Thomas Womack @fivemack.bsky.social · 11hVery little - data centers are big but easy to build, there is much less plumbing in one billion-dollar data center than in a billion dollars worth of houses. 110
Thomas Womack @fivemack.bsky.social · 01/10/2026I gave in and allowed my six year old to trace around her piece of ham. She was saying tearfully that it was the perfect shape and she could never get that shape again. 010
Thomas Womack @fivemack.bsky.social · 25/09/2026To be fair part of the over-run is because they decided in 2022 that it needed to be five times larger capacity than the original plan, and it’s not a factor five cost overrun. 010
Thomas Womack @fivemack.bsky.social · 24/09/2026Whilst I am cross that food banks are generally not allowed to buy chocolate biscuits or Easter eggs with donated money, and feel an obligation to make up for this. 241
Thomas Womack @fivemack.bsky.social · 23/09/2026Speaking of that, the French toll motorways in mid-August between the two great migrations are in places zombie-apocalypse empty. 000
Thomas Womack @fivemack.bsky.social · 23/09/2026“What is the correct amount for the WHO to spend on hookers for the Potslavian health minister, with the clear understanding that the hookers go away if polio doesn’t?” 020
Thomas Womack @fivemack.bsky.social · 23/09/2026Because it’s £380 return for the train, and the wait at the port each way if you drive is more than two and a half hours. 150
Thomas Womack @fivemack.bsky.social · 20/09/2026Though observe quite how the fees of private schools in England have completely failed to drop after the cartel was identified twenty years ago en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private...en.wikipedia.orgPrivate school fee fixing scandal - Wikipedia 030
Thomas Womack @fivemack.bsky.social · 20/09/2026Saw a radio station with the tagline ‘Satnav for your soul’, and the more I think about it the more sinister it gets: “follow our directions to our choice of destination without having to think about what you’re passing through” 010
Thomas Womack @fivemack.bsky.social · 20/09/2026The one we do is aubergine based, with an awful lot of caramelised onions and a couple of hard boiled eggs, the whole thing blended to a paste. 170
Thomas Womack @fivemack.bsky.social · 18/09/2026I am not at all sure that reading What We Are Seeking and When There Are Wolves Again in parallel is quite the path of wisdom. 020
Thomas Womack @fivemack.bsky.social · 18/09/2026Great, this error message from Apple setup is, being interpreted, ‘do not try to set up your new phone on the day iPhone 18 Pro becomes available’ 010
Thomas Womack @fivemack.bsky.social · 18/09/2026Also nobody knows better than the Iranians what happens to deeply buried expensively engineered single points of failure; it is an awful lot easier to sabotage an oil refinery built in an underground canyon than to build such a thing, a small fire will wreck it even worse than at the surface. 061
Thomas Womack @fivemack.bsky.social · 18/09/2026And if you happen already to have one, I get the impression it's quite difficult with western hemisphere air-focussed HVAC configurations to restrict the heating to a couple of rooms if fuel is low - the ducts are deliberately inaccessible 140
Thomas Womack @fivemack.bsky.social · 18/09/2026I think it might be fairer to say that global oil infrastructure has no strong points! If you're pumping a litre per second of very flammable stuff you are unavoidably quite explodable; the Saudis have the money to build their pumping stations like nuclear bunkers but it takes time. 1111
Thomas Womack @fivemack.bsky.social · 16/09/2026Also helicopters just aren't that fast - organ delivery in northern Italy has a couple of Lamborghinis, with good drivers on good roads they get there as fast as the helicopter would at 5% of the operating cost. 030
Reposted by Thomas Womack👻 🎃 🦇 Bela Lughosti's Dad 🏳️⚧️ 🇵🇸 @belalugosisdad.bsky.social · 15/09/2026I mean, I wouldn't pick that fight anyway because I'm not a transphobe, but doing it with the guy who has spent his life min-maxxing his Stength and Charisma stats and is married to literally fucking Xena the Warrior Princess seems absolutely fucking insane to me. 9108280
Thomas Womack @fivemack.bsky.social · 16/09/2026Switch 2 was clearly a rather delayed launch, they were intending Tears of the Kingdom to be the big S2 launch exclusive. 000
Thomas Womack @fivemack.bsky.social · 16/09/2026You could probably get sub-pixel positions for the stars with a bit of work, but stars bright enough to show up with that much defocus are going to have incredibly precise Gaia astrometry already. 140
Thomas Womack @fivemack.bsky.social · 14/09/2026At any reasonable valuation of time, spending 20 minutes a week chipping a bucket-load of ice off the inside of the freezer that doesn’t close properly is a better deal than buying a replacement freezer. But when I’m standing with a bucket and cold hands it doesn’t feel that way. 000
Thomas Womack @fivemack.bsky.social · 13/09/2026Sterling’s Zenith Angle on the train out of Chicago the evening of 9/11 for me. 111
Thomas Womack @fivemack.bsky.social · 12/09/2026I emailed them on 21st August saying “I would like to extend the rent for this garage: please send an invoice for the next quarter.” and the next thing I had from them was a message saying I hadn’t paid an invoice for one month’s rent that I never received 000
Thomas Womack @fivemack.bsky.social · 12/09/2026Is ‘I am not willing to pay a penalty fee for not paying an invoice for the wrong rental term which I never received’ an unreasonable way to interact with a landlord? 201
Thomas Womack @fivemack.bsky.social · 11/09/2026Is that 'open models that just about fit in a DGX Station if you happen to have that $125k machine lying around' or 'open models with <20B parameters that run in ollama on a fancy gaming PC' ? 250
Reposted by Thomas WomackH R Pickens @hrpickens.bsky.social · 09/09/2026This is a terrible time for everyone to be losing their shit about migrants. We're headed full-speed into an epoch that's going to be defined by enormous flows of migrants fleeing climate disaster. Everyone ought to be thinking about how to maximize the number of people they'll be able to rescue. 3275
