Lance Walton 🇬🇧 🇺🇦

@lancewalton.bsky.social

1348 Followers 1329 Following

Programmer (mostly Scala), Pianist, Composer of Baroque Musick

A screenshot of my PodPoint Solo car charger app, which is currently indicating that charging is paused and there is -53 minutes of charging left. It has a “Stop charging now” button. Pressing it does nothing. Trying to get it to start a charge doesn’t work.
A screenshot of the Nissan iPhone App saying that they’re “having a tune-up and will be finished at 11:15.”
A picture of Rachel Reeves with the caption “Rachel Reeves blames Brexit deal for long-term damage to economy”
An article: Nobel peace prize Norway braces for Trump's reaction if he does not win Nobel peace prize US president may impose tariffs, demand higher Nato contributions or even declare Norway an enemy, analyst says
A screenshot of the post I am replying to together with the next post down in my timeline, which is by @effinbirds with a picture of a bird (not a duck, admittedly) saying “What the shit?”
A bar chart apparently showing the “Top 15 most attractive hobbies to women”
Screenshot of a post with the text: German cops arresting someone for displaying a pink triangle because it can be "mistaken" for a red triangle in support of Palestine is such an encapsulation of the liberal order everyone is desperate to maintain.
A photo of Darren Grimes (who looks very pale and is smiling in a way that suggests he might have fangs) and Nigel Farage (who looks quite tanned and is smiling in a way that suggests rigor mortis might be setting in and that teeth will soon start falling out).
A picture of Rod Stewart with the headline: “Rod Stewart: We've got to give Nigel Farage a chance” And it has a summary of an article: “The singer talks politics, potholes and having a policewoman wife as he prepares to play a 'noisy, sexy and energetic Glastonbury set on Sunday’”
An article with a picture of Rod Stewart and the headline: “Rod Stewart: We've got to give Nigel Farage a chance” There is a summary of the article too: “The singer talks politics, potholes and having a policewoman wife as he prepares to play a 'noisy, sexy and energetic Glastonbury set on Sunday”
A tweet by Elon Musk. It says: We will use Grok 3.5 (maybe we should call it 4), which has advanced reasoning, to rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge, adding missing information and deleting errors. Then retrain on that. Far too much garbage in any foundation model trained on uncorrected data.
A picture of a timer.
The beautiful Steinway and Sons piano at the Wigmore Hall.
A screenshot of a Twitter post by Jack Posobiec that says: “Some of y'all cant handle 2 high agency males going at it and it really shows This is direct communication (phallocentric) vs indirect communication (gynocentric) I understand you aren't used to it”
A post by Elon Musk on Twitter today. It says: “Time to drop the really big bomb: @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!”
A chart of my heart rate over the three minutes after my last walk. The heart beat drops from 126 beats per minute to 95 beats per minute in 3 minutes, which is a drop of 31 beats in 3 minutes, or about 10 beats per minute. The caption says “In the 3 minutes after your last walk, your heart rate went down by 31 beats per minute”, which is obviously incorrect. They either need to divide the 31 beats by 3 to get the rate per minute, or change the caption to “your heart rate dropped by 31 beats *over* 3 minutes”.
An image of the screen in Settings on my iPhone that shows data usage per app.
An image of two vans with the Thames Water logo on their sides, parked by the side of the road in behind traffic cones. The caption says “Thames Water fined £122.7m in biggest ever penalty”
This is a “Summer Reading List for 2025” produced by a newspaper using an LLM. The authors are real, but the books don’t exist.
This is a screenshot of some stuff about why Meta does not think they should pay authors for using their books as training data. The entire text says: ‘But their defense also hinges on the argument that the individual books themselves are, essentially, worthless-one expert witness for Meta describes that the influence of a single book in LLM pretraining "adjusted its performance by less than 0.06% on industry standard benchmarks, a neaningless change no different from noise." Furthermore, Meta says, that while the company "has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in LLM development," they see no market in paying authors to license their books because "for there to be a market, there must be something of value to exchange, but none of Plaintiffs works has economic value, individually, as training data." (An argument essential to fair use, but that aiso sounds like a scaled up version of a scenario in which the New York Philharmonic board argues against paying individual members of the orchestra because the organization spent a lot of money on the upkeep of David Geffen Hall, and also, a solo bassoon cannot play every part in "The Rite of Spring.")’
A photo of Liz truss with the caption “Liz truss to launch ‘free speech’ social media platform this summer’
The stage of Wigmore Hall with a Steinway grand, waiting for the young master to arrive.
My dog, Scallywag, lying in a bed leaves that fell In Autumn and are still on the ground. In front of Scallywag is a daffodils that have just flowered. Scallywag is looking directly at the camera.
