs. Maybe more within said institutions.
The last government was deliberately stoking racism in order to use migrants as a scape-goat to cover for their looting the nation.
The country's history is of an empire founded pretty much explicitly on racism and exploitation.
But other than that, we're not a racist country.
Fri, 06 Sep 2024 17:50:56 +0000
Gaza / Media
Oh my god, not an American. 😭
A young pretty one? 😭 😭 😭
Oh no, now they've crossed a line.
Western colonial capital will surely reduce support for the genocide by another one or two percent for this!
Fri, 06 Sep 2024 16:20:02 +0000
Not really much change from the usual through-the-door shot today, but hidden around around the corner there has been tiled up a third or so of the height of the wall.
When I bought the massive tiles I'd vaguely thought it might be easier to apply fewer large files than a larger number of small ones.
That's wrong. It's more difficult to have to cut the tiles up all the time and try and place these big unwieldy objects.
Presumably there is an optimum somewhere between meter-square slabs and a mosaic of micro-tiles.
Aesthetically I'd sooner it wasn't tiles at all, just one giant slab exactly the same size and shape as the wall with no gaps. So that's also why I picked the big ones.
If I were able to go back in time I'd say to go with the 30cm tiles not the 60cm tiles.
Fri, 06 Sep 2024 11:30:07 +0000
This month's newsletter is being sent into the email inboxes of all the beautiful and amazing people who asked for it.
Those of you who are so much less cultured it's frankly embarrassing can read it here:
https://dalliance.net/vPre2/aug24
Featuring builder's tales and political ranting and pondering on AI/copyright plus loads of great videos in the links section. That Over-powered Netherlands video is great.
Fri, 06 Sep 2024 10:16:54 +0000
Read Greg Egan's "Teranesia". Well, re-read, coz I couldn't remember if I'd read it or not. Some of the start seemed familiar but I couldn't remember the end. Maybe I didn't finish it before? Didn't have the paperback so maybe I lost it.
It's a nice story about an orphaned kid going back to the place he lost his parents, and also a brilliant genetic and quantum conundrum of how and why evolution seems to be going into overdrive on that island.
Greg's great at the nitty gritty of the science and that's why I love him.
Thu, 05 Sep 2024 14:47:30 +0000
A failure day where the trains couldn't deliver the worker to the work site followed by a day in which more of the wall is built, and the tiles start to be attached to the wall.
Those gray tiles are massive, and it turns out also much thicker than the red ones. Didn't think about that at all when picking 'em.
Builders apparently have techniques for compensating for this depth disparity though so I won't have indented red stripes.
Apparently these big thick tiles are too big and thick for the tile-cutter too so special equipment will be needed.
Mon, 02 Sep 2024 18:16:14 +0000
Wait, what? National Novel-Writing month is some kind of organisation not just a hashtag?
Next you'll be telling me the #caturday corporation is thinking of including robot cats.
Mon, 02 Sep 2024 18:07:06 +0000
See, Labour are completely different to the Conservatives, this is like 10% less support for genocidal wars for a start.
Mon, 02 Sep 2024 14:50:43 +0000
Trips to the tile-supply store and the rubbish-dump has changes the character of all the junk filling up my flat. Less of it's rubbish, more of it is tiles still not tiled.
Construction of the panel hiding the pipes and cistern has begun, a frame now exists for it.
Sun, 01 Sep 2024 12:13:29 +0000
Watched Succession in which Brian Cox plays the aged leader of a corporate media empire and his family are all scheming and backstabbing each other to be the one to take over.
It would seem that taking control of these kinds of corporate machinery is mostly a question of convincing everyone else to back you, including the bankers. The whole setup is a confidence game. Whoever gets the most confidence gets the crown.
And yet why would any of them have confidence in any of the others at all, given that they all betray and scheme against each other all the time?
Engaging to watch them all as they plot and gather support but it's not the kinda life and I'd want to live at all, not the kind of friends I'd like to collect.
Can you even have love and friendship when the stakes are that high? Kings and courtiers don't have real relationships, only alliances and strategic affiliations.
Fri, 30 Aug 2024 22:07:59 +0000
Hello @llamasoft_ox !
Glad you stayed around on Fedi.
I was talking to @inpc and saying how there is such a thing as a light-synth that a person can play while doing a live-stream. To make pretty pictures.
And I realize I've never actually played one or know what it's like to do so.
Are you using a midi-keyboard, a game-controller?
What is the best way to play with your best light-synth right now with steamdeck or linux or is there even a VR?
Or i'm-not-Phil-Collins might be using Windows or Mac actually, I dunno.
