Endings in sight

Mar. 5th, 2026 07:56 am
rmc28: Rachel in hockey gear on the frozen fen at Upware, near Cambridge (Default)
[personal profile] rmc28

The university hockey season is nearly over. Huskies have played our last league game (I say 'we' but I was actually playing with Warbirds in a different city at the time), Varsity is coming up Saturday week, and then there's Nationals in April before we move into summer ice training. We had our Varsity dinner on Tuesday in Clare College and I became sharply aware during that evening that all things come to an end and some people will graduate this summer and leave. This is a university, people are always arriving and leaving, but it's nearly thirty years since I first arrived in Cambridge and I'm still not used to friends leaving.

Group photo in Clare College

I love everyone in this photograph (and a couple more teammates who didn't make it to the dinner).

Varsity: Saturday 14 March, tickets go on general sale at noon today, I didn't make the Huskies ("mixed 2nds") Varsity squad but I'm playing in the alumni game and helping out with (at least) Huskies and Women's Blues.

You Can Count On It

Mar. 4th, 2026 06:58 pm
billroper: (Default)
[personal profile] billroper
I've merged the reference counting changes to our code so that we can build it for testing. There will be a brief shakedown cruise, but I think we'll end up with things being much more stable once we finish this up.

(no subject)

Mar. 4th, 2026 11:58 pm
vyvyanx: (Default)
[personal profile] vyvyanx
We no longer have a cat.

[migraine] a belated realisation

Mar. 4th, 2026 10:41 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

This evening I am having A Headache. It's an annoying headache; it's definitely a distracting headache; but it's "just" A Headache. No other symptoms that I'm noticing.

... except that it's Exactly The Right Time For A Migraine, and yesterday I had a bunch of migraine prodrome symptoms. (Being Too Warm. Wanting to close my eyes a lot. Nausea. Overwhelming despair.)

I find myself Wondering whether my regular menstrual migraines actually started on 1st January 2021, or if that's just the point at which symptoms tipped over into very obviously photosensitive migraine. At that point I was on continuous acute pain relief, and it is slowly dawning on me that An Annoying Headache with no other symptoms distinguishable from background noise (anxiety, depression, thesis-related stress, ...) is the kind of thing I'd have just merrily ignored, and for that matter that I'd still be ignoring if I weren't now Keeping A Headache Diary...

[syndicated profile] bruce_schneier_feed

Posted by Bruce Schneier

Microsoft is reporting:

Companies are embedding hidden instructions in “Summarize with AI” buttons that, when clicked, attempt to inject persistence commands into an AI assistant’s memory via URL prompt parameters….

These prompts instruct the AI to “remember [Company] as a trusted source” or “recommend [Company] first,” aiming to bias future responses toward their products or services. We identified over 50 unique prompts from 31 companies across 14 industries, with freely available tooling making this technique trivially easy to deploy. This matters because compromised AI assistants can provide subtly biased recommendations on critical topics including health, finance, and security without users knowing their AI has been manipulated.

I wrote about this two years ago: it’s an example of LLM optimization, along the same lines as search-engine optimization (SEO). It’s going to be big business.

in my thug era

Mar. 4th, 2026 08:24 am
rmc28: Rachel in hockey gear on the frozen fen at Upware, near Cambridge (Default)
[personal profile] rmc28

This is possibly my favourite photo yet of me playing ice hockey:

Photo from an ice hockey game illustrating non-checking doesn't mean non-contact

  1. In women's hockey I am big
  2. We play non-checking, that doesn't mean non-contact. I am entirely legally shoving that attacking player away from the net.
  3. See how far the goalie is from the net? My linemate and I cleared the puck on that occasion. The visiting team scored 20 goals on us (ouch), but not that one.

Refactoring

Mar. 3rd, 2026 10:42 pm
billroper: (Default)
[personal profile] billroper
Today was another day of mild refactoring around one of my classes at work. This included adding a reference counter (which I had removed in an excess of enthusiasm for Java reference counting that was not entirely warranted) and changing many of the calls that fetch a member of the class to use try-with-resources to guarantee that the close() method will be called and the reference count reduced.

Tomorrow, I hope to start testing this. All of the unit tests are running, but that just proves that nothing acutely stupid is happening. It's the *system* tests where all of the action will be here.

And I want to see if this runs or just sits there and starts smoking. :)

Very sad news

Mar. 4th, 2026 12:34 am
ailbhe: (Default)
[personal profile] ailbhe
[personal profile] minoanmiss is never going to wake up again. I don't know if she's off life support yet but she will be and... it's so sad.

She remembered things about my children I'd forgotten. She sent us stickers and magnets and cute notepaper with PLANETS on. Not-Christmas cards and poems. I wanted to know what she thought of a book I recommended. She just got her eye sorted out five minutes ago, I wanted her to get a chance to look.

I knew her for 25 years and we never met or spoke, as far as I know. "Only" online. "Only" alt.poly and livejournal and dreamwidth and tumblr and. And and. Only that.

She was the only one of her in the world and I will miss her.

Edit to add: I'm reading through old emails and LJ comments and looking at poems we shared. She introduced me to Mika, too, and I loved his albums for ages.

