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Pete Birkinshaw

@binaryape.bsky.social

1.4K followers 1.7K following 10K posts

Hat-wearing devourer of chickpeas, Manchester vegan, manager of identities, developer of obscure software, Green inactivist, Elixir & Ruby coder, watcher of K-dramas, daft-apeth. Alignment: Quixotic-Good https://binary-ape.org

binary-ape.org

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Pete Birkinshaw @binaryape.bsky.social · Jul 30

I'm going to list Korean romcoms I've watched so far [copied from my old thread elsewhere]

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Reposted by Pete Birkinshaw

Cohen is a Ghost @skullmandible.bsky.social · 32m

"even if it's AI, it's at least true" hard to overstate the damage this stuff is doing to people's brains. we're gonna be cleaning the slop out of archives for decades

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Reposted by Pete Birkinshaw

Ben Evans @ogkittylyst.bsky.social · 1h

I can't wait for this "big tent" to provide funding to some communist trans catgirl collectives who are working on F/OSS. After all, it's not some mealy-mouthed bullshit to provide cover for the fact that they're just funding fash.

Arya 🏳️‍⚧️ @aryafairywren.bsky.social · 7h

The Framework forums thread got insanely unwieldy, so I wrote up a (somewhat shorter) summary post of the situation

crimier.github.io/posts/Framew...

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Pete Birkinshaw @binaryape.bsky.social · 1h

That's pretty much the reason - some contain dyes, scents or other components made from animal ingredients or tested on animals. There's a paragraph in this article discussing it wearedame.co/blogs/the-pi...

We’ve made it official with The Vegan Society - DAME

We’re bloody proud to announce that this Veganuary, our tampons, pads and newly launching period pants have all been certified by The Vegan Society.

wearedame.co

Pete Birkinshaw @binaryape.bsky.social · 1h

No. Some contain dyes, scents or other components made from animal ingredients or tested on animals.

Pete Birkinshaw @binaryape.bsky.social · 1h

Lots of naivety and enthusiasm combined in dangerous ways

Pete Birkinshaw @binaryape.bsky.social · 3h

DHL have failed, 3 times, to deliver my parcel to one of their own pick-up points, which is actually impressive. And deleted tracking details.

Pete Birkinshaw @binaryape.bsky.social · 3h

Exactly. And no, they did none of those things.

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Pete Birkinshaw @binaryape.bsky.social · 3h

Here's my kill-joy old person reply

Andrew is right.
I'm a relatively old software developer and systems administrator who started in the 90s, I worked for a university for 15 years, was a software test engineer at the BBC, have worked on EU standards for authentication in research organisations.
Never run code written without review by other experienced programmers online, particularly not in production.
You open your university up to huge dangers. It could provide an entry point for ransomware gangs. It could leak personal information. It could present incorrect information that harms staff or students.
As a member of staff you have legal and moral responsibilities. If you are running code for students on your own website, you will need to make sure you have the correct GDR and privacy policies, and if something goes wrong your employer could bring legal action against you. Students may harm themselves as a result of administrative errors.
If you must use generative "Al" code, use it as a learning tool. Write unit tests. Have a person with suitable skills review the code.
There is much more to creating an online service than just code, even if the code is written by a person with the appropriate skills.
One of the most common causes of security incidents when I worked at a university was PhD students, often acting at the request of staff or as part of their research, throwing together badly coded little websites or web apps that would then be left unmaintained. I fear this is going to become an even larger problem now.
I'm afraid there isn't a shortcut, there is no silver bullet.

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Pete Birkinshaw @binaryape.bsky.social · 3h

Someone on an education tech mailing list is boasting of having "vibe coded" a student calendaring app using "AI" & then running it in production despite having no programming skills. If this takes off HE and FE are going to be absolute disaster zones. Universities need policies now to prohibit this

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Reposted by Pete Birkinshaw

Jamie Schler @lifesafeast.bsky.social · 23h

And for my friend @darthbluesky.bsky.social who LOVES potatoes. I've got two for you, darling. And they are both excellent recipes!

Plus, added bonus - a bit of potato history!

I love this pâté de pomme de terre - potato tart or tourte

jamieschler.substack.com/p/pate-de-po...

Pâté de Pomme de Terre - Potato Tart

Part 1: the apostle of the potato

jamieschler.substack.com

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Reposted by Pete Birkinshaw

Madeley @madeley.bsky.social · 17h

This is a fascinating thread.

