scmbradley

Boring tech guy. Former professional philosopher.

Unremarkable cis-het middle-class able-bodied white guy. He/Him.

Irish/British. Currently living in Leeds. Former resident of Luxembourg, Germany and Netherlands.

This toot will self destruct in one month.

Public Key

npub1m76hqmjy0yxmt3f4yh4c2aup4vluvta4tmfazf6s3xvkpnh83xgqdqrcmh

NIP-05 Address

Scmbradley@mathstodon-xyz.mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsdldtsdez8jrd4c56jt6u9w7q6k07x9764a573yaggnxtqemncnyqpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dsn553s5

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1m76hqmjy0yxmt3f4yh4c2aup4vluvta4tmfazf6s3xvkpnh83xgqdqrcmh

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Last Notes

2026-09-23 08:34:50 UTC

"Oh sorry, that was Claude" is not a fucking excuse. If you let an LLM write something, in a bug ticket, in your code whatever, you are responsible for it and if it's wrong, it's your fucking fault.
"If I have to check everything anyway I might as well just write it myself". Yes.

2026-06-22 08:54:51 UTC

It is very funny that because of the paliamentary calendar, Starmer will stay in office after having resigned longer than Liz Truss lasted in total.

2026-06-01 08:43:34 UTC

Finally! Coffee for MEN. Introducing the manly coffee range.
Chapaccino
Manchiato
Tactical Espresso

2026-05-29 15:05:09 UTC

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@nprofile…2q04 great question. First its very important that you let your personal bodyguards unionise.

2026-05-07 08:44:34 UTC

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@nprofile…3q9y be sure to do some free will stretches before starting your free will exercise.

2026-04-16 12:45:39 UTC

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@nprofile…ds0l I don't think this is telling you what a whale is, it's making it clear that the relevant aspect of whales for the purpose of the paper is their matrilineal small group social structure.

2026-02-26 21:41:36 UTC

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@nprofile…2d25 oh my god if you could buy jelly babies in the pub I would eat so many jelly babies

2026-02-04 15:14:25 UTC

Gang, I left my passport at home and I'm supposed to be flying this evening. Luckily, this uber driver is a mad bastard and I'm going to make the train to the airport.

2026-01-28 12:59:25 UTC

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@nprofile…tfwq thoughts and prayers

2026-01-22 16:41:21 UTC

What are good "go into it knowing as little as possible about it" films?
I think from dusk til dawn would be very funny to watch knowing nothing about it.

2026-01-15 12:12:38 UTC

Pro tip. React to every Teams message with a different emoji. Soon people will go out of their way to avoid interacting with you.

2025-12-12 22:19:33 UTC

There must be some interesting sociological work on what regional British accents show up in fantasy games, films and TV shows. Like you get a reasonable amount of Irish, Scottish, Yorkshire/Lancashire, West Country accents or at least attempts thereof. Less scouse or geordie. Not much Welsh. Hardly ever see a brummie in these settings. What's going on?

2025-12-12 15:35:25 UTC

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@nprofile…u6hy
https://media.mathstodon.xyz/media_attachments/files/115/707/327/161/583/014/original/e6b81457d5a54d62.png

2025-12-12 15:17:44 UTC

Python's re match method matches an initial segment of the input. This strikes me as unintuitive. I would have expected either match the whole string (and use '.*' if you don't want that) or match any substring (and use anchors if you don't want that). But instead it's kind of half and half? Use anchors at the end, use '.*' at the front.
Am I wrong here? Is the default behaviour obviously right for some salient collection of problems?

2025-12-11 21:07:16 UTC

Bad news, nerds. Star Trek shows leaving Netflix early next year. Looks like I won't get to finish Voyager before then. Oh well.

2025-12-04 14:07:50 UTC

Tap your credit card here to pay. On the screen. Where it displays whether or not the transaction has been authorised. No don't take the card away to look at the screen we display information on.

2025-11-07 10:54:09 UTC

Happy Four Seasons Total Landscaping Press Conference Anniversary to all who celebrate. Five years already!

2025-11-07 10:03:07 UTC

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@nprofile…u6hy you can see why the company that makes these excellent products has a market cap of over a trillion dollars.

