My mentor told me once: "The guy who throws the bomb doesn't make it over the line"

It's good practice to kill with kindness sometimes, it turns out.

This was the first place I was thinking of going lol.

I think there’s a visit to Teotihuacán on the itinerary at some point? I’ll look forward to it

I’m headed to Mexico city in a few hours. Suggestions welcome lol.

We’ll see how much I’m able to transfer my French skills across in a few days 🤔. dw I have low expectations 😂.

Any half decent video compression should be able to handle that fairly easily right

It's funny that everyone who has *ever* programmed, knows how important attention to detail is. Hours wasted because you made a typo, forgot to add a character, etc.

The tiniest thing you literally don't notice is wrong, and your program screams at you and dies.

This is a universal experience.

I cannot imagine learning how to tie my shoes without a pair of chopsticks

It’s cool how taking an image of the moon at half-moon phase is arguably better than a full moon because the full moon doesn’t show the shadows in the craters so well.

Bust-A-Groove: Kitty-N's Song (English Version) YouTube video by LunaLust

Kitty-N’s theme is top tier Eurovision music

youtu.be/pcLox-o5GKU?...

I’m not, but I should probably look around for courses. So far I’m just self-studying, for about 90 mins a day.

I look forward to learning about this (Spanish is next lol)

*similar to te reo than to English

There's also something about the way French handles plurals that seems more similar to te reo than to French in my mind.

I think it's that both languages mark the plural on the possessive and not just the noun as in English. In Mãori it's more like "mys shoe" but in french it would be "mys shoes".

An obvious example is that te reo has the a/o category system, which splits nouns into classes similarly to gender.

Another example is that te reo has a kind of verb-adverb agreement such that if you passivise one you have to do the same to the other, and there are many similar things in French.

There are more similarities between te reo Mãori and French than I would have expected

Foil would probably be sufficient. Like a faraday cage. The point is to block the phone from sending or receiving any kinds of signals.

"If anyone builds it everyone dies" but the "it" is colonialism

C Thi Nguyen has a paper called "Transparency is Surveillance" which is about how forcing expert decisions to be made in an explainable, transparent way can have worse results.

Sometimes vibes are just expertise in a trenchcoat. Other times it can be unconscious bias, but there is no free lunch.

(Often, but of course not always). We have steered students away from other professors but it’s all word of mouth.

My supervisors are both high powered academics and excellent supervisors. They both take supervising their students very seriously and have a similar mentorship philosophy.

I honestly just got lucky. I made the decision based on not a lot of information, mostly vibe. Talking to their students if you can (I wasn’t able to) is certainly recommended.

Also perhaps it’s good to be willing to trade things off. Often the really high powered academics are bad supervisors.

Looking for a PhD program? It all starts with great supervision. Choose wisely.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

"so much depends / upon / a whitespace: Why Whitespace Matters for Poets and LLMs" by Sriharsh Bhyravajjula, Melanie Walsh, Anna Preus, Maria Antoniak

When you read a poem, do you wonder how the poet structures it through whitespace between/before words and lines?

We did! Our findings on whitespace - how to measure/preserve it, how usage varies across form/time, how it affects LLMs - now in an #EMNLP2025 (main) paper: arxiv.org/abs/2510.16713
🧵👇

Hana-Rawhiti accepting the Time Magazine award in NYC is a great example of how the world is really not paying attention to the NZ govt at all.

They can go lose in their Oxford Union debates and kiss up to Trump all they like but they won’t get anywhere near that kind of attention.

Release: Targeted tax to grow the economy and fund free doctor’s visits

#nzpol Labour is proposing to create a Capital Gains Tax on property - excluding farms and the family home. That income will help make GP visits free for the majority of people. Is that a better policy than continuing tax-free profits on, say, someone's seventh property? Absolutely. A🧵

my 17yo niece is part of a choir that won an international championship earlier this week, just casually singing at the montserrat benedictine monastery

she has had a hard start to life and when i was 17 looking after her we would sing phantom of the opera over and over (even the organ parts)

This sums up my week for sure

A more progressive Labour would be better for everyone not just in terms of policy outcomes but also electability

Totally, it's the opposite. The money was there so it would make more money. Now it's going to cover for $2.9 billion dollars in budget deficits that they created by giving tax breaks to landlords and tax cuts to the wealthy.

I grew up visiting my friends and family nearly always unannounced unless it was for some kind of occasion.

I wish we would all drop by each others places more often. In my family, if you just drive past it’s considered rude if you don’t say hi.

Maybe it’s too much for some but I liked it.

If you’re my friend and I’m inviting you over I probably enjoy spending time with you so I don’t mind if you come however early.