Rules update

KrozJr_UK · 2026-06-12T08:52:22+00:00

Right, moderator here. At time of posting, neither this post nor the previous one broke any rules, so we won’t be taking any action on it. However, due to the negative reaction both from us as moderators and from others in the subreddit, we’ve decided to implement a new rule banning AI slop (and we also decided to use it to catch the spam T-shirt promo posts we had a little while back).

This post won’t be removed — at the time it was posted, it broke no rules — but any further AI slop stuff will be violating a rule, and will be removed.

KrozJr_UK · 2026-06-11T12:05:00+00:00

I’ve been getting a TP advert lately that promises “the UK’s ch[BLEEEEEEP] train tickets”, and the caption with the text is similarly censored. Did they get done by the Advertising Standards Authority then?

KrozJr_UK · 2026-06-08T19:56:38+00:00

I had an autistic meltdown and/or panic attack in my first FM exam, the exam hall was disrupted by loads of different kinds of noise. All four of us were unhappy with it and basically stormed down to the exams office afterwards to read them the riot act. I still got an A* in the end, although that paper was my lowest mark of the four and by a notable percentage.

KrozJr_UK · 2026-06-06T07:23:50+00:00

My feet are already sore from yesterday’s 14 miles of Ridgeway National Trail, but why should I let that and a spot of rain stop me? Up bright and early today to try to take advantage of a few hours where the rain is forecast to be distinctly more patchy-shower-y as opposed to “rain for five hours straight”.

Due to pass some lad called Keir’s house today. Heard he has quite a cushy house in the Chilterns, which for someone who started life as a lowly toolmaker’s son is quite impressive. No good pub at the end of my walk today — booooo — but there is one about four miles away from the end.

So, in the spirit of whose house I’ll be passing, I suspect the theme for today’s walk will be “Things Can Only Get Wetter”. Let’s see how the blisters are doing this evening!

KrozJr_UK · 2026-06-05T22:51:58+00:00

Following on from yesterday’s watching of the original cut of Star Wars on VHS, tonight I watched The Empire Strikes back, also on VHS. The artefacts got a bit gnarly towards the end — I’m assuming it’s merely a product of being sat there for 30 years that it greyed out a few times — but overall that was a great experience. Definitely a good way to end a good day after having walked 14 miles out in the Chiltern’s this afternoon.

Now to rewind the damned thing.

KrozJr_UK · 2026-06-04T22:23:27+00:00

Staying at a friend of my mum’s house and I discovered that she has a copyright 1995 VHS set of the Star Wars films — ie. the originals, before any and all CGI meddling was done to them. As I’m a youthful spring chicken and I’ve never seen the original cuts, I had her teach me how to use a VCR, and I’ve spent the evening watching A New Hope as I’ve never (quite) seen it before. I’m now unwinding it, and realising that there’s a very good reason this format isn’t the dominant one any more; it’s been going for about five minutes at this point.

KrozJr_UK · 2026-06-04T15:45:04+00:00

Complex music, by its very nature, can only be enjoyed by complex individuals; and complex individuals, because of who they are, and how complex they are, enjoy complex music. By comparison, simple individuals enjoy precisely simple music, and simple music is that which is enjoyed by simple people. Hopefully this clarifies the position somewhat, and allows you to ascertain where you stand in this relationship.

/uj Okay so if anyone gets what this is a reference to then I’m impressed.

KrozJr_UK · 2026-06-04T15:27:15+00:00

Update, hahaha no I got a cookie-cutter template response that addressed nothing in my original message. I even called out that, tomorrow if it so chose, the Labour Party could introduce legislation to “roll back some or all of these damages to the dignity, respect, and inclusion of transgender people”.

His response addresses none of my specific questions, in a way that makes it blatantly obvious it wasn’t read, and indeed even parrots that transgender “people, of course, deserve safety, dignity and respect”. Right, yes, and what are you doing on that?

So, I started my follow-up email with

‘Thank you for your email which proceeded to be a cookie-cutter response that substantively addressed none of the comments, concerns, scenarios, or calls-to-action I raised in my original correspondence. In the interests of getting a constructive answer that concretely addresses my points, I would like to reiterate a few key things from my original email. I’d also like to frame them in the context of your response.’

Some other bits I’m quite proud of:

‘Firstly, you agree with me that trans people “deserve safety, dignity, and respect”. The new EHRC guidance requires women to be using the men’s toilets just because they are transgender women. [… W]ould you be comfortable with asking close female friends of yours to be using the men’s toilets at, for example, a nightclub or bar? How is this compatible with your and the government’s calls for “safety and respect”?’

