theandrewhickey

Spent the afternoon at Hugh and Meredith's, where Hugh showed Sophia how his 3d printer works (and how he makes 3d dungeons out of foam). Very cool stuff, and they both enjoyed their souvenirs.
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

liv

I want to talk about the education privilege meme that's been doing the rounds. On the one hand I love old-school memes that encourage lots of cool people on my d-roll to talk about their experiences growing up. But at the same time, I'm kind of frowning at this particular iteration.

( thinky thoughts )

Anyway, hopefully this is an adequate substitute for the meme and you don't need me to tell you in detail how absurdly precocious I was in reading and maths.

Current Mood: cynical

andrewducker

1. Matching sounds to shapes: Evidence of the bouba-kiki effect in naïve baby chicks: (tags:language chicken psychology )

rmc28

Zach Sullivan was interviewed on the "Duke's Download" podcast about being openly queer in ice hockey, and his decidedly mixed feelings about Heated Rivalry. I liked listening to what Zach had to say, and was impressed by the thoughtfulness that obviously goes into his answers (I think the podcast host could stand to say less and interrupt less).

siderea

If you live in the BosWash Corridor, especially in NYC-to-Boston, you need to be paying attention to the weather. We have an honest to gosh Nor'easter blizzard predicted for the next 3 days, with heavy wet snow and extremely high winds – the model predicts the damn thing will have an eye – which of course is highly predictive of power outages due to downed lines.

Plug things what need it into electricity while ya got it.

Whiteout conditions expected. The NWS's recommendation for travel is: don't. Followed by recommendations for how to try not to die if you do: "If you must travel, have a winter survival kit with you. If you get stranded, stay with your vehicle."

I would add to that: if you get stranded in your car by snow and need to run the engine for heat, you must also periodically clear the build-up of snow blocking the tailpipe, or the exhaust will back up into the passenger compartment of the car and gas you to death.

As always, for similar reasons do not try to use any form of fire to heat your house if the regular heat goes out, unless you have installed the necessary hardware into the structure of your house, i.e. chimneys, fireplaces, and wood stoves, and they have been sufficiently recently serviced and you know how to operate them safely. The number one killer in blizzards is not the cold, it's the carbon monoxide from people doing dumb shit with hibachis.

NWS says DC to get 2 to 4 inches, NYC/BOS to get 1 to 2 feet. Ryan Hall Y'all reports some models saying up to 5 inches in DC and up to three feet in NYC and BOS.

2026 Feb 21 (5 hrs ago): Ryan Hall Y'all on YT: "The Next 48 Hours Will Be Absolutely WILD...". See particularly from 3:30 re winds.

If somehow you don't already have a preferred regular source of NWS weather alerts – my phone threw up one compliments of Google, and I didn't even know it was authorized to do that – you can see your personal NWS alerts at https://forecast.weather.gov/zipcity.php , just enter your zipcode. Also you should get yourself an app or something.

cosmolinguist

Like D, I have been telling all the canvassers who come to the door that I'll vote for whoever has the best chance of beating Reform, but I am relieved that now the constituency-level polling indicates that it's more likely to be the Greens than Labour, because I really didn't want to have to hold my nose and vote for Labour. I'm a trans disabled immigrant and they went through a phase last year of trying to make things more difficult for every single one of those groups of people.

And I do like the points the Greens in the person of Zack Polanski are making, particularly in their most recent party political broadcast. (With one note: I have very strong feelings about "make X Y again" constructions of any kind these days, but I'm grudgingly willing to make an exception for "make hope normal again" despite how loaded "hope" and "normal" are as the X and Y in this case!)

diffrentcolours

For the last couple of weeks I've been telling every canvasser that's come to my door the same thing - that I'd like to vote Green, but I'm going to vote to keep Reform out, and that there wasn't any clear evidence of the best way to do that. Labour have been relying on an opinion poll of 150 people taken weeks ago before the close of nominations, which shows them in second place to Reform. The Greens have been relying on betting shop odds (very easy to manipulate) and internal polling (very unreliable). Both have been telling me that their "internal data" points to them being the best option.

Yesterday, a new poll from Omnisis was published. The sample size is still small (450) but much larger than we've seen before, and the polling was carried out after the candidates were finalised and after the campaign started. I am pleased to say that it puts Greens in front of Reform in the constituency, within margin of error. Labour are trailing Reform, also within margin of error, but the Green-Labour lead is outside that margin. It also says that the Green supporters are more likely to actually turn out and vote than Labour ones, which suggests that the Green lead will be bigger on Thursday than this poll suggests.

I can nitpick some things about the poll such as the sample size, but this is the best indicator I'm likely to get before going to the polls on Thursday. And I'm glad that I have some reasonably solid evidence that convinces my head that I can vote with my heart, rather than just looking for something that reinforces what I want to be true. I know from previous experience that the Labour vote in Gorton is soft as anything, and it's nice to have evidence that the Green squeeze is actually working.

