Mike Lynch

No One is Talking About This, London: Bloomsbury, 2021 Patricia Lockwood I finished this in a couple of days and it was funny and touching—people probably think of Lockwood as a Twitter phenomenon but she'd have been a good writer no matter what platform…

A couple of months ago I got a bit obsessed with this recurring question on Metafilter from people who can't or won't learn to cook and are keen to know if a single food will supply all human dietary requirements.

Just when I think I'm fed up with multiverses, I discover this two-season show, a spy thriller set in two parallel versions of Berlin, with an amazing central couple of performances from J K Simmons and Olivia Williams.

Home sick from work today: I've been going to the office three days a week, and this is the first time I've had a sick day when it doesn't feel like it's blended in to working-from-home.

Thinking about yesterday's post and whether it really went anywhere, and whether the same criticism I levelled at the waffly IT blog post might be levelled at my own writing here, which doesn't need to come up to any real standards of coherence or clarity.

Setting aside the question of whether LaMDA is sentient, or whether the Turing Test is valid, or whether general AI is possible or likely—there are a lot very strongly held opinions on the matter out there if you want to go looking for them—I've been thin…

Here's a meme I made a few months ago.

I used to do a Bloomsday blog post every year until last year, which was the first time I forgot to commemorate the day in any way for as long as I could remember, and I almost forgot this year as well.

Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life London: Chatto and Windus, 2022 Claire Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman I bought this as soon as I saw it, after having read a review of it in the LRB - it follows the lives and careers…

I've been reading a bunch of books this year about the history of philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century and the linguistic / analytical turn it took in England under the influence of Wittgenstein and A J Ayer, most recently Claire Mac Cumh…

So I have opinions about the Google engineer who thinks that his chatbot is sentient, because of course I have.

I'd had goat, I'd had rabbit and duck, I'd had quails, I'd had clams, I'd had squid, I'd had fungus and snails.

I know it's bad that Epic have bought Bandcamp, and when that was announced I made sure to download a copy of everything I'd bought there, but I still rely on their emails to not just let me know what's new but also what's old.

In Search of the Third Bird: Exemplary Essays from the Proceedings of ESTAR(SER) London: Strange Attractor Press, 2021 D Graham Burnett, Catherine L Hansen and Justin E H Smith (eds.)

I'm now on campus three out of five days, Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the first two of these seem more normal, it's the start of the week and more of the rest of the team are around, but Thursdays it's a bit emptier.

One of the frustrating things about web3 is that people who talk about it seem to be lumping together a bunch of things - intrinsic decentralisation, crypto, disillusionment with corporate social media, virtual reality - which don't really have much in co…

A bit hesitant to blog about web3 because, like cryptocurrency, it seems to be a topic which drives people to a kind of monomania even if they're opposed to it.

I still feel like I don't quite have the hang of blogging regularly again, and do things like leave it until too late in the day, when I'm too tired to write anything useful.

On Friday mornings I run up Talavera Road and along a footbridge under the M2, down the bike track through the Lane Cove National Park to Brown's Waterhole, back up again and then back across Macquarie University, where I studied in the late 80s and early…

Hopscotch New York: Pantheon Books, 1966 Julio Cortázar (translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa) I bought a copy of this a few years ago, and I'm not sure what made me start reading it this year.

My current coding project is developing a utility to help medical researchers upload batches of imagery, mostly CT scans, to our instance of a piece of repository software called XNAT.

This isn't a very auspicious start to a month of blogging - I decided to join in on #blogjune, which I found out about via Mastodon, and thought it would be a good spur to start writing more here.

This week I finished off a quick project to upgrade the University's instance of CQPweb, a web app for doing corpus linguistics - the analysis of language based on large corpora of texts from sources such as journalism, legal proceedings, TV scripts and t…

At the start of September this year I applied for a new job at the University of Sydney.

Anniversaries: from a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl New York: NYRB Classics, 2018 Uwe Johnson (translated from the German by Damion Searls) A novel which appeared in German in four volumes from 1970 to 1983, and which has only been fully translated…

VQGAN+CLIP is a method for generating images from text phrases using a GAN image generator and the CLIP image recogition system: I tried feeding it the first few numbered paragraphs from Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which I was thinking…

We went away to the Southern Highlands for the second week of May, which is our first holiday away from Sydney since we spent three weeks in the States in September 2019.

This week I helped run three workshops on researcher training and data management, and it was the first time I'd got up in front of a physical room to talk to people since October 2019.

I think that things are settling down, or that I'm getting more comfortable in my role, although my mind has still felt all over the place.

My anxiety and mental restlessness felt like they were getting the better of me, this week.

So that writing these posts up would be less of a chore, I've started keeping a Zettelkasten document every week to make notes about what's happening every day.

This felt like a long short week.

Easy to get out of new habits when they're interrupted by Easter.

I got myself a gemini.

Copying a practice I've seen other bloggers do - and as an attempt to kickstart this one, and also remind myself that giving this domain a bit of an overhaul is something I want to do this year - I'm going to set aside a bit of time every Friday afternoon…

One of the original promises of the net was that it would transcend territories, another part of John Perry Barlow’s declaration of independence which hasn’t worked out.

This is a blog version of my presentation for the GoGLAM miniconf at Linux.conf.au 2021 on Arkisto, a framework for describing and preserving research data assets with open source tools and standards.

I'm moving this blog and all the rest of *.mikelynch.org to a new host - things will be patchy and possibly broken for the next few days.

After skipping it last year (I did NaNoWriMo instead) I decided that I missed doing National Novel Generating Month and thought I'd do something relatively simple, based on Tom Phillips' A Humument, which I recently read for the first time.

A fun quality of Mastodon - a social communication platform I hang out on a bit too much - is that individual instantiations can fork its basic form and add odd twists which suit just that community.

Point 2 in this advice to new developers is "Never use a plugin which you can't write yourself" I think this is really bad advice, although his less extreme version -- that you should try to read and understand other people's libraries -- is actually good,

I didn't contribute to NaNoGenMo this year: on the spur of the moment, I decided to try writing 50,000 words of fiction, rather than generating it, and blogged briefly about it at Nannygoat Hill.

g CINA CONTENC MI CINE SI CENTENI SEE CONDENN DE CRE SU DE QUAENT ME CONNE CUNTUR DEACLETICE (FIUD SEE DED SEE SER SER SER SEENNN SER SER SEENN SER SER SEENDENNENCEN (_DER SER K of my own striking the more than the spirit of the morning of the Professor,…

I trained a recurrent neural net with the same parameters as the most recent version of GLOSSATORY on the Gutenberg e-text of the 1811 edition of Francis Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue.

This is the output of the neuralgae algorithm, which visualises a neural net's idea of some image classes and then classifies the result and repeats, looped into a GIF, and it's exactly the sort of fluid morphing between surreal forms I've been trying to…

Last year I went right over the top for National Novel Generating Month and wrote a dynastic succession simulator and blogged about it at length.

Here are all 1000 classes in the ImageNet challenge, rendered with the Visual Geometry Group's 19-layer neural net, using the same deepdraw technique I used for the thousand faces of CaffeNet.

Glossatory is a recurrent neural net trained on all of the definitions in the lexical database WordNet.

I was tinkering around trying to get Justin Johnson's neural-style implementation working on the HPC - this is an algorithm which uses a deep learning image recognition net to extract low-level style features from one image and use them to render the larg…

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