Mark Cusack

After 30+ years, "Is Linux disk I/O finally fast enough?" floedb.ai/blog/after-30-…

@Gibboanxious Careful now

Only Fools and Horses is NOT better than Father Ted

@spclsmthin Love Donald Pleasence in my timeline.

I worked twice w/Donald and my cousin Francoise did “Cul de Sac” with him. We both liked him immensely. He was very quiet with very refined taste and a great connoisseur of wines. Plus he told scathing stories of the shits he had worked with, most notably Donald Sutherland.

@AlfaMikeNS @philjocar @WilliamShatner Well, there was an HMS Enterprise in the past that was very real.

@philjocar @WilliamShatner They literally named the first space shuttle after the fictional ship he Captained, I think NASA counts him.

As many of you know, I played an astronaut once. 😉These are the real ones. Godspeed to Crew-12. 🚀 The view never gets old and neither does the courage it takes to leave home to quell mankind’s hunger to explore! To the crew:🫡. Bill

@paulg I’m 55 and my entire professional life I’ve been called Cusack. I don’t know why.

Why kids at British schools are usually called by their last name: 17 yo was in a five-a-side football match, and all five boys on the team had the same first name.

@fesshole You all deserve each other.

We use a spreadsheet at work where cells are coloured to show status. Two members of the team will just colour the entire row - all 16k columns - rather than just the necessary cells. It's a petty thing, but I want to murder both of them.

@fesshole I don’t believe this is delivering the intended effect.

I am from a country formerly colonised by the British, one famous for tea. I have found that the best way to annoy British people is to casually drop a teabag in a mug of cold water and stick it in the microwave. I don't even like tea. I do it just for the trolling entertainment.

@liamgallagher @liampurrs Nicely played 🏏

@liampurrs Your welcome

i've learned more english from trying to decode liam's tweets than from school

@Anthony_Bonato Brilliant. Rage baiting before it was even a thing 🤣

This is perhaps the best chapter in any science book

@icelandcricket Under estimate Rockall at your peril, Sir!

Enough is enough! We are a volcanic rock in the North Atlantic, surrounded by other insignificant islands who don't play cricket. But once we have sorted the game here, we will kindly export it around our region and destroy Greenland, the Faroe Islands, Jan Mayen, and Rockall!

@OldRomanProverb @Empireaesth And Maxwell, for christ sake. 😭

@Empireaesth I'll give you everything except inventions and science. Sorry bro, those are 'Merica

Has any people group done more than that of the British? - Largest empire ever - Most inventions ever - Most spoken language - largest and most successful diaspora - Most contributions to sport - Massive scientific contributions All this from a small European island.

@AmbJapanUK Thank you for taking Paddington to watch the greatest team on earth last week.

Honoured to be appointed Honorary Advisor of the Chado Urasenke Tankokai UK Association. Paddington was so interested in tea ceremony!!

@marshyleeds It would be fun listening to Bryn Law’s commentary.

Would be absolutely amazing to draw Wrexham in the FA Cup fourth round. Leeds (as United) have been in existence 107 years this year; Wrexham for over 160 years (they’re the third oldest football club in the world) - astonishingly, we’ve never faced one another!

@GrahamSmyth There’s got to be some retrospective action and a ban for that.

The behaviour of a pathetic little man.

@DireStraits77 Urgh, this reads like AI crap.

Mark Knopfler ended one of the biggest bands in the world while it was still printing money. There was no feud. No collapse. No creative drought. He stopped Dire Straits because it was working too well. By the late 1980s, Dire Straits had crossed into a rarefied category of success few bands survive. Stadium tours, global saturation, and an album—Brothers in Arms—that sold tens of millions made Knopfler’s voice and guitar infrastructure in the music world. MTV, radio, corporate sponsorships—everything amplified the machine. The system did not expect a pause; it expected scale. Momentum was the job. Knopfler was expected to repeat the formula. Bigger tours. Longer runs. Fewer limits. Industry language was practical and unyielding: you do not dismantle a machine at peak efficiency; you refine it and keep it running. The cost, however, was already showing. Endless touring hollowed out the work. Writing became transactional, performing felt compulsory. The band’s success required a version of Knopfler that no longer aligned with how he wanted to live or make music. The system framed it not as danger but as privilege—a golden cage disguised as opportunity. He could have coasted for decades, repeating a formula that had been proven across the globe. Instead, after the 1991 tour, he shut Dire Straits down completely. No farewell spectacle. No reunion roadmap. No negotiation phase. He dissolved a globally dominant band because continuing would have required turning music into maintenance rather than creation. The consequence was immediate. Relevance narrowed. Stadiums disappeared. Cultural volume dropped. Solo work drew smaller audiences and less certainty. There was no replacement machine waiting—only quieter rooms, and full control. The industry treats decisions like this politely, then reallocates attention elsewhere. Knopfler never reversed it. No reunion tours. No legacy revival cycles. He accepted a permanent reduction in scale as the price of ownership. His later work traded reach for authorship, sacrificing mass exposure for creative freedom. Years later, he said he wanted to be able to walk down the street and live like a human being. It was not nostalgia. It was boundary setting. By stepping away, he reclaimed autonomy over music, over life, over the story he wanted to tell—not the one the system demanded. What unsettles is not that he walked away from fame. It is that the only way to keep music intact was to dismantle the system built to amplify it. Sometimes the most expensive thing is staying successful once success no longer belongs to you. Knopfler’s choice shows that true ownership of art sometimes requires surrendering its amplification, even at the peak of achievement. #MarkKnopfler #DireStraits #BrothersInArms #MusicLegend #ArtistAutonomy #CreativeFreedom #WalkAwayFromFame #MusicIndustry #StadiumTours Written by @JgSzymon

@Kaju_Nut What convinces you that the current LLMs are capable of coming up with new physics rather than recycling old ideas?

I expect widespread adoption of AI as a computational tool by theoretical physicists in 2026. Most are already using it for lit review, learning new topics etc. but many are under the impression that AI still sucks at calculating, even though this has changed. Significant productivity boosts expected. It is harder to how AI will do in generating new ideas. AIs, especially when a generator-verifier method is used, are evidently capable of coming up with genuinely new, nontrivial ideas. But they are so hit-and-miss that they need human intervention. I expect AI-lead papers to become a common occurrence in certain fields of physics (especially those involving coding) but still fairly rare in formal theory.

@tomhfh Be on your way.

‘UK’ is a horrible soulless term that only became popularised this century. Get rid. Next time you’re about to write or say ‘UK’ - stop, think, and replace it with Britain or British instead. RETVRN.

@Keir_Starmer And can you pinpoint exactly when you thought this was a good idea?

I’m delighted that Alaa Abd El-Fattah is back in the UK and has been reunited with his loved ones, who must be feeling profound relief. I want to pay tribute to Alaa’s family, and to all those that have worked and campaigned for this moment. Alaa's case has been a top priority for my government since we came to office. I’m grateful to President Sisi for his decision to grant the pardon.

@Blue_Footy They’ve probably both done a ton of strength training on their own between clubs.

Calvert-Lewin is no longer getting injured since he left Everton. And Callum Wilson has been fit since he left Newcastle. What is happening? 🤔

@Sunlundy It was a good game and a fair result can’t believe some are saying that was boring! Hope we both stay up. This league would be better with us both.

Leeds have no worries of relegation if they play like they did second half. One of the best teams we’ve played at the SOL this year #SAFC