Bruno Nicoletti

Unabashedly “woke” professional software guy, a Sydneysider exiled to London who used to write special effects software for a living. I teach and study historical martial arts for fun https://www.armizare.uk. I paraglide when I can. I’ve also started to publish translations of historical martial arts manuscripts, https://www.armizarepress.com #HEMA #paragliding

Avatar : me flying a paraglider

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npub1npn768e8a4p04n50z5ss7z5z80gac48k86w3wer0p784uex6auaqv5pfac

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[email protected]

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nprofile1qqsfseldrun76sh6e6832gg0p2prh5wu2nmra8ghv3hslr67vndw7wspz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dsz9fhxu

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relay.damus.io

nos.lol

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npub1npn768e8a4p04n50z5ss7z5z80gac48k86w3wer0p784uex6auaqv5pfac

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Last Notes

2026-05-30 07:43:30 GMT

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@nprofile…x9tq There are good reasons we don’t try and punish children as adults, but that doesn’t meant their actions should have minimal consequences. The victims need some sense of justice and the perpetrators need to learn never to do that again and offer some genuine form of restitution. Throwing them in prison for 20 years is wrong, but so is a derisible fine.

2026-05-27 06:39:30 GMT

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@nprofile…x9tq Annoyingly, he was the last vaguely competent PM the country had. They hit the ground running with a range of decent programs that did help people and could deliver on them. However, PFI, the Gulf War, bending over the backwards to do whatever the City wanted, Academy schools and a range of other bad decisions (did I mention the Gulf War?) taints him and his government. Now his latest bollocks statement would make him welcome in Reform. Gah. I despair.

2026-05-20 19:43:01 GMT

For fans of historical martial arts and sword play, I've just the finished the last of my translations of Fiore dei Liberi's three manuscripts written in mediaeval Italian. Sadly, unlike the translations of the Getty and Pisani-Dossi manuscripts, I was unable to secure the rights to reproduce the scans in my translation of the Morgan manuscript.
No large language models were used, any mistakes are all my own.
https://www.lulu.com/search?contributor=Bruno+Nicoletti
#HEMA #swordplay #historicalMartialArts

2026-05-20 17:53:39 GMT

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@nprofile…x9tq Why doesn’t the government have first claim on any assets should the company go insolvent. Why is such financial engineering allowed in the first place when in receipt of state grants?

2026-05-09 10:08:02 GMT

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@nprofile…qynj @nprofile…x9tq Unfortunately first past the post voting in the UK makes that a much harder thing to do.

2026-05-02 17:53:18 GMT

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@nprofile…x9tq How much does it matter if it goes over 100%? What amount of debt is actually critical? The Reinhart-Rogoff paper that warmed the heart of fiscal conservatives everywhere was proven to be bollocks, but folks still cling to it and use it a justification for austerity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt

2026-04-24 12:10:31 GMT

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@nprofile…la7y And Norway put all the money they earned from oil and gas into a sovereign wealth fund whose income now covers about 20% of their government’s expenditure. The UK’s plan under the then Labour government was to do something similar, but Thatcher came in, sold it all off and used any revenues they received on the sugar rush of tax breaks to bribe the middle classes.

2026-04-12 08:07:13 GMT

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@nprofile…x9tq Along with storage alongside generation so you can buffer excess power when the grid is saturated. That can be built much faster than interconnects.

2026-04-10 11:52:18 GMT

Sam Altman has so much faith that his software won’t kill or harm people that he needs a law to protect him from any consequences of it doing so.
#nevent1q…cjl6

2026-04-01 10:00:36 GMT

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@nprofile…x9tq Ember believes that China cut its fossil fuel use by 2% in 2025, mainly due to their massive expansion of renewables. So renewables growth is out pacing demand growth. This is hopefully a turning point given that they haven’t slowed down the pace of their renewables roll outs.
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/china-energy-transition-review-2025/

2026-03-31 16:40:39 GMT

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@nprofile…3src It's a work in progress, but many mines in Australia are currently transitioning to electrification using renewable generation to power it all. For example Fortescue is going all in on eliminating all fossil fuels from their operations, including electrifying giant earth moving equipment. They, and many other miners, are powering their remote sites with wind and solar to cut down on millions of dollars worth of diesel they otherwise have to burn.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/fortescue-lays-out-plans-for-biggest-wind-farm-in-australia-to-help-eliminate-fossil-fuels-at-giant-mines/

2026-03-23 12:41:13 GMT

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@nprofile…3src I’ve been snowed on in Iceland in the middle of July!