2025-11-05 12:05:33 UTC

Do you want a list of valid RGB colours that can also be read as words? Here you go:
DEFEA7
C171E5
BE51DE
ED17ED
AFFEC7
AC1D1C
ACCE55
A55E75
CEA5ED
E57A7E
7E57ED
BA77ED
5EEDED
ABB075
5EA7ED
DEBA7E
57A71C
57A7ED
DECADE
DEFEC7
B0D1E5
FACADE
0FF1CE
57A7E5
DEC1DE
EFFEC7
F177ED
A55157
BEA575
C0FFEE
DE7EC7
5C071A
CA57E5
7A57ED
B1A5E5

2025-11-02 08:24:53 UTC

I don't mean to brag, but I am very good at cheating at Uno to ensure I lose to The Boy.
Only to be deployed when he's tired and fragile, when he's one loss away from a meltdown. But a very useful skill to have in that situation...

2025-10-19 15:07:01 UTC

If Charles had predeceased Elizabeth, would Andrew be king now? Or would it have gone to William? How does succession work? It's been too long since I played Crusader Kings, I forget these details...

2025-10-07 15:59:15 UTC

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@nprofile…h9qy it's becoming more reasonable both because everything else is getting worse and because Linux is getting easier and better.

2025-10-06 10:27:10 UTC

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@nprofile…hr6z or a sad Henry with the text "nature abhors a vacuum"

2025-10-05 10:16:58 UTC

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@nprofile…args now I just want to categorise shakespeare plays into Catholic plays and protestant plays. Like twelfth night is catholic. Lear is Protestant. Timon of Athens: protestant. Most of the comedies are catholic. The tempest is Protestant.

2025-10-05 07:21:16 UTC

Oh good I've acquired a new pedantic bee in my bonnet.
If you are carefully reading a text you pore over it. You do not pour over it.

2025-10-04 10:51:41 UTC

I just bought a waffle maker and these fucking ding dongs made it so I can't post about making waffles for fear of being mistaken for terf. What a stupid timeline.

2025-06-18 20:18:40 UTC

Super Smash Brothers Malaise

2025-06-18 20:04:24 UTC

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@nprofile…7x4l
Donald trump
Donald trump
Does whatever
He fucking wants
Look out!
Here comes Donald trump

2025-06-13 14:37:26 UTC

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@nprofile…dsla London and Paris are closer together than London, Texas and Paris, Texas. So maybe they were like "eh, close enough".

2025-06-13 13:42:14 UTC

The Addams family meet up with a Navy officer.
The daughter says "hello Commodore".
Wednesday, it's Captain.

2025-06-11 20:16:15 UTC

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@nprofile…hr6z this one in particular is hurting my brain
https://media.mathstodon.xyz/media_attachments/files/114/666/563/799/226/792/original/86f93d91979673eb.png

2025-06-11 20:01:35 UTC

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@nprofile…hr6z howing until we have custom emojis of them?

2025-06-10 07:18:42 UTC

How much power does a vape need? Could you replace the battery with a little hand crank and a capacitor? I don't know if it's practical but it is a very funny image: people stood outside, vigorously winding a tiny crank before each puff.

2025-05-30 09:59:51 UTC

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@nprofile…args bookmarking this so I can come back later to see if you found the title...

2025-05-22 19:31:43 UTC

l2s r5e t1e m4e l5s o0f e3y w2d w2h n5s!

2025-05-19 20:45:55 UTC

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@nprofile…jqvx most software documentation employs an unreliable narrator, so why not let them experiment with other literary tropes?

2025-05-12 11:38:30 UTC

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@nprofile…saev @nprofile…fqqu @nprofile…4mn6 @nprofile…0kak let's face it, maths is already a typesetters nightmare so why not lean into it

2025-05-11 19:51:40 UTC

Been doing some gardening, yo
https://media.mathstodon.xyz/media_attachments/files/114/490/937/724/454/142/original/db42fcde1acce432.jpg

2025-05-11 09:22:09 UTC

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@nprofile…fa4k my son pays no attention to what bedtime we try to impose on him. So it's something of a natural experiment...

2025-05-11 09:16:33 UTC

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@nprofile…fa4k they stay up too late, and then possibly have a meltdown over something or other because they're overtired. it's then a real struggle to get them up and ready for school the next day. As long as we also stop respecting the social construction of school timetables, it probably wouldn't be so bad.

2025-03-12 08:21:10 UTC

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@nprofile…saev brute force the 36^36 possible solutions. Or wait, is it less than that because the numbers are each used once?

2025-02-13 08:22:48 UTC

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@nprofile…e5g0 why insist the earth is an orientable surface? Klein bottle earth.

2025-02-11 12:59:46 UTC

I kind of think using gendered pronouns for inanimate objects is weird, but also, I think German is just wrong that the moon is masculine and the sun is feminine. The french have it right that it's the other way round!

