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A beer festival? In Wigan? With rave reviews and recommendations? Well I wasn’t going to miss that! The late kick off (doors 6pm) on a Thursday was less of a deterrent and more of an excuse (as if I need one) to spend the afternoon exploring the lovely pubs of Wigan. And yet…I am back on SlimmingWorld now and, after the disaster of Preston the other week, I knew I …

Following on from the first bits of Irvine, I walked from Puffers Cafe towards the coast, via the edge of the Scottish Maritime Museum. This whole area was regenerated in the 1990s with some substantial Georgian-style buildings. Past Boyd’s Automatic Tide Signalling Apparatus, there is a cracking big beach. It was wet and windy, so I stuck to the beach park – a wide open area in between the beach …

You can get surprisingly far, before it bites you, with only a fuzzy and incorrect understanding of how you should read from a TCP socket. I see this often in (failing) Protohackers solutions. Once you are over the initial hurdle of reading enough documentation to actually get a TCP session connected, there are 2 key things you need to understand: TCP gives you a stream of bytes, not packets. read() …

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Busy was the Chinese Communist Party in the first few days after it brutally suppressed pro-democracy demonstrators on June 4, 1989. It produced a series of horrifying photos and a photo book to justify its brutal suppression. The post The Truth about the Beijing Turmoil appeared first on Iconic Photos.

Attempting to describe the ways that mathematics touches our hearts. Or the author's specficallly.

Dan Janes writes: Spam is nothing new, spam on GitHub is also not particularly new. Any site that accepts user-generated content will need to figure out how to prevent people from submitting spam, whether that is for scams, malicious software, or X-rated material. I have been getting tagged in Crypto related for the past 6 months or so. In the past 24 hours I have been tagged in two of …

Following on from last week’s catchup on Delfinen, this week we’re going to look at Hästen, which has been a long time in the making. Hästen (pronounced like “hesten”) is Swedish for “The Horse”, being this is a build based on a Fender Mustang, a hold over from the early days of my guitar building when I had a series of people ask me to build them Mustangs after I’d …

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An interesting piece by Alfred Moore over at The Conversation talking about “Online anonymity: study found ‘stable pseudonyms’ created a more civil environment than real user names“. This hearkens back to a lot of thoughts I had about online identity back in the day – it’s interesting to see newer studies examining the space. The basic gist is that when comparing online discourse using real-life names, pseudonyms, or “durable pseudonyms”, …

Star-struck sisters coming to New York, struggling songwriter, backstage drama, misguided love -- it's all there, and more, in the 1929 film "The Broadway Melody." It's like a cliche incubator. It also has those awkward little touches we love in early talkies -- hammy acting, stilted silences and a musical soundtrack that makes it sound like the orchestra's in the bathroom.To the concrete canyons of Broadway, where there's a broken …

This feels significant. Check out this video. Hat tip: Rory Chitwood.

I've experimented a couple of times with generating candy heart messages using various kinds of machine learning algorithms. Originally, short messages were just about all the original text-generating neural networks could handle. Now we've come back around to approximately the same performance, yet with orders of magnitude more computational resources consumed. (although I don't have to photoshop the messages onto candies any more, so that's nice) Here's DALL-E3 generating candy …

The church that stands today as Blackburn Cathedral is a mix of Georgian and mid-Twentieth Century architecture. Welcoming those of faith and no faith alike, inside there is a wealth of artisan design and history that stretches back to Medieval and Tudor times. The site the cathedral stands on is an old one, and there […]

10th February 2024 This week Prospect posted something by me on the issue of a potential border poll in Northern Ireland. Please click (and read!) here. This post unpacks that Prospect post – a sort of “behind the scenes” perambulation of how that post came together – and a further discussion of the issues. * The starting point is that a potential referendum in Northern Ireland has been in the …