Ben Collier

I really miss those old catalogues that sold practical jokes. You'd respond to a tiny advert at the back of a comic, and they'd send you the catalogue, normally with a free fortune telling fish. We got all sorts of good stuff from them back in the day.

This. As of this morning , the US is preventing us from using cutting edge AI, and we have nothing to counter with. A big national security issue. Media, politicians silent.

A very interesting result which indicates that LLMs are modelling a sense of good and bad (I hesitate to use 'evil'). If you train them in bad behaviour in one area, they behave badly in others.

Hello everyone! The latest episode of "The Retro Adventurers" is out! After a hiatus, I'm back on the roster, doing the odd episode here and there! retroadventurers.podbean.com…

Do you want a full-size train departure board in your lounge? Look no further! What a company, just saw their ad and I'm reposting because I'm so impressed! ukdepartureboards.co.uk/

Our cat, Rufus McFish, is particularly unimpressed by his new Lego companion / replacement... @LEGO_Group

Attempting to perfect the art of the Boxing Day breakfast...

.@LNER your new ticket booking site online is unusable - completely impossible for me to book a flexible off-peak single return on the same purchase as an advance single outbound. Please don't remove the "classic" option.

Having an absolute blast watching #Ludwig with the family. Utterly brilliant stuff, with David Mitchell (@RealDMitchell) pulling an absolute blinder. Can't wait for many more series (once we get to the end of this one).

One for the team at @DeezerDevs @Deezer - I switched the family account across from Spotify today because of Spotify's feature creep. Spotify has added YouTube videos, and to prevent everyone from sitting around watching them, I moved to simple platform. Please keep it that way!

Don't have my green screen this week, but Newsterm works just as well in a Window - have pulled it open wide today as it looks rather a lot is going on. #stockmarket github.com/bmcollier/newster…

Well this is disconcerting. The kicker being that if someone has forked your repo, and you accidentally commit a secret to it *which you immediately delete*, anyone can access that secret via the forked repo, *even if they hadn't synced the change. trufflesecurity.com/blog/any…

I've now completely given up caffeine and I feel a hell of a lot better for it. I expect we'll see more studies like this one showing interesting effects over the coming years. nature.com/articles/s41598-0…

I've written a VT100-friendly RSS dashboard which runs in my green-screen while I'm working. Frustratingly, every time the @BBC update one of their articles slightly, the published time gets reset. I must have seen "GPs, pharmacies and airports in UK hit" about 20 times today...

New desktop setup is go! #vt220

It is just rotten luck that these things look like something the borg would use to assimilate people, but if they ever get used for medical treatments, the public relations campaign may be... challenging? In reality they're an important part of our gut microbiome.

So given that the UK leg of the #Elections2024 are tomorrow, I must exercise my semi-regular duty, and remind everyone that as a voting system, Sortition has all the advantages of both FPTP and Proportional Representation. See "for multi member bodies": en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rand…

Just an update on this one. Probably the best gig I've been to in years. Where else would you here Schumann's Dichterliebe translated into Hindi and mashed up with an Indian paean? Wish I had a picture but the phone was off to not spoil it. All five musicians were fabulous.