Tristram Brelstaff

Software engineer/web developer. Retired in 2024. Just in time.

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Last Notes

2026-04-05 09:54:32 GMT

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@nprofile…x9tq I remember someone (maybe Bruce Schneier) pointing out that the USA has a much larger attack surface than smaller less developed countries such as North Korea and so has more to lose from conflict.

2026-03-29 09:56:38 GMT

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@nprofile…x9tq I think people who are corrupt often assume that other people are as corrupt as they are, and then use that to justify their corruption to themselves.

2026-01-28 21:01:49 GMT

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@nprofile…gu9p Neptune is about 2 to 3 magnitudes fainter than the Galilean Moons of Jupiter. It would have been faint in Galileo's primitive telescopes, but not impossible for him to see. However, he would have needed a detailed map of that part of the sky if he was to notice that it was not one of the background stars. Over 200 years later, Gall and D'Arrest were able to recognise that it wasn't a background star because they had, by chance, just created a detailed map of the part of the sky where LeVerrier predicted the new planet to be. I think there were several other astronomers who recorded Neptune in the intervening centuries, but all failed to notice its significance.

2026-01-28 14:24:59 GMT

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@nprofile…97ud @nprofile…g0zc @nprofile…gu9p @nprofile…ck2y Surely you would need an Axiom of Rugs for that?

2025-12-20 16:33:21 GMT

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@nprofile…pklh @nprofile…8eua @nprofile…pwph (Checking to make sure I have my duck with me) You've been looking at too many Gary Larson cartoons

2025-12-10 13:51:17 GMT

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@nprofile…8eua Well that's mathematicians stuffed.

2025-12-09 12:15:01 GMT

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@nprofile…stct
I remember reading Neil Gaiman's Coraline to my daughter and thinking this is the stuff of nightmares. It sure scared me, but not my daughter.

2025-12-09 11:55:09 GMT

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@nprofile…u6hy When my daughter was young she used to leave discarded clothes all over her bedroom floor. I invented the game of 'panty football' in which you try to kick used underpants into each other's faces.

2025-10-19 12:44:50 GMT

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@nprofile…pklh It's a cocoon.

2025-10-19 10:22:26 GMT

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@nprofile…rrqe
The book version of '2001 A Space Odyssey'. Kubrick did Clarke a huge favour when he stripped out a lot of Clarke's explanations from the movie but the book is still worth reading.
'Pushing Ice' by Alastair Reynolds. A moon of Saturn starts moving out of orbit, in the direction of Spica. Some miners in the outer Solar System are sent to investigate.

2025-10-19 10:21:26 GMT

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@nprofile…rrqe @nprofile…d3wq
The book version of '2001 A Space Odyssey'. Kubrick did Clarke a huge favour when he stripped out a lot of Clarke's explanations from the movie but the book is still worth reading.
'Pushing Ice' by Alastair Reynolds. A moon of Saturn starts moving out of orbit, in the direction of Spica. Some miners in the outer Solar System are sent to investigate.

2025-10-16 20:33:39 GMT

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@nprofile…stct I think it was originally covered in chalk and so would have been all white and stood out for miles around. Apparently there were similar, but smaller mounds at Marlborough and Marden. My guess is that these are a result of rivalry between local chieftains.

2025-10-15 13:32:08 GMT

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@nprofile…ujrl It needs an international legal framework in which polluters have to pay compensation for any damage they cause.

2025-10-07 19:59:35 GMT

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@nprofile…fv4z The first set of Nazis were defeated by a pragmatic alliance of communists and capitalists.

2025-10-06 22:04:37 GMT

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@nprofile…h94j
I just typed
"WE WOULD BE MAD REBELS AGAINST GOD"
into Google search and got:
"AI Overview
Oops, something went wrong"
Maybe Stevenson's protagonist was disabling the girl's AI chaperone.

2025-10-03 10:16:15 GMT

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@nprofile…60lz I always associate "Jet Airliner" and "Rock'n Me" with the supermarket in the Students Union at Leeds University in 1976-79.

2025-10-01 09:46:46 GMT

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@nprofile…59k6 The shopping mall at Mach Picchu?

2025-08-23 10:05:41 GMT

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@nprofile…e5g0
"It's a hill I'm willing to die on."
That's one way that evolution works.

2025-08-19 11:06:53 GMT

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@nprofile…h94j Back a decade or two ago, when Google were doing great things, it occurred to me that if they were to do archaeology they would collect up all the flint flakes from a site, 3D-scan each one into a computer, and then algorithmically fit them all back together again. This would give the shape of the tool that was produced, the shape of the original lump of flint, and possibly also the sequence in which the flakes were knapped off.

2025-08-16 11:30:18 GMT

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@nprofile…yu7x @nprofile…fa4k What ever you do, do tell hiim about the current political situation!

2025-08-07 13:26:27 GMT

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@nprofile…fa4k @nprofile…f7v6 @nprofile…yu7x I think lots of those collected in the 19th Century would have fallen apart in transit to the museums. But having vast collections of them in museums has allowed Assyrologists to piece together things like the Epic ogf Gilgamesh from lots of fragments. It is a lot easier to send an assistant round a few museums to sort through a few hundred boxes than it would be to send them to Mesoptamia to dig up new material.

