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Reposted by ben

bleary @bleary.off-the-records.com · 2d

If anyone needs me I will be in the museum, lying down next to the bog bodies.

Did people really memorize phone numbers before cell phones, or is that just a movie thing?
2? Questions
I was watching some old shows from the 90s and noticed people would just dial numbers from memory - like they'd call their friends or family without looking anything up.
Made me wonder if that was actually normal back then? Did people genuinely have all their important numbers memorized, or did most folks keep a little address book or written list nearby?

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ben @eskola.uk · 3d

“Dost thou be”? Good grief.

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ben @eskola.uk · 4d

Glad it’s not just me!

It particularly struck me with the Bach because to me they’re very much equivalent sorts of compositions, basically (as I understand it) all just choral performances of different biblical passages and intended to be performed at the appropriate time of year.

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ben @eskola.uk · 4d

No.

ben @eskola.uk · 4d

I have some bad news for you about the history of fascism and the opposition to it.

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Reposted by ben

Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 4d

Here's a rule of thumb: If "AI" seems like a good solution, you are probably both misjudging what the "AI" can do and misframing the problem.

>>

Comment by Tom Diettrich on a linkedin post reading:

"You can't "test-in quality" in engineering; you can't "review-in quality" in research. We need incentives for people to do better research. Our system today assumes that 75% of submitted papers are low quality, and it is probably right (I'll bet it is higher). If this were a manufacturing organization, an 75% defect rate would result in bankruptcy.

Imagine a world in which you could have an AI system check the correctness/quality of your paper. If your paper passed that bar, then it could be published (say, on arXiv). Subsequent human review could assess its importance to the field.

In such a system, authors would be incentivized to satisfy the AI system. This will lead to searching for exploits in the AI system. A possible solution is to select the AI evaluator at random from a large pool and limit the number of permitted submissions. I imagine our colleagues in mechanism design can improve on this idea."

Original:
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7381685800549257216/?commentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Acomment%3A(activity%3A7381685800549257216%2C7382628060044599296)&dashCommentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afsd_comment%3A(7382628060044599296%2Curn%3Ali%3Aactivity%3A7381685800549257216)

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ben @eskola.uk · 4d

“Control was handed to Greenwich in the 1980s”

I’m not saying that everything wrong in this country is because of Thatcher but it happens more than you’d think.

The Greenwich Wire @greenwichwire.bsky.social · 4d

Campaigners have launched a petition calling for control of the Greenwich Foot Tunnel to be transferred from Greenwich Council to Transport for London.

The tunnel was originally run by London-wide government, but control was handed to Greenwich in the 1980s.

Hand Greenwich Foot Tunnel to TfL, lift campaigners demand in petition - The Greenwich Wire

Campaigners have launched a petition calling for control of the Greenwich Foot Tunnel to be transferred from Greenwich Council to Transport for London.

greenwichwire.co.uk

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ben @eskola.uk · 5d

Somehow Bach's St Matthew Passion and St John Passion are all-year-round music, not just for Easter; but the Christmas Oratorio, like Last Christmas by Wham, can only be listened to in December. #ClassicalMusic

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ben @eskola.uk · 5d

Have you seen André’s response to this? andre.arko.net/2025/10/09/t...

The RubyGems “security incident”

Ruby Central posted an extremely concerning “Incident Response Timeline” today, in which they make a number of exaggerated or purely misleading claims. Here’s my effort to set the record straight. Fir...

andre.arko.net

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Reposted by ben

André Arko @indirect.io · 5d

Ruby Central said some really concerning things today. I don’t think they’re representing the situation accurately. andre.arko.net/2025/10/09/t...

The RubyGems “security incident”

Ruby Central posted an extremely concerning “Incident Response Timeline” today, in which they make a number of exaggerated or purely misleading claims. Here’s my effort to set the record straight. Fir...

andre.arko.net

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ben @eskola.uk · 6d

happiest telecommunications

a black telecoms switch box in the street with a smiley face spray painted on it in lilac

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ben @eskola.uk · 6d

CW: tech racism and transphobia

Ah I see we’re having the “why can’t we keep politics out of discussions about whether we should give money to people who advocate deporting non-white people and exterminating trans people” discussion again.

ben @eskola.uk · 6d

For the third time in three months I’ve taken my kindle out to find it’s made itself unusable. This time within the space of the five minutes it took to change trains. Am I supposed to be doing firmware updates on the District line just in order to be able to read on the way to work?

ben @eskola.uk · 8d

i for one always start every comment in my code reviews with “as a senior Ruby on Rails developer…”

ben @eskola.uk · 8d

i'm sure it's been said before but i'm fascinated by the assumption that the average code sample has its author's credentials and experience associated with it so clearly that an LLM would associate them in a meaningful way

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ben @eskola.uk · 8d

"You are a senior Ruby on Rails developer"

if only it were that simple

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ben @eskola.uk · 9d

Well that’s a new one on me: just got a key stuck down on my iPhone keyboard.

Pressed backspace and it just… kept going. Thanks Apple.

ben @eskola.uk · 9d

Who’s out there actually choosing to buy a “Turner inspired” print instead of a print of an actual Turner? (Especially when said “inspiration” is just “it’s of a train”.)

ben @eskola.uk · 9d

Recently learned Etsy is full of prints of AI-generated garbage being labelled as the work of actual famous artists — e.g. a generic bland glossy picture of a train described as being by Turner. Who buys this shit?

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ben @eskola.uk · 9d

"Don't run Bundler as root. Installing your bundle as root will break this application for all non-root users on this machine."

Good thing there won't be any non-root users. Mind your own business and do as you're told #ruby

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ben @eskola.uk · 9d

But the whole point is to protest against the banning of that group. The banning of the group is a bad thing in itself. That would be true even if the group was (as you claim) “dubious”, because it’s bad for the government to just declare that everything they don’t like is terrorism.

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ben @eskola.uk · 10d

Anyway the solution I found was using #keyd https://github.com/rvaiya/keyd which can correct this with quite a simple config:

```
# /etc/keyd/default.conf
[ids]
*

[main]
leftmeta+leftshift+f23 = rightmeta # or whatever key you'd like to use
```

GitHub - rvaiya/keyd: A key remapping daemon for linux.

A key remapping daemon for linux. Contribute to rvaiya/keyd development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

ben @eskola.uk · 10d

And also because several of the codes it sends are identical to real keys, I can't just rebind all of the codes. (e.g., if I could throw away the shift and win, I'd just bind the F23, but that doesn't seem possible.)

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ben @eskola.uk · 10d

Have been wanting to figure out how to get the 'copilot' key on my #thinkpad doing something useful in Linux (primarily #Debian ) for a little while and finally sat down to investigate it properly.

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ben @eskola.uk · 10d

I think you’re making a valid point, but it doesn’t sound to me like the point that’s being made by the above screenshotted post.

Like, yes, I think you’re right that responding with toxicity is not constructive. But I don’t think that’s well expressed by conflating anti-AI sentiment with eugenics.

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