2025-02-03 11:21:45 UTC

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@nprofile…6kk0 I used to TA logic for philosophers, and we would use teaching logic as a way to teach how to reason properly. It was a way to introduce how to construct a valid arguments, how to analyse an argument for unstated premises etc.
But, we'd often have logic taught by the logicians, and so they would teach not just the rules of some natural deduction system, but also soundness and completeness, and these are not useful to most philosophy undergrads.
It's not that the metatheory confused them, it's just that they resented having to learn it (and with good reason, I think).
As a maths undergrad I don't think I was ever explicitly taught logic (except like by accident when my analysis lecturer would make an offhand remark about the contrapositive).

2025-01-29 18:15:19 UTC

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@nprofile…s6x2 a macroblog platform with per-paragtaph comments is a pretty neat idea.

2025-01-29 12:54:04 UTC

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@nprofile…6kk0 it might flood, but yeah forest fires are less of a concern.

2025-01-29 12:46:33 UTC

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@nprofile…6kk0 hey but at least we get better weather than California.

2025-01-22 07:28:04 UTC

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@nprofile…60lz it feels like such a wasted opportunity to have lived through a period of very low interest rates and not borrowed to replace aging infrastructure. Any rebuilding we do now will cost a lot more than it would have done in, say, 2015.

2025-01-11 12:30:01 UTC

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@nprofile…args my top three I use would probably be official documentation for programming languages.

2025-01-06 11:40:50 UTC

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@nprofile…x759 when I was affiliated with a university I had legal access to many scientific journals. It was often significantly easier and quicker to use sci hub, rather than the cumbersome log in procedures the library required...

2025-01-04 18:33:23 UTC

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@nprofile…p06x display of a quote containing bullet points looks weird. (Sorry I meant to file a big, I forgot until I saw this toot)
https://media.mathstodon.xyz/media_attachments/files/113/771/515/226/540/411/original/68e76df3fcc6951a.png

2025-01-03 19:11:39 UTC

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@nprofile…x759 thanks for the suggestion. I took my son (4) outside to look at planets. We spotted Venus, Jupiter and possibly mars. We couldn't see Saturn though...

2025-01-02 17:18:01 UTC

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@nprofile…8xaf a tiny NUC/mini-pc

2025-01-02 17:15:33 UTC

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@nprofile…s0cr @nprofile…y4rs orphean task: like an achillean task, but the thing you have to prevent happening is 100% under your control and you're going to mess it up anyway, aren't you, oh dear.

2024-12-30 17:28:40 UTC

Steam reviews are a trip...
https://media.mathstodon.xyz/media_attachments/files/113/742/950/792/644/687/original/b447bf65fc052b58.png

2024-12-21 14:11:22 UTC

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@nprofile…args @nprofile…xh7u having stuff run locally is 100% the best option. It opens up more options for debugging, and there's just something kinda magical about being able to make your computer do stuff. (It's also kinda magical that you can make remote computers do stuff, but seeing that magic takes more understandingz I guess).
I can see that for young learners you probably need to make the environment lots more forgiving than you might do if you were targeting people with a bit more knowledge.

2024-12-21 14:05:17 UTC

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@nprofile…args @nprofile…xh7u I wonder how hard it would be to self host something like this? Basically a text box and a button that runs the code from the text box with output captured somewhere. It feels like there must be a project to do this ...
I guess you can self host jupyter notebooks so that might be a solution for languages that jupyter supports?

2024-12-11 12:06:02 UTC

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@nprofile…args I think this is a really interesting question! I found it hard to think about ended up wondering about two kinda related questions instead: how has mathematics education changed in the last, say, hundred years? and how do I think mathematics education should change?
One trend I can imagine seeing is more emphasis on maths relevant to computing. So understanding binary (and hexadecimal), maybe graph theory/networking concepts, complexity and computability, queueing theory...

2024-12-08 21:00:26 UTC

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@nprofile…lwgl No the SELECT statement might not count, but the database is parsing the statement and using an algorithm to draw out the correct data from the db. That's what I was getting at.
Glad to have you on board on the quest to reclaim "algorithm".

2024-12-08 18:38:25 UTC

I know what people mean when they say "there's no algorithms on the fediverse" but uh that's just not true? Like, something's fetching the messages from a database, how do you think SELECT works? It's not fucking magic is it? How is the text displayed on your screen? Are the letters dumped out at random or is there some sort of procedure determining where the letters and words go?
This is mostly me being pedantic, but it's also partly me trying to reclaim the word algorithm. Algorithms aren't inherently bad. We wouldn't get far with our computing without them.

2024-12-08 18:17:54 UTC

I finished portal recently. I haven't played it before. I enjoyed it, and now I can join in on all those jokes about how the cake is a lie.

