Benjohn

pronouns: he / him

Last Notes

2026-02-22 19:00:29 UTC

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are you thinking rounded things are more likely to make rounded booming sounds? Maybe tree stumps and such. Sharp pointy things are more likely to make sharp crunchy plinky noises. Dried seed pods, shards of rock, maybe bone fragments?
But then, rounded flints can be very plinky! Hmm

2025-12-12 17:42:14 UTC

TIL car tyre sizes (eg, 225/55R17) manage to combine metric (225mm width), a percentage for an aspect ratio (55%), and imperial (17 inch diameter). I think that’s just marvellous. Well done everyone.

2025-12-07 19:49:51 UTC

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Edit - I didn’t read the other replies! I’ll do that now. Sorry!
Edit 2 - I think probably my premature post has good answers above. Thank you.
Here it is -
I’d like to hear about the other ones. … and also I think you are alluding to other work in maths that is much more creative? This is where my terrible lack of knowledge is a problem, but … do you think this would not be approachable by the kind of machine learning I’m speculating? I think the go people have had some discoveries from alpha go, but perhaps this would not be the case for creative maths?

2025-12-07 11:08:25 UTC

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that’s interesting… Alpha go’s success makes me think there ought to be something in “computers doing proofs”. Go is a system. There are rules about the changes you can make, and there are wanted and unwanted outcomes.
Expressions seem not far off? There are rules about the manipulations you can do, and there are desirable final states (finding equality or finding a contradiction)?
So I keep thinking an AI could be trained to explore that domain, and maybe even find “interesting” things in it?
Whether that’s “doing maths”, and whether there are huge holes in that idea, I don’t know! Interested to hear where the holes would be, though.

2025-10-07 02:47:54 UTC

Wondering about #SolarPunk adjacent board games – https://www.tagclimatedrill.org
A (probably coop?) planning game about helping a community through climate change seems like it could be fun? Maybe a mix of high level policy actions to increase resilience, along with low level support of random needs of community members?
--
Think link seems extremely powerful. Having people to interact and "game out" a seemingly remote, or naively hopeful scenario, is a brilliant way to get them imagining it could actually work.

2025-07-28 04:36:24 UTC

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its tapioca pudding. Someone discovered how to make tapioca pudding desired. Which is a reasonable contender for most surprising thing to happen this century. .

2025-07-06 10:46:57 UTC

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I feel like it’s mostly turned gold (literal and metaphorical) in to bullshit, so far.

2025-07-04 20:03:26 UTC

@npub1t2q…n4vh Hello – is the Mac version of Organic Maps part of https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps ?
I was just trying it. It's so fast! The maps are beautifully detailed (so much more walking route detail than Google or Apple).
I noticed a few things I wondered if I might be able to try and hack on…
* The track pad interaction differs from Apple's Maps (in both settings modes, I think).
* The text seems really small for my middle age eyes. … I just found the setting for "increase label size" – that helps!
* I'd love to print without screen shots.
… I'm a Swift developer – is this something I might be able to contribute to?
Lovely work though! The iOS version I probably use as much as Apple's maps.

2025-06-18 16:20:01 UTC

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god damn it.
I liked the sound of “abundance” - in my mind by not giving everything to a tiny minority and allowing diverse solutions with answers from everyone, collaborating together as it makes sense.
Didn’t know they were banging the same capitalist drum 😔

2025-05-09 08:42:20 UTC

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I was curious if the impression image was from fairly rigorous simulation / other very accurate modelling? Makes me want to find / build a gravity simulator for huge numbers or particles!

2025-04-22 14:46:35 UTC

Christ.
It has become necessary that I clarify: I continue to believe trans women are women.
And they really need to be left alone, not kicked about and vilified in some disgusting political game of screw the convenient and defenceless minority.
The PM of the UK can go fuck himself.
Really.
Piss off Starmer. You have been a terrible disappointment from modest expectations.
And UK labour, you are a pathetic spineless bunch too.
You’ve not moved the needle on working class quality of life, let alone protected society’s most vulnerable.
What are you actually for?
This is not a disappointment I will tolerate.

2024-11-22 11:34:07 UTC

My wife is an interpreter. Daily, she interprets for several new people who's health has been completely destroyed by hard physical work in the UK, just like Karolina here – https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/22/britain-working-class-pain-mental-health
Warehouse work, freezer work, delivery work, packing work. Almost always they have such agonising back or leg pain that they are bed ridden and just trying to get the support they are entitled to now that their ruined bodies can no longer toil.
You can very easily see a moral angle to this. But if you don't, if you're simply a hard nosed zero sum tosser about it, this is still a bewilderingly absurd strategy.
We're smashing people's able bodies to make greater profits for capitalists, and then the state supports the wrecked humanity with a thin gruel of NHS pain killers, 6 week cognitive training therapy (from private suppliers) and a pitiful subsistence income of welfare payments.
This is very much modern Britain.

2024-09-22 16:55:03 UTC

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I imagine this is totally naive, but doesn’t the force of gravity have to be the same “at sea level” everywhere (modulo air pressure) because otherwise sea level would change until it was? … (or at least, the force of gravity perpendicular to sea level 🤔).

2024-09-17 09:04:40 UTC

Blogs about technology, HTML, hand held game consoles and humane use of technology do not usually make me cry.
This one did. https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of-simple-html/

2024-09-16 08:59:18 UTC

Mood: We are pretty much at the local maxima for the usefulness of computational technology under the guidance of capitalism and App centricity. Further leaps of benefit exist but are improbable under present constraints.

2024-07-31 15:57:33 UTC

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on holiday, just swimming in lakes and biking a bit and stuff, and feeling this profoundly strongly a few times a day.
I noticed my brain has also started to work again too, and think, imagine and yearn. Maybe for nonsense. Probably for nonsense. But it feels wonderful nonetheless.