iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Hope you’re okay and that you were wearing a body cam.

Yeah, teaching those is very much a rite of passage, and is more about getting students to understand computational complexity than sorting/searching per se.

I regret to inform you that that particular joke goes back at least as far as Quine.

Saying the quiet bit out loud.

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It’s been a while since I last had an, uh, “independent researcher” turn up unannounced to my office. Sadly, I have had an old friend ask me to check his Theory of Everything that he’d developed with an LLM.

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Ooooh! Was looking at the current documentation, which is clearly out of date!

Screenshot from https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/graph/graph-data-models reading:

Important

Graph in Microsoft Fabric only supports the LPG model. Resource Description Framework (RDF) isn't supported.

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Also: boo, hiss, Microsoft Fabric doesn't support RDF, only their own labelled property graph model.

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I just *knew* that the time was ripe for a Semantic Web comeback...

Some aspects of TAoCP, principally the use of the MIX/MMIX assembly languages rather than the ALGOL-like pseudocode found almost everywhere else, are rather idiosyncratic. Knuth gives his reasons for this choice in vol. 1, but I remain unconvinced.

I have the first four volumes; I've yet to buy vol. 4B (only came out in 2023 and one shouldn't rush these things). I'm staring at them on the shelf above my desk - but I can't remember the last time I had to use any of them in anger.

A photo of the bookshelf above my desk. Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming (vols. 1-4A) holds pride of place in the centre, but is suspiciously unthumbed.

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Unpopular opinion, but I think that the utility of Knuth's TAoCP is much overstated. It's comprehensive, and has for many years been considered the sine qua non, but I've found that other reference works on algorithms are far more useful in practice (e.g. Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest and Stein).

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Nick Gibbins @nick.gark.net · 28/09/2026

For one glorious moment I thought that you were referring to the 1965 Peter Watkins film (which is of course The War Game) because I’d managed to forget about the existence of Michael Gove.

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The credulity of some people continues to amaze me. Alas, this is not "Cary Grant's mugshot when he was arrested for being drunk & disorderly in 1959", as claimed by @rufustsuperfly.bsky.social This is a continuity photograph taken during the filming of North by Northwest, for scenes 48 and 49.

Cary Grant, dressed as the advertising executive George Kaplan, poses for a continuity photograph for scenes 48 and 49 (48 is his arrival at the Glen Cove police station, 49 his subsequent appearance in court).

The claim in the skeet - "Cary Grant's mugshot when he was arrested for being drunk and disorderly in 1959" - is utter bunk.

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Nick Gibbins @nick.gark.net · 28/09/2026

As one of your Playschool Babies (I was three at the time of that first episode), thank you!

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Nick Gibbins @nick.gark.net · 27/09/2026

The only solution is for you to up the ante and start liveblogging all JR timetable changes.

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Also Babbage having a clear idea of what he wanted to be built and not fiddling with the design…

It didn’t help that Babbage took time off after the death in 1827 of his father, Georgiana, and two of his children, leaving John Herschel to mind the workshop and keep Clements on the job. (this is from memory - my books are in the office)

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Babbage never got as far as Clements not scaling, because Babbage kept changing the design and Clements knew just how much his time was worth.

If only we cared about “legitimate concerns”.

Labour have already united progressive voters - against them.

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Oh well, could be worse. At least I don’t have to join a sex cult and start drawing Sankey diagrams.

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You swine - you alluded to Roko’s Basilisk! There goes my plausible deniability! Guess I’m just going to have to become an e/acc ai bro now…

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That’s a misrepresentation of the history of the Difference Engine, which was buildable at the tolerances that could have been achieved by Babbage’s engineer Clements - as Doron Swade’s team demonstrated 35 years ago.

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I for one welcome the harebrained schemes of our TESCREAL übermenschen.

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You clearly haven’t been listening hard enough to the musk stans - this space stuff is easy! Captain K-Hole says so, and he’s a super genius!

Each AI1 has about 110m2 of radiators and 600m2 of solar panels - that’s a *big* target, so better prepare to either repair or replace them on a regular basis.

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At a bit over 2t each, that’s about 50 launches of a Block 3 Starship (with its 100t payload) - if it finally works and goes into service. Block 4 is pie-in-the-sky.

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SpaceX’s AI1 satellite, according to the pre-IPO marketing puff, has peak compute of 150kW. You’d need 2000 such to equal the compute performance of the EHDC. That’s 20% of the current size of the StarLink constellation for *one* data centre.

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Data centres are big, and scale will be an issue. To pick a proposed data centre, the East Havering Data Centre in North Ockendon is predicted to consume 5.3Bn kWh per year at 100% load. Assuming half of that is cooling, that’s still about 300MW on compute.

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Thermodynamics is *among* the issues. Inter-satellite latency is another, as are environmental hazards (both radiation and debris), and the difficulty of upgrading servers when they’re on-orbit.

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None of those can be programmes from the 21st century because I remember when they came out only a couple of years ago - just before the millennium - and I’m still in my early 30s.

It’s all been downhill since the platty joobs, not to mention the panny d and the corriebobs.

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Prof Llama, what sort of dance do I need to do to get 80% on this module? Can I use genAI to dance for me?

On the plus side, you get to leave London.

Nick Gibbins @nick.gark.net · 24/09/2026

But that’s Optima - a more delightful humanist typeface you’ll not find! And besides, while *technically* sans serif, the strokes in Optima are modulated and actually swell slightly at the terminals in a manner suggestive of a serif.

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Still, at least we have 15-minute cities.

Nah, it's just a typo. This is for adversarial cheese on toast.

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That mirrors my experience of paroxetine in the mid-90s. Start taking them? Vertigo. Stop taking them? Vertigo. Accidentally miss a dose? Vertigo. Had an agreement with my housemate at the time (also on paroxetine) that we'd cover each other if we were late refilling our prescriptions.

*laughs in the UK equivalent of USD 7.82 / US gallon*

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If it doesn’t come with a Sankey diagram, I’m not interested.

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You don’t need to buy lots of books. If you’ve been building your Traveller collection for almost forty years.

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Also, "managing staff costs" doesn't just mean sub-inflationary pay rises, but also increased workloads as fewer people than it takes to do the job are employed.

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Existing *decades* before that, if we're honest.

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