Andy Wootton

Data physicist, information philosopher & network culture theorist.
Writes in Obsidian, computes in Clojure, using emacs with Cider. Less is more. Small pieces, loosely joined, for emergent complexity.
Agile software development with models, functions, graphs & flow. Not tech used to be @wootube@mastodonapp.uk. I was banned and my appeal ignored.

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Last Notes

2026-10-30 15:08:06 UTC

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I'm retired but I used to think about this and there seems a fundamental conflict between co-operation and competitiveness that can only be resolved at societal level. If someone in a co-op gets seriously ill, do you leave them behind? Who gets allowed inside the shelter? Only The Best? You may as well stick with Capitalism :-).

2026-10-30 14:06:10 UTC

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Anthropic fixed it without admitting it existed. A cynical person might think they hoped one of the companies they'd allowed it to infect would take the blame.

2026-10-19 23:23:01 UTC

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Though checking the drive is actually writing something, using the same drive is a good way to fail fast (it wasn't me, this time!)

2026-09-23 18:10:45 UTC

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Thanks for the pastry explanation. I thought a small creature had pounced on your ham.

2026-09-04 23:07:48 UTC

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Where do you buy these British fridges that last for decades? :-)

2026-08-20 15:33:25 UTC

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I started work on a DEC VAX 11/780 serving a college of higher education, as it was upgraded from 1 to 2 MB.
I think the ICL mainframe I used at university had 256kB.

2026-08-20 15:18:11 UTC

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:-) I read earlier that it's got 5-10 times more expensive over the last year. It's all been bought by Evil Techbroze to feed into the AI slop factory. Today: Raspberry Pi 5, 1GB £43.20, 16GB £292.80. Nobody sane would pay that. They'll wait. CLI, here we come!

2026-08-20 15:02:52 UTC

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What we really need right now is low-memory computing. Maybe we should have listened to Bill Gates.

2026-08-18 09:47:31 UTC

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I think "I am" ADHD rather than autistic but I see it as a natural variation, at the opposite end of a continuum to "stick to the knitting". I wander off and find interesting things which I bring back for the consideration of the tribe. The tribe may be annoyed by that but I think is evolutionary advantage in society having a few non-conformists. It makes people who think everything is simple very uncomfortable though, like art does.

2026-08-11 07:22:30 UTC

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I thought that was obviously nonsense. How much trouble could it be to avoid a small monument?
OTOH: I find it odd that a film set has acquired religious significance.

2026-07-17 11:01:44 UTC

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Because it's bad for gas suppliers? I went to an old steel plant in South Wales. It was like the Moon outside. Inside the office space, everything had a layer of shiny ash on top, including the computer I was there to work on and my shoulders. If we can stop that now, it would be great. It had the worst working conditions I've ever seen.

2026-07-17 06:59:54 UTC

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The new furnaces can't make new steel, only recycle old. With no blast furnaces, Britain would be entirely dependent on countries that have them. Some of our key allies haven't been reliable lately.

2026-06-16 20:08:47 UTC

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Payment of 'a value', which may change, depending on what people value that week, or evaporate completely.

2026-06-16 17:37:19 UTC

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Money isn't real. It's a promise made by someone you shouldn't trust.

2026-06-16 10:26:29 UTC

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Imagine being so tight that you'd rather move home twice a year than pay something towards the NHS (or for the armed forces to defend their country, if they are that way inclined.)

2026-06-03 10:44:39 UTC

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Music jargon is awful. They also use 'inverted' about intervals, where it makes more sense, so a 5th inverted is a 4th because 7 and 5 make 12, an OCTave. Now it's stopped making sense again :-).
We'd never give two different things the same name in computer science. OK, bad example.

2026-06-03 10:33:55 UTC

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I completed a table I'd forgotten starting and didn't at first understand (too late) last night. It showed the number of sharps and flats in each Major and Minor key and the number in their related pentatonic scales. There was a weird kind of symmetry in those results too. I've no idea what inspired me to start it.

