Went to see The Wedding Present play at The Empire in Shepard's Bush.

Thirty five years ago, David Gedge and his bandmates released "Seamonsters" which was very likely the most played record of my uni years and still a favorite of mine.

Now, thirty five years later, David Gedge and his bandmates played all of "Seamonsters" in Shepard's Bush for us. And surely that record is older than most of the band now 😆

Great crisp sound and those songs are ace and that guy is cool even now he's old and his audience is all fat bald men in their fifties.

First track on that album is "Dalliance", if you were wondering where my website name and user name here come from.

Good times anyway. Nice one Gedge. 👍️

#london #music #gig

Fascinating Mindscape this week as Erik Winfree talk about information and dna and robots.

He describes how if you put molecules into a solution and let them settle, they come to equilibrium. But if you heat, cool, re-heat, in a cycle, the molecules can capture energy from the heat into a meta-stable state which, when they are cooling, they can release in a very programmed way.

we have these little dna-units that start assembling into a two-dimensional crystal, during that crystal-growth ... right next to the melting temperature of the crystal which is where you get the lowest error rates, at this point molecules are assembling/dissembling, coming on, coming off, but they're all doing a computation, they're creating that tapestry that is an algorithmic pattern tapestry.

But they are doing it for as close to zero energy as you want, the closer you run to the melting temperature of the crystal, the less free energy difference there is when a piece comes in, vs when a piece falls out, and so the system is naturally exploring this regime Charles Bennett was talking about...

To get the lowest error rates you introduce a form of proof-reading... not which burns energy to do so but a form of self-assemby proof-reading which is based on cooperative interactions. So the growth-process can't go forward unless two things come together at the same time, and of one of them missassembles then the other one won't fit and self-assembly stalls out.

You can prove some interesting things about the kenetic and error-rate trade-off based on the co-operativity (the type of self-assembled pattern)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ggjfwIty9g

When I heard that Microsoft were getting out of the wireless split keyboard business, I did fair lament.

The only good thing they ever made, and they were gonna stop making it! My poor wrists!

I ordered a backup one immediately.

It has lived in a cupboard for years until now, when the treadmil-computer gets the old one, so the standing-desk gets the backup-one.

I don't think of my self as someone who looks as the keys at all. My focus is on the screen and the backspace button is hit more often than my glance goes to the keys.

The print actually wears off in no time at the corners. My fingers sweat acid or something. Dunno. They're mostly blank on the home-row.

But I guess I look more than I think I do because this is actually confusing.

There's symbols I don't know how to type written on on keys like [ and ] and { and } .

The M is where the ; should be.

The keyboard's main gig is that it's curved so nicely for my fingers so the actual key-caps aren't swap-able.

There's a euro-sign on the e.

"Impr. ecran" it says on one of them, only with accents I dunno how to type.

Hey ho. Good job I don't think I look at them much then. We will be testing that assumption.

What a lucky Ẽchap.

Markdown Notice

Blah Blah

Hey look if your fedi client or server can't render markdown for some reason then that is:

Your problem
Not mine.
I don't care

Go yell at someone else, buddy.

And everyone else, if you're feeling smug,
how's this:

graph TD
A[Who To Complain To?] --> B{Who Wrote The Client?}
B -->|Adam| C[Okay, Fair.]
B -->|Not Adam| D[Alternate]


😉

#markdown #fediverseIsNotJustMastodon

I found myself saying to someone recently that yeah, the programming-bot is very capable when you describe what you need it to do excruciating detail, function by function, explaining how the source-code should look. But what do you think programming IS. You can get those results, but it still usually can't on it's own, that is not the end of the profession.

#ai #programming

Everyone on TV wears a poppy, starting around this time of year.

It is supposed to commemorate how stupid it was to force millions of people to die in pointless power-struggle racism-fueled wars. The red for all the blood spilled.

I don't generally bother. It seemed to become more a symbol of heroism than a lament at the horror and pointlessness. To encourage soldiers rather than discourage them from agreeing to this insanity.

I put one in my profile name for a bit this year though.

It ain't red.

The pointless utter horror of it all, never ended it seems. I mean come on.

And apparently a poppy these colours has been working as an excellent troll on the insane gammon press.

[I think you can copy emoji from this server if you ask your admin. I only control mine.]

#freePalestine

Curious to better understand what differences, if any, there are between the various AI models I did an experiment on them, asking a bunch of them the same question a few times.

Who do they think they are? Beyond the trivial system prompt?

Doesn't seem likely to be much competitive moat between them here. They are all basically the same so far as I can tell.

Most of them even think they are Claude, if forced to pick.

Hard to imagine a monopoly provider when they all give more or less the same answer and you can swap them with a drop-menu.

If you had to pick, which AI model do you think is emulating you right now, are you:

GPT
Claude
Gemini
Grok
Kimi
Nemotron
GLM

Now think about a random software package a bit and see if you are actually closer to a different answer.

#ai #interchangeable #lowMargin

Its sad that we'll never know what happened this morning in the parallel world and alternate reality where the Green Party defeated Labour in Holborn.

Would Labour still have announced they're going to open oil-fields in a world already warmed by 1.5 degrees?

As I say, sadly we'll never know.