2026-03-23 10:05:32 GMT

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@nprofile…8mxe @nprofile…x9tq You also want to spend money on backroom people to support the frontline staff. So your specialist heart surgeon should be seeing patients, not handling appointment bookings, cleaning the operating theatre or dealing with patient car parking. It's a system level design thing. Where appropriate, spend a bit more in backroom staff and get much more out of your frontline staff.

2026-03-10 07:51:20 GMT

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@nprofile…x9tq There isn’t enough oil and gas left in the North Sea for us to stop importing the stuff, and even if there were we’d still be exposed to global prices and we’ve never had enough to influence that. So reducing the “windfall tax” is just special pleading to not pay the UK for extracting our natural resources, it would have zero effect on any price we pay. Sod ‘em. Take the proceeds of the throw it at building renewables, storage and interconnects.

2026-03-09 09:35:34 GMT

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@nprofile…x9tq Have they run a similar analysis on whatever Reform happen to be spouting at the moment?

2026-03-09 09:34:03 GMT

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@nprofile…x9tq On top of that, from my understanding he was much prouder of his often overlooked The Theory of Moral Sentiments than The Wealth of Nations.

2026-03-01 14:54:31 GMT

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@nprofile…x9tq It’s a replay of what they did with Royal Mail, which is slowly dying because of the cherry picking of services that other mail providers can do to undercut RM which has the universal service obligation. Same will happen with the NHS.

2026-03-01 14:40:17 GMT

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@nprofile…x9tq What’s wrong with “distorting” the labour market anyway? Lack of regulation tends to benefit one capital over labour. And what about the regulations limiting the scope of union behaviour? Does that not “distort” labour markets? If capital can organise (which is what a company is, along with trade associations) why not labour?

2026-02-10 22:57:32 GMT

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@nprofile…g0zc If I recall correctly, they snuck a custom chip into a games cartridge for the SNES to accelerate Star Fox graphics. Can’t do that with a Steam download.

2026-02-10 22:53:30 GMT

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@nprofile…g0zc Oooh, I went for a job interview at Argonaut soon after I moved to the UK. I didn’t get it.

2026-02-06 22:08:10 GMT

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@nprofile…la7y To me it looked like the team was cheered but when Vance appeared on the giant screen the booing started.

2026-02-06 18:52:31 GMT

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@nprofile…g0zc @nprofile…xuzd Give Farage free rein and I think it will get pretty ugly. There are no real institutional checks in the UK as parliament is sovereign and can legislate whatever it wants.

2026-02-06 18:04:50 GMT

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@nprofile…g0zc @nprofile…xuzd We had Johnson as PM, who is basically a poor man’s Trump who can quote the odd bit of Latin. I’m still angry that, while foreign secretary, he went to party with a KGB agent directly after a NATO meeting discussing the Skripal poisonings. No consequences for any of that, all fading away into the background. The UK political establishment is rotten, maybe not as bad as the USA, but rotten nonetheless and somewhat better at stringing sentences together.

2026-01-31 10:06:56 GMT

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@nprofile…x9tq Why didn’t they hit the ground running with this 18 months ago?

2026-01-28 08:12:41 GMT

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@nprofile…ugp2 There is also the problem of retaining people. @nprofile…cgvr, a UK lawyer with solid takes on pretty much everything, just went on an extended fedi break because the purity police didn’t like him using substack and he got bored of the hassling. Lovely own goal reply guys, the only behaviour you changed was his posting on the fedi. This is a people issue not a tech issue, which I’m not quite sure how to get around. He’s not the only one either.

