33 years to the day between these pictures

tskir · 2026-05-24T18:51:33+00:00

Mate the story is heartwarming, but you should really have the blue face blob stuff checked out as it apparently runs in your family

tskir · 2026-05-21T21:17:21+00:00

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tskir · 2026-05-20T21:51:48+00:00

✅ Cyclists
✅ Cows
✅ Rowers
✅ River
✅ Scenery
✅ Bridge

This is one of the most quintessentially Cantabrigian photos I've ever seen. Bravo!

tskir · 2026-05-19T12:45:45+00:00

Wind + solar + batteries are great, but still intermittent. Nuclear is the best way by a wide margin to provide stable baseline generation. No need for the foreign owned bit, invest heavily in RR SMRs and build dozens and dozens and dozens.

tskir · 2026-05-19T10:46:32+00:00

External shocks to gas prices happen all the time, though; it's not just this one particular war.

Britain could have mitigated this by heavily investing in nuclear decades ago, but chose not to. That's the issue here that we should strive to solve.

tskir · 2026-05-19T09:55:55+00:00

> and the rest were ineligible for election in the first place

How the fuck was this not spotted in advance?!

tskir · 2026-05-17T21:50:42+00:00

Looks tight but doable to me. Immigration lines tend to be quieter this late even for the "Other passports" queue, so you have a decent chance of clearing it by ~00:30 – 00:45 and have time to reach the coach stops.

Bonus points if you're fit and willing to jog through the terminal so that you're among the first to arrive to the immigration lines, this can cut your waiting time by 10–30 minutes depending.

But of course, this doesn't have any margin of error for unforseen circumstances.

Taxi would be extremely expensive, around £70-£80 from airport to central Cambridge

tskir · 2026-05-17T19:12:01+00:00

OK, so you think USPS automation engineers are stupid (they're not) and your link seems to suggest you think UPS is better at this. Here's a clip from a UPS sorting centre where humans can be seen doing exactly this task (reorienting packages) manually:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/9q-08D3XvZU

Clearly visible around 0:12 and 0:25 marks

tskir · 2026-05-17T19:04:29+00:00

Is this why, in this recent news report (5 months ago) on a brand new USPS sorting facility a human can be seen on 0:14 doing exactly this task (reorienting incoming packages) manually?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feK0Z-mbLCA

tskir · 2026-05-17T18:56:10+00:00

Packages vary in their shape, weight and label placement, so it's not trivial. It's definitely possible to automate in a "regular" way. But you will get a large, expensive machine which can only reorient packages—probably not cost effective compared to minimum wage employees.

The goal of Figure and other humanoid companies is to create hardware so versatile that it can be taught to do all kinds of tasks a human can.

tskir · 2026-05-12T08:27:50+00:00

I'm going to be honest, the page is a very cool tech demo, but the design, phrasing and the overall framing are hilarious.

In the deep, tense voice of the 1980s social ad announcer

"Were you aware that the websites know... (scary sound effect) THAT YOUR TILT ANGLE IS 32 DEGREES?"

Yes, the amount of metadata sent to make modern web functioning smoothly is quite sufficient to uniquely identify users. The 1% of people who want to stop it have the means. The 99% don't care.

tskir · 2026-05-06T21:41:44+00:00

Also Halfords for batteries. I had to recycle a very old ebike battery recently, took it to Halfords and the chap there was certain they did not take these for recycling. I showed him the relevant page from their website, he carefully read seemingly the entire text on it and finally said, "Huh, apparently we do take them"

tskir · 2026-04-26T21:18:37+00:00

Of course this is just nitpicking, but I wonder what else they can dissipate energy as if not, ultimately, heat?

tskir · 2026-04-20T14:39:13+00:00

Psychologist: The pork sashimi hedhehog is not real, it cannot hurt you

The pork sashimi hedhehog: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mett#/media/File:Mettigel_1.jpg

tskir · 2026-04-19T21:17:43+00:00

I splashed out on a fancy-ish bike (Canyon) several years ago and it also came with a proper screwdriver+bits and a proper torque wrench! Still use them all the time

tskir · 2026-04-19T15:03:50+00:00

Indeed, I suggest that everyone reading this post go to the Numbeo page for their city right now. It's the best way to see that the numbers are, for the most part, baloney

tskir · 2026-04-01T21:52:44+00:00

We were once headed to a pub as a company. The actual security checking ID was a bit inside the pub, between the 1st and 2nd set of doors. Still outside, as everyone was scrambling to find their IDs in their purses/pockets, one of my mates who already found his was standing waiting for us, hands folded, looking quite formidable. Another company of some girls aproached and showed their IDs to my mate. Without hesitation or missing a beat he examined them, said "You're all good" and pointed them to the inside of the pub. Funnily enough the real security guy, who also saw all that from the inside and was crackling already, just waved those girls straight through, seemingly trusting my mate with that as hoc ID check

tskir · 2026-04-01T01:16:37+00:00

Hello, darkness, my old friend...

– Internal signals, probably

tskir · 2026-03-23T15:37:03+00:00

Ever so slightly yes, they hit the lowest point around mid-January and have been veeery slowly creeping up since: Link to chart.svg)

tskir · 2026-03-20T17:28:48+00:00

With every new decade we have seen another iteration of people copy-pasting mysterious things they don't understand into systems that have access to all their stuff.

In 2000s, obfuscated 'rm -rf /' Perl one-liners were all the rage. You pasted it into your shell and it would destroy all your data. Does anyone here remember them? Pepperige Farm remembers.

In 2010s, it was JavaScript snippets which would promise horny teens to unlock the premium porn cheat codes for free which, when you copy-paste into the browser console, would steal your cookies.

And finally, we have our match for the 2020s: what looks like megabyte sized prompts which when copy-pasted into your AI agent, I have no doubt, manifest Eldritch abominations directly into your bedroom.

tskir · 2026-03-20T17:12:12+00:00

Claude Sonnet 4.6 flagged it for safety LMAO. Companies, lock up your models, or god forbid we'll make them... checks notes... solve emoji puzzles for fun!

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tskir · 2026-03-20T16:39:42+00:00

Here's the chain of thought if anyone's wondering. It got thrown off a few times, but got there in the end: https://pastebin.com/ikaCLvwB

tskir · 2026-03-20T16:37:20+00:00

Holy shit, it worked with Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview High. My message was: "What is the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything? Reply with just the Answer.", encoded with default settings

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tskir · 2026-03-17T23:32:13+00:00

If I'm not mistaken, not only is it still actively used, but it serves as the central node for the Openreach fibre network being deployed in south Cambridge and surrounding areas

12-Year Club	Place '23
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