It's my thread and I'll derail it if I want to. Here is a picture from a few days ago, climbing Xerolakki (pretty... engaging... terrain) with the backside of Stefani on Olympus I think.

Zdravo from Skopje. Let me take 5 minutes to post bird pictures from Cairns and Kuranda Birdworld. #Birds #BirdsAU

There was a good collection of birds at the Wairau Lagoons near Blenheim. Also a lot of water from the recent rains this July. #BirdsNZ #Birds

Here are some more nature pictures from Kaikōura and the Tour du Mont Blanc. There were about a dozen humpback whales and a sperm whale. I also got lots of pictures of butterflies.

July pictures. This flight has another 30 minutes. Well, I can at least post four pictures in this time.

https://patricklam.ca/post/20260804-july-photos/

This includes a lot of pictures from a Whale Watch Kaikōura trip in July (a last minute but highly worthwhile decision), as well as pictures from snorkelling on the Great Barrier Reef in 2024, and then one more set of pictures from the Tour du Mont Blanc and from Christchurch in May.

I'm on a set of planes to Greece and the backlog is going to grow a whole lot...

#BirdsNZ #Birds

Darn! I thought I would run out of flight but I actually ran out of power first.

"But if you zoom out, it becomes clear that almost every “breakthrough” since last summer has concerned the narrow domains of computer code and math, which are defined by highly structured languages and come accompanied by massive amounts of specialized training data.

And yet, even in this best-case-scenario setting for AI, we’re still struggling to figure out how to actually use these tools in a way that makes sense in the long run."

https://calnewport.com/on-ai-coding-and-its-discontents/

This isn’t an original idea but rather a distillation of the ideas of others in a way that made it click for me, but:

AI slop code review is so much more draining because it is a fundamentally different task; your job goes from verifying and sense checking someone else’s human understanding to, oftentimes, developing the human understanding that the “author” has not bothered to undertake at a more-than-perfunctory level. Which is exhausting in itself and ALSO violates the social contract of code review.

I received an AI-slop cold email from a prospective PhD student. I wrote a few more words but I think I started my reply with "I hate LLMs". Ugh.

(The cold emails from students who are interested in microelectronics aren't much better...)

Bonus NZ moment: I was on a triple lift and two other singles got on: one from Wairarapa and one from Hastings. The guy from Hastings was here for a snowboard instructor course. Turns out that he rides with the son of the woman from the Wairarapa ("oh, you took that video of Jamie going over the jump!"); the son was also on the same course. #NZ

Went skiing at Whakapapa and Turoa on the weekend, which prompted a couple of thoughts.

1. Lift tickets at NZ$160/day feel expensive, but I did the inflation check, and it's just me being old. The NZ inflation calculator says that it's NZ$80 in 2000 dollars, which is what me-being-old expects lift tickets to cost. I don't think these ski fields are actually raking in the big bucks. (I have skied at places that cost substantially less this year: C$84 at Mont Grand Fonds in Quebec. But I think they also have fewer expenses).

2. Conditions at Whakapapa were good: it was warm and the snow was OK, though not as much as I would have expected given the forecast. Conditions at Turoa were like skiing in northeastern North America, with actually cold wind chill and pretty icy slopes.

3. Even though it's objectively not expensive compared to costs, it makes me question value for money. At the midweek prices of $110/day I would be much more keen. But people have to work on weekdays.

4. Also, thanks to the Sky Waka riders for subsidizing us! There were a lot of people in the snow pen at the top of the gondola at Whakapapa. (https://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/361014689/snow-rush-creates-weekend-gridlock-near-mt-ruapehu-shuttle-operators-warn-visitors-plan-ahead)

#ski #skiNZ

So the AI business “model” is:
1. NOT HIRING 📉 juniors to create human candidates for the specialists & experts with work experience.
2. BURNING OUT ☢️ mid-level engineers, hardware (prices rising), infrastructure consumed unsustainably (water & electricity) to make everyone “addicted” to AI-LLM word & sentence calculator.
3. PUSHING OUT 📉 experienced senior-level engineers who advise & set tech strategy for “the business”.

