Another data point: I've occasionally received emails from people outside the UK beginning "Dear Billy (if I may), ...".

(They may.)

Yep! Completely normal in the UK. But I admit I'm aware it's different elsewhere, and I'm never sure how to address people when emailing internationally.

Anecdote: I once (pre-PhD) received a bilingual email from someone in Germany beginning "Dear Billy, sehr geehrter Herr Woods,"

I can't think of anyone I'm not on first-name terms with, even in formal contexts. That seems to be the norm over here.

My mnemonic is to never use any of these honorifics. (This might work better in the UK than elsewhere.)

is there another technology in modern memory that's needed this kind of full court press to convince us it's inevitable?

Anthropic is having a month | TechCrunch A human really borks things at Anthropic for the second time this week.

The "careful" "AI Safety" company that just accidentally leaked its entire source code to the world is the one that African governments are entering into agreements with to include in infrastructures from health to god knows what.
.
techcrunch.com/2026/03/31/a...

💜

Talking to some undergrads tomorrow about the why no one actually pays us to type model.fit() and asked them ahead of time to submit answers to a "trivially easy" data problem

Fun to see the results come it, wild to know how many business run with a not dissimilar fog of war

Equally committed to excellence in education and research - "dual intensive" universities A small but select group of institutions excel at both teaching and research, according to REF and TEF results. Anthony Forster introduces the "dual intensives"

one of the earliest instances of the phrase i've ever heard, and it comes from somewhere uncomfortably close to home: wonkhe.com/blogs/equall...

hello from a mathematician who is probably about to be made redundant, repping their trade union's merch

A screenshot of a post on X (formerly Twitter) by Mark Shearman MBE (@AthleticsImages). ​The text of the post reads: "After today's excellent decision by the IOC.,if the Rio 2016 women's 800m. was held today, the 3 medallists in my photo. Wambui, Niyonsaba & Semenya would be barred and the medals would go to Canada's Melissa Bishop, Poland's Joanna Jozwik & GB's Lynsey Sharp @AthleticsWeekly" ​Below the text is a photograph of several female track athletes running a race on a blue track. Prominently featured in the front pack are runners wearing race bibs that say Wambui (wearing a red Kenya uniform), Niyonsaba (wearing a green, white, and red Burundi uniform), and Semenya (wearing a green and yellow South Africa uniform). Several other runners, including one with the name Arzamasova, are visible trailing slightly behind them.

The push for sex verification tests is rooted in racism and they're explicit about it. Not a surprise they want to eliminate the 3 Black women in this photo.

I think we need to celebrate the death of Sora a bit more. This is a technology that, just MONTHS AGO, we were being told was going to literally destroy Hollywood and Disney was going to give them a BILLION DOLLARS and NONE OF THAT EVEN REMOTELY HAPPENED

(This is to say nothing of the fact that we are recognising these unfamiliar formants in familiar contexts - e.g. a pitch-shifted English sentence is not the same thing as an isolated syllable in a language I don't speak.)

Pitch something down and it sounds like a giant, pitch it up and it sounds like a mouse - we intuitively link formants with vocal tract size in this way. So it doesn't surprise me that we can recognise unfamiliar formants, especially when they're in familiar positions relative to each other.

I'm no expert, but: the frequencies aren't exactly the same. Women have higher formants than men on average, and sopranos have higher formants than mezzos, for example. Formant values are averages: actual formants are still coloured slightly by the "timbre" of individuals' vocal tract sizes/shapes.

I think an unfortunate number of professors also have AI brain worms.

"genAI can be used to create podcasts from a paper to teach st-"

Let me stop you right there. Before you feed somebody's paper to a slop machine, invite that somebody to talk to your students about their paper. We're right here. We academics won't shut up about our work, man. 🧪

Wikipedia now has higher standards than all universities

Seeing "trans kids given deadline to segregate themselves" and "trans women banned from yet another part of society" headlines *every single day* while everyone you know and every organization stays breathtakingly silent takes such a damn toll on your heart.

pretty depressed tbh

Like it or not, cursive is here to stay. Those who don’t learn cursive will be left behind. Earlier versions of cursive may have had their problems, but the latest version changes everything. We are only a few years away from a cursive so elegant that it completely takes over civilization.

Re: my last reposts

“Do not put money in the pocket of a woman who has sworn publicly to use it to disenfranchise vulnerable populations” is the smallest ask imaginable. It’s not oxygen, it’s not food. It’s television. You can do without. There are thousands of other shows for you to watch.

was teaching english to a group of chinese students today and one of them asked me "what do you think about LGBT?"

oh boy

ah! i have been using vim for a couple of years now, so we lead parallel lives. i tip my hat to you from across the gulf of the editor wars

oh i don't know most of these!

accidentally close a browser tab? ctrl+shift+t reopens it. you're welcome

same with alt+tab to switch between windows, or ctrl+tab to switch between tabs (add shift to go in reverse order). same with win+d to minimise or restore everything. they're so baked into my fingers by now that swiping on phone screens feels like using a device from the stone age

i know the majority of people are never going to learn more than ctrl+c and ctrl+v, but i swear to god, i use shortcuts like ctrl-left arrow, shift-home, ctrl-del etc to navigate and edit text every day. when people see me do it they normally look at me like i'm performing arcane magic

i use my desktop for most things, but that's because i learnt to touch-type at the age of 8 (thank u mavis beacon). also navigating with keyboard shortcuts is just objectively faster than any mouse or trackpad or screen swiping you can invent. but i admit to most people it looks like magic

Controversial but - students *perceive* they have been failed when what has happened is they have failed to understand information retrieval is a skill requiring effort. I don't believe a zero friction experience is realistic or desirable in learning, actually.