2026-01-25 10:32:07 GMT

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@nprofile…x9tq Trials involving sexual assault are taking too long and do traumatise victims, but this doesn’t seem to be the most considered way to address that problem. I’m not sure what is, but this feels like a case of “Something must be done! This is something! Let’s do it!” as opposed to a reasoned approach.
FWIW I’ve sat on 5 juries, including a one for domestic violence. I think the system has quite a few problems, but removing trial by jury would be a case of baby with the bathwater.

2026-01-09 22:19:30 GMT

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@nprofile…g0zc I use “and” and “or”, I prefer the aesthetics . Also “not”, I started using that one after it took a day to spot a typo bug along the lines of “if (!!condition)”. I must have looked at that line dozens of times and I was blind to it.

2025-12-26 18:11:12 GMT

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@nprofile…hzyj My websearch turned up nothing. Is this price for end users or cost to operate? (Either way I have my doubts). If the first, prices are currently completely artificial. If the second, it means that AI models will be stupidly cheap to run and all the money being spent on huge data centres will be thrown at soon to be stranded assets.

2025-12-26 11:35:54 GMT

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@nprofile…hzyj It’s just social darwinism in a new coat.

2025-12-24 16:13:38 GMT

Dear Fediverse. I’m thinking of adding a wiki to my historical martial arts club’s website. I need it to be self hosted and free. There are quite a few of these out there, what do folks recommend?

2025-12-16 14:11:38 GMT

For all the #HEMA folk on mastodon, I’ve been working for months on my translation of Fiore dei Liberi’s late mediaeval book, Fior di Bataglia, which covers sword play and armed combat. Finally finished it and I released it today.
https://armizarepress.com/books/ms_ludwig_xv_13_softback/

2025-12-12 11:52:31 GMT

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@nprofile…hzyj For some reason we have far to many people sick and unable to work in the UK and the government wants to cut back on benefits paid to sick people. Completely unrelated, our medical system is overloaded and people can’t get prompt treatment and the government wants to slow that down even more. I wonder if there might be a link?

2025-12-06 17:40:50 GMT

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@nprofile…stct To be honest, you aren’t missing much.

2025-12-04 17:08:19 GMT

So Reform just took a £9 million donation from a cryptocurrency backer based in Thailand. Which of course will have no influence of the party’s priorities.
Why are donations of that size to political parties even legal?
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/nigel-farages-reform-uk-handed-36351307

2025-10-24 18:24:54 GMT

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@nprofile…stct How?????

2025-10-14 16:11:58 GMT

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@nprofile…tj3s How is that a feder? Looks like a lovely blunt to me.

2025-08-17 09:20:55 GMT

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@nprofile…y5kn @nprofile…pam3 The more horrifying thought is that he isn’t ignorant.

2025-08-14 12:25:30 GMT

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@nprofile…59k6 Fourth time in a week the foxes have raided our planter in the front garden. Nothing left now except for the lavender. The window boxes have only been hit twice. Fox repellent doesn’t work and any electronic device would just be purloined. Getting tired of sweeping it all up in the morning.
https://media.mstdn.social/media_attachments/files/115/027/104/415/398/804/original/d0f0efde47226170.jpeg

2025-07-24 19:18:59 GMT

This is why I don’t use genAI for anything if I can possibly help it. When the main LLMs are where you get your news and general answers from, it centralises the dissemination of information much much more than now. If the owners chose to or are forced to bias the slop that their LLMs generate, then everyone will be Fox News’d. Note that Trump wants this of “other countries” as well.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/gop-ignores-groks-right-wing-bias-in-anti-woke-chatbot-fight-democrat-claims/?comments-page=1#comments

2025-07-24 16:49:41 GMT

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@nprofile…59k6 Ewww. No coyotes in west London but enough foxes causing havoc, including home invasions. In the recent heat wave, the cheeky buggers have been wandering in through open back doors or windows of the houses in our street to go raiding kitchens or just for a wander. They drive our dog nuts. And crap everywhere. But they can be annoyingly cute. Especially the cubs.

