Blog
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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.
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Sometimes all you need to complete the perfect offset geocache is a GPSr, some hand tools... and the willingness to unilaterally declare a remote bench to be a memorial to a fictional person, just to get a particular set of numbers out into the world!
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Dan, a white man with a beard and long, blue-tinted hair, sits sideways on a wooden bench behind which overgrown tree planting can be seen. On the back of the bench is perched a handheld GPS receiver, and in Dan's hand is a small screwdriver and a hand drill. The bench has a plaque attached (parts of which have been censored for the photo), which reads: In memory of George Oscar Cacher who spent ... years exploring the world. Died aged ..., ... July ....
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Pretty sure there isn't a prize for Throwing Wet Sponges At Children during the graduating year's "fun run" at the school sports day... but just like the kids are asked to, I'm going to try my best. 😁
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Smug Interview Moment
Recently, I got to answer a technical interview question with "Coincidentally, I implemented exactly what you're describing two weeks ago. For fun. Can I show you the code and the blog post I wrote to explain my design choices?"
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Not just a global issue but a local one too. A local one... almost everywhere.
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Series of coloured bars trending from blue to red, representing relative temperature change in Oxford, UK, for the last 111 years, showing a clear average increase of a couple of ℃.
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Did not find GC81KDC Standardisation Roundabout
This checkin to GC81KDC Standardisation Roundabout reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. Deciphered this puzzle when it was first published: so long ago that I'd forgotten the specifics of how exactly I did so (although I'm pretty confident I remember the gist of it). But I don't find myself over …
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Found GC7ZA2Z My Friend Dotty
This checkin to GC7ZA2Z My Friend Dotty reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. In Marston on an errand, I found myself with enough free time to try to find another few local caches. This puzzle wasn't as easy as Dotty's other one, fir me, because for a while I was …
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If this man isn't hired immediately, it's a huge loss
Shortly after I found myself redundant, the other month, my former colleague Kyle wrote some inspiring words on LinkedIn that I've re-read about once a week ever since then. So now I'm going to keep a copy here for posterity.
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Scarecrows
As part of the Village Festival, there's a scarecrow competition around my way with a televisual theme. I love that my local community works so hard to carve out an individual identity and personality for itself!
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Happy Stone Circle Sunday! The youngest and I went out to Avebury Henge, the world's largest neolithic standing stone circle and henge.
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On verdant grass and under clear skies, a boy in a white-and-blue 'Sonic the Hedgehog' t-shirt strolls in front of a line of about half a dozen enormous standing stones.
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Note to future self: when you want git to tell you all the files you've modified, but not those you've deleted (e.g. to pipe through xargs and feed to your linter for bulk-linting), the command you're looking for is -
git diff --name-only --diff-filter=M
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Found GCAPFH3 Cherry Blossom
Third time's the charm. I don't live too far away and I'm often found cycling to, from, or through Eynsham. As a result, I've on two previous occasions come to this GZ with a view to finding this cache... and both times have been glorious summer weekend days when the adjacent café has been brim full of guests, and I've declared it "too muggley" and backed off.
Today, though, is a gloomy and overcast day, with rain on the way and a threat of thunderstorms. So as I cycled by, on my way home from the dentist, I stopped by. I quickly found and retrieved the cache, signed the log, and returned it to its spot.
Now I'd better see if I can pedal all the way home before the clouds burst! TFTC. -
Did not find GC74Z2R Metal bridge cache
Stopped by while cycling back from Witney. Made a moderately thorough search above and below the titular bridge, without success. Might benefit from a checkin/note from the CO.
Maybe I'm just not seeing it, or else maybe it's vanished in the six months since its last successful find. Great place for a cache, though!