Jonathan Merritt
lancelet.bsky.social
Jonathan Merritt
@lancelet.bsky.social
AI, deep learning, numerical, functional programmer.
Looking for a job!

Uilleann piper, highland piper, extreme Gaelic music enthusiast.

https://jmerritt.blog
“I thought you were the strong, lazy type.”
“Yes, but now I’m also into leaning.”

- a Haskeller exploring Lean.
November 16, 2025 at 10:30 PM
Looks like Amazon Australia might be having issues. Lots of one-day deliveries are now two-or-more-day deliveries. Sydney metro area.

(No, Australia doesn’t have any new tariffs.)
April 27, 2025 at 4:02 AM
No Strava, nooooooooo!

(But that’s a nice way to do an outage message.)
April 23, 2025 at 8:31 AM
You can give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Or you can teach a man to fish and watch him die slowly from mercury poisoning.
April 20, 2025 at 7:45 AM
If this is true:

a) why don’t other Western nations know already? if they do, why are the public being mushroomed? (why is Spain acting pro-China, etc?)

b) can we *finally* talk seriously about widespread severing of Western ties to China?
April 20, 2025 at 6:38 AM
Brawndo stocks have dropped to zero!
April 20, 2025 at 3:35 AM
Interesting; an all-cause mortality study that found no benefit from resistance training: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

I have to wonder whether any association between RT and all-cause mortality is perhaps due to incidental aerobic exercise and better diet.
Associations Between Resistance Training and All-Cause Mortality: NHANES 1999-2006
Background: The Physical Activity Guidelines 2nd Edition recommends ≥2 days of resistance training (RT). Evidence supports a dose-response relation between RT volume and cardiometabolic health. We exa...
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
April 15, 2025 at 5:56 AM
Q: why was the USSR an economic disaster, but China is successful?
A: access to Western markets.

Neither Chinese nor Soviet style economies work well as closed systems. But there’s a cheat code if they can simultaneously exploit both their cheap/slave labor and the wealth from Western nations.
April 14, 2025 at 12:31 AM
To anyone building activity / sleep trackers: PLEASE account for different average heart rates!

Just because my HR is 40 bpm, that doesn’t mean I’m asleep!

(I got about 4h sleep last night, but my Apple Watch thinks it was 9h+ because it can’t seem to tell whether I’m asleep or not!)
April 13, 2025 at 10:09 PM
“The marginal cost of labor is dropping to zero.”

Victorian-era people: “How wonderful! Let us all enjoy the bounty of leisure and wealth!”

Modern-era people: “How will I pay for my health insurance? What will all the baristas do?! There will be riots in the streets; PEOPLE MUST WORK!!!”
April 8, 2025 at 3:58 AM
Australian politicians are now trying to push house prices up by allowing people to erode their retirement savings to buy a house. Desperate to keep those prices from crashing, at the expense of literally everything else.
March 28, 2025 at 6:27 AM
The difference between having an idea and having an implementation isn’t hammered into the general public strongly enough.

The illustration I like is “There was a talking computer on Star Trek, but nobody’s suggesting Gene Roddenberry invented large language models.”
March 19, 2025 at 12:06 AM
“There’s a WHAT?! In AMERICA?!!!” 😁
March 11, 2025 at 6:32 AM
SOTU review:
Support act at the beginning: 7/10
Ass boring middle: 0/10
Big crescendo: 3/10

If Trump could actually speak, the end had the potential to have been quite stirring. But he sounded like he’d already lost interest by then.
March 5, 2025 at 4:00 AM
I clicked that “deep research” option in ChatGPT for the first time just now. It asked some (appropriate and intelligent) clarifying questions and how now gone off to do stuff.

Is this what being a manager feels like?
February 28, 2025 at 12:04 PM
In Nike Run Club, there’s a looong way between Black and Volt levels!
February 28, 2025 at 8:33 AM
Algebraic numbers.

I’ve been trying to figure out what to use as an exact “field” type to use when testing a NURBS library I’ve been building. Algebraic numbers seem to be the answer.

I wish they were as well-written-about as the rationals!
February 25, 2025 at 12:15 PM
lol… least spammy thing on BlueSky!
This semester, my first year "I can't believe it's not discrete maths" lectures are being recorded and youtubed.

Most of you have better things to do with your life than to watch badly edited live content, so sorry for spam.
February 24, 2025 at 11:48 AM
Instead of asking Canada to be the next US state, Trump should try Australia! 🇦🇺

We’re like Canadians, only our national words aren’t “eh” and “sorry”, they’re “fuck” and “cunt”; often combined as “fucken cunt!”. Trump will already be remembered that way, so he might as well make it official! 🤣
February 21, 2025 at 9:00 AM
One of the best, short pieces of commentary about the current state of tech:
Things are gonna be bumpy for a bit because there’s people with a lot of money who are very invested in not having to hire you.

This is a grave mistake.

And it’s a lesson they will learn the hard way.

I’m the meantime, trust me when I say there actually is still room RIGHT NOW.
February 21, 2025 at 7:26 AM
WinderBot’s very first winding. I only got this far before I accidentally broke the copper wire.

Still, I learned a few things for the next try, and I’ll be able to use this one to confirm some magnetic field strength estimates.
February 15, 2025 at 5:54 AM
Reposted by Jonathan Merritt
Few companies can be held financially accountable for data breaches
#DataBreaches #Cybersecurity #PrivacyConcerns #InformationSecurity #ProtectYourData
Why Companies Aren’t Held Accountable For Data Breaches
It's rare for companies to be held accountable when attacks expose customers' personal information
time.com
February 14, 2025 at 10:39 PM
A very sure Tesla doomer: medium.com/predict/oh-t...

I don’t disagree with the conclusions, but I do disagree with how he got there.

Self-driving cars and autonomous robots are *great* ideas. They’re what we need a lot more of.

Where Musk (and so many others) are failing is in taking short-cuts.
Oh, Tesla Is Doing So Much Worse Than I Thought
The future for Tesla is bleak.
medium.com
February 12, 2025 at 11:46 PM
TPG’s home broadband network in Sydney seems to be down.

At least it was still up for my job interview this morning! #WinningTheGameOfOutages
February 10, 2025 at 7:56 AM
L'esprit de l'escalier, but for coding interviews.
February 10, 2025 at 2:19 AM