A screenshot of the nav bar of the iPhone BlueSky app showing the DM button with a little blue “1”, indicating I have 1 unread DM.
A screenshot of an Elon Musk tweet saying “Visual representation of the social security database”. Under this comment is an image of a street in the background with two telegraph poles in the foreground. The telegraph poles are about a meter apart. One of them is broken close to the base and is being held together with a lot of duct tape. Elon Musk is an idiot.
A photo of Keir Starmer standing at a podium in the United State said America. Behind him is the US and UK flags. The picture has subtitles of what Starmer is saying, which is “there’s a famous slogan in the United Kingdom”. And my contribution to the meme that this has started is “Oh no there isn’t”, as if it’s a pantomime. Which it is.
A dialog box that popped up on my laptop asking if I want to “Allow Slack to find devices on local networks”. The explanation given is “This will allow the app to discover, connect to and collect data from devices on your networks.”
A Venn diagram of two sets. The first set has the caption “The set of people who do an annoying/upsetting thing”. The second set has the caption “The set of people (possibly defined by some immutable attributes) you are predisposed towards being annoyed/upset by because of your personal biases”. The intersection has the caption “The set of people you believe are the vast majority of people who do the annoying/upsetting thing”
This is a two panel meme. The first panel shows Joe Biden walking confidently up the stairs of Air Force One. The caption is “Playing my instrument”. The second shows the instant just after Biden tripped whilst walking up the stairs. The caption is “Playing the same instrument except I’m recording it”.
Kemi Badenoch: "I find it interesting that everybody defines me as being Nigerian," she said. "I identify less with the country than with the specific ethnicity [Yoruba]. That's what I really am. I have nothing in common with the people from the north of the country, the Boko Haram where the Islamism is, those were our ethnic enemies and yet you end up being lumped in with those people."
A Telegraph article entitled “Truss sends Starmer cease and desist letter over claim she 'crashed the economy”
The front page of The Guardian newspaper with a picture of Mark Zuckerberg and the headline “Dismay as factchecking ditched on Facebook in 'free speech' drive”
My dog, Shenanigans, who is a black and white Tibetan Terrier, with her nose pressed against the bottom of the door. She loves going out to play in the cold outside for about 5 minutes and then wants to come back in. I’ve let her in and out about 20 times today.
A post from r/womenintech asking “Is programming 90% debugging”. I will quote the entire text: Is Programming 90% Debugging? I'd love to know what others spend their work days doing. For me, it's debugging. I am on three projects at the moment. I had been off one project a while and was put back on. There were errors in the code. I spent two days solely debugging the code to make it work. I am currently mentoring someone where we are using an open source project. It didn't run out of the box. More debugging. This has been about a days worth of work. Another project I work in a simulated environment. That code isn't working. I will probably spend next week before time off getting that to work. TBH I love debugging but I also want to actually write code. Is this normal for other programmers at their jobs? I don't know if it's about me having multiple projects to work on or what but I feel like I don't spend a lot of time actually writing code...
This image has two frames. The top one shows a wolf with a thought bubble saying “I'm cold and hungry. I see humans around a bonfire. Maybe I can ask for food. What could possibly) go wrong?” The bottom frame shows a pug (or something like that) with the caption “30,000 years later”. The pug is wearing a balaclava with a knitted birthday cake on top. It looks very silly.
A crescent moon.
Two tweets that appeared next to each other on my timeline. One from @hourlywolf.bsky.social with a picture of a cute wolf puppy. The next from @susaretow.bsky.social with a very nice picture of a full moon.
Bar 5 of the same fugue.
Bars 16 and 17 of the fugue.
My dog, scallywag, who is not well, lying on my very expensive piano bench, preventing me from playing the piano.
My dog, Scallywag, asleep in a plastic bath of the kind you’d bath a baby in. We use it to put clothes in temporarily after washing them.
Rippling clouds, but there is also a thin “horizontal” line of clouds across the middle of the picture.
A book I saw in a shop. Its title is “Password Logbook”. Under the title is the text “Keep track of usernames, passwords and web addresses in one easy and organised location”.
An email with a message saying we must provide details of our household for the electoral register. It has a link, two security codes, and the statement “Please complete your response by Wednesday 30 October.” So it hits 3 out of about 5 common markers for phishing. But it is legitimate.
A very ugly looking email telling me that payment could not be taken for ICloud storage & that all of my photos & videos will be deleted.
A ladybird meeting point of 3 leaves
My dog, Scallywag, who is a black & white Tibetan Terrier, is curled up fast asleep inside a box that was recently delivered, the contents having been removed, with only the shredded paper packing material left.