Software engineer, person with many interests, and actual mad scientist living in Amsterdam
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2026-10-21T14:11:32Z Event JSON
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Last Notes npub159e5wd7cdfyljj3nfv9cddfytdwrjs8d80syrh69u37k45kw88zqykfl8u ·J Mopp Rambling through the Amsterdam city centre, I saw a guy walking his four huskies, and that makes me wonder: has anyone tried getting a pack of huskies to pull a bakfiets? Sounds awfully convenient for doing the groceries and getting the kids to school npub159e5wd7cdfyljj3nfv9cddfytdwrjs8d80syrh69u37k45kw88zqykfl8u ·J Mopp One of the things I like is seeing the vast array of languages and alphabets people use in this very international city. From the kid who's graffiti tag is his name in Berber, to the Syriac signage in front of that church on Keizersgracht. Today's Fun with Scripts was a car I saw that had old Turkic runes on the back npub159e5wd7cdfyljj3nfv9cddfytdwrjs8d80syrh69u37k45kw88zqykfl8u ·J Mopp Ran out of turpentine? Did all the paint thinners end up in your lungs instead of the cleaning bucket? You can also clean paintbrushes with cooking oil! Sign up to my newsletter for more arts and crafts tips npub159e5wd7cdfyljj3nfv9cddfytdwrjs8d80syrh69u37k45kw88zqykfl8u ·J Mopp Oh they were committed capitalists, too. I guess my 21st-century bleeding-heart-liberal tendencies mean I can't look at that without a profound sense of dismay myself npub159e5wd7cdfyljj3nfv9cddfytdwrjs8d80syrh69u37k45kw88zqykfl8u ·J Mopp Economics is sometimes called the dismal science, owing to the very doomer view of early economists, that there's basically no way in improving the lot of the majority of people, and the masses are destined to live in an eternal state of squalor. I wonder whether this is because early economists were incredibly dreary people, or whether they looked helplessly at the ever-widening gap between rich and poor npub159e5wd7cdfyljj3nfv9cddfytdwrjs8d80syrh69u37k45kw88zqykfl8u ·J Mopp I'm a ¿Por que no los dos? type of person. One month I write my space opera epic about the generation ship that perpetuates itself with a Culture of Names, the next I write an ML pre-print, and I'm between I, idk, paint landscapes of the Matterhorn or something npub159e5wd7cdfyljj3nfv9cddfytdwrjs8d80syrh69u37k45kw88zqykfl8u ·J Mopp This weekend I'm sleeping in a modest, sparsely-furnished room that is giving Poustinia vibes. I wish I could stay here for like a month and come out of it with a finished manuscript or a solid understanding of generative pretrained transformers npub159e5wd7cdfyljj3nfv9cddfytdwrjs8d80syrh69u37k45kw88zqykfl8u ·J Mopp About 500 years ago, the English language underwent a phenomenon known as the Great Vowel Shift. Starting from about 40 years ago, Dutch has been undergoing its own Great Vowel Shift, and from what I glean listening to spoken German, it recently began its Great Vowel Shift. I would love to be able to hear how both languages sound a century from now npub159e5wd7cdfyljj3nfv9cddfytdwrjs8d80syrh69u37k45kw88zqykfl8u ·J Mopp "Wyvern's time will finally come next year. I have officially entered Sam Altman's solo unicorn contest." npub159e5wd7cdfyljj3nfv9cddfytdwrjs8d80syrh69u37k45kw88zqykfl8u ·J Mopp Today I learned that it's not the first time that Amnesty International has caved to the British Establishment. They refused to publish reports of torture by colonial authorities in Aden in the 60s npub159e5wd7cdfyljj3nfv9cddfytdwrjs8d80syrh69u37k45kw88zqykfl8u ·J Mopp It mildly bothers me that Atlanta isn't along the Atlantic ocean. npub159e5wd7cdfyljj3nfv9cddfytdwrjs8d80syrh69u37k45kw88zqykfl8u ·J Mopp Me: I see they're selling banana plants! npub159e5wd7cdfyljj3nfv9cddfytdwrjs8d80syrh69u37k45kw88zqykfl8u ·J Mopp As I saw the bus I was supposed to get on