Ian Thomas

everyone on their third hour of watching the #OpeningCeremony

@gray Was the similarity of the Aldi-brand beans canny, or uncanny?

Several times I picked an item up, assuming it was Kellogs/M&S/Heinz/whatever, only upon closer inspection it turned out to be an incredibly canny use of design/photography/typography.

Popped into Aldi wearing old-prescription sunnies, and I swear the hardest working designers out there are the ones creating packaging that *almost* looks like the big brands but stays juuuust this side of copyright infringement.

Starmer has written in the Express that he will not restore Freedom of Movement. Please retweet if you want our Freedom of Movement restored. We were robbed of our right to live, work, study and love in 30 countries by the worst abuses of democracy in modern British history.

To my tiny group of followers, I'm leaving Xitter. You can find me (and my very infrequent posts) over on Threads (yes, I know other twitter alternatives exist, but I don't have the energy to keep track of them all): @liesdamnedlies" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">threads.net/@liesdamnedlies

@cstegman Blade Runner is set in 2019.

@GaryMarcus Hinton (or somebody on his team) should be fired for that howler. It's absolutely unacceptable.

What was 60 Minutes thinking? I dissect that Hinton interview, and identify a major, major howler right at its core. (You have to type the URL indicated in the Link in top left corner of the image, over at 🆂🆄🅱🆂🆃🅰🅲🅺.🅲🅾🅼.)

@stevemaythe1st @MitchBenn @DHBJones @vizcomic A treasure trove for @secondmentions

As Eamonn Holmes is trending, any excuse to share @DHBJones masterful tribute from the pages of @vizcomic!

@t0nyyates @michaelphe14501 Seconded on the Baroque Cycle. It's a great trilogy, and taught me a great deal about the 17th century origins of modern finance (lots of stuff set in Amsterdam)

@michaelphe14501 No! I'll look into it, thanks.

What new novel or history book should I read? Has to be a page turner, beautifully written, offering days in the company of a fine intellect.

@tgwilson I'll be interested to try it (though will quickly need to learn Python first, LOL) but it does make me nervous about yet more ad hoc analytics code living in Excel...

Python is coming to Excel (for Windows). Intriguing move (that now seems *totally* obvious to me…in hindsight!). techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/excel-blog/…

@danhancox @yorksranter The US versions often focus on adulation of things like Miracle Whip, Twinkies, Velveeta cheese and the like - basically all the ersatz food products that came out in the 50s.

@yorksranter what's the US equivalent? have spent so long looking at the british ones...

the fixation on food in particular as a focus for Proper Binmenism is fascinating - as is the mingling of the occasional historically accurate comparison with deranged and/or racist nonsense

For those of you still hanging on here, I posted about whether the current crop of LLMs can really generate high-quality SQL code for analytics instantly (spoiler: they mostly can't): liesdamnedlies.com/2023/07/the-gr…

A good thread on why @pmarca's essay and pronouncements on the safety of AI are flawed. All the folks on LinkedIn uncritically reposting it should take note.

@HoloMarkeD More interestingly, embeddings could become a de facto machine-to-machine semantic language.

Will the embeddings for a book and all its references be a new medium? Plug it into your favourite chatbot, ask questions and explore over its content.

@alexandr_wang It's pretty good at identifying the location and even the time a photo was taken of a landmark, as with this example of a photo my Dad took of the Sydney Opera House in 1963:

multi-modality on Google Bard (just launched today) is pretty awesome

@quaesita Are there really Data Scientists who believe this? Have they not heard of things like marketing automation, or even just reporting/dashboarding?

Data scientists, while it’s true that you are a key customer for data engineering, you’re probably not the only customer. Modern businesses use data to fuel operations, often in ways that can hum along nicely enough without your interference.

@MollyJongFast Giving Beijing vibes

This seems not great

I go to a lot of CDO conferences. This one, though, I might skip.

@QueefEnchiladas @kareem_carr The balls are actually very tiny, especially in comparison to the aperture and the gap between the pegs, so they're pretty independent. The pegs are in a sort of triangle only because there would be no point having a full row of pegs at the top because no balls would hit them.

The central limit theorem is a statistical law that’s almost like a law of nature. It says that a large-ish number of small, random, independent contributions tend to produce outcomes that resemble a bell curve. The Galton board is an example of this:

Our Summer highlight @SheldonianOxUni features Handel’s electrifying Dixit Dominus and Vivaldi’s ever-wonderful Gloria featuring Baroque trumpet and oboe plus more 🎶 Excited? We certainly are and can’t wait to sing for you on 2nd July. Tickets live @TicketSource

We have two fabulous concerts for your diary 🎶 On 20th May @ExeterCollegeOx we commemorate the 400th anniversary of William Byrd’s death with a wonderful selection of his choral music and that of his renaissance contemporaries #Byrd400 Tickets are already on sale @TicketSource