@pre@boing.world2025-06-02 20:28:08
Confusing episode. Let me clear it all up.
The world is sinking into the doubt needed to rescue Omega, remember, and The Doctor is falling with a balcony that's separated from the building.
How does he get out of that?
Well, saved by a literal magic door that pops out of nowhere, leading back to the time hotel. 🤨
Anita, who he spent a year with once a couple of Christmases ago, has been popping around the Doctor's entire long life, peeping on him with the Daleks and stuff. Trying to find him on the Earth's last day. Today.
And now he's rescued, today turns into a groundhog day. Same day over and over again. 😆
There's another woman that's been stalking him through time lately, Mrs Flood. She was following him everywhere, but she had Xmas off she reckons, so didn't see the Time Hotel bit. Thus the element of surprise in the deus ex machina rescue. 😀
The Doctor is broken free of the wish spell now anyway, popped his conditioning, and can use the time hotel's door to recall Unit and break them all out of the wish too.
The Rani pops in to say hi and explain her plans. 😝
How did the Rani survive the end of the Timelords? She flipped her DNA to sidestep the genetic bomb apparently? Well that makes no sense, but nor does anything else so no time to ponder.
The end of the Time Lords made them all Barons... No, made them barren. There can be no more children of the time-lords.
She's popping Omega back out of the underworld for his DNA because the timelords are all barren and she wants to recreate Galifrey.
But wait a minute: Poppy is the Doctor's kid in wish world! So she should have Timelord DNA too! Maybe that could work?
No. The Rani is a nazi, don't like the kid's contaminated blood. She's got human all over her DNA. Eww.
Rani pops off back to her Bone Palace, and makes the bone beasts attack.
The Doctor explains that the Giant dinosaur skeletons are beasts that pop in to clean up the world when there's a reality flux, and the Rani has turned them on Unit HQ.
So the UNIT HQ turns into some kinda ship? Like the Crimson Permanent Insurance. Lol. It's blasting lasers at the bone beasts and turning around, and has a steering wheel like pirate ship now. 🤣
During the battle, the Doctor pops out to take a ride on the sky-bike, looking like something from Flash Gordon, and crashes into the Bone Palace.
Too late though! Omega is pretty much here now. He's a giant boney CGI zombie, become his own legend. Looks great but doesn't really seem like Omega, who ought to be held together by pure will.
Omega eats the Rani! One of the Ranis anyway. Mrs Flood avoids being eaten. She pops off with the time bracelet. "So much for the Two Rani's. It's a goodnight from me!" as she disappears off into time. Great gag. 😁
The Doctor just shoots Omega to get him back into his box. Pops a rifle off the wall. The Vindicator has apparently also got a built in laser as well as locator beacons. So that's handy. The Doctor doesn't use guns but some of his devices work like one. 🔫
So all is well! The day is saved and the wish is over and baby Poppy survives in a time box! 🍻
They're going to take the space baby off to do space adventures. Ruby is jealous of seeing The Doctor and Belinda vibing like that, as they plan a life in space with the space baby. Aww. Poor Ruby. 😭
But then Poppy pops off! Disappears entirely, and everyone other than Ruby forgets. Ruby remembers because she's disappeared from time herself in the past they say.
Okay: to save his child and on Ruby's word alone, the Doctor will sacrifice himself to turn reality one degree.
He goes off to commit suicide by Regeneration, but Thirteen is here! She's popped out of her timeline to stop him! Or maybe to help, with a motivational chat instead. Gives him a pep talk then pops back off again.
The Doctor zaps reality with his Tardis, dying but holding off on the actual regeneration for a few moments to go check on the kid.
The kid is safe! But isn't his own kid any more. Poppy has popped all her Timelord DNA and is just all human now. Poppy's pop isn't the doc, it's someone called Richie.
And Belinda has been so keen to get home all this time in order to get back to her Baby! Who isn't a timelord, and definitely didn't exist until she was wished into being.
This may not be the most ethical action The Doctor has ever taken: To bend the whole universe in order to recreate a baby that was accidentally wished into being out of nothing. Twisting time to give a child to a nurse who didn't previously have a child, or even remember the wish. Then it's not even the same child that disappeared, coz this one is all human. 🤷
But the doc is popping off to regenerate with Joy in the stars, and... Turns blonde: "oh. Hello?" 🤯
It's Rose! Billie Piper is back? Fantastic!
Is Rose doing a David Tennant Impression there?
Billie playing the Doctor, doing a Tennant impression as Bad Wolf? Amazing. Can't wait.
