I Will Not Stand For This Paul Morley Erasure

If you’re making a documentary on the strange end of the twentieth century in Britain, opening with a clip of Jimmy Savile taking a group of children to meet Margaret Thatcher is not exactly subtle. It’s been too long, Mr. Curtis.

(current thoughts on having seen the first episode of Shifty: feels like an expansion of The League of Gentlemen from Pandora’s Box and The Attic from The Living Dead, with some of the footage being directly lifted from those episodes. In fact, at one point, Curtis is lazy enough that he takes the clip of Not The Nine O’Clock News’s ‘Unemployment Figures’ sketch directly from Pandora’s Box, as it still has ‘1980’ in Futura burnt into the clip, instead of going back to the original footage¹. Having said all that, the ‘new’ clips are great, and to be honest, I’d be happy if he just dropped the narrative text completely at this point)

This week, we have been mostly learning how to play with sand and staring in awe at watching all our systems go down due to a global Google Cloud Platform failure…

And That Is Where I Decided To Wear A Watch Again

This week has sucked in a variety of ways, but it turns out I have been quite productive.

• The Adam Curtis image searching site, BUT THIS WAS A FANTASY has been refactored to use Qdrant as the backing vector store, which means it now has proper series filtering instead of the hacks I’d lashed together for it. All ready for Shifty!
• I’m about half-a-million entries into my latest synthetic data project
• I finally wrote up the proposal & demo for my new search research — Four Candles (and yes, it is)
• I built an MCP server for Lucidworks AI
• I created a model for [REDACTED] (it’s rubbish, but I did it…although I need to do more there)
• I built a semantic typeahead service that has a p50 time of under 1ms, and a p99 that just crosses 2ms. In Python, too!

There’s no way I’ll keep that pace up for all of June, but it’s a pretty good start.

The bad news is that on Saturday night, I discovered this Swatch website and Choices Were Made.

I mean, just look at this beauty.

Yes, sure it’s absolutely hopeless at actually telling the time (though surprisingly, nowhere near the worst in vintage Swatches, it turns out), but just look at it. Somebody thought this was a great idea for a watch. AND THEY WERE RIGHT.

(also, 1989 was a very good year if you wanted your watch to look like a Peter Saville New Order record cover. Which apparently is actually something I now covet)

Okay, I will now go back to refreshing windows to see if Switch 2 is back in stock anywhere in the Cincinnati region…

It's Goodnight From Me

Quite frankly, I would have thought less of RTD if he hadn’t made that Two Ranis gag.

“We’ve got the bangers now, but they’ll be followed by the bummers”

Of course, the problem with that is that even the Los Campesinos! bangers are…in fact bummers. I cherish with fondness the day (before) I met you and all that I can read is you’re the B-side! after all.

But still, always a treasure. Blowing the doors on a smallish indie venue on a Friday night in Columbus, Ohio as if they were on their first overseas tour, not nineteen years in. And I still don’t know why they come to Ohio on every tour (they even referenced the fact, but Gareth didn’t really delve into it except maybe it’s to piss Minnesota off), but I’m glad they do.

(If Saint Etienne were the band that presented a cool, modernist Ideal For Living and how you wanted to present yourself in the world, LC! are the band that is more who you are. Sure, you get the B.S. Johnson references, but also I think we need more post-coital and less post-rock)

Also: so many families there! Not just us, but a whole brace of mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, or a mix and match. Never seen that at an LC! concert before…

Oh, and if you were the guy in the Agora Cleveland t-shirt that leered over a bunch of people on your way down to the front, making an entire section of the first four rows incredibly uncomfortable for the second half of the show: we all hope that somehow you picked up a nasty boil on the way home and it just slowly grows year after year. Never life-threatening, just enough pain to make you wince every day…

Don't It Make You Glad?

I have perhaps read too many Tessa Hadley novels in succession.

Thanks to the efforts of Tammy, Robert, and Myles, we now have an adventure playground in the back garden. And I’m not kidding around when I say ‘adventure playground’. It’s something that you’d see in a decent council playground back home. And it’s just sitting behind our kitchen. Maeryn, of course, already loves it, and I imagine it’ll be a fixture in her life for at least a decade. It’s a banal cliché, I know, but I am loving how the mostly blank canvas of behind the house is changing as she grows up, becoming her space as it has become ours (with the guiding hand of Tammy, who has lots of thoughts for the garden. I did get lights for the deck this week, though!).

Can I make it to the end of tomorrow night avoiding Who spoilers?

Eyes Left, Eyes Right

Well, I guess it has been a while (Can’t Get You Out Of My Head was 2021, after all). It also looks like we’re back in firm Curtis territory versus the narration-free TraumaZone.