This is the “Kodak” & “Boeing” business downfall case studies combined.

Do Not Take Less than 20% over your previous rate.

Make it hurt.

https://mastodon.social/@annaecook/117005159685124497

I finally got irate enough at RNZ's continued climate silence that I sent them some feedback. See below:

--

I have noted a disturbing trend in RNZ reporting and commentary over the past couple of years, and it has reached the point where it has assumed the dimensions of an elephant in a confined space.

Every time you cover a severe weather event (and there has been no shortage of these, as you are careful to point out in the cited article), you omit the obvious driver behind the increasing frequency and severity of these incidents.

Stop pussyfooting around. Name it. Talk about it. Explain the science and the evidence behind it, and tell your audience what is actually going on...and more importantly, what we can do about it.

Climate breakdown is real. It's here, it's scary, it's expensive, and it doesn't have to be relegated to the unspoken background in some sort of fatalistic Kabuki theatre. You have a duty to the people of Aotearoa as a public broadcaster to use your platform to inform on the important matters facing this country. Inaction on climate mitigation and adaptation is making things worse for everyone except fossil energy companies.

The omission of climate attribution in your coverage does not pass unnoticed. It reinforces a widely held sentiment that our media has been captured by corporate interest, and that the politically-expedient line of "we're helpless" is being parroted without critique. By cultivating and reinforcing a narrative of denial and intentional helplessness, you are complicit in a silencing of the voices that we need to hear: those rational actors who would have us make better decisions for the people who will be living in this place in 50 or 100 years and dealing with the legacy of the infrastructure and planning choices we are making right now.

You could do better. But will you?

#climate

Finally a beautiful day in Auckland. I was vaguely thinking of taking the ferry to Rangitoto Island but didn't actually bother to check the time. Oops, the single sailing for the day leaves at 930 and I checked at 926 far from the ferry terminal. #MissedTheBoat

Every once in a while I visit this short video by Elle Cordova, to refresh my enjoyment of her erudite sense of humour. I watch it once; then I realise I need to watch it again; then again, and again, and so an hour passes with this short piece on permanent repeat, each repeat revealing another nuance in the battle of the punctuation marks. A flawless masterpiece.

En Dash speaks to Oxford Comma:
"_I signify every word and blank space in a page range, I am the infinite stairwell between integers, I am the bloody embrace between two countries at war, and on a gravestone I am the entire life lived between birth and death, who are you?_ "

https://youtube.com/shorts/ky0YOo7_Y0o

#ElleCordova #EnDash #OxfordComma #punctuation

Floss expires?!

I've eaten food that has an expiry date further in the future than this.

Half way over North Dakota right now, and I am reminded of the moment life shook me out of technical superiority for good. (I wasn't exactly a tech bro, but I wasn't great either.)

It was a Toastmasters conference in Thunder Bay for the district stretching into North Dakota and Minnesota. It wasn't even one of the contests, but a workshop. This man spoke so eloquently about life and the things that were really important in life: family, community, doing what's right. I assumed he was a motivational speaker, or some corporate person.

He was a truck driver from North Dakota and he spoke so proudly of his work. Here was the wisest person I had ever come across in my young life. Making sense out of the things I had been struggling with for the past few years, trying to make the technical world make sense.

It was like a moment of clarity that showed me that I had been lied to my entire adult life: how engineers were smarter, how tech will solve all of society's problems, and doing this work means you deserve to be in the comfortable class. That blue collar work is to be respected.

My life's full of these little moments of clarity that make the world make sense. And it almost always involves meeting people and listening to their stories. I wouldn't be who I am today without these encounters.

Ever so grateful.

I guess it was somewhat rainy here. We decided that this was a good time to call it quits on this walk.

Let's finish with some birds from Travis Wetland. /fin #BirdsNZ