@tuftyindigo@meow.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@johncarlosbaez The chimney effect used to be a design feature in most UK schools. Classrooms were ventilated into tall hallways, so the warm air would rise to the top of the hallway and be ventilated out. Two problems with this model: It's just not effective enough. Most UK schools suffer overheating already and are at "medium" to "extreme" risk of experiencing overheating in a +2°C climate scenario.The central corridor collects air breathed by all the kids, keeps it warm for an extended period, and then everyone has to walk through it several times a day. COVID taught us that this design is one reason why kids get sick so often: every individual infection gets incubated and exposed to the whole school population.

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Tufty Indigo 🪗 @tuftyindigo@meow.social

· 10mo ago

Replying to

@preya Because they don't have shareholders. Camera-based tracking is an AI feature, but they don't need to say that, because analysts at Gartner aren't gonna tell people to sell their Valve shares after poring over every word of the video.

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Tufty Indigo 🪗 @tuftyindigo@meow.social

· 2mo ago

I've been watching a stream of the latest Voices of the Void update, and it looks like it was made by people who are too young to remember the devices it depicts. You have to use a 3.5″ floppy disk to move data between computers. The tower PC clearly has a 3.5″ floppy drive, but the disk is too big to fit in it, and when you use it, it goes into what looks like a CD-ROM drive. It goes in upside-down (spindle up), and then ejecting it pushes it out label-up but with the business end pointing towards you. You also have to ship some reel-to-reel tapes. When the tape is full of data, both reels are full of tape, and you have to put both of them in a container and then ship the container. These smack of just not knowing how these things work. But even so, I wouldn't put it past the developers to make them work wrong deliberately just to troll players.

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Tufty Indigo 🪗 @tuftyindigo@meow.social

· 5mo ago

In an internal work email, I've just been described as "effervescent" by a colleague.

I feel like I haven't been bringing as much of this energy to Masto as I used to. Maybe I'm effervescing too much at work and I've gone flat by the time I get to posting.

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Tufty Indigo 🪗 @tuftyindigo@meow.social

· 5mo ago

Today's thought, inspired by a trip to #JesusGreenLido: If I had a washing line on my bike, my wetsuit could be dry before I got home.

Unfortunately I said this out loud to no one in particular while everyone was standing around packing their bags just before closing time, and caused a ripple of nervous laughter. Truly I am terrorising the regulars with ideas too powerful for them.

meow.social

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Tufty Indigo 🪗 @tuftyindigo@meow.social

· 5mo ago

The Co-Op's new "Aldi price match for members" promotion is weird. If you're not a member, it's just a way of marking which products are cheaper in Aldi and how much you'd save by shopping in Aldi instead

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Tufty Indigo 🪗 @tuftyindigo@meow.social

· 5mo ago

Chestnut Corn has been looking very dirty after years of pub trips, so this morning I'm turning out the stable for a bath.

Chestnut Corn 🪡 Sewpoke
Shining Armour 🪡 Epic Rainbow Crafts

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Tufty Indigo 🪗 @tuftyindigo@meow.social

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@pinakographos The worst thing is, that's probably not even generative AI. They'll be using CLIP for the descriptions, which is cheap but fallible (phallible?) Any VLM would get the right answer here, but that would cost money to run...

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Tufty Indigo 🪗 @tuftyindigo@meow.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@alex@tech.lgbt I think you only have to look at digital workflows in other fields to see how good programming tools are in comparison. We're so accustomed to having (a) non-proprietary files so you can choose an editor and use the same editor for all the parts of your system, (b) a way to see what you've changed recently and undo it if it's not what you want, (c) a way to make sure the whole team is working on the same artifact, and see what other people have changed, and (d) automation that finds most mistakes you can make before anyone else sees them. Other workers tend to have proprietary software and files, so you are always working across multiple applications that can't talk to each other and are hard to automate; no long-term change history; either no way to collaborate beyond "email me your file and I'll assemble all the files together" or collaboration features with no way to see what's changed; no way to define rules for automated validation. Software developers have so much tooling, and that's actually a huge benefit for coding assistants: they're a lot more effective when they can collaborate with you on the same artifact directly, and when they can check whether the artifact is right or wrong without having to ask you.

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Tufty Indigo 🪗 @tuftyindigo@meow.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@plexus Luckily it doesn't make coding several orders of magnitude more energy intensive. Check out this guy's blog: https://www.simonpcouch.com/blog/2026-01-20-cc-impact/ He's a heavy Claude Code user (multiple sessions in parallel), got fed up that all estimates are about the "median user" or "median query", and benchmarked his own use. He worked out that the energy cost of his CC use is about the same as working on a high-end desktop PC instead of a laptop. It's not even one order of magnitude more. If you want to convince people you're not just mourning the "loss" of a hobby that's more accessible now than it's ever been, don't try to justify it with climate misinfo.

simonpcouch.com

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Tufty Indigo 🪗 @tuftyindigo@meow.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@_thegeoff@mastodon.social "And why do we have to all sit on the same side of the table? Nobody has dinner like that."

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Tufty Indigo 🪗 @tuftyindigo@meow.social

· 6mo ago

If I set up an MCP to control a custard pie launcher and a gunge tank, would that be AI slop?

