The year went by so fast

oday is the first day of November and it’s getting dark very early. We’re only 2 months away from 2027, a year that promises lots of exercise, a lot of writing, and a 23^rd anniversary of Tux Machines.

We’re only months away from the end of the fifth year of the Ukraine war. Putin would rather destroy Russia (and his neighbour) than accept defeat.

I was 24 at the time

wenty years ago I finished my thesis (but not my viva), about year after I began public speaking. My first talk as a Ph.D. student was in London, I think 22 years ago.

It never ceases to amaze me how fast time goes by. I started my Ph.D. more than 23 years ago.

Scams and/or scammers rely on misplaced trust

have a friend who keeps being scammed or falling for charlatans, repeatedly (despite my warnings about almost all of these scams). As a scholar, he has been scammed by Saudis, Chinese, Italians, and something in Malaysia and/or Korea. That last one nearly killed him, after it had wiped out all of his life savings.

I don’t know why he falls for it, I keep warning him about these things and he should know better, he’s a professor.

I think the first example goes back more than 15 years ago. He suggested I go work for some college in London, which probably turned to be somewhat of an unprofessional diploma mill. I smelled something wrong and didn’t go to an interview they had invited me to. Good. My friend later said they were horrible (he didn’t specify all the reasons; he was too focused on having a rowing machine in his office) and he inadvertently fooled some colleague from Manchester into going there; it turned out to be a mistake. Thankfully I wasted almost no time on it.

Strike 1.

A decade ago he tried to convince me to invest in some company he told me he had become a partner with. He said the head or founder was super-rich and had a castle. Not too long afterwards, after I told him he was likely faking the finances (genuinely rich people don’t need to get pretentious by getting castles), the guy filed for bankruptcy. So I was right about this.

Strike 2.

It seems like some people are naturally susceptible to work that does not pay them, making false promises or even takes money only to make it vanish away.

Strike 3 is the one he told me nothing about (until he swallowed his pride and it was already way too late).

The world is full of people who cheat, lie, and scam other people. It’s good to be cautious and presume no innocence.

Yes, one of those blog posts about one’s dreams

his past night I dreamt of it again. I had a dream about writing blog posts. I have long had dreams about losing what I had typed, then accepting it was probably nothing important anyway. I think those sorts of dreams (about writing long articles, in the abstract) began more than 20 years ago because I was writing a lot, sometimes “in my sleep”. Over time I became accustomed to the idea that this would keep happening. Regret over “losing the work” (that I could never even recall) faded away.

I can imagine that footballers have lots of dreams about playing football and carpenters dream of doing carpentry, so there’s nothing unusual about it, it’s just another fact of life.

Almost 15

oday is a cloudy day and it looks like I’ll be leaving while it’s still rather dark. We’re not even in October yet!

I recently realised that my bicycle turns 15 in a matter of months, maybe about 19 months. It still works OK. It’s a German brand, but I think it’s built and assembled in Taiwan based on a German design.

I need to inflate my tires again today. There are particular things we need to buy and some of them are quite heavy.

I believe this bike can turn 20 and still be used. That’s better than many ‘modern’ cars.

Don’t do that

think I was about 3 when I was in a particular place and time and can still vaguely remember that place and time. I also think that psychologists deem this to be normal, based on the belief people cannot have any vivid memories of them being 1 or 2 (belief; we cannot “read” brains). I don’t know why, but it’s something to do with memory retention in the brain as it ages. I also think that recollection requires rehearsal, so in order for me to remember some moment from age 3 I’d need to recall that at age 5, then 7, 10 and so on. It reinforces that memory.

The same is true for adults in their professional lives. Without exercising some skill regularly, that skill will be lost.

This is one strong argument against using slop, either in a business (collective skills/retention thereof) or as an individual.

Also see this new blog post: If you don’t have the factories, you lose the expertise

Ignore how he uses for slop for images (hypocrisy when it comes to LLMs for code, too). To quote: “If you have the factories, sooner or later, you get the designers. If you don’t have the factories, you lose the expertise. Or you never get it. There aren’t that many people left in the Silicon Valley capable of working on silicon. You can design a chip from California. Making one is done where the fab is. You can get a PhD in robotics in Quebec City, but you won’t be designing robots unless you fly over to where they are made. Zoom calls won’t cut it at scale.”

We’re drowning in seas of words

‘ve been typing and keeping personal stories since around 2002. It started when I sat at my office in Manchester Computing with plenty of time to pass, not much to do. Some of those stories predate that habit by a year or two. I thought to myself, one day I can turn those notes into publications, even though books were still more common at the time.

The world has changed somewhat since then. Quantity of text does not matter because of serial sloppers who do not value quality and who conflate plagiarism with “intelligence”.

People’s stories that are authentic still have real value; a high quantity of computer-generated garbage ‘stories’ will be culled and put in the digital ashtray sooner or later.