Does the light-synth take a midi/wav input to make it all beat on time?
Fri, 30 Aug 2024 15:05:15 +0000
Sink removed, skirt-board removed, the rest of the wall broken down, everything is stripped.
Construction materials have arrived. Mostly wooden boards and beams.
The bath-outlet is pretty high apparently, and the shower-basin will need to be above that height, so some of this wood will build a stage on which to place the shower unit.
The rest will rebuild that wall, only longer to also contain and hide the new toilet cistern and accessible stop-cocks.
And I guess also new skirt and stuff, I dunno.
This is my weekend then: Wobbly toilet with bucket-flush, no shower, no bath, not even a sink in the loo.
Will have to wash my hair and sponge-bath in the kitchen sink at some point in the weekend.
And next week, things should start being built instead of just destroyed. 🤞
Thu, 29 Aug 2024 20:19:16 +0000
Turns out there are two water-inputs into my flat.
I guess this is probably why I can safely shower while the washing machine is running. I've lived places where the shower would stutter or boil if someone made a cup of tea, but that don't happen here.
Thu, 29 Aug 2024 20:08:37 +0000
The stop-cock replacement was made more complex with the realization that we can't disconnect the water for the whole block after all, because that stop-cock is also broken.
😬
Turns out there are two water-inputs into my flat. The mains connection plus also a tank in the roof.
Nobody seemed to want to explain why. Something to do with pressure maybe. But if mains-pressure can fill the tank in the roof can't it also blast my shower?
Anyway, both inputs to the flat have broken stop-cocks, plus the one that feeds the whole block is broken. How do you deal with that?
The mains-input stock-cock does actually just-about work if you get enough leverage on it that you nearly break the pipe. So they can close that one, add a new tap after it, turn turn it back on. Now I have two stop-cocks there and only one is broken.
I think with the other one they drained the entire tank then replaced the tap live when it was down to a drip, something like that. I was mostly working. Dunno what was going on. Splashing and swearing.
Heroes frankly, I was suspecting there'd be months of delays while the bankrupt Thames Water postponed replacing the block's stop-cock.
Thu, 29 Aug 2024 14:46:56 +0000
I now has no bath, no cistern.
Wall fully removed, many old pipes removed.
The toilet has been removed and the sewer pipe under it dredged. If it had a cistern it might finally flush okay again now! The old pipe there had much much limescale and apparently a trapped flushed plastic bag.
But we can't know for sure coz it'll be just flushing by pouring buckets into it till the new one is fitted.
Tue, 27 Aug 2024 19:05:01 +0000
#ukpol starmer austerity speech
I don't really understand what the point of this morning's little address to the nation was. Just purely to lower expectations? There was no announcement, no occasion, no event.
Just "Hey fuckos, thanks for the votes, now I'm gonna stomp on you all. Bwahahha! Did I say, it's the old guy's fault. You're in for so much pain though. Bwahahha"
No reason I can fathom, just a de-motivational speech from a leader: Hey everyone, I promise misery! Moral will not improve!
Maybe he thinks he's ripping a mask off, revealing the truth of how he'll govern after the lies during his selection, and the other different lies during the election.
Under it all I'm even more austeritan and less willing to tax the rich than I revealed, either time! Your poor clods are in for it now.
Tue, 27 Aug 2024 13:25:41 +0000
Made worse, and that's all that can be done today apparently. Can't really do most of the work until the stop-cock is replaced coz can't unplumb any plumbing.
At least I get the afternoon with the flat to myself.
Mon, 26 Aug 2024 13:47:40 +0000
Goodbye old broken bathroom, you were often annoying and usually dirty but mostly at least worked.
I have dyed my hair in you for the last time.
Things will get worse over the next week or so before they start getting better.
Bookmarks
A list of the last few things I’ve enjoyed reading/watching or sometimes bookmarked to read later. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed here or follow the little robot on the fediverse that toots them out as I bookmark them.
Prepare for Execution - DYNAMO DREAM - Ep1 Pt2 - YouTube
Ian Hurbert's latest is like he scripted the whole thing to be as difficult to shoot as possible and then went and excelled at every shot. So beautiful. The only point of that coat can be the make the lighting harder. #film #cgi #watching
Stumbling and Mumbling: Playing by the rules
StumlingAndMubling on Labour's apparent rules:1. Accept the media's framing of economics. 2. Don't challenge the power of capital.3. Increase profits.4. Don't engage with the left.5. Let money talk.
