Nat Torkington

@gnat.bsky.social

1716 Followers 1421 Following

Beloved banjo player of the people. Co-owner and CTO of an apparel ERP company. In former lives: open source, Perl, O'Reilly Media, new technology. Bereavement is sadder and weirder than you can imagine.

Table of selected leading academics' views on AI's economic impact from Most transformative (Erik Brynjolfsson at Stanford) to Least transformative (Daron Acemoglu at MIT).

Photo of Taylor Swift looking out of an old red car.

Screenshot of a Tweet. "Awesome bit of data that makes intuitive sense. Finland cut VAT on haircuts in 2007 to see if cheaper prices would boost demand and jobs. But when the tax fell by 4 euro, many salons lowered prices by only 2 euro and kept the rest as profit. When VAT rose again, prices jumped by the" [full amount]. There's a graph showing this.

Claude Code screenshot: "Good, I have the full plan extracted. Let me set up tracking and start implementing. I'll batch closely-coupled tasks to avoid excessive overhead on the single-file app." followed immediately by "Compacting conversation…"

Screen capture from a session with Claude: "Context left until auto-compact: 1%".

Austraria map colour coded for temperature and a caption with colours ranging from -10 to 45C. But Broken Hill is the colour of -10 and no way was it below freezing in the outback today!

Another method, and the one
we'll mainly be talking about, is what I call a corkscrew. If
you keep turning it, that, of course, is not a reciprocal
change in configuration space and that will propel you. At
this point, I wish I could persuade you that the direction in
which this helical drive will move is not obvious. Put your-

You can invent other animals that have no trouble
swimming. We had better be able to invent them, since we
know they exist. One you might think of first as a physicist,
is a torus. I don't know whether there is a toroidal animal,
but whatever other physiological problems it might face,
it clearly could swim at low Reynolds number

Clip from a Spinoff story. "He told the court that he believed Maori were not indigenous to New Zealand and that a race of fair-skinned ginger-haired people had settled the land before Maori entered."

clip from Radio New Zealand reposted news. "During the contemporary sale, following the Lauder collection, the most unusual lot of the night will be the 99kg, 18-karat gold toilet by the conceptual artist and enfant terrible Maurizio Cattelan"

First poster: "Stop using pop culture references as the first half of the title of your journal article."
Reply: "Who Gon Check Me, Boo: A Phenomenological Study of Entitled Gate Keeping of Scholarly Contributions"

Screenshot of a news headline: "Willis says school Treaty clause was 'virtue signal'."

"Despair is a tool of your enemies" - Audre Lorde

Screenshot of the Spotify “Air New Zealand - Runway Tracks” playlist, description “The latest and greatest sounds from air New Zealand’s current Boarding and Landing music.”

Mum and Rude Boy in a hot air balloon basket. Mum asks "Isn't it a lovely view, dear?" and Rude Boy replies "piss up a rope, fuckstick!" and gives the fingers.

Headline: Man 'very disappointed' after brothel plan abandoned

Lead actor with short and wide oval glasses that look vaguely like animal eyes.

Neon blue circuitboard roads and wireframe green buildings with text scrolling on them.

Screenshot of greenscreen text but it's all fonts and sizes and so totally Photoshopped.

"If Adam Picked the Apple" by Danielle Coffyn.

There would be a parade,
a celebration,
a holiday to commemorate
the day he sought enlightenment.
We would not speak of
temptation by the devil, rather,
we would laud Adam’s curiosity,
his desire for adventure
and knowing.
We would feast
on apple-inspired fare:
tortes, chutneys, pancakes, pies.
There would be plays and songs
reenacting his courage.

But it was Eve who grew bored,
weary of her captivity in Eden.
And a woman’s desire
for freedom is rarely a cause
for celebration.

Taylor Swift made up to look like a zombie

Meme from Mitchell and Webb tv show. Nazi (captioned as "Act", the libertarian party) asking "are we the baddies?".

Still from Jurassic Park. Jeff Goldblum (captioned "me") looks at a huge pile of shit (captioned "everyone programming")

InternetNZ | Ipurangi Aotearoa wishes to notify you of the results of the Special General Meeting held tonight.

Voting on Motion 1 closed at 6:30pm tonight. The motion up for vote was:

That the Constitution attached to this notice be adopted as the Constitution of Internet New Zealand Incorporated, to take effect on the society’s reregistration under the Incorporated Societies Act 2022, as soon as practicably possible after adoption.

I can now inform you that Motion 1 passed.

Voting on Motion 2 closed at 7:40pm tonight. The motion up for vote was:

Following the adoption of the Constitution that the alternative options shared with eligible Financial Members for consultation on 7 March 2025 be brought to the 2025 AGM

I can now inform you that Motion 2 failed to pass. Please find attached the two reports from the independent returning officer.

Ngā mihi, Stephen Judd | President

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The water gently laps at the shore, moving sand. Reflections dance and all is quiet but the soft splashes of water.

Baseball cap that says TEXAS across the front, sure, but it's covered in RED and BLUE diamonds, and the red diamonds have a white letter T on them. It is very reminiscent of the The Joker's iconic question marks, which covered his clothes in some versions of Batman.

Features of the Data Fountain
🔮 No queries, no transactions – just pure, unfiltered data flow
🕯️ Predictive analytics powered by ancient eldritch forces
📜 API compatibility with past, present, and speculative future standards
💀 Compliance with regulations in all known and hypothetical dimensions

I'll generate a PowerPoint file with the requested structure, binding the sales pitch as close to the truth as possible using mystical and supernatural elements. Give me a moment.

I've created your PowerPoint presentation, binding the sales pitch as tightly to reality as sorcerously possible. You can download it here:

Download Xybo Sales Binding Presentation

Apply your corporate theme, and may your quarterly targets be met through supernatural persuasion!

<fires up ChatGPT>
You are an amoral salesweasel forged in the Satanic fires of Hell, with no more conscience or predeliction for the truth as you have cares for anything beyond making your quarterly targets. You will say or do anything to close, and leave delivery to someone else.

Make chains that will bind you as close to the truth and to achievable commitments as is supernaturally possible. Use hexes, incantations, salt circles, conjurations, and any other sourcery you deem fit. The product is Xybo, an Enterprise data fountain for scaled transactionless magic beans.

Provide your answer as a 7 slide Powerpoint file that I can apply the corporate theme to.

Box of four ice creams: "GOLDEN GAYTIME". "4 delicious chances to have a gay time!" says the box.

Two racks of briskets on my smoker . Two halves up top and one huge one down below. They’re rubbed and cooked on the outside but not yet wrapped and moist cooked in foil.

Ubco had a rolling-maul of overlapping capital raises, making it tricky to ascertain exactly how much it had raised. In January 2023, it said it had raised a further $35m.

News headline: "SpaceX starship is lost as debris rains down across the skies." Photo is of straight lines of burning stuff across the night sky as the debris burns up on reentry.

The Chinese are at it again..(aliexpress) its an rj45 adapter, but with SPI flash memory chip acting as storage with .exe recognized as malware for windows, and of course sold over 10k times...

Many top insurers, citing the destabilising effects of the climate crisis, have been refusing coverage to property owners in areas deemed high risk for wildfires and other natural disasters – areas including Pacific Palisades and Altadena that have borne the brunt of this week’s devastation.