This means I really do have to get a move on to update But This Was A Fantasy with all the updates I’ve been planning for a while - mainly: using a vector backend that allows me to do proper metadata filtering instead of the current system hacking bits onto FAISS in an attempt to make filtering work. I’ll also take the opportunity to re-encode all the images from the documentaries with SigLIP2 to get better text-image similarities too.

Anyway, the hope is to get most of the changes and migrations underway next weekend so I’ll be good and ready to upload the new series very soon after broadcast. Let’s see if that really happens…

Otherwise, back from Vegas and celebrating Tammy’s graduation this weekend (Masters #2 for her!). Thank goodness for Memorial Day next week…

A Change In Scenery

A later blog this week, because as I write this, my computer is a couple of thousand miles away to the east. I, however, am in Las Vegas, where I have flown in to surprise my family while they’re on their trip. And they were somewhat surprised! So now, it’s very much a traditional Pointer holiday, at least until Monday afternoon when I fly back home. Also, a quick stop to an out-of-the-way liquor shop which appears to have the last stocks of last year’s Wild Turkey 70th Anniversary edition left in the country (seemingly a complete case of it, too).

The odd thing when talking about being in Vegas is that everybody expects me to spend the 48 hours on the Strip, but our family’s visits to the city have evolved to the point that we hardly ever go there when we’re in town. Which sometimes leads to us wandering around a very large set of fields in 35ºC heat trying to find food trucks, but it does let us see more of the place than a lot of visitors do.

(Some things are traditional though. I got propositioned twice by ‘adult entertainers’ in the first 24 hours of being here, and my family found a way to watch football matches in the morning)

Once again, I brought the iPad with a view of using some quiet time to hack on an embedding idea I have; and once again, it has fallen flat. I don’t know what’s at fault, but even with a keyboard and a mouse, Google Colab is pretty much unusable in Safari, locking up the screen on a simple small copy/paste and scrolling sometimes working, but most of the time being a janky mess that causes a reload of the tab randomly. So I guess, back to just scribbling on papers with the Pencil; which admittedly, it does do very well. But sometimes, I want to go beyond scribbling to playing with ideas, but I don’t want to lug my laptop around.

May????

Astounded at how fast the year has gone. Already May seems to be completely locked up (with some news this week, I think the only free weekend I have all month is Memorial Day weekend…which at least has a Monday off too. But busy busy busy otherwise.

And as I don’t have a lot else to talk about this week, welcome to Ian’s Round-Up of TV Things He’s Watched FROM THIS YEAR!

The White Lotus S3: I feel cheated that the central UNC/Duke tension was not resolved. Otherwise, a bit of a step down from S1 and S2, longer in length, but feeling twice as padded. Still, here for Carrie Coon rave scenes.

Andor S2 (so far): Not the greatest show that television has ever produced, as some would have you believe. But here for the Mon Mothma rave scenes. And it really is the best Star Wars thing in absolutely ages.

Doctor Who S2 (so far): Considering how S1 went off the rails, it’s probably still far too early to say (if Anita Dobson ends up being The Rani than RTD needs a quiet talking to), but a decent run of episodes, probably the best since the Capaldi Era, even if the politics of Lucky Day were pretty muddled…

When GERD ATTACKS!

Currently suffering through a particularly acute acid reflux flare that makes me not want to do pretty much anything. Hopefully the medication will help out a little in the days to come.

My GRPO adventures in April were…pretty much a bust. I’m trying to do something that’s a little more complicated than just trying to do multiple choice answers to the AIME dataset and it is failing miserably. Possibly because I’m using too small a model, but that was the main point of the experiment. Not everything works out, but it has been a bit of a dry spell lately. But I haven’t entirely given up yet…

Next up: May. Fun and games ahead!

Regrets At 46

They say you can’t make it this far without some regrets. Well, I’m here to tell you that this Easter, I have a big one. I really should have picked up that 1kg bag of mini eggs in Waitrose back in February. I had plenty of space in the suitcases for another bag!! A nice round 5kg of egg goodness would have been just the ticket!

Anyway, a quiet but nice birthday. I finally visited The Toy Department out in Fairfield, confirming that people will indeed spend far too much money on old Transformers, and Maeryn even bought me some Lego! Plus, I now have the complete DC One Million Omnibus, which I think pretty much rounds out my Morrison DC collection.

In parenting news, I have finally caved and bought a Fire tablet on sale to be a wifi-less device to help with potty times. Loaded with all the Hey Duggee and Bluey that you can fit on there, I expect…

Adventures!

I feel like there needs to be a banner or something when you start potty training. “WELCOME TO THE NEXT LEVEL”, perhaps. Still, some progress on the first day…

Also, I’m wondering if there should be a WHAMageddon-esque contest for “how long can you avoid looking at your retirement account while the line keeps going down?”