Mike Taylor 🦕

Mike Taylor 🦕's avatar
Mike Taylor 🦕
mike_at_sauropods.win@momostr.pink
npub1vacl...xh6n
By day I am a computer programmer with Index Data, where I have been happily and gainfully employed for 20 years. By night, I am a vertebrate palaeontologist with the University of Bristol, specialising in sauropods: the biggest and best of all dinosaurs. I am an advocate for open access, open data and open source, and also for open peer-review though I'm beginning to think pre-publication peer-review might be a mistake. I support [#LFC](https://sauropods.win/tags/LFC). Email: dino@miketaylor.org.uk ORCiD: 0000-0002-1003-5675
RE:
Mastodon
Firefox for Web Developers (@firefoxwebdevs@mastodon.social)
Something that hasn't been made clear: Firefox will have an option to completely disable all AI features. We've been calling it the AI kill switch...
 This is great news so far as it goes. But. It amounts to "We're going to take all our resources (apart from the CEO's $7M salary, obviously) and plough it into generating plausible bullshit. But GREAT NEWS! You can turn it off. What if we spend all that effort on something people actually want? View quoted note →
I was already done with the shrivelled husk that still calls itself the #Labour Party and will be voting #Green in future — a party that actually stands for something. But if I'd not yet given up on Labour, yesterday's vile anti-refugee rhetoric would have put the lid on it. The UK has not had a #Conservative Party for ten years now: the name and machinery succumbed to reverse takeover by UKIP. Now the same is happening to the former Labour Party. It's a cancer.
Today I learned that all those pointless collective nouns (a murder of crows, a parliament of owls, a pride of lions), which are only ever used in pub quizzes, were made up by one woman 500 years ago.
The Marginalian
A Parliament of Owls and a Murder of Crows: How Groups of Birds Got Their Names, with Wondrous Vintage Illustrations by Brian Wildsmith
Language is an instrument of great precision and poignancy — our best tool for telling each other what the world is and what we are, for conv...
 #TIL #TodayILearned