2025-08-07 13:20:01 GMT

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@nprofile…yu7x @nprofile…fa4k @nprofile…f7v6 I seem to remember (probably from watching Time Team programs) that in Britain it is standard practice not to excavate the whole of a site. Unless it is going to be completely obliterated anyhow, for example to make way for a motorway.

2025-08-07 13:03:28 GMT

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@nprofile…d6h6 When I first came across your posts 2 or 3 years ago, I immediately recognised in you someone who thought much as I did about web development. Since then your post have been a beacon of sanity in a fast turning mad world. It must have been difficult to keep up the pace you set yourself and I am not surprised if you need to take a break and reassess what you are doing.

2025-08-07 12:40:13 GMT

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@nprofile…fa4k @nprofile…f7v6 @nprofile…yu7x Actually, when you are a field scientist collecting data, it is very tempting to just collect away and leave the analysis and interpretation till later. Especially if the collecting environment is pleasant and the collecting itself is not onerous. It so happens that I am currently sitting beside 12 plastic crates containing 42,000 mostly unidentified fly specimens.

2025-08-07 12:29:02 GMT

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@nprofile…fa4k @nprofile…f7v6 @nprofile…yu7x Like mathematicians writing down conjectures in margins and leaving other people to finish off the proof.

2025-07-27 23:06:28 GMT

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@nprofile…yu7x I gave up on Amazon when I found it impossible to buy anything from them without being signed up for Prime and then having to spend half an hour cleaning up my bank account of charges which they had put on it without my knowledge. A customer experience which I have likened to treading in dog shit.

2025-07-26 09:01:31 GMT

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@nprofile…h94j
"...most people in the country with a salary will be foreign-*born*"
and more importantly, they will be paying taxes.

2025-07-20 09:47:54 GMT

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@nprofile…fa4k @nprofile…sj8x Would it be possible to build a model for a better democracy based around this idea of enclaves within enclaves? Using mathematics to dissolve the borders between countries.

2025-07-12 16:53:46 GMT

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@nprofile…gwm4 @nprofile…kkxq There may well be something to the idea that an abused people passing on the abuse to other peoples. Many of the most committed Nazis in WW2 were young teenagers in Germany during the 1917-1919 starvation years that resulted from the British naval blockade and the WW1 Armistice conditions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18nCZvOlRLs&t=3889s

2025-07-12 10:53:22 GMT

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@nprofile…60lz "Wealth trickles down from the rich.... (it doesn't);"
Indeed, I suspect that 'trickle-up' would work as well if not better. If you were to give, say £1000, to everyone in the country, I am fairly sure most of that would eventually end up concentrated in the hands of a few. (But I am no economist)

2025-07-11 09:10:33 GMT

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@nprofile…6kk0 @nprofile…gd2c A teacher's job is to train the LLM's in the student's heads; not to make the students dependent on external LLM's.

2025-06-23 19:26:18 GMT

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@nprofile…hr6z Sacrifice a chicken. Back up your data. Or is it the other way round?

2025-06-23 09:11:01 GMT

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@nprofile…e5g0 Immortal beings would also compete with their own offspring for resources. Death is nature's mechanism for getting you out of the way of your children.

2025-06-18 10:57:40 GMT

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@nprofile…59k6 I have always thought of Python as a sort of 'string and sellotape' language. Something made by Valery Singleton on Blue Peter.

2025-06-12 16:47:41 GMT

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@nprofile…hr6z I had to look it up.

2025-06-12 09:59:55 GMT

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@nprofile…hr6z @nprofile…fa4k Actually Spain was a republic at the time of the Spanish Civil War.

2025-06-12 09:38:16 GMT

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@nprofile…fa4k Our monarchs here in the UK have been relatively well-behaved ever since we chopped one of their heads off. I might even be coming round to thinking that a neutered monarch is better than no monarch at all. The latter leaves a vacancy that could be occupied by a Napoleon or Hitler. A neutered monarch can act as a sort of lightning conductor that attracts adulation and patriotic fervour but allows it to dissipate without undesirable consequences.

2025-06-06 11:10:18 GMT

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@nprofile…e5g0 But marketing people will continue telling lies, even after they have lost their jobs, because, as far as I can tell, they are physically incapable of telling the truth.

2025-06-04 13:56:59 GMT

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@nprofile…e5g0 And then they burnt up all the rest of their resources pursuing AGI. And, in doing so, solved the Fermi Paradox.

2025-06-03 08:01:36 GMT

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@nprofile…h94j And they don't report everything you say to a central database.

2025-06-02 22:54:12 GMT

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@nprofile…59k6 But making the hard things hard is the easy part.

2025-05-30 19:54:52 GMT

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@nprofile…cp0t At the start of COVID my daughter said to me "Daddy, you've been self-isolating all your life". I have to admit she was right and that I actually enjoyed Lockdown.