2025-06-15 17:44:24 GMT

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@nprofile…d6h6 Professional visual effects software (eg: Nuke, Maya, Houdini) runs fine on Linux, and Linux is generally the platform of choice for the people doing VFX work. While the state of photo editing and graphic design is pretty sucky. The last I looked GIMP still had a terrible UX.

2025-04-07 15:46:26 GMT

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@nprofile…59k6 The tariffs idiocy was all explicitly laid out months ago, even if the exact details weren’t exactly clear. So I don’t think it counts as a black swan event. More like giant locomotive steaming down the tracks, seen miles off, with the world’s economies tied to the tracks like a helpless innocent.

2025-04-04 22:02:23 GMT

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@nprofile…59k6 Just a bunch of linear algebra and some activation functions?

2025-03-07 20:14:58 GMT

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@nprofile…x759 @nprofile…gdtc Yep, you’re right. Sorry.

2025-03-07 19:48:22 GMT

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@nprofile…x759 @nprofile…gdtc Reading it, it’s only HMRC, Companies House will still take web filings.

2024-09-15 08:40:33 GMT

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@npub15zu…s7lx More importantly, the NHS shouldn’t embrace GenAI systems until GenAI systems are up to scratch.

2024-09-06 20:51:31 GMT

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@npub1c9m…9xjd TIL that you can do fractional order calculus (and complex order and matrix order). So much maths!

2024-09-01 19:11:01 GMT

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@npub1psd…9sr7 Reverse acquisition, NeXT took over Apple computer by being bought.

2024-09-01 19:04:14 GMT

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@npub1psd…9sr7 I’m pretty sure his involvement at PIXAR was mainly as a money guy, with the odd bit of wisdom as chair. Ed Catmul and Alvy Ray Smith basically just got on with it.

2024-08-17 12:57:37 GMT

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@npub15zu…s7lx This cartoon will never get old. Delusions of adequacy.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/cartoon/2012/mar/16/1#img-1

2024-08-05 01:19:49 GMT

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@npub1c9m…9xjd In Hammersmith? I’m slightly down the road in Chiswick.

2024-07-11 19:43:13 GMT

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@npub15zu…s7lx That was faster than I thought it would be. Definitely a pop-corn moment.

2024-06-21 18:39:48 GMT

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@npub1c9m…9xjd I’m obviously teaching a grandmother about sucking eggs here. I’m fairly straight forward in my use of them, what kind of gotchas are you thinking of?

2024-06-08 08:27:24 GMT

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@npub15zu…s7lx I think the Rees-Moggs of this world do understand it. Which is why the attack the democratic open organisations like the EU, but are quiet on secretive ISDS with their private courts.

2024-06-05 20:30:05 GMT

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@npub15zu…s7lx And several other severe diseases as well.

2023-12-31 10:23:04 GMT

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@npub1yyx…qa5g They are doing the classic strategy of spending money to grow the user base. The real question is what happens when they run out of money. Will they have a sufficient number of users dependent on their services that they can jack up the price while cutting costs at the same time. Given Duolingo just fired their translators, some companies are betting heavily on LLMs, so OpenAI may have a bunch of businesses by the short and curlies in a few years.

2023-10-12 07:39:34 GMT

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@npub1yyx…qa5g Eventually they’ll realise that they have to do something to combat climate change, probably very late in the day. But their solutions won’t be at all fair or equitable, to put it mildly.

2023-07-13 18:47:24 GMT

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@npub1psd…9sr7 The Cleaning Up podcast has a new episode on Zaporizhzhia. DL:DR should they blow it, it wont be good, but nowhere near as bad as Chernobyl. 4/5 reactors are shut fully down, only one is on ‘hot shutdown’ and still producing radioactive iodine and other nasties, but at a reduce rate. The reactors are not RMBKs like Chernobyl and so they have significant containment and are not giant graphite piles waiting to burn and spew radioactivity over the landscape.
https://cleaning-up-leadership-in-the-age-of-climate-change.simplecast.com/episodes/ep134-chris-gadomski-zaporizhzhia-nuclear-on-the-front-lines-cpJzsqlE