Thomas Womack @fivemack.bsky.social · 07/09/2026The computer has already read literally the entire literature, it’s all in there. It’s synthesising things which likely no human mathematician had read and understood all of, because we have small brains and read slowly. 130
Thomas Womack @fivemack.bsky.social · 07/09/2026Think so: it was a fun two hours. Could profitably have had some more Easter eggs. 120
Thomas Womack @fivemack.bsky.social · 07/09/2026In my part of the UK it had precisely one showing per cinema this weekend, on a weekend morning - I wasn’t available Saturday so drove 40 minutes to the nearest place showing on Sunday. 120
Thomas Womack @fivemack.bsky.social · 06/09/2026To quite an extent a number of digital cameras are not controlled by the photographer any more - you probably saw the smartphone pictures of the solar eclipse where the camera app had detected an overexposed disc in the sky and pasted an image of the Moon on it 110
Thomas Womack @fivemack.bsky.social · 04/09/2026You absolutely cannot set messages to auto-delete on either SMS or email; at most you can politely request the client to do that and the client probably didn’t bother parsing the esoteric request. 120
Thomas Womack @fivemack.bsky.social · 03/09/2026They've lasted, the receipt was inside the oak secretary-cabinet which my parents still have, though use mostly as a chest of drawers. I think my aunt has the eight-day clock and I'm not sure what became of the side table. 000
Thomas Womack @fivemack.bsky.social · 03/09/2026Quite possibly; but what he bought was an eight-day clock, an oak secretary-cabinet and a rosewood side table! I don't think those were household essentials even in 1945, electric clocks had been around for fifty years. 200
Thomas Womack @fivemack.bsky.social · 03/09/2026Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demobil... suggests everyone got £83 regardless of rank and the process started six weeks after VE Day; it seems slightly out of character for my grandfather (with an 18 month old baby at the time) to have spent more than half of it at an antiques dealer.en.wikipedia.orgDemobilisation of the British Armed Forces after World War II - Wikipedia 100
Thomas Womack @fivemack.bsky.social · 03/09/2026I'm reasonably sure it's not medical grade after it's been through a crematorium, you probably have to take it back to the tetrachloride and rerun the Kroll process, but it's still going to be a much more concentrated source of titanium than titanium dioxide. 150
Thomas Womack @fivemack.bsky.social · 03/09/2026It’s going to the share-owning classes, but the share-owning classes are mostly pensioners: the timing looks right for this to be a consequence of the baby boom retiring and starting to live off the investments. 000
Thomas Womack @fivemack.bsky.social · 03/09/2026Fifteen years ago I was supporting people trying to make antivirals for dengue fever, because the timeline to a working drug was about the timeline to dengue-bearing mosquitoes getting to survive in southern France and Italy. 000
Thomas Womack @fivemack.bsky.social · 03/09/2026Does anyone else have the thing where they wake up thinking they’ve slept like Rip van Winkle and it must be at least supper time, and it’s actually 0930? 000
Thomas Womack @fivemack.bsky.social · 02/09/2026Does the process even present name and address to the magistrate? I can certainly imagine one that’s more like marking and keeps those hidden to avoid obvious bias risks 100
Thomas Womack @fivemack.bsky.social · 01/09/2026I have been shown a receipt for my grandfather buying some furniture for 47 pounds on 12 September 1945. He was a flight lieutenant: would he have been demobbed by that stage, and how would demob pay for someone that rank have worked? 101
Thomas Womack @fivemack.bsky.social · 30/08/2026The profit is capped at 5% for electricity network operators. 000
Thomas Womack @fivemack.bsky.social · 30/08/2026The network operators make a regulated 5% profit. Octopus Energy lost a quarter-billion pounds last year but survived through being a division of a large hedge fund. Energy company profits from pumping gas far from Ukraine and selling it into a distorted market are irrelevant to UK household bills 110
Thomas Womack @fivemack.bsky.social · 30/08/2026I am certain this sandwich shop knows what it’s doing 030
Thomas Womack @fivemack.bsky.social · 29/08/2026‘Chime Street was in an area that wasn’t exactly poor but was close enough to a poor neighborhood that there were a great many ostensibly decorative iron fences’ 000
Thomas Womack @fivemack.bsky.social · 29/08/2026‘There were stories about what happened if you turned a stranger away. They were the sort of stories that ended with “And you can still see the blasted stones to this day.”’ Enjoying the new @tkingfisher.com very much. 224424
Thomas Womack @fivemack.bsky.social · 29/08/2026I thought the fantasy was retiring to a rural location, which you did because it was quiet and the property was cheaper than in Chicago. Maybe keep bees because that always sounded a fun idea but was impractical in Chicago. 060
Thomas Womack @fivemack.bsky.social · 29/08/2026What exactly is depicted in that picture? My best guess is the filter wheel, but id have thought that was deep inside the assembled telescope. 000
Thomas Womack @fivemack.bsky.social · 28/08/2026What is shown in that picture? It looks like ten amateur Schmidt-Cassegrain telescopes, which it can’t possibly be - is it the filter wheel? 210
Thomas Womack @fivemack.bsky.social · 27/08/2026(seen on the Adafruit blog) Putting surprisingly clear images into readable QR codes by convincing the reader to use only the centre of each 3x3 pixel block, then error-diffusing the forced colour of those pixels into the underlying grey-scale image. www.andrewt.net/dithered-qr-...andrewt.netDithered QR code generatorMake QR codes with photos in them 031
