Tim Cutts

Shocking coxing from Oxford in the Ladies’ #boatrace. They were lucky not to be disqualified for that.

We owned Canada at the time. Lots of natural resources there…

I believe we make our own warheads. The trouble is the delivery system, Trident. We have control over it, but rely on the US for maintenance.

I wonder whether Starmer has re-written the letters of last resort…

Even Musk seems to think so … he’s changed his X profile image to being a black hole!

Actually, I think she’s talking about British reserve. I would probably avoid a neighbour who put that sort of sign on their lawn. Not because I disagree with the sentiment, I agree with it, but the British generally just cringe at that sort of thing.

Exactly. That’s how I use coding assistants for example. I’m a competent programmer, so I can use it to learn new things but have enough knowledge to correct what it suggests. Same when I use things like Copilot in MS Office.

It takes a lot of awareness to use AI tools consciously so that they don’t rob you of agency. I think this is a really important message, both in home life and at work. GenAI does not replace expertise. All it actually does, at best, is make a good thinker more efficient, by being a source of ideas

I always like @techconnectify.bsky.social content but this is a particularly important and insightful video. Don’t allow AI and algorithms to rob you of your agency. (Moving to Bluesky was a good start!)

Wow. I got blocked for pointing out cherry picking of evidence. This is what’s wrong with debate today. People are completely unwilling to listen to an alternative point of view. That is precisely what leads to the polarisation of politics.

You’re presenting a partial picture. The Falcon has launched 448 missions and failed 3 times. Starship is still in development. Failures are expected, and actually deliberate in many cases. As far as the money’s concerned, as a proportion of the multi trillion dollar budget it’s peanuts

That’s only true of the new starship rocket which is still in development. Falcon and Falcon Heavy are extremely reliable and doing a good service. I abhor Musk’s current activities in the US government, but don’t stoop to the MAGA level and spread misinformation to make a point.

Is governing by executive order any different from being a dictator? Asking for a friend.

Fantastic. That was the only track to select when playing Outrun!

C, no, (I *am* the provider), a/b

That’s good to see. It’s essential for production environments that require deployment through IaC

I’ll contact her - I’m sure her email address will be easy to find.

Yes, the same! How are you doing up there?

Two issues, from my perspective. 1. Do those industries have problems that actually require national facility scale HPC? Or can they actually solve most of their needs with their own modest infra, and/or cloud? 2. It can be very hard to get governance permission to use a shared system.

16/22 - in my defence I was attending remotely and it was getting pretty late in the UK. :-)

Fortunately most big Pharma are multinational and can carry on doing evidence based research and medicine development elsewhere, even if the new US administration tries to make it difficult

Multi cloud is a a different matter. Depends on your use case. If you’re heavily data dependent, such as genomics, egress charges can be a real barrier to multi cloud.

Aha, right, yes, that I do understand and agree with - in fact it’s the future plan for how we’re going to deploy SLURM in the future at AZ, rather than in VM’s or metal today. Makes CI/CD easier too. Want to test that new config? Easy peasy.

I’m going to have to watch that tutorial later. I’ve yet to be convinced as to what K8S adds over singularity containers in a regular HPC cluster. I’m not sure SLURM is the ideal scheduler either; it has enormous mindshare because it is free. But it is complex, inconsistent and arcane, IMO.

It just shows. It’s not being told what to do that they object to. It’s who’s telling them.

I think might have predated my time. Or else I wasn’t in the select group. I suspect Flinty to have been involved? Two curries in a night is quite a challenge. Was a tactical chunder required in between?!

Nothing wrong with cats and dogs.

The challenge will be when the trolls and others with no brain-mouth filter arrive, which they will.

Convergent evolution, innit

Yesterday, a snapshot view of AZ’s main cluster was 15 “proper” HPC jobs running and more than a thousand HTC tasks.

HPC is a much broader term than it used to be. The majority of workloads on any cluster I’ve managed in the past 20 years have been HTC. Yes, we use HPC tools and systems, but how many workloads are there now that really require MPI across multiple nodes, when a single node is 256 cores?

Type safety.