The End of Western Pluralist Democracy - Craig Murray
Craig Murray on the state crackdown on anti-genocide protestors: "Palestine has the legitimate right of self defence against the illegal occupation."The occupying power Israel has no right of self defence. That is the plain position in international law."Yet in the UK, it is legal to offer full throated support to Israel’s genocide and to wish that all Palestinians are exterminated."IDF participants in genocide happily move between Israel and the UK with no legal consequences."Yet it is illegal to support certain Palestinian organisations when engaged in legal acts of armed resistance."
How might LLMs store facts | Chapter 7, Deep Learning - YouTube
3Blue-1Brown video on Multi Layer Perceptrons, the other layers that aren't attention layers in a transformer AI like GPT.#maths #video #ai
Why Ukraine Suddenly Decided to Invade Russia - YouTube
Strategy analysis of Ukraine's counter-attack back into Russia.
Signal Is More Than Encrypted Messaging. Under Meredith Whittaker, It’s Out to Prove Surveillance Capitalism Wrong | WIRED
I remember being a little worried when Moxie left Signal but I need not have worried because Meridith is well cool. She gets it. She's hip.
We Traveled Back in Time. Now Physicists Are Angry. - YouTube
Kurzgesagt on time-travel and tachyons and all that.
Elon Musk buys a pub - YouTube
Matt Green doing two minutes on "What might happen if Elon Musk bought a pub?" is fun.
Does this audio illusion fool you? - YouTube
Veritasium's video on sound illusions and the methods a brain uses for sound perception is good. Remember first having my attention drawn to those phase-beats when learning to tune a guitar. #video #sound #perception
God Bless Bitcoin | Full Movie | Documentary - YouTube
"God Bless Bitcoin" is a 90 minute documentary film explaining what bitcoin is and why it might be better than government money.Despite the name, it's mostly not about how much God thinks bitcoin is better. Only a bit of it is about that.It's a pretty good summary of the state of the argument. I mean not even-handed of course, it's very arguing on one side.The five minutes where they're explaining why Buddha and Jehovah and Allah all love bitcoin was a bit weird though. Guess you have to speak to people with those delusions from within their own delusional mindset, and there's a lot of them.
Why the Netherlands is Europe's Most OP Country - YouTube
The Netherlands is Over-Powered. They fight the sea, they fight the land, they fight the silicon. They are power.
The Instigators – George Monbiot
Monbiot knows who to blame for instigating riots: "Rather than developing a coherent policy, it chose to keep redefining extremism, to exclude the bigoted elements in its own base and focus instead on environmental protesters and peaceful campaigners contesting the unfolding genocide in Gaza. The police kept warning that the far right was the fastest-growing terrorism threat in the UK, but the government did nothing."
A.I. ‐ Humanity's Final Invention? - YouTube
Kurzgesagt on evolution of intelligence and possible AGI catastrophe. The first three minutes are a great exploration of how billions of years got us to now. I don't really know where most people start disagreeing after that.
Where Facebook's AI Slop Comes From
investigation into Facebook's spam problem.
Democrats have begun belittling Republicans with a cruel mocking epithet … and they don’t like it! | First Dog on the Moon | The Guardian
First Dog On The Moon cartoon about calling republicans weird on account of them being so weird.
David Beckham Beach Kicks DEBUNK - YouTube
Captain Disillusion's latest in which David Beckham is shown to be a liar.
Doctor Who @ San Diego Comic-Con: Full Hall H Panel | Doctor Who - YouTube
Three stars from #DoctorWho on stage at #comicCon They're all so sweet.
The Game Theory of AI CapEx | Sequoia Capital
On the AI arms race and misspent capital expenditure: "The arms race between Microsoft, Amazon and Google is thus game theoretic. Every time Microsoft escalates, Amazon is motivated to escalate to keep up. And vice versa. We are now in a cycle of competitive escalation between three of the biggest companies in the history of the world, collectively worth more than $7T. At each cycle of the escalation, there is an easy justification—we have plenty of money to afford this. With more commitment comes more confidence, and this loop becomes self-reinforcing. Supply constraints turbocharge this dynamic: If you don’t acquire land, power and labor now, someone else will."
Crypto, As a Political Characteristic - by Hamilton Nolan
Hamilton Nolan on politics of crypto: "If you are unsure how to feel about crypto, a good exercise is to ask a true believer to explain to you why the US government should be promoting crypto rather than regulating and restricting it."
Nature's Incredible ROTATING MOTOR (It’s Electric!) - Smarter Every Day 300 - YouTube
Smarter Every Day's done a video on the flagellar motor in bacterium talking about how it's structure is investigated and known and the models we have built of it. Pretty cool nano microscopes.
