biofox

"Number 5 is alive!"

I lost the only recordings of my band when Myspace Music died.

At one point, I also had files on RapidShare. They probably weren't of any value, but I have no idea what they were now.

I am the only Brit in the department I work in. No one gets the cultural references or British idioms I use, and I've found myself significantly changing the language I use to a very utilitarian and direct style to prevent the endless blank stares... reading this blog post just made me realise that this self-editing has made my interactions rather more 'flat' and unnatural, as they now lack spontaneity, with everything passing through a secondary filter before leaving my brain.

I got into programming and computers due to their intellectual depth, and the exciting opportunities they opened to explore everything from electronics to obscure areas of mathematics... through to theory of mind and the dream of making silicon think.

The combination of endless trend-chasing, software churn, and techbro culture made me hate everything about software, so I jumped ship to biology.

Oh... I was wondering why every single chat (including "Hello") was being flagged.

Seems I am barred from using Fable just for being a biologist :(

Holy shmoly... I'm a biologist who has used Thermo antibodies before, and this is seriously disappointing to see.

Just discovered the documentary, and it's such an interesting time capsule. That period simultaneously feels like yesterday, and a lifetime ago.

Exactly the same as my experience in the UK.

Ugh... that worked, but I gave up once I got to the home page.

To quote the late, great, Ray Arnold...

"I hate this Hacker crap!"

It can't be a good idea to condition yourself to be comfortable around an exposed wire that's near to a real power socket.

Good luck finding out how to contact customer support. The darkest dark pattern of them all.

Reminding me that early Windows versions used to have this colour as the default desktop colour -- and I remember seeing similar tones on Mac and Unix desktops in the 90s.

https://faculty.washington.edu/ajko/books/user-interface-sof...

That would require technical know-how.

It's much easier for clueless lawmakers to write "the computer check the age", and make it everyone else's problem.

"Privacy isn't a feature — it's the foundation."

"No feed, no doomscrolling — just intention."

"Not your whole address book — just the ones you'd hate to lose touch with"

"You care deeply—you're just terrible at follow-through."

"You care deeply—your ADHD brain just doesn't..."

The Middle English spelling and phonetic shifts are what make it so painful to read. The words themselves though are mostly comprehensible with a bit of effort.

Go back another four hundred years to Old English and Beowulf and it becomes complete gobbledygook (to me at least).

The batteries were either charged using a "telephone magneto", or were taken to a local town to be charged off of mains electricity:

https://www.1900s.org.uk/1920s60s-windup-phones.htm

Very cool to see one comment linking to an old Sears magazine from the 1920s, showing some of the equipment people would have constructed these networks from:

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101066805050&vi...

The thing I'm most amazed by is how "modern" the catalogue is, especially the clothing and phonograph sections.

Did you forget the /s?

Some people mentioned the dollar as the global reserve currency, but there's also the use of English as the global lingua franca, the US being the largest global destination for talent and investment, and countries (previous) willingness to make sacrifices or deal with the US on less-than-perfect terms out of a sense of shared culture.

In silico duckying

What was the reasoning behind that?

SSRIs saved my life. No exaggeration. They might be overprescribed, only effective is some individuals, and they certainly have their share of side effects, but they're still the gold standard treatment for clinical depression and anxiety.

Never used a Virtual Boy, but I'm somehow nostalgic just for the development tool -- grey metal boxes with vents, LEDs, and rocker switches transport me into an optimistic future of the past.

The US embassy in London do this. You can take liquids in, as long as you drink from them at security.

The UK dominated the world in coal production, shipbuilding, factory machinery and textile mills before WW1, and went into steady decline post-war.

E.g. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mikael-Hoeoek/publicati...

That's a sad indictment of tech.

Most underlying technology is timeless (see TAOCP, SICP, CLRS, K&R, GoF, Dragon Book, Beej's Guide, Sipser,...); but we seem set on producing an endless, pointless, churn of frameworks and minor language differences in the name of progress.

I think there is a lot of truth in that. It led to the death of patriotism (which is now considered embarrassing outside of sport), national purpose, institutions, empire, and coincided with the decline of heavy industry (which only happened much more recently in the US).

EDIT: Saying that, there is still a strong positive national identity. We're just too embarrassed to express it strongly (see patriotism), because of our fall from grace.

I work in biomed. Every textbook on epidemiology or medical statistics that I've picked up has had a section on Bayes, so I'm not inclined to believe this.

Thank you. You just unlocked a repressed trauma.

I ask for confidence scores in my custom instructions / prompts, and LLMs do surprisingly well at estimating their own knowledge most of the time.

There has certainly been an overreaction, and it continues to be the case even after efforts have been walked back.

I have yet to hear a good justification for why people who are not interested in programming should be encouraged to become interested purely in the name of equality, yet my institution is still spending huge amounts of public money on trying to achieve exactly that.