There are some interesting nuggets in the data which show how people either don't understand questions or give nonsense answers, like the Labour supporter who would vote Reform if they "knew" this was a Labour-Reform battle. There are a small minority of both Green and Labour supporters who would vote Reform to stop the other from winning. The Reform vote is largely unsqueezable - even if they think Reform can't win, most supporters would either vote for them, or not vote at all, than vote for either Greens or Labour. More would break Green though, which suggests the "vote to get Kier Starmer out" message is working.

purplecat

Photo into a museum case with a Vortex Manipulator and Teleportation Bracelet prop from Doctor Who.

rmc28

February is flying by, the university term-time intensity is very high, my life is work, ice hockey, occasional time with my family. I did switch things up and also try out a couple of kpop dance classes in a relatively light week (the university has a KPop society!) and they were exhausting and fun in the best way. Now to find the time to go back before the end of term.

Ice hockey

( Read more... )

Driving

( Read more... )

Percy Jackson

( Read more... )

cosmolinguist

I am so tired I can hardly string a sentence together but I wanted to say that today went great from a "finding a new place on my own" perspective, from actually being incredibly useful from a work perspective. Getting back was actually the annoying part (road works made it difficult to escape the area I'd arrived to by bus, and I got lost trying to walk back to anywhere I could get a bus or Uber; getting back from Stockport took much longer thanks to Piccadilly still being closed).

But I made it just in time to get to a much-needed yoga session, and got home to eat delicious takeout, and a basically-empty weekend and most-of-a-week off now stretches before me.

cosmolinguist

I thought I'd just get dropped off at the train station after our session (and the all-important debrief in Costa) was finished. But I should've known: my lovely colleague has sight loss herself and assured me that they -- she, her husband/PA, her guide dog -- would wait until I was safely on a train.

But first, I needed to pee, so I got directed to the gents' and I was only gone for a few minutes but when I walked back up the platform I saw those two (three, counting Flick the dog) standing with two other ladies chatting away. As I got closer I'd have guessed they were people R knew from work; one of them mentioned another charity that's known to us. I was happy to chill while they did that "Oh you know Nick?" kind of thing. But it turns out they didn't know each other; these women had just been at some sight-loss related event but one of them just spoke up when she saw the guide dog because she always does and is clearly the kind of person who'll talk to anyone. They had made friends at a local society for blind people, and had just come from, of all things, a funeral for someone they knew from that group. The chattier one told us about her eye condition, Homonymous Hemianopia -- and R and I said "that's the one we couldn't say before!" when we were going through a list of them at the session earlier; we both know about hemianopia but neither of us could get the word out at the time.

Then the other person said "And I have optic nerve hypoplasia."

And then I said "Shut up!" because I was so surprised. That's what I have! And even among other blind people, no one's heard of it. It's an odd, rare thing. I literally don't think I've ever met anyone else who's got it.

They and I ended up getting on the same train for the first 15 minutes or so, by which point the chatty one had made friends with the conductor and exchanged numbers with me.

My hypoplasia pal lives in Runcorn and says she comes to Manchester regularly; I said she should let me know if she wants to hang out.

Such a goofy coincidence, but an uplifting end to a day that could've gone better. (It was fine, it just...well, I'm too tired to explain it now. But it was fine. Just, could've been better.)

purplecat

I am surprised to find myself surprised by the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. It reveals that I had subconsciously assumed that obviously he would get away with whatever it was he had been doing.

andrewducker

Three minutes ago Sophia asked me how to spell "pregnancy simulator", and now I'm getting the regular buzz of notifications as she installs apps on her phone.

andrewducker

1. U.K. government covered up dramatic spike in trans youth suicides: (tags:transgender suicide UK OhForFucksSake LGBT )
2. WD and Seagate confirm: Hard drives for 2026 sold out: (tags:manufacturing harddrive Technology doom )
3. Ancient bacteria found frozen in cave resistant to 10 types of antibiotics: (tags:antibiotics bacteria doom )
4. Fake law: Barrister suing Dan Neidle relied on cases from ChatGPT: (tags:ai law fail UK )
5. The association between academic pressure and adolescent depressive symptoms and self-harm: (tags:mentalhealth academia UK psychology )
6. Using Origami to Imagine Emergency Shelters That Are Sturdy, Cost-Efficient and Easy to Deploy: (tags:origami materials design architecture )
7. Amazon are cracking down on erotica: (tags:erotica publishing Amazon OhForFucksSake )
8. How "Remote Assistance" works with Waymo's autonomous taxis.: (tags:taxi driving automation )
9. Inside Horden, the County Durham town failed by politics (if you were wondering why people are turning to Reform): (tags:politics poverty uk )
10. New Silent Hill game inspired by tiny fishing village in Fife: (tags:horror games scotland )

fanf

https://dotat.at/@/2026-02-16-async.html

I'm writing a simulation, or rather, I'm procrastinating, and this blog post is the result of me going off on a side-track from the main quest.

The simulation involves a bunch of tasks that go through a series of steps with delays in between, and each step can affect some shared state. I want it to run in fake virtual time so that the delays are just administrative updates to variables without any real sleep()ing, and I want to ensure that the mutations happen in the right order.

I thought about doing this by representing each task as an enum State with a big match state to handle each step. But then I thought, isn't async supposed to be able to write the enum State and match state for me? And then I wondered how much the simulation would be overwhelmed by boilerplate if I wrote it using async.

Rather than digging around for a crate that solves my problem, I thought I would use this as an opportunity to learn a little about lower-level async Rust.

Turns out, if I strip away as much as possible, the boilerplate can fit on one side of a sheet of paper if it is printed at a normal font size. Not too bad!

But I have questions...