@ErikUden@mastodon.de2026-08-19 10:39:18
The enemy is not fighting on the battlefield!
@bthalpin@mastodon.social2026-08-19 21:17:11
@… To be clear, I'm not dissing technical progress, but trying to be clear about the difficulty of the problems at the frontier.
@bthalpin@mastodon.social2026-08-18 20:21:02
@… I bet it has already been done! (But on face value, LZ compression of a textual representation of the tune seems like a very good first-order approximation.)
@BugWarp@wikis.world2026-07-18 06:45:59
Wow, I cannot believe they turned the city from Ratatouille, Miraculous Ladybug, and from that mission of Battlefield 3 into a real place!
@bthalpin@mastodon.social2026-08-19 19:48:54
@… I like to sketch the rate of progress in terms like: "because computers are one million times as powerful as back then, we can forecast the weather 10 days ahead instead of just 7".
@bthalpin@mastodon.social2026-08-18 21:14:15
@… @… @… Perennial
@bthalpin@mastodon.social2026-08-18 19:57:20
@bthalpin@mastodon.social2026-08-18 19:54:59
Am currently in Britanny & exposed for various reasons to Breton music. Inevitable observation: B music is far more repetitive (limited) than Irish. Therefore am currently coding in Lisp (with thumbs in #Emacs on my phone; am on holiday!) functions to take tunes in ABC notation (thesession.org etc), doing Lempel-Ziv compression, and comparing compression rates. So far: Irish 33%; Breton 50%, i…
@bthalpin@mastodon.social2026-08-18 19:54:59
Am currently in Britanny & exposed for various reasons to Breton music. Inevitable observation: B music is far more repetitive (limited) than Irish. Therefore am currently coding in Lisp (with thumbs in #Emacs on my phone; am on holiday!) functions to take tunes in ABC notation (thesession.org etc), doing Lempel-Ziv compression, and comparing compression rates. So far: Irish 33%; Breton 50%, i…
@bthalpin@mastodon.social2026-07-16 22:05:09
I saw a Reddit post earlier complaining about Americans saying they invented the internet, and another just now from Oxford grads wondering if they could keep their e-mail addresses.
I then tried to find my old e-mail address, which lead me to remember that my online experience pre-dates the internet, and covers the moment where things pivoted from HALPIN@UK.AC.OXFORD.VAX to halpin@vax.oxford.ac.uk
(Big-endian to little-endian, in Dublin terms)