2026-05-26 15:38:46 UTC

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Have they given up on Globalism? Wasn't "Buy British" what took us into Europe. A better political communicator would talk about reducing transportation costs with our choice of goods, to avoid sounding like an anti-woke, flag-wanging nationalist.

2026-05-19 18:20:06 UTC

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I don't know what "AI-powered delivery" is. I think we may assume they didn't either.

2026-05-16 00:03:13 UTC

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12 isn't divisible by 5 or 7. Most music is based on Pentatonic and hepatotonic scales. Coincidence? :-)

2026-05-15 23:50:44 UTC

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Yes. You would like Mike George on YouTube.

2026-05-08 14:15:35 UTC

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Let people experience Reform and Greens for a year and see who seems happiest. I don't hold much hope that Labour will do what's necessary to recover, or that there's a better leader waiting in the wings.

2026-05-05 07:19:39 UTC

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That sounds to me like an admission that Claudia may have no understanding of narrative. It builds a network of words and compares them to its network model of language, statistically. A story has a direction. A LLM doesn't have to read serially but to understand cause and effect, its model must identify direction. A map isn't a journey, though a route through a spacial map is, so it picked the wrong analogy.
To Know is not to Understand. Meaning is a directed graph.

2026-04-30 08:38:45 UTC

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Well, if you can't trust a crypto billionaire who wants fascism then who can you trust?

2026-04-22 18:19:06 UTC

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I think the problem is that renewables can't be relied upon to be there when needed, so we need gas to be. If gas generation has to compete fairly, companies will fail, so availability of generating capacity from fossil fuels needs to be rewarded, even though we really don't ever want to call on it. It's like a second car in many families. Market changes are always fraught. They may over-simplify for a fast result.

2026-03-27 14:42:49 UTC

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All he ever really did was eat a bacon sandwich wrong, in the opinion of the Far Right gutter-press. I think he could work well in a tag-team with Polanski. They both take on their enemies.

2026-03-02 19:39:37 UTC

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Does this mean Ticey will be spending more time in the UK?

2026-02-27 10:04:30 UTC

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It was a huge error of judgement by both Burnham and Starmer to stage this fight in public. They both lost.

2026-01-27 16:19:57 UTC

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Leaving the wealthy with proportionally yet more disposable income than the poorest, I assume and, in a better position to absorb tax increases and redistribute done of their 'unearned' income from invested capital?

2025-11-14 11:34:29 UTC

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"Waiting" got changed to "waring". I keep turning auto-correction off but then I find it's on again.

2025-11-12 15:09:30 UTC

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The way that 'religion' does in Israel? :-) You can easily arrive at the principles common to the major religions just by thinking what's best for everyone. Sins are generally actions that hurt others, for selfish reasons.

2025-11-12 14:36:14 UTC

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Why can't it be rationalism? It is in large parts of Europe.

2025-11-11 14:18:14 UTC

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Typo: fine = gone?

2025-11-11 12:25:02 UTC

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~"You don't know all the other things they did/were planning?". Has there been any further information about 'those things'? I seem to have missed it. I would feel safer in a country that didn't punish 'Future-Crime'.

2025-09-23 13:16:16 UTC

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This seems a much better way of trying to get the trains to run on time than electing Nazis.

2025-09-18 09:20:55 UTC

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Yesbut: I don't think that would stop Right Wing propagandists using your toot as evidence that 'All Lefties are anti-Semites'. It doesn't need to be true to re-enforce prejudices and prevent people listening to you. They aren't looking for truth or logic, just ammunition.

2025-09-18 00:18:00 UTC

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I don't think you mean "Israel" but "Israel's government and anyone who supports it". There are good Israelis; to think otherwise would be anti-Semitism.

2025-08-15 11:56:10 UTC

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You could just explain that you may sometimes feel that you are part of a machine with no soul but really you are just its fuel.

2025-08-04 11:03:43 UTC

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The key point was that the shape and engineering of the leading and trailing edges of the cogs was different. At your scale, I imagine a simple visual inspection would tell you whether to worry.