2025-05-24 10:16:45 GMT

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@nprofile…fa4k My daughter studied structural engineering at HKUST and I occasionally joked with her about using bamboo scaffolding for building sky-scrapers. But she now works on more modern things, like studying how wind-turbines collapse and earthquake-proofing a sauropod skeleton in preparation for a tour of the Far East ( https://www.nhm.ac.uk/press-office/press-releases/opening-friday--see-one-of-the-biggest-creatures-to-ever-walk-th.html )

2025-05-12 18:06:32 GMT

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@nprofile…59k6 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/wellllll

2025-05-08 10:17:32 GMT

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@nprofile…yu7x What the Pope really needs is a Sherman tank: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lw4ZjhOukwU&t=1s

2025-04-14 12:46:45 GMT

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@nprofile…e5g0 Ah but you will stop feeling flattered the moment you come across the blog post that it copied that phrase from.

2025-04-06 10:31:19 GMT

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@nprofile…59k6 Does this mean that you can read the two pages concurrently?

2025-03-27 09:16:18 GMT

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@nprofile…d6h6 Talking while walking seems to add weight to what you are saying.
I think this must be a result of the deep breathing giving the impression that it is costing you some effort to produce the words.
I first noticed this effect while listening to Clare Balding on the BBC Radio 4 program 'Ramblings' where she interviews people while walking through the British countryside (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006xrr2/episodes/player).

2025-03-26 14:39:49 GMT

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@nprofile…e5g0 When I first heard of LLMs, my first thought was that a writer could use them to predict what the expected continuation would be, and then write something else. This might be a good way to avoid cliches but is probably too unconstrained to ensure originality.

2025-02-27 10:39:54 GMT

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@nprofile…fa4k In the longer term, we need to be thinking of how we can make democracy more stable.
I suspect that democracy can never be stable in the presence of very wealthy people. We should treat billionaires as a threat to the good working of democracy in the same way that monopolies are treated as a threat to the good working of markets. Billionaires should be restricted and regulated by the government. It might even be necessary to supress them altogether (Henry VIII did this with the monasteries in England when he felt the Roman Catholic Church was too powerful). One way to supress them would be to have progressive taxes which rise to 100% at a certain proportion of GDP. When a person's wealth nears that limit they can either continue accumulating money for the government or else they can go off and do something else. No need for revolutions. No need for anyone to be killed. Just one person mildly inconvenienced so everyone else can just get on with their lives.
Capitalism in the small and medium-scale but communism in the large.
This might be impracticable, it would almost certainly need a lot more thought to be made to work. But we need ideas to challenge the gobshittery with. We cannot challenge it by saying everything was OK as it was before.

2025-02-01 16:11:13 GMT

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@nprofile…fa4k There are several WW2 airfields near there.
https://crashsiteorkney.com/orkney-airfields.html

2025-01-29 15:51:34 GMT

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@nprofile…yu7x I think they should change that requirement to roll 3 sixes in row. That should set alarm bells ringing among some of his supporters.

2025-01-12 16:32:11 GMT

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@nprofile…e5g0 For illustration, soil temperatures at depths of 5, 10, 30 and 100cm over the past week at Reading University: https://www.met.reading.ac.uk/weatherdata/Reading_weekly_AWS_graphs.html#5

2025-01-10 15:28:28 GMT

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@nprofile…fa4k @nprofile…2jsf Do countries get to chose their own pronouns?

2025-01-10 15:26:16 GMT

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@nprofile…fa4k While you are at it, could we have our colonies back please? Their experiment with democracy seems to have failed (and we could do with the tax revenues).

2024-12-29 12:19:06 GMT

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@nprofile…e5g0 The interesting bit will be when people start using LLMs to find and exploit the weaknesses in LLMs. That will probably consume all the remaining resources of the world. This is my current favourite explanation for the Fermi paradox.

2024-12-12 07:19:02 GMT

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@nprofile…h94j With a bit of luck, it will have been underfunded for the past 2000 years and you will find some maths books written by Archimedes.

2024-12-11 10:08:09 GMT

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@nprofile…e5g0 Violent revolutions tends to create the ideal conditions for the emergence of violent repressive governments. And in the Middle East you have multiple interests all quite willing to sacrifice the lives of innocents to get their way. I don't hold out much hope for Syria. But I would be very happy to be proved wrong.

2024-11-23 09:03:04 GMT

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@nprofile…e5g0 You give him the drink but you put poison in it. (He has already shown that he is ready to die.)

2024-09-05 14:19:20 GMT

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@npub1c9m…9xjd I once saw a fireball off the foot of Orion. Probably not an attack ship on fire, but....

2024-08-16 12:58:38 GMT

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@npub1s7n…75gz You ought to inform HMRC. They have a page for that: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/hm-revenue-customs/contact/reporting-fraudulent-emails

2024-08-02 11:48:59 GMT

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@npub17nm…dm57 You've just given me an idea for when I next try to contact my bank and get through to an AI.

2024-07-06 17:02:00 GMT

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@npub1ky2…ghvc If I remember correctly from the backs of my school exercise books in the early 1960's, the proper Imperial unit for tipping things would be Bustons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42f3Cn6XlSk