Keen techie. Tech leader and strategic consultant. Retrocomputing enthusiast, home brewer, chorister and maker of curries.
π¬π§ Manchester
Joined November 2007
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- Followers1.1K
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Ben Collier retweeted
OK, let's talk about Steve Harvey's suggestion that you can flip five suits into 75 outfits. π§΅
Ben Collier retweeted
I would like to see UK with learning posters at supermarkets, bus/train stations, petrol stations, motorway flyovers. It could be how to do a maths equation; an annotated quote from a Shakespeare play; Greek alphabet; French phrases; annotated human skeleton; chemical reaction...
Ben Collier retweeted
Are these real polyglots though? This sounds like an English speaker with GCSE French, rather than a quadralingual person from Zurich.
The vast majority of polyglots aren't polyglots. Perhaps that's where Dijkstra's quip about BASIC ruining programmers forever comes from.
Ben Collier retweeted
Twitch time! I'm working on the Guitaraoke song list web app - ASPNET Core, C#, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, today we'll be building signups and song queues and maybe plugging in a little FontAwesome! Swing by and say hi:
twitch.tv/dylanbeattie
Ben Collier retweeted
So OpenAI didnβt give the thing a gun (lucumr.pocoo.org/2023/2/17/tβ¦) but quite a few other scary things. This will be interesting openai.com/blog/chatgpt-plugβ¦
Ben Collier retweeted
It's a strange world. Right now, in light of technology, schools need to be teaching a combination of abstract philosophy and manual creativity.
Ben Collier retweeted
This is my CEO body. I've yet to have any of these dreadful people contact me, presumably because I'm yet to be a CEO, in which case they're missing a trick. Sorry to hear this is a thing.
Ben Collier retweeted
"Here's what I've been working on, let's discuss it". Makes sense as long as you do synchronous review, not a passive-aggressive comment-fest.
Ben Collier retweeted
"Skunk Works", the autobiography of Ben Rich, for a number of reasons. The sense of achievement, of successfully negotiating challenges, delivering some engineering marvels, and the context of the political ferment of several decades in the C20th. Plus some great anecdotes.
Ben Collier retweeted
The interesting part for me are sets of interfaces which allow AIs to instigate tasks. That and a "motivational function". With those two elements you could realistically operate a market of competing only-AI corporations, using Mech Turk, Zoom Avatars etc. to reach meatspace.
Ben Collier retweeted
Long ago on a job, checking outsourced code, we found a function which intended to run some code if a value was below 20. The code was repeated verbatim 20 times under a series of equalities between 0 and 20. Don't know if this was down to a LOC measure or the dev not knowing '<'
Ben Collier retweeted
After dying, we strongly recommend that you do *not* disclose any personal information to superficially angelic-looking interlocutors, as this is likely to be a phishing attempt. Type the URL for paradise manually into your soulβs browser, and double-check for a padlock symbol.
Ben Collier retweeted
Β«I believe that scientific knowledge has fractal properties, that no matter how much we learn, whatever is left, however small it may seem, is just as infinitely complex as the whole was to start withΒ» -- Isaac Asimov buff.ly/3dvByR8
Ben Collier retweeted
I assume that the exemption is there because someone said "we can't put an age gate in front of IMAP or SMTP", but there are plenty of other protocols which that is true of. Telnet on a green screen terminal? Finger? I mean, that falls into the bounds of the regulations. Finger.
Ben Collier retweeted
HN is down again with what appears to be a second disk failure. This is on the fallback server, which we switched to last night when the primary server failed. Will update when we know more. Sorry all!
Ben Collier retweeted
Cute article. It also says "There's also a lot of bad C++ in finance... ...it's like a giant puzzle."
efinancialcareers.com/news/2β¦
Ben Collier retweeted
In conversation with @microlabdoc earlier, I discovered that not everyone knows of the hamster's prodigious capacity for alcohol.
They love it so much they prefer to drink 15% ethanol instead of water, and can tolerate relative quantities that would kill a human. 1/
Ben Collier retweeted
Fun fact: the US decided to build "the world's first full-scale atomic electric power plant devoted exclusively to peacetime uses" in 1953 and it went live in 1957.
That is, it took less time to invent nuclear power stations in the 50s than it takes to replicate them today.