drive away from me, I imagined what it would be like to teleport onto a moving bus. Then I imagined getting hit in the solar plexus by a seat at 60km/h, and I accepted my fate and waited for the next one. npub159e5wd7cdfyljj3nfv9cddfytdwrjs8d80syrh69u37k45kw88zqykfl8u ·J Mopp That's par for the course. Remember Adam and Eve were the only two humans. The inbreeding that resulted is also the reason why we no longer live to the age of 900 like Methuselah npub159e5wd7cdfyljj3nfv9cddfytdwrjs8d80syrh69u37k45kw88zqykfl8u ·J Mopp Just realised that the book of Genesis has at least four instances of brotherly strife: Cain vs Abel, Jacob vs Esau, Isaac vs Ishmael, Joseph vs everybody else. The writers of Genesis must have really hated their brothers npub159e5wd7cdfyljj3nfv9cddfytdwrjs8d80syrh69u37k45kw88zqykfl8u ·J Mopp Looking at my bike's headlight held on with packing tape along with the 3D-printed spacer to keep the bike-lock in place and thinking, nothing's more permanent than a temporary solution npub159e5wd7cdfyljj3nfv9cddfytdwrjs8d80syrh69u37k45kw88zqykfl8u ·J Mopp Is it antisocial if I get an airboat and rip it across the canals while not wearing a shirt Florida-style? npub159e5wd7cdfyljj3nfv9cddfytdwrjs8d80syrh69u37k45kw88zqykfl8u ·J Mopp I'm sad there isn't a radio station with the call sign WTAF npub159e5wd7cdfyljj3nfv9cddfytdwrjs8d80syrh69u37k45kw88zqykfl8u ·J Mopp Electric Wizard for today's workout soundtrack because that's what I feel like after the workout npub159e5wd7cdfyljj3nfv9cddfytdwrjs8d80syrh69u37k45kw88zqykfl8u ·J Mopp Of all the visa bullshit one has to go through, transit visas are the most bullshit of all. Do you really think someone is going to try and sneak into your country through one of the most surveilled and secured public spaces there is? What are they going to do, jump the turnstile at passport control? npub159e5wd7cdfyljj3nfv9cddfytdwrjs8d80syrh69u37k45kw88zqykfl8u ·J Mopp Yes! Not enough people are aware of this fact. Velociraptors were tiny npub159e5wd7cdfyljj3nfv9cddfytdwrjs8d80syrh69u37k45kw88zqykfl8u ·J Mopp I would love to see a turkey-sized velociraptor give a peacock mating show with his feathers npub159e5wd7cdfyljj3nfv9cddfytdwrjs8d80syrh69u37k45kw88zqykfl8u ·J Mopp The law of the excluded middle: not because it's right, but because it ain't wrong npub159e5wd7cdfyljj3nfv9cddfytdwrjs8d80syrh69u37k45kw88zqykfl8u ·J Mopp A guy that I work with who has an Indian passport tried to get a South African visa. The authorities wanted a police report over the past five years. He was like "How am I supposed to get that considering I have lived in 3 different countries over that time" npub159e5wd7cdfyljj3nfv9cddfytdwrjs8d80syrh69u37k45kw88zqykfl8u ·J Mopp True, we in South Africa don't nearly have it as bad as you folks do. People do though get shocked when I tell them I need a visa to visit the UK. They're like "but Commonwealth" and I'm like "but racism" npub159e5wd7cdfyljj3nfv9cddfytdwrjs8d80syrh69u37k45kw88zqykfl8u ·J Mopp "Every page of every passport you've ever had" I have no idea what happened to the long-expired passport I got when I was 17 npub159e5wd7cdfyljj3nfv9cddfytdwrjs8d80syrh69u37k45kw88zqykfl8u ·J Mopp Eating a balanced diet is hard. Getting enough fibre of a wide variety is even harder. That's why I scarf down 30 capsules a day containing ground chia seeds, dried berries, and pure cellulose. Join my newsletter for more fibremaxxing tips npub159e5wd7cdfyljj3nfv9cddfytdwrjs8d80syrh69u37k45kw88zqykfl8u ·J Mopp My brain wants to read it as Forg Jo, but then that raises the question: What is Joseph doing when he forgs? npub159e5wd7cdfyljj3nfv9cddfytdwrjs8d80syrh69u37k45kw88zqykfl8u ·J Mopp That's actually a good description for addictive spyware which you don't pay for where you are the product: free as in 'free