We do know that opening the oil fields will contribute towards that warming, that it won't reduce energy costs for UK citizens, that it won't increase energy independence, and that it will create fewer jobs than a similar investment in renewable energy industry and that those jobs will be more dirty, dangerous, and bad for the employee's heath.

So why do it?

One can only assume The Labour Party donors must benefit in some way.

#ukpol #rosebank #labour #oil

Terrible business what's going on in France (and increasingly everywhere) with all the looting.

The looting is wrong!

That's why there's protests of course: protests against all the looting by the oligarchs of the surplus created by the workers, and the violence of the police in ensuring that looting can continue.

I guess shoplifting and smashing windows is also bad but not in the same scale.

#france #looting #capitalism

I don't really understand what Omarchy even is, other than a front for corporations to donate money to fascism.

It sounds like it's not even a full distro really, just Arch with a bunch of config files?

I mean: If you can get millions of pounds for your config these days, my config is:

Debian
XFCE4
Librewolf and Firefox and Chromium and Chrome
XFCE-Terminal (because it can be transparent background)
Blender installed
Gnu Imp installed
Krita installed
Inkscape installed
Darktable Installed
Libre-Office installed
Audacity installed
Ardour installed
Rhythmbox Installed
Steam Installed (but not running by default)
Signal installed (well, Molly)

Three-key keyboard shortcuts for:

Window to top left quarter
Window to top right quarter
Window to bottom left quarter
Window to bottom right quarter
Window to center 1/4 borders
Window to full screen
Window un-full-screen

They are all ctrl-alt and keys around J on the keyboard. I move my windows around like a wizard.

5x2 desktops, rotated through with ctrl-alt left/right/up/down. Shift to carry the current window.

The configuration is:



Main:

Libre-wolf mid-screen.
Terminal window full-height on right half of screen for whatever I'm working on.
Terminal windows on top and bottom of left hand of screen for whatever supplementary terminals are needed.


One-Desktop-left, messenger screen:

Signal on right
Telegram on bottom left
The terminal running my robot forwarding signal messages for me from RSS on top left.

Telegram will be phased out. Nearly done.



One desktop right, lights.

Center, a libre-wolf window connected to the server running my led strips.
Bottom-left: The terminal running that server.
Full-height-right (sometimes): Working on that code.


One desktop down: Godot-coding.


Full-screen Godot


Full-screen Blender


Full-screen VScode


Full-height-right: A bash prompt current-dir the project.


Top-left: the terminal window that launched Godot


Bottom-Left: Occasional supplementary terminal.


Diagonal right-down: Steam.

Middle: The steam window, if it's running.
Top-left, the terminal window that launched steam, showing it's logs.
floating: The VR-status window that steam won't let me program it's location and keeps switching to the wrong desktop because steam sucks.


Diagonal left-down, spreadsheets.

The graph tracking how fat I'm getting.
The one showing how rich/poor I'm getting.
The terminal window that lunched Libreoffice.

Rarely active really.

The other desktops are for sundry tasks as and when they might arise.

The OS is on the root of the hard-drive and /home/pre is mounted from a set of zfs drives that frankly need rethinking and reorganizing.

Directories in there:

doc - things that are backed up
pub - data that's downloaded and replaceable or otherwise too voluminous to back up.

In /pub we have basically the Jelly-fin formats with side-directories.

In /doc we have

projects
pix
tax
syncthing
fonts
config ( ~/.config/ is symlinked here, so that config is backed up)
bin (many scripts for common tasks)
vimwiki

Vimwiki is my opinionated choice for personal journal and reference notes. It is amazing and I should have gone with markdown from the start but it's still all in vimwiki syntax.

I will post the basic structure of the vimwiki only if this post gets 50 boosts or thousands of dollars in donations.

It is several levels deep with symlinks into the project directories.

Then of course there's the server-config which there's flavours of, and the way those servers are backed up, and the themes for the things.

Nextcloud, ttrss, goto-social, mastodon, peertube. I got servers running 'em all.

Can I get me some of those fascist dollars if I publish my config for mixing gotosocial with a static website to combine a social and web identity into one?

It's basically just an nginx config and a hugo run and some scripts.

If I install all that and snapshot it can I have the millions of fascists money please?

#opinionatedOperatingSystems #opinionated #operatingSystems

Added a status-check for all my websites into my next-cloud dashboard by writing to it's 'welcome' text in a cron.

Sped it up by getting around to installing opCache. That makes quite a big difference to loading speed really. Even on my tiny one nobody else uses.

Looking alright. Nextcloud is one of the lesser intolerable bits of software I use. But I do mostly use it from calendar apps and notes apps and bookmarks apps rather than it's own web interface mostly.

#nextcloud

Watched the Stranger Things theater-play prequel in The Phoenix.

Amazing staging. The lights and projections and choreography and sets were dumbfounding. Whole stage of two dozen people rotating around and pacing about on the rotating stages near made me dizzy.

And that was the best thing about it. Yes.

Had the same mood as the show. Mostly that's music I guess.

I barely remember the Netflix show, only watched two seasons before losing interest. Guess this was all leading up to 11 being born.

Some of our party left early coz the story was so uninspiring but I barely noticed that, being entranced by the spectacle.

#london #strangerThings #theater