Philip Purser-Hallard @purserhallard.com · 18h

It occurs to me that the Doctor's polyethnic identity in recent times recontextualises Peter Davison's casting in quite an interesting way.
(For context, although you'd be unlikely to guess it by looking at him, Davison's paternal family is Guyanese. He has close relatives who are visibly Black.)

Peter Davison, a fair-skinned blond man, as the fifth Doctor, circa 1982.

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Pete Birkinshaw @binaryape.bsky.social · 16h

Here he is on location en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jc...

Cover of Julian Cope's album 'Fried'. He is apparently naked except for turtle shell costume, crawling on some coal slag. I have moped on that slag.

Pete Birkinshaw @binaryape.bsky.social · 17h

Without knowing it, as a teenager I used to walk off into the fields and ruined colliery landscape near my house and sit and have deep* teenage thoughts in exactly the same place Julian Cope had done years before. There's no actual point to this anecdote.

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Reposted by Pete Birkinshaw

Yoïn van Spijk @yvanspijk.bsky.social · Jul 20

'Ye' in names such as 'Ye Olde Inn' was originally pronounced 'the'.

The pronunciation with y is due to a misinterpretation.

'Ye' originated as a second-best way of writing 'þe', þ being thorn, the original English letter for the th sound.

Click my new infographic to read the story of thorn:

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Pete Birkinshaw @binaryape.bsky.social · 22h

"she was not sure exactly how Paddock ended up with something reported missing from an Italian museum"

This might come as a shock but I think the answer is "looting"

"It was also not uncommon for soldiers who fought in Europe during the second world to come home with souvenirs"

Oh, "souvenirs"

Roman grave marker found in New Orleans yard left there by US soldier’s granddaughter

Erin Scott O’Brien says grandfather Charles Paddock brought back artifact with him from second world war

www.theguardian.com

Pete Birkinshaw @binaryape.bsky.social · 23h

They are chasing a funeral, I think.

Pete Birkinshaw @binaryape.bsky.social · 1d

and please remember that everyone in that video is British

Reposted by Pete Birkinshaw

Martin Nutbeem @martinnutbeem.bsky.social · 1d

Such a great poem! Zephaniah is sadly missed.

Americans with thoughts about British food, please take note this is not about food.

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Pete Birkinshaw @binaryape.bsky.social · 1d

Are Sky News lost?

A flight tracker map showing a helicopter has been flying in circles around Manchester all day irritating people

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Reposted by Pete Birkinshaw

your #3 source for absurdist true crime 🔨 @davidgerard.co.uk · 1d

LLM AI exists to crush labour. That's not even my surmise, the people paying billions of dollars to fund this stuff are extremely open and explicit that this is their goal.

There are no ethical use cases for LLMs at this point in time. Maybe when the bubble has popped thoroughly. Not before.

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Pete Birkinshaw @binaryape.bsky.social · 1d

I shouldn't nitpick Robert DeNiro's advert, but, BUT the USA has not really had 250 years of democracy. It's had 250 years of being a republic with elections and a large electorate, which was a huge step forward but not fitting the definition of democracy today. (A. disagrees with me on this)

Pete Birkinshaw @binaryape.bsky.social · 1d

Rails is a different problem, but it looks like work has begun to route around the two toxic people and corporations who seized control of the Ruby programming language's infrastructure

Buckle Up, There’s a New Gem Server in Town: gem.coop

New modern Ruby infrastructure coming online by the folks who were unceremoniously kicked out of Ruby Central.

www.fullstackruby.dev

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Reposted by Pete Birkinshaw

Paul Bernal @paulbernal.bsky.social · 1d

Yup. And it’s not ‘secure’ at all. timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/meerut/...

How UP-based gang tampered Aadhaar biometrics, altered thousands of digital identities across 12 states - The Times of India

A hi-tech identity fraud racket, operating from Uttar Pradesh, has been busted for allegedly tampering with biometric data of over 1,500 Aadhaar cardholders across 12 states. Police arrested four indi...

timesofindia.indiatimes.com

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Pete Birkinshaw @binaryape.bsky.social · 1d

This is like a government praising the UK's Post Office software

Pete Birkinshaw @binaryape.bsky.social · 1d

"During a trip to India this week, Sir Keir praised the country's Aadhaar digital ID system, which is far more extensive than the plans initially announced for the UK and involves the storing of biometric data, as a "massive success"."

*facepalm* Aadhaar has had a massive number of problems

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Pete Birkinshaw @binaryape.bsky.social · 1d

There's a relatively sensible, proven, widely used set of standards in Europe called eIDAS that they could follow. That they *should* follow, if they want this sort of thing. Aadhaar is a notorious mess.