I saw people blaming the flooding in Berhampore and Newtown on intensive housing. I agree that all residential development needs to treat runoff better, but when you see the amount of runoff from vegetated hillsides it’s clear that it was just the sheer amount of rain that did it.
Quickly, cheaply…and well? How do you know it’s accurate and complete?
Three racks of fudge bars, labelled lemon cheesecake, dark forest and cheeky-nana, with grotesque uncanny valley illustrations showing, respectively, an Aryan nuclear family, a dead-eyed red riding hood with a plate of fruit and misshapen faux-Oreo cookies, and a banana being dipped in chocolate by a monkey-slash-sleep-paralysis-demon. A sign underneath these abominations says “Prestige Fudge NZ”.
Seriously, what in the Wolfgang Willrich is this nonsense?! Blonde, rosy-cheeked mother and child clones wearing clothing that is part 1890 and part 1950, with a brown-suited father who resembles the unholy offspring of Noel Edmonds and JD Vance. One of the dead-eyed apple-cheeked children of the corn is about to pierce a glutinous yellow cake with a fork that has been twisted into eldritch non-Euclidean forms by the tortured neurons of an LLM.
Can’t even go to the supermarket without getting GenAI slop pushed in your face. These unheimlich nightmares make me never want to eat fudge again.
So sorry to hear that. Hope everything goes as well as it can.
Not necessarily. I’ve seen that all all levels…though the demand for said knowledge-shaped objects usually comes from management.
I like this thread, but unfortunately I’ve worked in far too many places where “the production of text, or knowledge-shaped documents” is indeed the goal. The answer isn’t LLMs; it’s reforming the organisations to remove such busywork. But that seems to be too hard.
I’m guessing that commenter wasn’t from Wellington.
It’s the exact same set of gears that unfairly chewed up Metiria and it absolutely deserves harsh critique. But even an unfair clock grinds the right person into paste twice a day
“I am sitting in a Gallery, different from the one you are in now. I am recording rumours and I am going to play them back again and again until the resonant frequencies of the Gallery reinforce themselves so that any semblance of meaning, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed.”
WHERE is it circulating RNZ? WHERE was it posted? WHERE did Jones appear? Why should that platform matter, profoundly, for any critical appreciation of what he said? What has that platform seeded, and spread with regards to what Jones noted, and how? What's he signalling, to whom, & why? #nzpol
Comic of the beetle from the cover of Massive Attack's "Mezzanine" meeting the crab from the cover of The Prodigy's "Fat of the Land".
Hi this joke is for me
This Is Just To Say
I have turned off
the AI features
that were in
the update
and which
you were probably
hoping
to monetize
Fuck you
they were stupid
so unnecessary
and so annoying
Weather events are becoming more frequent, more intense and often times more unpredictable. This is yet more evidence of that behaviour.
Do not expect to have a warning but be grateful when you do and plan as if the next one is going to arrive unannounced.
Red ink line drawing of a Kebab Chef with his Meat Roll. On the roll the pattern from the album cover of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures, which is also the caption under the image.
I thought about going back to the last big damaging flood from Te Awa Kairangi (Hutt River) itself, but I suspect it was decades ago. The flood defences need work, but they’re still pretty impressive. At least, I hope so.
I looked at that comparison too, but it may not be that relevant to today. In that case, the flooding was due to localised downpours around the Waiwhetu Stream catchment, rather than the Hutt river itself. Here’s what Waiwhetu was doing then.
A picture of a rather dilapidated copy of "The picture of Dorian Gray" There is visible water damage to the cover and the plastic cover is yellowing. Obviously, not evident from the picture but there is a truly foul musty smell emanating from it!
Last week, a gentleman returned this rather dilapidated copy of this famous book to us after 50 years. He had found it in his attic!
Presumably this means there is a pristine copy somewhere in our libraries....
The publicly available data is quite limited, since MetService is supposed to commercialise a lot of its products. Though it’s decades since I was a forecaster, so I may be well out of the loop on what’s available now.
Reminds me of the (possibly apocryphal) story of a complaint about The Penguin History of New Zealand by Michael King that it didn’t contain enough about penguins.
Thanks! I had a look at that, but the last one seems to be from a few days ago. The temperature and humidity at lower levels has dropped a lot since then, I think, but there might have been something strange going on aloft.
This is not the highest it has been (it would need to nearly double to be the most extreme in the past year of readings I looked at) but it is in the top 0.15% of 5 minute readings for the year
The Hutt River has about 10 times the flow now (in cubic metres a second) than it was having at 3pm [link works in Chrome but seems a bit iffy in Safari] graphs.gw.govt.nz/envmon?view=...
They’re not that interested in not maiming anyone.
New article from @cubaraglanguy.bsky.social with some background to these Wellington floods:
www.rnz.co.nz/news/weather...
Cripes! I suppose they must be worried about the piers eroding.
Update from Hutt City FB page: The river is rising quickly. They are closing both Kennedy Good and Melling bridges overnight and not reopening until they've been assessed by engineers in the morning. Get home, sooner rather than later. Roads are already closing.
www.facebook.com/plugins/post...
Palantir are about six months away from ordering their employees to leave audio logs scattered around their offices
Yes, I’d like to think that with all the good work that’s been going on a breach of the stopbanks would be highly unlikely.
Plot of stage (water level) for the last few days, showing a big spike in the last couple of hours, higher than the previous spike a couple of days ago.
For context, a plot of stage (water level) from the same site since 1 Jan 2026, showing that it’s currently the highest it’s been all year.
I’m keeping an eye on Kaitoke as a possible leading indicator of what might happen downstream (disclaimer: IANA hydrologist). It’s rising quickly, already higher that a couple of days ago and the highest this year so far. graphs.gw.govt.nz/envmon?view=...
Hope it helps! Levels are rising rapidly upstream, and it looks like there will be at least 12 more hours of heavy rain in the catchment. But hopefully it won’t threaten the stopbanks, so without localised downpours like the Waiwhetu floods a few weeks ago, it mightn’t be too destructive. 🤞🏼