2025-08-04 10:34:37 UTC

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I don't but I know there were problems using turbines from jet engines in wind turbines because the cogs were designed to push, not to be pushed so they broke off and vibrated in unexpected ways, so I'd check that first.

2025-06-11 17:43:42 UTC

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Sorry for your problems but we really need independent hardware for FOSS systems. I don't want to buy from Google or Apple again after their support for the orange fascist. There need to be legal protections too.

2025-04-26 12:10:01 UTC

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Was it critical of the Trump/Vance/Musk administration? Google picked a side, and it was Team Evil.

2025-04-01 16:52:22 UTC

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The problem is that it makes it a good day for Trumpet to launch his next assault on democracy. The BBC is just reported on his white-supremacy poodle buying votes again but I think that happened a couple of days ago. Stay safe. Elbows Up!

2025-03-30 14:44:08 UTC

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I'm pre-mouse. I found it to be a horrible drawing tool. There are touch screens available for the Raspberry Pi.

2025-03-04 21:51:39 UTC

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I assume painting yourself orange, pretending to be taller, or wearing a fake ear is still OK?

2025-02-23 11:53:01 UTC

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Yes, but no. It should be possible to organise capitalism so people are rewarded for having and risking capital, without punishing those who don't have it, we just didn't choose to do that because our electoral systems are 'winner takes all" too.

2025-02-20 23:32:55 UTC

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vi and emacs are still free. Simpler text editors are also available.

2025-02-20 21:05:26 UTC

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I always thought FOSS would be in trouble if it became successful and big enough that it couldn't depend on free, part-time work by employees of non-FOSS companies. What are the objectives for a sustainable income model, given that the general public don't like paying taxes or making donations. Look at UK libraries and museums to see the likely future of FOSS unless there is radical change to the funding model. Things can't be free for everyone but it isn't fair to tax generosity.

2025-02-14 19:29:10 UTC

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That was fairly easy to predict, when Amazon didn't use an open protocol for their books, so they could be read on competitors' book readers.

2025-02-04 17:33:01 UTC

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I was recently given a window of 2 hours to have a mattress delivered, 3 times, including a call from the delivery driver. I had 3/4 of an hour to have a shower before the window. Guess what happened?

2025-01-29 18:52:56 UTC

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I blame Object Orientation. If we'd taken the Functional Programming route, state would flow. "It's ALIVE!".

2025-01-28 14:46:00 UTC

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No idea. I haven't installed Windows this century.

2025-01-24 09:10:12 UTC

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People actually voted for this leach. Tiny hands but huge shoes. A mystery!

2025-01-23 00:58:23 UTC

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It's time for the world to help Ukraine take the garbage out. That includes the traitor BoneSpurBoy Trump, for siding with Putin by running away from a fight again. We've all seen Musk's true colours too.
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/113/874/926/022/182/882/original/b15ac322a7af0e41.jpg

2025-01-22 13:37:31 UTC

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Thanks. The toot didn't mention Sweden, so it was a bit confusing for me, here on "speak English!" Brexit Island of slow-creeping racism :-(. So few of us are competent in even a second language, it was difficult to imagine.

2025-01-22 11:14:57 UTC

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Is this a country where the teaching language is different to the native language of the country? I would expect new students to be competent in the teaching language. In England, that's the same thing.

2024-10-15 17:01:20 UTC

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The British Empire, before the National Health Service existed, when everything had to be cured by 'fresh air', though getting your clothes wet might kill you faster than a letter from India could give your mother permission to spend money.

2024-09-26 08:56:34 UTC

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I want to change my answer. I said "Never" but I might tear down the fence once I had understood the danger and taken mitigating action to make the fence unnecessary but the cost of removing some technical debt is too high. Those cases are "Never", at least until a cheaper solution emerges. Just say if I'm overthinking this :-)

2024-07-31 23:05:16 UTC

Today, I mostly calculated the centre of gravity of a brick.
Phase 1: How hard can it be?
Phase 2: Oh.
Phase 3: Am I going to need to revise calculus?
Phase 4: All else has failed. In desperation, I shall employ Common Sense.