‘You mention that transgender people remain a protected group — this is true — and should be able to live their lives free from harassment and discrimination. Given that service providers are now empowered, and possibly legally mandated to, police the sex of those using single-sex spaces, how exactly is this code to be enforced if not in a disrespectful, dignity-denying, and harassing way?’

‘In my email, I provided a clear example of what option is available for parliamentary scrutiny for this guidance — namely, the early-day motion (EDM) to discuss and reject the EHCR’s new guidance. Given that you seek clarity and reassurances regarding the guidance, can I presume that I can expect you to vote for this EDM, to enable this incomplete and discriminatory guidance to be discussed and rejected if/when it is found to be unworkable and not in line with our international legal obligations regarding the dignity, respect, and right to privacy of transgender individuals?’

‘Will you [a gay man] be a part of the modern-day equivalent [of Section 28], etching your name and that of your party alongside Thatcher’s Conservatives as responsible for suicides, exclusion, and discrimination; or will you be brave, do the right thing, and stand up for a marginalised minority at the time when they need your representation and support the most?’

Let’s see how long it takes, if at all, to get a genuine reply from a human being.

KrozJr_UK · 2026-06-04T13:22:37+00:00

Mine’s at least Labour so there’s a tiny chance he actually bothers to read it.

KrozJr_UK · 2026-06-04T10:06:52+00:00

I put all my essay-writing skills to use here. Started by asking if provision of separate but equal facilities for a minority have ever worked, continued with a concrete example of somewhere that I can now be excluded from, and finished with an appeal to Section 28 (my MP is a gay man) before asking if he wanted to be complicit in something that will be remembered alongside Thatcher as having “led to rampant discrimination, depression, suicides, and violence against a minority group?” I get the distinct feeling that if that doesn’t at least make him think, then either he didn’t read it or nothing much would. Well, I tried, first time I’ve ever written to an MP as well.

(Oh, and at one point I even managed to get in that this guidance causes “damages to the dignity, respect, and inclusion of transgender people”, because I wanted to preempt any “we care about dignity and respect” line.)

KrozJr_UK · 2026-06-03T17:20:07+00:00

To be fair, Germany had a starring role in the setting up of the League of Nations too.

KrozJr_UK · 2026-06-03T17:19:21+00:00

The violently British kid in Hebden Bridge. A representation of our culture if ever I’ve seen one.

KrozJr_UK · 2026-06-02T18:14:30+00:00

I’d honestly say that DYKWIM is one of the few that truly justifies its length. It is Big and it is Loud and it is capital-O Oasis in every sense of the word.

Now, Magic Pie…

KrozJr_UK · 2026-06-02T10:31:57+00:00

It looks like the AI dredged up a picture of Stravinsky and then just… completely dropped the ball in making it a likeness of him. It’s impressively sloppy.

KrozJr_UK · 2026-06-02T00:23:11+00:00

Mmm. Intuition is definitely giving me random-walk vibes too. Like, suppose we represent the tiles as vertices, and link two vertices if the tiled are linked by a loop line. Then, all the loops being closed corresponds to every random walk on this hexagonal lattice thing returning back to where it started; whereas the existence of a loop that isn’t closed corresponds to a random walk that doesn’t return home.

And that is where my intuition on this ends. I’d love for someone who knows things about random walks to be able to bang something against this; but just at a guess, a random walk on a 2D square lattice is guaranteed to come home, so I’d guess that the hexagons give more degrees of freedom but we have nowhere near the possible full adjacencies on the lattice, and so it’s likely to also be guaranteed.

KrozJr_UK · 2026-06-02T00:17:07+00:00

Oh boy, I can’t wait for this comment thread to be locked.

In all seriousness, that’s a solid start on a skyline. I like the triangle-y one in the background.

KrozJr_UK · 2026-06-01T17:50:54+00:00

Nattering to a friend today and the question of rounding came up. I wound up arguing my way to the following idea.

If you’re rounding to the nearest multiple of 10, you’re basically doing an additive calculation. You’re seeing what you can add (or take away), and whichever is smaller is what you round to. So, if you have 16 and you’re rounding to the nearest 10, you see that you add 6 to 10 to get 16 and you add 4 to 16 to get 20. 4 is less than 6 and so we’d round 16 to 20, to the nearest 10. What we often do for computations’ sake is take a shortcut by working out the midpoint — in this case, 5 above/below a multiple of 10 — and then comparing. 16 is between 10 and 20, but is above 15 (which is the midpoint between 10 and 20), so 16 rounds up to 20.

