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November 2023

I always had the sense that many Doctor Who actors retired from the role to avoid being typecast, with a slight air of resentment/wariness. Tennant, clearly, actually just loves the role and wanted to do it again.

There's a section in my next book about the insanity of NFTs. By the time the book's even been produced though, the tech world has moved on to the next insanity.

The problem with the production stage of academic books (and I suspect fiction books, too) is that you are so sick of reading your own words by the time that you get there that, say, reviewing copyedits feels like a total menace. Anyway, they're done!

Has anyone studied what the effects of LLM's responding in anthropomorphic first-person terms are ("I can't do that" etc.)? This personification definitely has some effect.

"High taxes disencourages [sic] work, Hunt says."

National Insurance is part of how we pay for the NHS. Cutting its revenue sources for individual wealth advancement is hideous.

Probably one of the good things to come out of LLMs for coding is that there are many more comments detailing exactly what code does now, because it helps to prompt the LLM that helped to write it in the first place.

God.

"Disabled people must work from home to do ‘their duty’, says UK minister"

The ones who can, are. Disability benefits are _so_ low that nobody would choose to rely on them. The people in question are so unwell that they can't work.

Our country is disgusting.

Had an academic invitation today to visit, and speak in, China. I cannot see that I will ever be in a state to do this. I would have to organise dialysis while there, transport many meds with me, and I think I'm just too fatigued by the kidney failure to survive it. I regret it.

A reminder that tomorrow, at 13.30 UK time, I will be speaking with @IndependentSage about "vulnerability" and what it means in our brave new world. Streaming will take place on their X account.

The worst thing about the dialysis machine is the fact that the alarms make it sound as though there's a nuclear meltdown happening. Usually it's just a kink in the line or something, but the alarms are truly earth shatteringly panic inducing. Not conducive to a calm response.

This weekend, it's copyediting review time! The copyeditor has done a really good job on this and caught lots of (embarrassing) grammatical slips. As usual, this hidden labour vastly improves the quality of long-form academic writing.

'Courtney, who confessed in a video released after his death to murdering a drug-dealing rival and once attacking five Chinese waiters with a meat cleaver, was described by friends as “like an angel”.'

An Old Testament angel, I'm guessing?

Well, I made it out of home haemodialysis probation. I've done my two weeks and am now allowed to do it "out of hours" (when the nurses aren't at their phone station). Phew. Two weeks down, errr, rest of my life to go :P

Nigel Farage has said being on "I'm a Celebrity" would be "quite an unconventional thing for me to do" but he's well-used to degrading himself in public in a bitter contest to get attention, so he'll be right at home.

Old photo, new material! I'll be speaking on the Independent SAGE broadcast next week about those who remain vulnerable to COVID and what isn't but should be being done.

Braverman's strategy: get fired now so she isn't associated with Sunak's election defeat. Make increasingly polarising right-wing statements to play into Tory internal member politics. Emerge as leader in 5 years' time to contest next election.

I really wish people would stop scaring our poor little doggies with fireworks. Robyn has been refusing to go outside ever since they started and is terrified.

Spent some time in the night wondering whether hermit and hermetic were rooted in the same etymology. Turns out that they're not and the "seal" of "hermetically sealed" has nothing to do with hermittude.

Was trying to build an OpenSearch/Elastic index for a hobby project and the AWS managed service was running at $30 per day - even on non-ingest days and without too much data. Painful.

A note on popular culture research. I am trawling through a huge number of 1990s magazines devoted solely to Star Trek: Voyager. Most of them are filler; plot summaries of episodes and many pictures. But every issue features interviews and some have been very enlightening.