Peter Russell

Have you tried coffee or beer?

The first time I became aware of him as an AI influencer was his PyCon keynote (which admittedly wasn't that long ago, but feels like a long time). Don't generate slop was something he was saying back then.

According to a Stack Overflow answer, the aliasing behaviour depends on whether you're using C or C++, but it's designed for (utf8) text.

I think I saw a comment on YouTube saying that there's now a thing called char8_t, and it exists for precisely this reason.

I for one am really enjoying them.

Yeah, it's not very surprising that being Googlable wasn't a high priority at the company that brought us .Net.

Well it's only a story because the Chancellor made a big deal out of it. If she hadn't had the press conference, we wouldn't be here. As a punter it does seem like what she said was spurious at best.

The accusation, as I've understood it, is that she was dishonest when she said she needed to raise taxes because of x, because actually she needed to raise them because of y (and also a little bit of x).

Is that right? You'll be far better informed than me, but my impression is that the bulk of the tax rises are for increased spending, not increased headroom.

The risk of acting like you think we might be credulous fools might be far worse than whatever you're trying to avoid.

Same now. I'm not a keen observer of the Labour party, but my impression is that Rachel Reeves remains a good, or even the best pick for chancellor from the Labour benches. Does anyone truly want her sacked? Other than the opposition? So keep her! Admit that it was an error, and move on. 5/

Here's the thing, I don't think either needed to be such a big deal.

I don't think Boris Johnson needed to sack Dominic Cummings. He was the PM, if he wanted to keep a key advisor, in a pandemic, he could, couldn't he? Did he need to tell us that black is white and up is down to do so? 4/

D) The person in question, and then the Prime Minister barefacedly claim that the thing didn't happen. 3/

A) Person does a thing. It's not the sort of thing that a person in that position ought to do.
B) It's pointed out that it's happened.
C) It's plain to all that the thing did in fact happen. 2/

Is anyone else finding this Rachel Reeves / OBR / dishonesty business increasingly reminiscent of the Dominic Cummings / Barnard Castle thing? 1/

A screenshot of the app Libra, showing a consistent downward trend in a person's weight over a period of three months.

Felt cute, might delete later.

@simonwillison.net Have you ever tried your pelican benchmark with PostScript instead of SVG? I've just been playing with Gemini 3 Pro thinking and it's really good at PostScript, but it definitely can't one-shot it.

Star Trek The Next Generation scene. Riker is sitting in quarters, probably in November but we cannot be sure. Some nice gentle orange mood lighting glows in from the future space window. That's about all that's happening visually. Closed caption reads, "The beard is an ancient and proud tradition."

I was today years old when I realised why it's called firmware.

Yes, I guess it makes sense.

TIL you can await in an F string.

I thought it was really eye-opening the way that just choosing a slightly less obvious way of encoding the data gives a free lunch in terms of density. The clapping was a good demonstration too.

I often wonder whether disproportionate punishments could be a good thing. The death penalty is clearly no deterrent to murder, but I bet it would make you clean up after your dog.

How the Brexit debate was flushed down the drain On a scale of one to seven, how well do you understand how a flush lavatory works? This was a question asked by two Yale psychologists, Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil, almost two decades ago. Befo…

@drmaciver.bsky.social I enjoyed your email this morning. I too am a fountain pen user who had previously never thought about the principles of operation of the cap.

It made me think of this Tim Harford post. timharford.com/2019/07/how-...

Out of curiosity: why isn't the existing tier 1 support for aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu sufficient?

I really loved this talk.

That was such a special experience. Thanks again to all involved.

I've got a pipedream of putting a Raspberry Pi Compute Module in my old netbook to give it new life. Kinda like a cyberdeck but boring.

I read that GNU Screen has some support for charset conversion. Is anyone using it? Does it work?

Is there anything else? 6/6

I think I need some sort of software in between the terminal and the shell to convert back and forth. Then I can run with $LANG=en_GB.UTF8 as usual, and I won't leave strange byes on the filesystem. 5/