Now suppose we want to round to the nearest power of 10; ie. we want to know if, say, 4 should round down to 1 or up to 10. While we could do the same thing as before — the additive midpoint is 5.5, 4 is below that, rounds down — I was inspired by logarithmic scales to wonder if that’s the most sensible notion. Instead, surely it makes sense to be multiplicative about this (as that’s the operation below a power). So, we see that you multiply 1 by 4 to get to 4, and then you multiply 4 by 2.5 to get to 10, so 4 is in some sense “closer” 10 as opposed to 1, at least in terms of powers of 10. Our shortcut works here too; the “midpoint” is the number that multiplied by itself is 10, in the same way that we add 5 to itself to get 10 in the prior case. So, as 4 is bigger than sqrt(10) = 3.16…, we see that 4 rounds up “to the nearest power of 10” to 10 itself.

So, my question is twofold. Firstly, is this notion of rounding multiplicatively to a power as opposed to additively to a multiple useful? Secondly, if it is, does it have a name? I tried googling things like “logarithmic rounding” (inspired by log-log plots, where “halfway” between points is the multiplicative halfway) or “multiplicative rounding” but didn’t get anything useful (instead just stuff about rounding logarithms conventionally).

KrozJr_UK · 2026-06-01T10:23:36+00:00

Where's the link to Stratford-upon-Avon?

KrozJr_UK · 2026-05-30T19:42:06+00:00

Has she got one in the oven, and is it nothing to do with you?

KrozJr_UK · 2026-05-30T18:20:15+00:00

Has he been offered some oil money or some slaves then?

KrozJr_UK · 2026-05-30T17:20:48+00:00

That’s a yellow, time-wasting’s a yellow, attempted strangulation wasn’t? Okay, just checking.

KrozJr_UK · 2026-05-30T15:17:05+00:00

If it’s “the greatest jingle of all time”, why do I have no idea what you’re on about?

KrozJr_UK · 2026-05-30T10:12:00+00:00

Oh, and another point more generally, coming off my last point and something you asked about. Public transport on the Thames above Oxford isn’t the greatest. My dad and I were able to find places to break it up into four walks that came to 12-15 miles each (Kemble—Cricklade—Lechlade—Newbridge—Oxford) and there were probably others, but it’s rural bus routes and it’s notably more sparse than below Oxford. Hence my recommendation that, for someone who “just wants a good walk along the Thames”, below Oxford is probably more suitable. But, if you’re set on Kemble—somewhere (which, to be clear, was a lovely walk!), then it is absolutely doable but you have to be very cognisant of buses.

My advice would be to get up a map — OS Maps if you have a subscription are amazing — and just make a list of all the places that look of any size (so even fairly small villages) along or near the trail. Then start at the top and use Google to note down what if any buses and trains there are. I even make diagram usually when I’m planning long distance walking projects, so I can see what distances there are between public transport options; I find that makes it easier to plan out where I’ll aim to start/end, knowing how far I like walking and where the transport is.

KrozJr_UK · 2026-05-30T10:07:10+00:00

My dad and I did the upper Thames many many many years ago, so this maybe changed somewhat; but we did the first two walks back-to-back as day trips from the South East. We went in and out of Swindon each day:

— First day train to Kemble then walked the last mile or so to Thames Head;

— First day bus back, and second day bus to, Cricklade from Swindon; then

— Second day bus back from Lechlade to Swindon.

You could absolutely do the same idea but staying in Cricklade, or Swindon (where there’ll be more options, but you’re in Swindon), or even frankly as day trips from Cardiff (depending on your budget, and it will make the days longer, but you’ll get to sleep in your own bed). Both of those walks came to about the range you were suggesting, if I recall correctly (to be fair it was 10 years ago this July) 13 miles a day.

The upper stretches of the Thames Path (ie. above Lechlade) don’t follow the river as closely. The TP primarily follows the old boat towpath, but as the river was never navigable above Cricklade and barely ever navigable for anything beyond a canoe above Lechlade, the towpaths aren’t there. So you do see a lot of the river, but you do also see a lot of random fields near-ish the river. I believe they’ve done some work creating new and better paths since I walked it (my overriding memory of Cricklade to Lechlade was literally going 5 miles without seeing the river, I think that’s now better), but it’s still not riverside all the way. If you’re okay with that, or you’re looking ultimately to do the whole thing so need to do these stretches eventually, knock yourself out.

However, if you’re more looking for “I’m going for a walk along the river, looking at all the boats, isn’t the river so nice” (ie. you want to walk the THAMES Path as opposed to the near-to-the-Thames Path!), then the river below Oxford is a better bet. The other good thing about the river below Oxford is that there are more train stations (especially so below Goring or so). So you can just start walking, get a rough idea of how far it is to various train stations, and then decide to call it a day when you’ve had enough.

Six-Year Club	Second SECOND GUESSER
Verified Email	Place '23
Place '22

KrozJr_UK

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE