Flipper 🐬🏳️‍🌈

I'm what used to be called a machine learning engineer, originally from London (the English one), living in the SF Bay Area for the past 20 years.

Likes left-wing politics and long walks on the beach (I guess).

In a past life, I've been a climate scientist and I self-identify as a Bayesian. I'm an active member of the DSA.

ifl books.

I will always like pictures of nature; especially birds, but also the weird and wonderful and unsung. Nature is the best.

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NIP-05 Address

flipper_at_mastodonapp.uk@momostr.pink

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Last Notes

2026-04-04 07:14:17 UTC

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all your pictures are worth taking time to view, but this is remarkable even by those standards. Thank you for sharing.

2026-02-18 18:00:17 UTC

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The males sing so beautifully.

2026-02-17 16:45:41 UTC

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Which birds make the best drinks?

2026-02-16 19:38:25 UTC

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A game theory explanation of this, that I read a while back, is that communities play a complex version of the iterated prisoner's dilemma - which has a very successful strategy of being nice to people unless they're shitty to you - but as the community grows it devolves into an independent series of simple prisoner's dilemmas (which have a dominant strategy of being a dick) as the proportion of repeated interactions between individuals drops. So this is why big subreddits are toxic but small ones retain community.
Community schisms are also super interesting - Zachary's Karate Club being a canonical example.

2026-01-16 23:16:54 UTC

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i always wanted a Blue Peter badge, but could never be bothered to do the things you needed to do to get one. In that small way, I am just like Trump.

2026-01-15 20:38:31 UTC

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Thanks for that. Some days it feels like hope is about as abundant as toilet paper during COVID.
Had to look up the other two words as I forgot what they meant.

2026-01-11 18:40:59 UTC

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The best, most succinct, explanation of the difference here came from @npub1fdr…lvhs:
Coding makes things run well, software engineering makes things fail well.
All meaningful software fails over time as it interacts with the real world and the real world changes., so handling failure cases well is important.
Handling these cases involves expanding one's context window to take into account a lot of different factors.
For LLMs, a linear increase in the context window results in a quadratic increase in processing. And the unit economics of LLMs sucks already without squaring the costs.
Which is why AI, in its current incarnation, is fundamentally not capable of creating good software.
(I've heavily paraphrased, so apologies if he reads this).
@npub1ppe…qv2g @npub16nw…ulpa [@david_chisnall](https://infosec.exchange/@david_chisnall )

2025-12-06 06:34:57 UTC

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I'm sure that there's a massive covid bias in this study as people who got the vaccine were much less likely to die as a result, but I wonder if they controlled for selection bias, in that people who believe in the objective fact of vaccination saving lives are also more likely to survive generally.
#vaccineswork

2025-10-27 20:59:22 UTC

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i understand the "I don't trust Big Pharma" instinct, but the conclusion to not vaccinate kids as a result is like saying: "I don't trust Big Ag, so I'm just going to stop giving my kids food"
Do your research, sheeple, everyone who has ever died ate food first.

2025-10-27 20:25:20 UTC

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Vaccines are a cost-effective way to have smaller child cemeteries.

2025-10-16 19:13:27 UTC

So, I'm at my regular antifa meeting (you know how you have to go regularly otherwise they revoke your membership and it's a real pain filling in all those forms to get it reinstated) and I'm just browsing the balaclava merch stall, when this guy comes up to me and asks if I want a job as a protestor - pays $100k a year, medical, dental, in-house shiatsu masseur, may require frog attire. Heck yeah, I do.
As the guy moves on, I turn to the woman behind the merch stall. Did that just happen? Or was it some kind of Republican fever dream?
Yes, she replies.
#uspol #microfiction #nokings

2025-09-28 05:45:56 UTC

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I work in the front line trenches of this bubble and I think what you say is correct. I do think that this is the result of the need to burn off excess capital, shrink the market, and then give the system room to grow again.
We are in for a collapse that will hurt most of us but allow the biggest players to consolidate further. Tens of people will make out like bandits (and not in a good way) and tens of millions will suffer.
After all of it, there will be some really useful tools that can be used to make really useful things. But they will all be owned by a few.
I hope I'm wrong and AI just collapses back to what it used to be - fun and interesting.

2025-09-24 15:23:27 UTC

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I feel sorry for billionaires. These are people who will never write a poem, who will never pay taxes, and who probably have someone help them when they go to the toilet.
Perhaps RFK should concentrate on finding the cause of billionairism, instead of whatever bullshit he's up to today.

2025-09-08 18:21:26 UTC

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This is the essence of Taylorism - something that Vonnegut was consciously satirizing - where the process for making something is centralized so skilled workers can be replaced by cheaper, unskilled manual labour or by automation.

2025-09-05 01:31:06 UTC

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I read everything voraciously.
I read a lot of philosophy, mostly driven by reading articles and then buying the books that are referenced in them. Mostly general and political philosophy. I just finished The Genealogy of Morals by Nietzsche.
I read about 10 classics or contemporary literature a year, and often take online courses on the books or authors - writing essays makes it stick for me. Last one I read was Mdme Bovary (and wrote an essay comparing Flaubert's view of history vs that of Marx).
I also read a lot of science fiction. Currently reading Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson.

2025-08-31 18:02:15 UTC

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This is a feature of the liberal compromise. While we allow extremely wealthy people to exist (or even the possibility of their existence), the possibility (or perhaps inevitably) of fascism will coexist.

2025-08-20 14:39:23 UTC

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Return of the Nightmarish Zuckerdoll. Your war on peaceful sleep continues.

2025-08-15 22:20:00 UTC

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interesting. I may finally join bluesky after all.

2025-08-11 19:54:02 UTC

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Also, famously, Dr Krieger from the television show Archer.

2025-08-10 16:25:19 UTC

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this sounds a lot like early Marxist thinking. Marx originally thought the bourgeois class would help bring in a more egalitarian society, but in the failed revolution of 1848 they just grabbed power and turned it on the workers who helped them.
As much as it's fun to cheer these wannabe billionaires on as they fight the incumbents (i know i am 🍿), they are not on our side. The pigs will take over the farmhouse if we don't stick together.

2025-08-01 00:24:58 UTC

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"To make changes, you have to exist in society. Yes, the Democratic Party is a weak and pathetic failed gerontocracy, but the Democratic Socialists, the Sunrise Movement, and other political groups that are independent of the Dems but still drag them into doing something good, sometimes, all deserve your support."
I agree. The DSA is trying to fill that gap. We've even started trying to fill the media gap in the SF Bay Area with our own worker-focused online newspaper, called the Bay Area Current - just launched in April. https://bayareacurrent.com/
Everyone is welcome.