2024-12-08 16:28:48 UTC

Lazyweb: if I want to play around with generative art, is processing.org a good option, or are there better choices? Searching for generative art brings up a lot of AI bullshit, and even the pages that do seem to be about creative coding mostly talk about nft bullshit.
Is Nannou any good? What other options are there?

2024-12-07 18:10:50 UTC

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@nprofile…4lq3 I actually dislike travel. I like being places, but getting there is rarely pleasant.

2024-11-26 08:18:39 UTC

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@nprofile…32kp I wonder if there's an automated or somewhat automated way to turn these into monochrome variants?

2024-11-11 20:30:23 UTC

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@npub1afz…wdvg @npub14uk…2erc it's not a very good store of value, because it's so volatile. It's an instrument for speculation.

2024-11-10 18:41:15 UTC

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@npub1a4g…yuyx have you seen the video of the biff actor singing a song about his experience filming bttf? It's great.

2024-11-08 12:36:14 UTC

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@npub1zdp…vqv8 ok. So what kinds of questions are there? There are bad faith questions (stupid). There are "more a comment than a question" (often stupid). There are questions that involve a misunderstanding (not stupid, a good way to resolve the misunderstanding is to ask the question). There are questions to which you should really already know the answer (not stupid, but not good either). There are questions to which there is a straightforward answer (fine, but not great). There are questions that require a really long answer (good, but often unproductive in context). And then there are the questions that make the person you're asking stop for a minute and go "hmm... " (This is the good stuff).

2024-09-11 17:19:50 UTC

I now need to be logged in to GitHub to clone from GitHub? (Or have an ssh token that identifies me to GitHub). This didn't use to be the case, right?

2024-09-06 11:27:57 UTC

I saw a car transporter with the ramp down while driving and an alarmingly large part of my brain was like "hit the ramp it's a shortcut"

2024-09-03 18:28:43 UTC

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@npub1a4g…yuyx extremely relatable toot. One day last week I had to take the bus to work without my headphones, and I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say it was literally the worst day anybody has ever had anywhere ever.

2024-08-31 10:07:50 UTC

Did my first #ParkRun in two and a half years. Pretty pleased with my time.

2024-08-27 17:46:54 UTC

Alternate universe where everyone who played Doctor Who in our universe had played James Bond, and vice versa.

2024-08-27 17:37:09 UTC

Anyone else remember Google buzz? Did I dream this one?

2024-08-15 06:22:36 UTC

Singing cyclists: acapeloton

2024-08-14 18:22:21 UTC

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@npub1a4g…yuyx no they're asking why you're a communist

2024-07-29 17:00:35 UTC

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@npub1a4g…yuyx this chapter of your memoir is going to be LIT

2024-07-27 07:39:31 UTC

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@npub19lt…qfjk the link to the controversy in the wine world appears to be a domain squatter now.

2024-07-19 12:10:54 UTC

I dunno man, crowdstrike just isn't giving me the visceral joy of previous global disasters like Boat Stuck.

2024-07-14 19:36:26 UTC

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@npub198t…hasj I read that through twice and I still cannot fathom what you've been found guilty of

2024-07-02 18:56:17 UTC

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@npub1pfe…e2dm the irony being, of course, that NFTs got commodified: those stupid monkey pictures were kinda interchangeable

2024-06-15 09:09:10 UTC

#Mosstodon
https://media.mathstodon.xyz/media_attachments/files/112/619/848/870/801/647/original/ed14edd15d18df81.jpg

2024-06-08 18:44:20 UTC

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@npub16u7…uend infotrickle

2024-05-25 16:38:58 UTC

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@npub1a4g…yuyx reminds of the time I was in the pub and my Scottish colleague took it upon herself to teach a french guy to swear properly. Hours of fun.

2024-05-10 20:00:34 UTC

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@npub1upk…tcwy could you give an example of good command line UIs?

2023-12-23 11:17:11 UTC

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@npub198t…hasj blocked and reported

2023-08-28 19:47:58 UTC

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@npub1z2q…3yuf this got me thinking (sort of tangentially to your point). An irrational number is never repeating in every base! And every rational number has a finite representation in some base (x/y has a finite representation in base y, for example). So this means that every infinite, but repeating number, has a finite representation in some base. I don't really have a conclusion, I was just sort of surprised by that.

2023-08-09 10:41:39 UTC

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@npub19lt…qfjk I think I care much more about consistency than I do about which of these is used. (java drives me nuts is it length or size? An attribute or a method?)

2022-12-15 08:46:17 UTC

It's hard to keep up with who is currently on strike, but solidarity with whoever it is this week. ✊