Tufty Indigo 🪗

Fox with a box, accordionist, singer, synthesist, and social 🎮 videos on Twitch/YT. Bringing accordion weirdness to a furry or pony con near you! By day I write software in Cambridge, GB.

Twitch: https://twitch.tv/tuftyindigo
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@tuftyindigo
Pronouns: he/him
Bandcamp: https://tuftyindigo.bandcamp.com/
Personal site: https://futur.istic.org/

Last Notes

2026-09-24 19:07:06 UTC

- reply

Have you decided what kind of piercing? Ears have so many options for hole-pokery!

2026-09-14 21:03:19 UTC

- reply

RCX and I are around next Tuesday and the bronies would be happy to see you again at the pub. We are a larger group now than last time you were here!

2026-08-17 15:08:29 UTC

- reply

Yes, it's exactly the kind of distinction I'd expect journalists to make to try to avoid getting sued. But as it's the main process by which misinformation spreads, that's why I'd expect better from a science communicator.

2026-08-17 14:57:03 UTC

- reply

Kinda disappointed to see a science communicator uncritically repeating nonsense claims like "upholding these physical texts as uncorrupted by shoddy AI writing that’s already polluted so much of the internet (and indeed, newer books)." Outlets like 404 Media were pushing this misconception earlier in the year, that AI-generated text is somehow harmful for training and will lead to a situation where models get worse because they're training on increasingly "sloppy" writing over time. In fact LLMs are trained predominantly on LLM-generated text, and it's one of the reasons performance has improved so fast over the last year.

2026-07-08 22:20:06 UTC

- reply

looking very summery

2026-06-24 11:28:43 UTC

- reply

I volunteer at quite a few punk gigs but don't look at all like a punk, so you can have my valour if that makes you feel better

2026-04-28 16:30:32 UTC

- reply

The chimney effect used to be a design feature in most UK schools. Classrooms were ventilated into tall hallways, so the warm air would rise to the top of the hallway and be ventilated out. Two problems with this model:<li>It's just not effective enough. Most UK schools suffer overheating already and are at "medium" to "extreme" risk of experiencing overheating in a +2°C climate scenario.</li><li>The central corridor collects air breathed by all the kids, keeps it warm for an extended period, and then everyone has to walk through it several times a day. COVID taught us that this design is one reason why kids get sick so often: every individual infection gets incubated and exposed to the whole school population.</li>

2026-02-26 11:07:05 UTC

- reply

Has big industry really been brainwashing the audience? I don't see companies like Disney or companies like Google telling people to harrass artists for using or not using AI models.
But I have seen artists spending the last couple of years telling people that whether you used AI or not is the most important thing in art, when most people simply can't tell the difference.
It's really sad that you're being harrassed this way for making great artwork with a process you're passionate about. You can only fight it if you put the blame in the right place. It's not the big industry harrassing you, it's the anti-AI movement.

2025-12-22 10:53:46 UTC

- reply

My best one of these was the day I noticed we have an uncommon word "don" for putting on an item of clothing and "doff" for taking off an item of clothing, and they look like opposites. Turns out they are both contractions of "do on" resp "do off".

2025-11-18 15:44:24 UTC

- reply

"there's no way something of one charge can turn into something of another charge without changing the charge of something else" vs "you can turn one [angular momentum] into the other just by rotating it" Yes, that's exactly the bias I had before reading your toots, but both angular momentum and charge are conserved quantities. Just like charge,
there's no way something of one angular momentum can turn into something of another angular momentum without changing the angular momentum of something else.
I was going to ask about this in the comments of your first video on the Standard Model, but this thing about the bits expresses it way clearer. Are there really six flavours of quark, or just six states that quarks can be in? When quarks decay, are they really transitioning to a different particle, or are they just dropping to a lower energy level? The more I read, the more I feel like the "different flavours" idea is a barrier to understanding.

2025-11-18 12:12:31 UTC

- reply

I think this last bit is interesting, because we tend to think of spin as a "state" of the electron while other things like its charge are a fixed "property" - at least, that's the mental model I came out of first-year undergrad physics with. But it seems like in part that comes from how those things were discovered: at first it looks like all electrons are negative but they can have either spin, so then when positrons are discovered, they feel like a fundamentally different particle. We say the weak interaction "changes a down quark into an up quark" but would it make more sense to say it "changes the quark from the down state to the up state"?

2025-05-30 15:14:15 UTC

- reply

Sure, but that totality of power is serving 47 million people. That's about the population of Algeria. Any industry's energy use is big if you add up every customer.

2025-05-30 06:59:01 UTC

- reply

"Untold megawatts" is about 2 Wh, according to the recent MIT Technology Review article, or less according to a paper in Nature last year. If you wrote that toot on a laptop or desktop, you probably burned more energy doing that than the AI did.

2024-08-26 08:56:39 UTC

Good news for furry scrabblers: OwO, UwU, and floof have all been added to this year's edition of Collins' Official Scrabble Words.
https://scrabble.collinsdictionary.com/blog/collins-official-scrabble-words-2024/

2024-08-15 15:29:35 UTC

- reply

Gitlab, and purely because it's not GitHub and you can self-host it. USPs used to be that you can have private projects on their instance for free, and it supports CI built-in without having to use another service like TravisCI, but GitHub has both those features these days.