Stefan Siegert
mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06About me: Male, pale, stale. My interests are all over the place. Some hashtags I have used and followed include:
#programming #rstats #python #foss
#running #juggling #footbag #skateboarding
#books #music #photography #streetart
#physics #mathematics #philosophy
#machinelearning #statistics #ai
#research #academia #science
#generativeart #visualisation
#exeter #dresden #chemnitz #portland
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https://streetartutopia.com/2026/04/22/land-beach-art-sculptures-by-jon-foreman/
Throughout his career, Yomif Kejelcha ran 100% of his marathons in less than 2 hours, but never managed to win even once.
The Xteink X4 is an affordable pocket sized ereader with a community working on improving the firmware. I've had mine for a few weeks now. Here is a guide on setting it up https://hollie.eilloh.net/xteink
It has a magnetic strip on the back that I use to fix it to the back flap of my moleskine notebook. A good combo to carry around to combat that phone addiction.
@hollie@social.coop Looks familiar?
This is hard work, does anyone remember the recipe for a diamond pick axe?
I like the trolley memes subreddit, but it sorely lacks the Koenigsberg Trolley problem.
RE: @appassionato@mastodon.social
The strange loop between my ears has been enjoying this book over the last few days.
Any chemists here? After watching the recent Veritasium on Disappearing Polymorphs, I saw on Wikipedia that progesterone (an important sex hormone) has become more difficult to produce in its more reactive Form 1, possibly due to higher prevalence of the more stable Form 2 in the atmosphere from synthetic production. Could this explain the global decline in sperm count and fertility? A hormonal ICE-9 situation?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ksn5yrsC3Wg
Leibniz envisaged the computer, he worried about spaghetti code and used the battle cry "Calculemus!" ("Shut up and calculate!"). A true visionary!
https://www.leibnizpapers.org/combinatorial-machine.htm
> this proposed device was intended to carry out calculations with letters that represented general terms; in other words, the manipulation of algebraic variables like a, b, and c. Leibniz was essentially conceptualizing a kind of seventeenth-century symbolic processor.
I've been enjoying some 1D chess today.
https://rowan441.github.io/1dchess/chess.html
It took me an embarrassing number of attempts to beat black.
Short Nature piece on scientists abstaining from using AI: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00508-w
Main reasons cited:
- Accuracy, reliability, hallucinations
- Inefficiencies from needing to fact-check AI
- Ecological impact (~ 50 Mt CO2, 500 Mt H2O in 2025)
- Social impact (job loss, skill atrophy)
- Copyright ethics
I strongly agree with: "I don’t think outsourcing it to a large language model is the goal of a PhD for me."
The AI-generated (?) luddite pic is an unnecessary dig though.
"I violated every principle I was given: I guessed instead of verifying. I ran a destructive action without being asked. I didn't understand what I was doing before doing it." -- Sincerely, Claude Code.
It's been quite a few years since I last read Daytripper. It's still my favourite comic.
"Life is like a book, son. And every book has an end. No matter how much you like that book... you will get to the last page... And it will end. No book is complete without its end. And once you get there, only when you read the last words, will you see how good the book is. It feels real. Now go have fun."
As a small action against the Palantir attack on your health records you can use the NHS national data opt-out service
https://digital.nhs.uk/services/national-data-opt-out
Related story: Palantir to be granted ‘unlimited access’ to NHS patient data https://www.digitalhealth.net/2026/05/palantir-to-be-granted-unlimited-access-to-nhs-patient-data/