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Tufty Indigo 🪗 @tuftyindigo@meow.social

· 6mo ago

I know this is unfair to say, but y'all need to understand that if KSP2 hadn't got cancelled so early, Artemis II would still be on the drawing board.

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Tufty Indigo 🪗 @tuftyindigo@meow.social

· 15mo ago

Replying to

@SwiftOnSecurity and as the 1's are narrower, it uses a lot less storage space

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Tufty Indigo 🪗 @tuftyindigo@meow.social

· 31mo ago

Replying to

@DotMaetrix@chitter.xyz Now we'll just get out this custom transdimensional biocoding tool that I designed with Dalek Bill...

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Tufty Indigo 🪗 @tuftyindigo@meow.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@jonhendry Do you have any evidence to back up that accusation? Anthropic's figures are not the best in the industry, but they're broadly in line, so while they could be exaggerating a little, it's hard to see how or why they could be far enough out to invalidate his conclusions.

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Tufty Indigo 🪗 @tuftyindigo@meow.social

· 5mo ago

Seasonal decisions were made in the big Tesco.

#Ninjicore

meow.social

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Tufty Indigo 🪗 @tuftyindigo@meow.social

· 6mo ago

I thought I was starting my new job as a chef in a Tunisian restaurant today, but the HR department said I needed to do harissment training.

#puns #jokes

meow.social

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Tufty Indigo 🪗 @tuftyindigo@meow.social

· 5mo ago

As it's #BandcampFriday, it's a good time to donate money to Mermaids by buying my charity album of #SpaceEngineers themed music. It is all-electronic so don't expect it to be like my live accordion music! https://tuftyindigo.bandcamp.com/album/music-to-escape-mars-by

meow.social

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Tufty Indigo 🪗 @tuftyindigo@meow.social

· 5mo ago

Thinking of a furry comic where a couple is kept awake by a neighbouring couple having loud yiffs, then they decide to get their own back by being louder. Both couples start being turned on by hearing their neighbours' fun, until they decide to just have a foursome.

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Tufty Indigo 🪗 @tuftyindigo@meow.social

· 5mo ago

Had a fun night at the #RockyHorrorShow last night, in Cambridge's Corn Exchange. The venue is acoustically tricky but the band worked really well and I thought the music was a lot better than other productions I've been to. Great cast as well, especially James Bisp as Brad, which I think is the hardest role to do well.

Very inspiring and I need to keep working on my accordion arrangement of the songbook!

meow.social

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Tufty Indigo 🪗 @tuftyindigo@meow.social

· 13mo ago

Replying to

@mjd I agree about bugs. I like to phrase the alternative idea as "The purpose of code review is to ensure that at least two people understand the code change." I think it makes clearer the implication that if you don't understand the code you're reviewing, you should ask the author to clarify it. Especially, it tells you it's not enough that you skimmed the code and didn't find anything wrong. If your goal is to understand it and convince yourself it's correct, you're much more likely to find a subtle bug in the logic or external constraint.

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Tufty Indigo 🪗 @tuftyindigo@meow.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@ricci @mayintoronto if "bad at math" means "making contributions to previously unsolved maths problems" https://github.com/teorth/erdosproblems/wiki/AI-contributions-to-Erd%C5%91s-problems https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/amateur-armed-with-chatgpt-vibe-maths-a-60-year-old-problem/

github.com

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Tufty Indigo 🪗 @tuftyindigo@meow.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@simontatham@hachyderm.io I've always wondered what would constitute orthonormal features or settings of a tool or language, and would orthonormality be a good or a bad thing? I've just never worked out what unit length would mean for -i.

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Tufty Indigo 🪗 @tuftyindigo@meow.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@simontatham@hachyderm.io by dotting them with themselves, obvs!

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Tufty Indigo 🪗 @tuftyindigo@meow.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@pomarede@mastodon.social They should have got Schwalbe Marathons, I'm pretty sure they'd still be going strong 😃

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Tufty Indigo 🪗 @tuftyindigo@meow.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@satnam6502@mastodon.social I wrote much the same in https://futur.istic.org/essays/llms-gave-back-the-joy-of-programming/

futur.istic.org

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Tufty Indigo 🪗 @tuftyindigo@meow.social

· 45mo ago

Replying to

@sable@meow.social We have AI for all of those things.

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Tufty Indigo 🪗 @tuftyindigo@meow.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@jonny@neuromatch.social If you're already a strong pianist, piano accordion is the obvious option, and I sense you'd get on best with a relatively dry-tuned instrument rather than musette, which doesn't get on with spicy harmonies as well. Piano accordion is widely available (check pawn shops, people are always finding their grandad's one in the loft) and it's relatively easy to find a teacher if you want one. If you get one with free-bass, you can play melodies on the left hand but I don't know if that would be any easier for your bad finger than a piano. If you use Stradella bass (the more common kind), it's more musically limiting but you can probably get by without using one finger at all. If you like playing in keys with lots of sharps and flats, a 120 bass instrument is worthwhile, but a 72 can still technically play in every key, it's just hard - but you get a much lighter instrument to make up for it. I recommend every musician learn Stradella bass, it completely changed my understanding of the circle of fifths.

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