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Stuart Watt@morungos.bsky.social |
285 followers 355 following 1463 posts
Cognitive scientist and developer: psychology, AI, bioinformatics, social science, PhD/Dr. Purveyor of economic democracy and Jurassic Park memes. Likes wild places. Umquhile academic, Mancunian, Aberdonian.
Halifax, Nova Scotia
morungos.com/
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Stuart Watt
@morungos.bsky.social
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I’d maybe consider databases if you haven’t dipped into them yet, even embedded ones like SQLite are easy to play with, and they’re surprisingly useful. Most other coding languages you’ll have no problems with if you can handle C++ and Java.
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Stuart Watt
@morungos.bsky.social
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One of my former housemates would, no matter how big the block of cheese, eat half of it. We ended up cutting the big blocks into smaller ones and hiding them.
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Cats of Yore
@catsofyore.bsky.social
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The White Cat, fairy tales translated by Marie Catherine La Mothe, Countess d’Aulnoy in 1698. This version was published in 1847 but unfortunately the illustrator is identified only as “J.W.”
12 replies 112 reposts 571 likes
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Stuart Watt
@morungos.bsky.social
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Well, this is damn fine -- could never understand why Don't Stand Me Down wasn't seen as one of the best things to come out of the 1980s. www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzMD...
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Stuart Watt
@morungos.bsky.social
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I had great fun at a small workshop on the challenges of testing AI systems, so I wrote about kittens and the joys of predicting the behaviour of very complex things. morungos.com/2024/07/05/h...
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Stuart Watt
@morungos.bsky.social
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Damsons are great! I made an amazing damson vodka a few years back — but haven’t seen them here since. Need to grow some.
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Stuart Watt
@morungos.bsky.social
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Hope so. But I think the actual campaign ended up more about getting the Tories out than anything else. Part of me thinks Scotland wants EU trade links soon, and Labour backed off from that under Corbyn. The new guy’s being given a chance to deliver something, and there’s nobody else who can.
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Stuart Watt
@morungos.bsky.social
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Excellent. I mean, shame about the elderflowers. Ciders are great, though — tomorrow I’ll be bottling our apple and black chokeberry, which looks and tastes amazing.
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Stuart Watt
@morungos.bsky.social
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I’d say so. I don’t even think Scotland wants to hear that they’re special, but they do want their economy, their culture, and their values (which are divergent from the rest of the UK) to be respected. Labour effectively supported the Tory disrespect. They didn’t oppose, as they could and should
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Stuart Watt
@morungos.bsky.social
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That’s truly interesting. I saw my (overseas) Aberdeen South stayed SNP — I’m so curious what happens next. I’m surprised — Labour in opposition had been so bad at Scotland. We shall see, I suppose.
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Stuart Watt
@morungos.bsky.social
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Nope, it’s not a valid vote if it doesn’t get to the returning officer by 10pm today. Stories are they posted the ballots out late June. Yes, the rules need changing.
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Stuart Watt
@morungos.bsky.social
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I get that people have to have mid-life crises, but could they do it in a way that doesn’t involve revving badly-tuned car engines all day long.
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Stuart Watt
@morungos.bsky.social
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A late postal ballot is *not* on the list of eligible reasons for an emergency proxy vote.
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Stuart Watt
@morungos.bsky.social
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Toasting Scotland with a wee Irn Bru and remembering the last time the UK threw out a Conservative Party government — amusingly the day before my PhD thesis defence, 27 years ago.
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Stuart Watt
@morungos.bsky.social
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Registering was fine for me, but the ballot papers arrived two days before polls close. No chance of that ever counting. I am livid.
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Dr Abeba Birhane
@abeba.bsky.social
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students use AI to generate essays; educators use AI to grade it… AI that is built on the backbone of stolen data and packaged as a shiny EdTech tool that educational institutes have to pay a fortune for… folks, do you see who benefits from all of this?
6 replies 52 reposts 128 likes
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Stuart Watt
@morungos.bsky.social
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I was, and am, one of those critics. I’ve opposed this grading tech since around 2000, when ETS was making claims of human equivalence in grading for latent semantic analysis. But I still think the tech (sans the data theft, obviously) can be used formatively to give students feedback.
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Stuart Watt
@morungos.bsky.social
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All too true. I have personal experience of having to make that case — needed a great lawyer to help on that. Fortunately, it worked out.
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Stuart Watt
@morungos.bsky.social
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The huge win for yogurt is that it the “boil” doesn’t need to be watched like a hawk and is so easy to clean up. My aging parent does his on the stovetop, then into an Easiyo, and I have tried without success (so far) to convert him.
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Stuart Watt
@morungos.bsky.social
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I actually go for 14 hours! I like it full on. So I usually start it off in the evening and it’s done after breakfast.
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Stuart Watt
@morungos.bsky.social
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The chemistry is crazy complicated. I won’t pretend to fully understand it, but this article corrected some of my misperceptions about the “boil” stage.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles...
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Stuart Watt
@morungos.bsky.social
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Yes, full 3% plus. A big factor does seem to be the “boil”, which isn’t a true boil, but needs to hold the milk at 175° or so for a good few minutes denaturing the proteins for a good result. My IP Ultra isn’t as reliable at that as my older Duo, so I now check manually before cooling.
