tomtaylor

Taking a leaf from Lara Hogan who celebrates significant career events with doughnuts (see https://larahogan.me/donuts/), I’ll be indulging in a huge vanilla slice today.

I hope this email finds you, no matter how long that might take or how many wrong turns you've made in your own personal road before you find the one whose heart answers yours.

'optimizing llm prompts' is the least satisfying work i've done in my engineering career, this is worse than tweaking kubernetes configs, it's like begging an idiot to do the right thing though an untestable blackbox interface

I hope this email finds you in the most unexpected places and at the worst possible time.

Finished the half-scale prototype this weekend.

My concrete mixing and handling have a lot of room for improvement, I hear vibration tables help with this a lot. I also need to design a multi-piece mold so I can do more than one tile per 48 hours, and make some improvements to the tile shape like the fragile neck area. Overall though I’m really happy with this result!

Ever fancied making your own nacho cheese?

50ml lemon juice
1/2 tsp baking soda
80ml milk
200g cheese

1. Mix lemon juice and baking soda
2. Allow fizzing to stop. Congratulations, you’ve made Sodium Citrate.
3. Add milk and bring to simmer
4. Melt cheese into the liquid. It should remain gooey.

"If a worker scans the QR code and clicks the link, Amazon’s software automatically generates a letter from the worker and then emails it to the trade union, ending their membership."

The innovation will continue until morale improves :goose_bonk:

[This from the very excellent Foxglove Legal's latest newsletter. Foxglove aren't on Fedi (yet?), but are on the web at https://www.foxglove.org.uk]

#Amazon #MayDay #JoinAUnion #Coventry

Very happy to announce that @tomcoates and I have been given a #SummerOfProtocols grant to develop an end-to-end encryption (E2EE) protocol for #ActivityPub DMs, including a reference implementation and a report to submit to the W3C SocialCG.

https://forum.summerofprotocols.com/t/sop-2024-pig-and-pog-grantees/1270

"If that sounds even more absurd, or provocative, than a social media account for a roll of toilet paper let me explain." – https://aaronland.info/weblog/2024/04/26/matrix/#usf

Listen here, app. I know you’re probably right but you gotta work on your communication skills.

@tom I also left a trail of decapitated cottages in my wake

I hope this email finds you interesting or attractive.

Obviously I chose the full- #CarryShitOlympics route with this one

Review: 7/10, much amusement from the yard staff, plenty of help getting it all tied up. Rode slow and easy about halfway then the board started to consistently work itself out of the front strap as the dolly encountered resistance.

Walking it the rest of the way to deal with a few turns and serious crosswalks.

Whoever wrote this headline is not paid enough.

someone at work requested a link be added to a widget but because the widget uses its own layout system the link cant be added with proper localization so someone proposed we put the text in a styled box that is not a link and then overlap it with an invisible button that would be a fixed size so would not match the localized text if it wasn't the same size as english and I gave an impassioned speech about if you ever find yourself building an alternate HTML renderer inside a web page you are lost and then it was silent on the phone for a while and then decided I guess we just won't add that link then

I hope this email finds you worthy to live this life.

I was reading through this article “The Man who killed Google Search” from Ed Zitron https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ I’m someone who has implemented search at a whole bunch of different companies (and got half way through writing a book on Search for O’Reilly before doing a startup put a crimp on that).

Global data center energy use is set to triple this year, from 15TWh last year to 46TWh this year.

That's an increase on the order of what Serbia or Ireland consumes in a year.

Given that most of this demand is being driven by Nvidia GPU systems for AI compute and Nvidia is manufacturing capacity limited right now, with all available hardware being installed, we can expect that growth rate to continue, adding another ~30TWh next year — except that the next generation of hardware consumes even more power, so it could be more like an additional 40TWh, another Denmark or New Zealand. If Nvidia gets over their supply chain crunch, this could go much higher, assuming the market and grid can support it. Even with only linear growth, this would put us at ~285TWh by 2030, approximately the same as all of the UK.

It won't, of course — it's an obvious bubble and the infrastructure simply isn't there to support this, but it's a catastrophe in the making regardless.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-electric-utilities-brace-surge-power-demand-data-centers-2024-04-10/

geospatial: everything about it is hard, but it's also the most fun problem area, also all of the hard problems are things that nobody expects to be hard