base' npub159e5wd7cdfyljj3nfv9cddfytdwrjs8d80syrh69u37k45kw88zqykfl8u ·J Mopp I love how the Wikipedia article for "free base" includes instructions on how to make crack. ChatGPT would never npub159e5wd7cdfyljj3nfv9cddfytdwrjs8d80syrh69u37k45kw88zqykfl8u ·J Mopp The body of water currently making world headlines is the subject of a naming dispute. The historical name Persian Gulf has fallen out of favour among Arab nations, and the compromise name The Gulf is seen by Iran as erasing their heritage. I have a proposal which should make everyone equally unhappy and thus be a perfect resolution to the conflict npub159e5wd7cdfyljj3nfv9cddfytdwrjs8d80syrh69u37k45kw88zqykfl8u ·J Mopp I thought it was well-established that Banksy was a pseudonym of the elusive programmer Satoshi Nakamoto npub159e5wd7cdfyljj3nfv9cddfytdwrjs8d80syrh69u37k45kw88zqykfl8u ·J Mopp As a third point, consider the old IBM maxim: A computer cannot be held accountable, therefore a computer cannot make a management decision. The fact that people anthropomorphise the AI and give it way more authority than it deserves makes me very wary that we're heading towards a future where nobody takes responsibility for anything because AI npub159e5wd7cdfyljj3nfv9cddfytdwrjs8d80syrh69u37k45kw88zqykfl8u ·J Mopp On top of this, vibe-coding and the whole idea of churning out code as quickly as possible is antithetical to how software should be developed, where the less code you can use, the better. Modern enterprise software is complicated and irritating enough as it is. Putting a large language model on top of it will only make it worse npub159e5wd7cdfyljj3nfv9cddfytdwrjs8d80syrh69u37k45kw88zqykfl8u ·J Mopp Part of the issue, for me at least, is in the way that LLMs are being sold. The people working for the AI companies are true believers that they're on the path towards artificial general intelligence, and that's part of what's fuelling the current frenzy npub159e5wd7cdfyljj3nfv9cddfytdwrjs8d80syrh69u37k45kw88zqykfl8u ·J Mopp I love Wiki's because anybody can edit them npub159e5wd7cdfyljj3nfv9cddfytdwrjs8d80syrh69u37k45kw88zqykfl8u ·J Mopp I imagine that a jellyfish sting tastes like licking a fishy kiwi peel covered in potassium permanganate npub159e5wd7cdfyljj3nfv9cddfytdwrjs8d80syrh69u37k45kw88zqykfl8u ·J Mopp That theme, the Days of our Lives theme, and the fashion saxophone from Bold and the Beautiful are etched in my memory npub159e5wd7cdfyljj3nfv9cddfytdwrjs8d80syrh69u37k45kw88zqykfl8u ·J Mopp I just realised: There's an alternate universe in which the US didn't build out the Interstate Highway system and the most convenient way to travel to small remote towns is with light aircraft npub159e5wd7cdfyljj3nfv9cddfytdwrjs8d80syrh69u37k45kw88zqykfl8u ·J Mopp Conventional wisdom dictates that when you sell your house, the walls should be white, the floors an inoffensive wood or laminate, and the furniture should be as normal as possible. But when I eventually sell my place, I want everything in it to be blue and I want to have an ambient piano arrangement of Eiffel 65's Blue (da ba dee) playing in the background when people come to view it npub159e5wd7cdfyljj3nfv9cddfytdwrjs8d80syrh69u37k45kw88zqykfl8u ·J Mopp South Africa, which still possesses its stockpile of weapons-grade uranium from the apartheid days: 😶 npub159e5wd7cdfyljj3nfv9cddfytdwrjs8d80syrh69u37k45kw88zqykfl8u ·J Mopp BAE Systems is when your girlfriend is an arms dealer npub159e5wd7cdfyljj3nfv9cddfytdwrjs8d80syrh69u37k45kw88zqykfl8u ·J Mopp I don't think enough people appreciate that the Eucharist being the literal body and blood of Christ is so fundamental to Catholicism that wars have been fought over it. npub159e5wd7cdfyljj3nfv9cddfytdwrjs8d80syrh69u37k45kw88zqykfl8u ·J Mopp Forget about S.M.A.R.T. goals; focus on V.O.L.U.M.E. — Vague, Open-ended, Lofty, Unmeasurable, Minimal, Ephemeral
