Mathew Lodge

@khalafroula Brilliant. Well done! 👏

Crispin Odey abandons £79mn libel case against the FT over sexual misconduct claims giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/ac…

How LLMs Really Do Arithmetic

@bea_johanssen @Steven_Swinford The reason they all use WhatsApp is that the messages do not sit on a server somewhere. They are only on the sender and recipient’s phones. Cabinet office IT gives them secure messaging that is 100% archived to meet data retention regs, and that’s why they don’t use it

@Steven_Swinford It's a red herring. McSweeney's Whatsapp messages didn't disappear with the phone: they sit on the server and were available to him as soon as he logged into Whatsapp with his new phone. Was McSweeney also dodging FOIA obligations - a criminal offence? x.com/AVMikhailova/s…

BREAKING   Scotland Yard has confirmed that Morgan McSweeney reported the theft of his phone to them on October 20 last year   They took down ***the wrong address*** and assumed the offence had taken place in East London rather than Westminster   As a result they could not identify a suspect and the case was closed   The Times has been told officers were 'too busy' to speak to Morgan McSweeney directly about it   Having established the error following the report by The Sun on Sunday they have amended the report   Worth bearing in mind that this was the theft of the phone with the prime minister's number, the number of every cabinet minister, sensitive WhatsApps, messages, emails… you name it. This was NOT an ordinary phone Starmer: “On Monday, 20 October police received a report from a man in his 40s alleging that his phone had been snatched.   “The incident was recorded as having taken place in Belgrave Street, E1.   “A review of the allegation, including a consideration of whether there was available CCTV, did not identify any realistic lines of enquiry. The investigation was subsequently closed.   “In the course of responding to a recent media enquiry, we became aware that the address was entered incorrectly at the time of the initial call and should instead have been recorded as Belgrave Road, Pimlico.   “Having identified this error, the report will be amended and the assessment of whether there is available evidence revisited."

Pretty much my view about PG’s latest, but better expressed by @mipsytipsy There is a kernel of wisdom in his view, but putting founders on a pedestal is a belief they somehow have exclusive access to The Truth. Also, I believe doing hard things should be fun — for all.

@DeborahMeaden .@nytimes ran an editorial last week saying worries about Trump bring a threat to democracy were overblown. Re-running the 2016 “it couldn’t happen here” playbook.

And so into Dictatorship then?

"The font shaping engine HarfBuzz, used in applications such as Firefox and Chrome, comes with a Wasm shaper allowing arbitrary code to be used to "shape" text." fuglede.github.io/llama.ttf/

@deloisivete Bourbon

What wine pairs best with finding out my in-laws are staying two days longer than planned

@TheEconomist Americans have never heard of most of this “deep bench”, and that really matters. You are delusional if you think the governor of Pennsylvania can win against Trump, for example. You have lost sight of the key calculus: who can win against Trump?

The Democrats have a deep bench of talent. Here are brief profiles of ten plausible alternative candidates to Joe Biden who would have the best chances of winning over a divided convention (and who have birth certificates that were issued after D-Day) econ.st/4eR7sZ6 👇

@CeliaRichards0n Completely agree -- Restore Trust's astroturfing should be banned

Today’s Daily Telegraph on the problems with astroturfing. It’s National Trust policy not to install the stuff. telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/07/0…

My team at Gartner is hiring! If you have an SRE, cloud operations, or DevOps-oriented automation-first modern ops background, and are tired of being on call, this is a great opportunity! linkedin.com/feed/update/ur…

@gvanrossum Google Fi is your friend

PSA: According to Verizon tier 2 tech support, all international plan customers have lost access to the network as of 2pm Eastern time yesterday, with no ETA for a fix (could be Monday). I guess a server crashed. Kinda sucks since I'm in Europe this week and next. :-(

GPT-6 will have an advice blog on how to switch from academia to industry

@heidisaint Get a bean to cup machine and skip the faffing with expensive pods. Put in beans and water and get espresso in 15 seconds.

I’m not a coffee expert but I do like a good barista coffee. They’re so expensive now though, iced latte is £4. If I wanted a machine at home that’s easy and sustainable and that I can make hot or cold drinks with should I get a pod machine? I don’t want any faff.

@CeliaRichards0n National Trust not involved in Taylor Swift selfie? Not really The Telegraph’s demographic, though, and not the kind of Billionaire they admire.

Scone eaten: National Trust makes no comment. Family refuses National Trust involvement in its caravan purchase.

@wrd83 @robertgraham @kunaldeo As x86 hardware improved, Linux displaced Solaris for web apps while Windows Server ate Sun’s lunch in enterprise apps. Between them the two OSes drained the Sun moat, with the help of Intel.

@mathewlodge @robertgraham @kunaldeo Honestly i think most of the solaris servers got replaced by linux 2.6

nVidia is in the same position as Sun Microsystems was in the early days of the dot-com bubble. Sun had the leading edge web servers, the smartest engineers, the most respect in the industry. If you were dot-com startup, you bought Sun servers. Smart engineers wouldn't come work for your startup if you were dumb enough not to buy Sun servers. And they charged a premium, their profits went through the roof. Except, well, there wasn't actually anything special about them -- they weren't actually "the best", nothing really was. It's just that they were the least risky option. You knew they'd work, that newly hired employees would be familiar with them, that they were good enough. As a startup, you don't optimize for the efficiency of your systems, you optimize for building the business, like selling pet food, doing auctions, selling books online, and so on. You want growth, not profits. Once you've dominated your market and have steady revenue, then you can afford to go back and fix the efficiency problems. It's funny because back in 1996, Windows NT 4 running on Pentium Pro was a vastly better web server than sun. It's just that Silicon Valley startups couldn't find anybody who knew the system. Techies looked down on "Windows" and considered it a "toy" operating system compared to the mighty Solaris, and Intel CPUs were "CISC" when everyone knew "RISC" was better. Everybody was wrong, of course. nVidia is in the same position. Everyone wants nVidia chips for AI because they are known to work, the techies know how to program for them, and so on. But Intel, AMD, and others makes competitive chips for part or all of the AI stack that cost a lots less. Indeed, Apple's own chips are quiet good -- their Private Cloud could in theory be serviced by racks of Mac Ultra servers. But they probably are buying nVidia, too. When the dot-com bubble burst, Sun crashed, and never recovered. Right now, VCs are throwing vast amounts of money at startups who are in turn sending it to nVidia. At some point, this will stop. Unsuccessful startups will go bankrupt and sell nVidia hardware and office chairs on eBay, successful companies will now work to attain profitability by reducing costs.

@QuinnyPig They have all worn Prada

Pop quiz: what do Henry Kissinger, Whoopi Goldberg, and Pope Francis all have in common?

@JoeBaguley With the hedgehog

@mathewlodge I'm confused - where was the fox?

I asked ChatGPT4o for help with an MBA problem and it gave me something a top consulting firm would be proud of:

There is nothing quite like taking an MBA problem off the Internet, altering one thing to make it trivially easy to solve, and seeing the latest "chain of reasoning" LLM get it wrong because it's just a pattern-matching machine.

@LearNonsense Where does he keep his bus pass?

Waiting for a bus, on Mull.