Year: 2025
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As the UK's heatwave continues, the dog and I were delighted that this morning was sufficiently overcast that we could manage a proper walk without completely melting.
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A French Bulldog on a forested path, panting happily.
Her breed copes badly with the heat and we've lately had to keep her indoors or in the shade more than she'd like, so a chance to run around among the trees was very welcome!
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I know how I'm SUPPOSED to read it, but when I see this I can't help but imagine a conversation like...
"What shall we call our car wash?"
/waves hand/ "I dunno."
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Google Maps screenshot showing the location of a business seemingly called Waves Hand Car Wash Cheltenham.
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On our family Slack, Ruth and I have a tradition of reacting to one another's messages, where no other emoji seems appropriate, with a "person rowing boat" emoji.
π£
I can't remember exactly how it started. Possibly one of us was using the text search to find the "robot" emoji (probably in reference to our robot vacuum cleaner, which used to be more-frequently found hiding under the sofa than anywhere else in the world).
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But whatever the reason, the game stuck. And because you can leave multiple emoji responses to a Slack message - and because Unicode permits a diversity of gender and skin tone options for this particular emoji - sometimes this results in a whole flotilla of rowboats parading beneath our messages.
And if an emoji armada isn't an excuse to demonstrate the fact that the <marquee> tag still works in most browsers, for some reason, I don't know what is.
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The Local Historian
This week I (again) helped share my knowledge about a nearby stone circle and henge with a group of children from the local school. And I was overjoyed to receive the most-delightful handmade 'thank you' card from the class.
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Doxxing an Imaginary Person?
This morning, Google pulled a video from YouTube belonging to my nonprofit Three Rings. This was a bit of a surprise.
Apparently the video - which is a demo of some Three Rings features - apparently fell foul of Google's anti-doxxing rules. I'm glad that they have anti-doxxing rules, of course. But in this case, the person we 'doxxed' lives on Some Street, Somewhereville. Which I'd like to imagine is clearly a made-up address, but maybe not! -
Found GCA6CCW Purple door
This checkin to GCA6CCW Purple door reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. It's possible that cycling this path wasn't the wisest idea, I realised, as I dodged brambles on both sides. So focused was I on riding safely that I forgot which GPSr I'd brought with me and listening for β¦
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Found GCADCWF Treasure island
After an appointment in Witney I opted to divert my cycle home to find this and the other cache on the same path.
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Historical Tech Tree
Γtienne Fortier-Dubois's excellent Historical Tech Tree is fun and informative, and worth an explore.
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The unrepentant bleppy face of a dog who, without fail, steals the warm spot I've left behind on the sofa within like three seconds of me standing up.
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A champagne-coloured French bulldog sits askew on a blue blanket atop a grey sofa, her tongue sticking out and to the side, as she looks at the photographer.
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Have I posted this joke before? It's all a Blur.
Accessible description: Dan, a white man with a goatee beard and a faded blue ponytail, stands in a darkened kitchen. Turning to the camera, he says "I get up when I want, except on Wednesdays when I get rudely awakened by the tadpoles." Then he holds up a book entitled "Pond Life".
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Firstup Recruitment
I'll soon by starting in my new role at Firstup, after a rollercoaster of a recruitment process that rocketed through all the usual tech job steps... but in barely over a week. What a rush!
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Sometimes LinkedIn's approach to anonymising who looks you up isn't very effective.
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'Anonymised' LinkedIn notification advising that 1 hour ago, 'Founder at WordPress viewed your profile'.
I wonder who that could be? π
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The Last Post for the Nightline Association. How does that make you feel?
Fellow Nightline enthusiast James Buller has written a stirring piece about his decades of volunteering for and around Nightlines, and - as usual - underplays the importance and significance of his work. Here's my take.
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The Huge Grey Area in the Anthropic Ruling
The court ruling that declares Anthropic's use of (purchased) books as training material leaves a curious sorites paradox. If we assume that an LLM trained on only one book (and so only capable of producing content directly inspired by that book) would necessarily be copyright-infringing, at what number of books does that cease to be the case?
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On Being
This week, my friend Boro shared a poem that he'd written. It's simple, and energising, and insightful, and I really enjoyed it.