Andrew Mobbs (@[email protected])

@shashj @theELN @vertic_org @TheElders @PaxSapiens @Justin_Br0nk "mass still counts"

🐕 LIGHTNING has gone missing on 5 Jan 2023 from Little Bradley #Thurlow #Suffolk #CB9 She was wearing a brown leather collar with a brass tag and has a blue lead rope attached. Please RT doglost.co.uk/dog-blog.php?d…

@eyebrowsofpower Or Beborn Beton?

The government's words: "utilising our Armed Forces for non-emergency, routine tasks where the military do not play a specific and defined role should be seen as an indication of policy failure, inadequate resilience planning or chronic underinvestment." gov.uk/government/pub…

@UKDefJournal Quite seriously, was that generated by ChatGPT? The repeated "In addition to" and slightly wooden phrasing looks a lot like this:

The UK is a major economic and military power, and its strategic importance to NATO cannot be overstated. ukdefencejournal.org.uk/the-strategic-…

@shashj Speculating here... we know there was a lot of work (e.g. Baum, Welch, Petrie, Soules & Weiss, Cave, Neuwirth) on Hidden Markov Models at IDA-CRD in the 70s, and those can be used for cryptanalysis which would have been very computationally expensive at the time.

Germany's new commitments and its contribution to the new EU package now make it the largest donor in Europe in absolute terms, overtaking the UK for the first time, with a total of 12.6 billion euros in German pledged support to Ukraine.

Update #UkraineSupportTracker: Europe has for the first time surpassed the U.S., EU countries and institutions now total nearly 52 billion euros in military, financial, and humanitarian commitments. Main reason is 18-billion-euro Macro-Financial Assistance package.

Thousands of Next Generation Light Anti-Tank Weapon (NLAW) systems will be assembled in Northern Ireland to boost the UK's 🇬🇧 stockpile, following a £229 million deal with @Saab announced today by @BWallaceMP. Read more: ow.ly/Snxc50LXsF4

@PickardJE @pmoore1975 youtube.com/watch?v=uxC1fP…

@pmoore1975 that’s a work of genius even if they did nick the chord sequence off Pachelbel

what’s your favourite space-related song, I’m taking Space Song by Beach House

@shashj Very interesting that it's "Russia has", with no PHIA probability language framing the statement. That does suggest it's past the >=95% "almost certainly" to being a simple statement of fact.

@ootastic Thanks!

@mobbsy Happy (St) Andrew's day ;)

Apparently I've been on twitter since 2008. I'm moderately surprised that it's been that long. I think I saw this new service getting somewhat popular as a way of telling people what you had for lunch, and just wanted the @mobbsy username before somebody else took it.

Kiel (population 250,000) decides to build a four-line light rail/tram network. cost:benefit ratio of 1.47. can raise local funding and also gets € from state and federal governments. nothing unusual about this, except in the UK railjournal.com/passenger/ligh…

@StarkUK What translation are you using for Deuteronomy 28:5 ?

@Flemn8r @t0nyyates I largely agree with that post. Mastodon will have painful scaling issues; for the protocol, the implementations and for individual server admins. That said, they've had an order of magnitude growth in a couple of weeks and broadly coped, which speaks to some engineering quality.

@mobbsy @t0nyyates That's why I'm sceptical that Mastodon will scale to really do what Twitter does without a lot more (painful) optimisation. "Social" (twitter) feels like it has polynomial complexity relative to "narrowcast" (email). Better informed critique at gist.github.com/jdarcy/60107fe…

Best Mastodon tweet I read last night was from the admin of an instance just for himself reporting how difficult it had been to weather the storm of 'tasks' yesterday and bracing himself for today. Has left me puzzling about what a server for one person does.

@t0nyyates However, the success of walled-garden services like Facebook and Twitter (though built on top of open standards, aren't designed for interop at all levels) suggests that some systems are better built as monoliths. I suspect there's some social and economics drivers for that.

@t0nyyates That success has led to a mindset in some (many) software developers that the answer is open standards and interoperable protocols regardless of the question. It also speaks to the libertarian techno-utopianism tendency, we're all free to control our own data.

@shashj Could Macron's briefing have distinguished "Offensive" vs "Counter-Offensive" and he's just repeated that without (important) context?