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Stuart Watt
@morungos.bsky.social
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I’d agree — because I think the issues we are confronting today are a resurrected mercantilism, not straight capitalism at all. I’m a big believer in economic democracy, co-operatives, worker-run companies, which are consistent with socialism and capitalism, but not mercantilism.
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Stuart Watt
@morungos.bsky.social
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Just a big pile of milk in the pot, usually 2-3 litres at a time, then into sterilized 1L tubs. And I don’t bother with bought starters, one bought tub of good active yogurt will make 4 batches or so. It’s great because I can make it lactose free by adding drops to the milk the day before.
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Stuart Watt
@morungos.bsky.social
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I thought it all came from Venice. Their merchants could buy monopolies and it kind of spread from there.
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Stuart Watt
@morungos.bsky.social
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I slightly dissent on the “just stop”. Why? Because AI is just one piece of the puzzle. We’d already lost the concept of “real food”, and “real jobs” before AI even got started. It’s all in Baudrillard. Instead, we need to consciously set a new direction, based on a positive vision for society.
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Stuart Watt
@morungos.bsky.social
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Couldn’t cope without mine. No more canned beans to buy (they’re so wasteful), home made yogurt as often as I like — I even steep grains for beer and make marmalade in mine. That’s before I even start cooking.
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Stuart Watt
@morungos.bsky.social
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Welcome to hyperreality
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Stuart Watt
@morungos.bsky.social
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Halifax right now.
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Stuart Watt
@morungos.bsky.social
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I’ve been digging into Smith’s “Money: a mirror image of the economy”, and it makes a good case that the way companies are valued is straight up bullshit, due to their need to create and hold monopolies. It’s fiction, not based on product reality. Tesla is probably the clearest example today.
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Stuart Watt
@morungos.bsky.social
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Oh. Sounds like they lifted the alert now, but helpfully, they create new advisory pages and don’t update the existing ones to clarify it is over.
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Stuart Watt
@morungos.bsky.social
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I wouldn’t necessarily interpret it that way. The vendors have a vested interest in lying because their valuations are based entirely on imaginary futures, not reality. It’s possible even they don’t believe it, but they can’t say that because VCs invest.
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Stuart Watt
@morungos.bsky.social
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If you’re still and quiet, and listen very carefully, you might just be able to hear the sound of Halifax Water’s communications team choosing to not update their web site again.
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Stuart Watt
@morungos.bsky.social
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He often is, when factoring in he's from a very different generation (born 1930s)
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Stuart Watt
@morungos.bsky.social
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Just spoke to my aging dad, who always leaned slightly conservative, and his assessment was (I paraphrase) the US, UK, and French political systems are all completely fucked.
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Stuart Watt
@morungos.bsky.social
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It should be using optical flow, ie the relative patterns of movement is what matters, not the images — this is largely how people do it. There’s a decent bit of optical flow work in computer vision, too. But the way Tesla have focused on classifying tells us they’re going the wrong way.
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Stuart Watt
@morungos.bsky.social
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I was taught What The Butler Saw in school. It was… surprising at my tender age.
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Stuart Watt
@morungos.bsky.social
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UK ballot papers finally arrived. That’s about three weeks after nominations closed. Chances of my vote getting to the UK for Thursday: zero. I am suspicious this is intentional.
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Stuart Watt
@morungos.bsky.social
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Love it — trying to write something on it right now. As an erstwhile AI person from the UK, one thing that intrigued me was how the UK “machine intelligence” was interwoven with (UK) cybernetics, Ashby, Grey Walter, but in the US they stayed more distant. And I always loved Brooks’s take. 👏
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Soraya Nadia McDonald
@sorayamcdonald.bsky.social
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Brb declaring myself a corporation so I can have some rights
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Stuart Watt
@morungos.bsky.social
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Thanks so much! Was mulling over this just yesterday reading Ross Ashby’s text on cybernetics, which was pretty explicit that it all applies to biology too. I’m now thinking that we had it completely wrong, and we don’t even think about machines as machines any more.
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Stuart Watt
@morungos.bsky.social
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#halisky right now — except for Dartmouth, obviously 😘
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Stuart Watt
@morungos.bsky.social
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I’m somewhat unimpressed by how long it took them to get the emergency alert out, more than two hours after the municipal one. Not good processes from the province there.
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Stuart Watt
@morungos.bsky.social
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Massacres come next, and to be honest, I think they’re quite looking forward to that part. They might not have planned fully for what comes after the massacres, though.
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Stuart Watt
@morungos.bsky.social
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Apple Photos is now officially crap. Any time I want to use it, it takes two hours to update a library. Utter garbage.
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Stuart Watt
@morungos.bsky.social
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I’ve been at an amazing AI and testing workshop the last few days, also there was @nate-custer.bsky.social.
Getting AI to do what you want is really hard — really really hard. Like trying to get a kitten to assemble IKEA furniture.
I am in awe of these testing folks. And my brain is still reeling.
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Sing Blue Silver
@dartmouthdogs.bsky.social
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Andrew
@andrewbarss.bsky.social
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Related to the old joke … In the Maritimes, what do you call a sunny day following two days of rain? A: Monday.
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Stuart Watt
@morungos.bsky.social
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Thank you so much, that’s good to know. Trying to build back into writing a bit — recovering from a patch of self-doubt. And yes, decent yeasts make a difference to flavour. It’s worth it.
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Stuart Watt
@morungos.bsky.social
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I really want to hear how this goes.
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