Listening to radio via the WebSDR based in Twente, in the Netherlands. Came across a German amateur radio operator on 3.782MHz broadcasting in LSB mode. Turns out I have enough German to recognise when someone is talking about his antenna.
Me: "But surely someone could just go to AA anyway?"
Them: "Yes, but this is so someone can go to a group and then discuss how it went in the FAMA group afterwards."
Me: "Erm, okay."
When I first presented myself to my local services one of the things they gleefully mentioned to me was a group called "facilitating access to mutual aid (FAMA)". I was like: "what's that?". "It's a group to tell people about groups they can go to, like AA or mental health support groups".
Sori, Syr Bryn Terfel.
(On watching Y Llais, the Welsh version of The Voice.)
Bryn Terfel can sing well, can't he?
Cute miscommunication 😻
Cat headbutt: Love
Goat headbutt: Play
He's playing you like a fiddle.
He's courting controversy. He knows that making an outlandish claim about it being "fake and gay" (whatever that means) will get attention. And it's worked! Thank you for doing exactly what Delingpole anticipated that you would do.
He skipped church? Well, that's certainly helped me make up my mind about the man.
I always used to wonder what amateur radio operators talked about. Turns out they mostly talk about their antennas.
Spoiler: there were some immigrants. But not that many. There wasn't that much to attract people to one of the least industrialised regions of Europe.
Surely this report doesn't tell you anything that wouldn't be obvious if people actually thought about it for a second. And don't get me started on the lazy clichés in the Guardian's copy.
www.theguardian.com/world/2026/a...
How on earth does anybody take Gary Stevenson seriously. Mind boggles.
No they haven't.
Am I really going to peruse a 1925 book called "A Student's Manual of English Constitutional History" just on the off chance that it contains some useful insight? Yes, yes I am.
And there's nothing anyone can do to stop me.
Going down massive rabbithole about the Nonconformist Relief Act 1779. I'm aware that I'm doing it, but I can't seem to stop myself.
Are you asking me for an exact count of how many academic papers pointlessly cite Foucault? Like, really?
(But is it necessary? Not really. Back in the day you'd look up how to do it elsewhere; but it does save you some thinking time. The danger is when people blindly accept the suggestions without reading and understanding them.)
I think it depends how you use it. I don't write code these days as a rule, but if I do I find myself knowing what I want to do but not being able to recall exactly how to do it - Copilot in VSCode can give you a useful hint in these circumstances.
It isn't just some world where everybody is engaged in the selfless pursuit of knowledge. People are, understandably enough, doing what they do with one eye on their careers. And most people, again understandably enough, don't particularly enjoy having their work trashed.
I mean, re: academic bandwagons look at how many papers published in the 1990s and immediately after cite Foucault for no real reason at all.
Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations thesis is derided by anyone with any common sense, but it nevertheless became obligatory to cite it.
The disputes are often rather bitter because there's so little at stake. And people are incentivised to come up with hot, marketable takes which more often than not involve jumping on bandwagons.
Well, that's the ideal - the reality is rather different. People do sloppy work. There's not adequate quality control because people don't do their best work when working for free. Nor do you get the best people if you don't pay them to do something boring.
The idea that academics are usually inherently trustworthy is highly questionable to me. They should be treated with as much scepticism as anybody else.
Also, obvious and unoriginal observation I'm sure, but the format explicitly making clear that they may laugh when Jimmy Carr is in the room feels a bit, I dunno - designed to stroke his ego?
I'm not planning to get into Last One Laughing, but was intrigued about it after seeing that clip of David Mitchell so I thought I'd give it a look. I must say, it bugs me that Jimmy Carr's name is in significantly bigger letters than that of Roisin Conaty in the titles.
Thing is, I know that there will almost certainly be an AI crash, but I know not when. (If I did, I'd just short the fuck out of Nvidia et al.)
I think if and when I decide to get a new computer I'll probably buy a refurbished business PC in SFF so that I can upgrade it incrementally if I need to.
Yes! Exactly that. I was trying to provisionally see how much a relatively modest build for music production might set me back.
This is what I came up with: uk.pcpartpicker.com/user/daihuws...
Late last night I was dabbling with PC Part Picker when I should have been trying to sleep. I really had not realised how much the price of RAM and SSDs etc. had shot up. Luckily I have no need to actually build a new computer at the moment.