#doctorWho
@fgraver@hcommons.social2025-08-03 11:46:06
Moral Deskilling – or, why you spend more time on admin than doing your job. — Crooked Timber https://crookedtimber.org/2025/07/31/moral-deskilling-or-why-you-spend-more-time-on-admin-than-doing-your-job/
@karlauerbach@sfba.social2025-08-02 18:28:59
If the US can tell the President of Taiwan to stay out of the US then one might wonder: When will other countries tell FFOTUS to keep away?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/30/world/asia/trump-taiwan-china.html
@tiotasram@kolektiva.social2025-08-02 13:28:40
How to tell a vibe coder of lying when they say they check their code.
People who will admit to using LLMs to write code will usually claim that they "carefully check" the output since we all know that LLM code has a lot of errors in it. This is insufficient to address several problems that LLMs cause, including labor issues, digital commons stress/pollution, license violation, and environmental issues, but at least it's they are checking their code carefully we shouldn't assume that it's any worse quality-wise than human-authored code, right?
Well, from principles alone we can expect it to be worse, since checking code the AI wrote is a much more boring task than writing code yourself, so anyone who has ever studied human-computer interaction even a little bit can predict people will quickly slack off, stating to trust the AI way too much, because it's less work. I'm a different domain, the journalist who published an entire "summer reading list" full of nonexistent titles is a great example of this. I'm sure he also intended to carefully check the AI output, but then got lazy. Clearly he did not have a good grasp of the likely failure modes of the tool he was using.
But for vibe coders, there's one easy tell we can look for, at least in some cases: coding in Python without type hints. To be clear, this doesn't apply to novice coders, who might not be aware that type hints are an option. But any serious Python software engineer, whether they used type hints before or not, would know that they're an option. And if you know they're an option, you also know they're an excellent tool for catching code defects, with a very low effort:reward ratio, especially if we assume an LLM generates them. Of the cases where adding types requires any thought at all, 95% of them offer chances to improve your code design and make it more robust. Knowing about but not using type hints in Python is a great sign that you don't care very much about code quality. That's totally fine in many cases: I've got a few demos or jam games in Python with no type hints, and it's okay that they're buggy. I was never going to debug them to a polished level anyways. But if we're talking about a vibe coder who claims that they're taking extra care to check for the (frequent) LLM-induced errors, that's not the situation.
Note that this shouldn't be read as an endorsement of vibe coding for demos or other rough-is-acceptable code: the other ethical issues I skipped past at the start still make it unethical to use in all but a few cases (for example, I have my students use it for a single assignment so they can see for themselves how it's not all it's cracked up to be, and even then they have an option to observe a pre-recorded prompt session instead).
@NFL@darktundra.xyz2025-06-03 15:46:20
Todd Bowles has more in common with Buccaneers QB Baker Mayfield than some think, calls him 'fraternal twin'
https://www.cbssports.com/n…
@Techmeme@techhub.social2025-07-03 22:55:47
Counterpoint Research: Apple's iPhone sales in China grew 8% YoY in Q2 2025, the first time Apple has recorded growth in China since Q2 2023 (Arjun Kharpal/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/03/apple-china-iphone-sales-grew-fo…
@akosma@mastodon.online2025-07-04 07:23:35
1945: rent time from humans.
1955: build your own computer!
1965: rent time on an IBM mainframe.
1975: get your own home computer!
1985: rent time on CompuServe.
1995: get a PC with Windows 95!
2005: rent time on AWS.
2015: get an iPhone or an Android!
2025: rent time on ChatGPT.
2035: get your own whatever!
@deprogrammaticaipsum@mas.to2025-05-04 12:34:09
"What Stroustrup wanted was apparently what a lot of people wanted: a language that provided OOP features, such as those offered by Smalltalk, but compiled into binaries that would execute as fast as an executable written in C.
The solution Stroustrup adopted was not to adopt the Smalltalk model, but instead to take inspiration from fellow Scandinavians and to bolt ideas borrowed from Simula into C."
@ErikUden@mastodon.de2025-07-03 08:54:43
Der Bundestag ist kein Zirkuszelt, so der Bundeskanzler zur Regenbogenflagge. Der Symbolismus wird kritisiert, gleichgesetzt mit etwas Lächerlichem. Die Form soll gewahrt werden, damit auch ja nicht die lächerlichen Inhalte zum Thema werden.
Ich mache mir schon über längere Zeit Gedanken zum Thema Respekt und dessen Einforderung. Politiker:innen bezeichnen sich als Respektspersonen, fordern diesen Respekt ein, sprechen oft viel über den Ton in dem man mit ihnen zu reden hat, was für Ei…
@NFL@darktundra.xyz2025-07-02 16:40:58
Seven-round NFL mock draft for 2025 season: Every team's full set of win-now picks https://www.nfl.com/news/seven-round-nfl-mock-draft-for-2025-season-every-team-s-full-set-of-win-now-picks