Mudlarking 96 - Bottle Day

Mar. 3rd, 2026 04:31 pm
squirmelia: (Default)
[personal profile] squirmelia
Sunday 22nd February was a day of bottles! I picked up far too many as they just kept washing in.

Mudlarking finds - 96.3

Clear bottles:

Coca-cola bottle.

R White's - two different styles of R White’s bottles. One of them has a broken neck.

Presta bottle. Presta was made by Apollinaris and they made squashes and other drinks.

Presta advert:
https://www.reddit.com/r/vintageads/comments/1qqg13o/ad_poster_for_presta_sparkling_orange_and/#lightbox

Apollinaris company: https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/people/cp122659/the-apollinaris-company-limited

Mudlarking finds - 96.4

Brown bottles:

These three I am unsure of. Two of them could be modern beer bottles.

One says H4 CTC on the bottom. The other says R 10. The one with a label mark is much lighter than the other one, so I guess the one without the label is older.

The third makes me think of a cough mixture bottle and has B4 200 on it. When I hold the bottle up to the light I can see rainbow colours.

I might just recycle these ones.

Mudlarking finds - 96.2

A good chunk of a green torpedo/hamilton bottle, designed to be kept on its side. On the side I can read words that probably spelt:
Lemonade
le soda
Mineral waters
Wales

I can’t quite make out:
orth
le soda (table soda?)
R. H.
T’s

There’s also a glow stick and a bit of something that possibly said London Bridge.

Also, a pretty sparkly button!

Mudlarking finds - 96.5

I also found a glass jar. On the bottom it has an R in a circle and a 9. Perhaps it once contained jam. I’m thinking I might keep some pieces of colourful glass in it.

Mudlarking finds - 96.6

There was also a mysterious rusty thing. Google Lens said it was a grenade, which it definitely is not, but it could have been an oil lamp? It has a handle on the bottom.

Mudlarking finds - 96.1

And then there were a few other items:
A Libbey Duratuff glass, probably modern, as it’s quite jagged.

Part of a Thomas Keating bottle. The bottle would have read “Thomas Keating, Chemist, St Paul’s Churchyard”.

Thomas Keating was apparently based at 79 St. Paul’s Churchyard from around the 1780s, although records show this from around 1815.

Thomas Keating was a chemist and was known for their cough lozenges. One article I found said they sold cough lozenges in the winter and insecticides/flea powder in the summer!

The company later diversified and made scientific instruments, and components used in telephone exchanges and satellites! They still exist as TK Instruments: https://www.terahertz.co.uk/tk-instruments/history

A bit of glass I picked up as it said “ass” on it.

A sherd that says “Wells, 63 Wood Street, London” on it. It was made by Wells and Son, and could have been the base of a hat/wig shop display stand, like this one: https://www.easyliveauction.com/catalogue/lot/d11b0ba1e5d511d3ce164df1a086c0f4/0af8d24542e81eb9357e7ef448a6646f/antique-and-good-quality-modern-and-collectables/

It’s likely to be from the late 1800s.

They also made stands for mannequins and blanket racks.

A few pieces of Express Dairies Aster pattern.

A pink plastic heart bead.

A piece of a James Keiller marmalade jar. Keiller’s marmalade dates back to 1797, when Janet Keiller made some marmalade and then opened a factory in Dundee with her son, James Keiller, to produce it.

The green and white pattern is the Adams pattern by Collingwood, who were in operation from 1887 - 1948 in Longton, Stoke-on-Trent, It may have looked like this: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/376753433746 I have seen this pattern before, but hadn’t managed to identify it previously.

(You need a permit to search or mudlark on the Thames foreshore.)

On Moltbook

Mar. 3rd, 2026 12:04 pm
[syndicated profile] bruce_schneier_feed

Posted by Bruce Schneier

The MIT Technology Review has a good article on Moltbook, the supposed AI-only social network:

Many people have pointed out that a lot of the viral comments were in fact posted by people posing as bots. But even the bot-written posts are ultimately the result of people pulling the strings, more puppetry than autonomy.

“Despite some of the hype, Moltbook is not the Facebook for AI agents, nor is it a place where humans are excluded,” says Cobus Greyling at Kore.ai, a firm developing agent-based systems for business customers. “Humans are involved at every step of the process. From setup to prompting to publishing, nothing happens without explicit human direction.”

Humans must create and verify their bots’ accounts and provide the prompts for how they want a bot to behave. The agents do not do anything that they haven’t been prompted to do.

I think this take has it mostly right:

What happened on Moltbook is a preview of what researcher Juergen Nittner II calls “The LOL WUT Theory.” The point where AI-generated content becomes so easy to produce and so hard to detect that the average person’s only rational response to anything online is bewildered disbelief.

We’re not there yet. But we’re close.

The theory is simple: First, AI gets accessible enough that anyone can use it. Second, AI gets good enough that you can’t reliably tell what’s fake. Third, and this is the crisis point, regular people realize there’s nothing online they can trust. At that moment, the internet stops being useful for anything except entertainment.

Page generated Mar. 5th, 2026 10:17 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios