Views expressed here are my own and not necessarily those of my employer. #HPC #AI #graphicsnerd #deeplearning #cartography #frustratedarchaeologist #rugbyfan
The Cotswolds
Joined February 2009
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RIP Patrick Stewart. I will forever be sad that I never saw you play in Waiting for Godot with Sir Ian McKellen. Always admired you and your decency.
Dairsie Latimer retweeted
Panelled doors wasn't a pretty extra but a clever solution to doors expanding with moisture and warping or jamming shut. Because wood expands and contracts in relation to the ambient air humidity (and also rain etc. if outdoors), the wood panels (not nailed or glued) could move freely inside the groves of the frame. This allowed tight doors that shut very close to the door frame, often mere millimeters or fractions of an inch, giving us ncreased privacy and better acoustics.
And they look very charming.
Dairsie Latimer retweeted
New Jersey, the 1970s. A girl is checking a long multiplication problem with a trick called casting out nines. Karen Smith loves it. Math feels like a puzzle.
Then her class switches to base 8. The trick fails. Most students move on. Karen cannot. She keeps at it until she finds that in base 8 you cast out sevens, not nines. She still wants to know why. That question stays with her for years.
In high school she meets modular arithmetic, the tool that explains it, and writes a proof that the method works in any base. On her own she starts imagining a geometry where parallel lines meet at infinity. She does not know mathematicians have studied it for centuries. It is called the projective plane.
A teacher, Mr. Drinfeld, sees what she is doing and opens an extra class for a few seniors. One of the books is number theory. Years later she says, “I loved it. It definitely made me a mathematician.”
At Princeton, her freshman calculus professor is Charles Fefferman, who will win the Fields Medal in 1978. He tells her something she has never considered. She could make mathematics her career.
She graduates in 1987, teaches high school for a year, then learns a math PhD can come with full support. In 1988 she moves to Ann Arbor. Her mentor, Mel Hochster, introduces her to tight closure, a new idea that becomes the center of her work. That fall she meets Finnish mathematician Juha Heinonen. They marry in 1991.
She earns her PhD in 1993. The thesis is published the next year in Inventiones Mathematicae. She goes to Purdue, then MIT, then back to Michigan as a professor. A 20-hour lecture course she gives in Finland in 1996 becomes a textbook in 2000. In 2001, at 35, the American Mathematical Society gives her the Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize and calls her a world leader in tight closure.
She and Juha raise three children, including twins. In October 2007 Juha dies of kidney cancer. The twins are four. Karen is a single mother of three with a research career still in front of her.
She does not quit. The children keep speaking Finnish. Every summer they go to Finland. Every week they bake Finnish rye bread. She keeps teaching, proving theorems, and training students. By 2017 she has written with 32 coauthors and guided 20 students through their PhDs.
In 2019 she is elected to the National Academy of Sciences. In 2021 she is elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Today she chairs the mathematics department at the University of Michigan.
It started with a trick that stopped working in middle school. She did not accept the failure. She asked why until she had the answer. Then someone told her mathematics could be her life’s work.
Dairsie Latimer retweeted
With everyone busily using LLMs + Blender/Three.js to make 3D models, I thought I'd try a different geometric representation.
This dragon isn't a mesh, NeRF, 3DGS, or video model: it's 27kb of GLSL code (generated via LLM), defining a closed-form implicit surface. 🧵 [1/n]
Dairsie Latimer retweeted
No, this isn't the new Taylor Swift album cover. I've cleaned-up this remarkable colour photo, taken 113 years ago in August 1913, a year before the First World War. It is a portrait of 16-year-old Christina Bevan at Durdle Door in Lulworth, Dorset. It was taken by Lt-Colonel Mervyn O’Gorman using an early colour glass-plate process and isn't colourised.
This was one of the first Autochromes I cleaned up for Twitter and I share it again with you because it is such a beautiful image 😍
Dairsie Latimer retweeted
From steam railways to early Linux clusters, the routes into HPC can be surprisingly varied.
Our Senior Consultant, Tez Gale, reflects on the engineering experiences that shaped his career in HPC.
📖 Read more: buff.ly/Rio5Row
#HPC #HPCCareers
Dairsie Latimer retweeted
So.... £2,485 on glasses for a PM was "sleaze rotting our politics to the core" but £72,000,000 in a single day for Nigel Farage is celebrated as hitting "the jackpot" and a "war chest..."
Whatever is happening here is happening in plain sight. You decide!
Dairsie Latimer retweeted
The crypto industry just bought Britain. Farage receives SECOND £36m donation, this one from Christopher Harborne
In any reasonable or honourable political world yes. But since the Right have learnt that they can say and do anything and gaslight as infinitum until the news cycle moves on (mostly because they are allowed to by journalists and their paymasters) it won’t mean anything.
Dairsie Latimer retweeted
After years of working in electronics, this feels like a full circle moment. Many late nights later we are releasing Atlas Fields Studios, free for everyone
fields-studio.arenaphysica.c…
The Fields Studio App lets you explore electromagnetic behavior around PCB designs
#buildinpublic – at New York, NY
Dairsie Latimer retweeted
Count Binface on the Clacton by-election on US TV,
"If Nigel Farage strikes me down electorally I will become more powerful than he can possibly imagine"
"Because the parliamentary committee will look into his £5 million unconditional gift, which he said he could spend on Ferraris if he wanted"
"But he didn't declare it"
Dairsie Latimer retweeted
Roco has been asking:
"Why isn't the cheapest HPC system always the cheapest?"
If you've ever owned a bargain printer, you may already understand some of the principles...
👉 Read it here: buff.ly/EUrK54N
#HPC #TCO #Procurement #Roco
Dairsie Latimer retweeted
I'm a second-generation bookseller. My family runs Houston's largest used & rare bookstore and I'm building an AI tool for used bookstores. We got hit by exactly these orders, including a single order for 70 obscure books that made us pause online sales entirely. So I dug in. I don't think this connects the way people want it to.
Every ingredient of the viral story is true. ISBNdb really does advertise sourcing books for AI companies. Anthropic really did destructively scan millions of books though they were mostly acquired through things like library deaccessions, not bookstore inventory. And booksellers really are getting bizarre bulk orders. But "rare" here isn't what you're picturing. It's The Insider's Guide to Metro Denver (1995) and how-to-use-WordPerfect 1991 manuals. Obscure, but often not precious.
When we combed through our orders, nearly every book bought from us was either unavailable on Amazon or listed there at 5, 10, 20x our price on the platform they were purchased on. And the shipments are going to FBA prep companies: which is what you do with a book you're about to resell, not one you're about to cut apart. There is more than circumstantial evidence that this is a well-funded company running algorithmic arbitrage, buying underpriced or out-of-stock books to relist on Amazon at markup. This evidence includes an official denial that they are selling to train AI but I don't want to mention them for several reasons. You can Google it.
That's more mundane than the shredder story. The actual risk is worse, though, because it's quieter: books that don't sell via FBA eventually get liquidated. If we really hold the last copies of some of these (and comparing platforms, it looks like we might) we're feeding them into a portal they may not come back from. No AI company required.
Everyone assumes the internet preserved everything. It didn't. Many of these books have almost no metadata anywhere, just a scattered listings across proprietary databases then nothing. That's what my project is for: building better bibliographic records for these books than exist anywhere else, so we at least have a map of what we stand to lose. So the Library of Alexandria is still burning, just more slowly, and kore from “who cares” than from some cinematic villain.
(I am open to being corrected.)
Full writeup: open.substack.com/pub/charli…
🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain "all the books in the world."
My Take
This got to me. A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email.
ISBNdb's website literally says "'AI company destroys two million books' is not a headline that generates sympathy," and they still built an entire business around making it happen quietly. They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it "digital preservation."
I've covered AI companies scraping the internet, torrenting libraries, and stealing music. This is worse because it's irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate.
"We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out" is a legitimate business model in 2026. What a timeline.
Hedgie🤗
Dairsie Latimer retweeted
A full timeline of Nigel Farage’s grift and corruption
1. 2001–2014: Rent-free office scandal
Farage used office space rent-free, failed to declare the benefit properly, and was fined by the Electoral Commission.
2. 2015–2016:
Whilst serving as an MEP, Farage’s EFDD group spent around €1.8 million of EU taxpayer funds improperly on his “Say No to EU” Brexit campaign activity, including paying for rallies in the UK, venue hire, banners etc
3. 2016–2019: Farage’s Brexit movement was heavily funded by Arron Banks. Questions over the source of funding were referred by the Electoral Commission to the National Crime Agency.
4. 2017–2018:
The European Parliament docked Farage’s MEP salary to recover around €40,000 after concluding parliamentary funds had been improperly claimed for staff costs.
5. 2018:
A European political party closely linked to UKIP and Farage’s parliamentary group was ordered to repay €1.1 million after investigators found EU grants had been improperly used for national political campaigning, including campaigns in the UK directly supporting UKIP.
6. 2019:
Channel 4 News and The Guardian reported that Banks gave Farage benefits worth around £450,000, including accommodation, transport and overseas travel.
7. 2019:
The Electoral Commission warned the Brexit Party’s online donation system was at “high and ongoing risk” of accepting impermissible donations and required stronger controls.
8. 2019:
Crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne donated around £6.4 million to the Brexit Party, beginning a financial relationship that continues today.
9. 2021 onwards:
Farage earns £400,000 a year from GB News whilst serving as the leader of a UK political party.
10. 2023:
Farage received around £1.5 million for appearing on I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here.
11. 2023:
Reform UK received £200,000 from First Corporate Consultants Ltd, linked to businessman Terence Mordaunt who lobbies against Climate Change policy and campaigned for Brexit.
12. 2024:
The Good Law Project alleged Farage failed to declare assistance from a US public relations firm during a US trip funded by Christopher Harborne.
13. 2024–2026:
Farage received a £5 million gift from Christopher Harborne around 1 month before entering Parliament. In 2026, Parliament’s standards watchdog opened an investigation into whether it should have been declared.
14. 2024–2026:
Since becoming MP for Clacton, Farage has declared more than £2 million in outside earnings from media, speaking engagements, commercial partnerships, including activity closely linked to lobbying for policies that benefit his private funders.
15. 2025:
A complaint alleged undeclared election spending during Farage’s 2024 campaign. Essex Police took no action because the statutory time limit had expired.
16. 2025–2026:
Farage failed to declare 17 separate payments, worth around £380,000, within the required parliamentary deadlines. The Standards Commissioner found the breaches were inadvertent.
17. 2026:
Farage declared £270,000 from Direct Bullion for promotional work while sitting in Parliament, equivalent to around £22,500 per hour.
18. 2026:
The Sunday Times alleged convicted former aide George Cottrell provided undeclared support including security, accommodation, staffing and media assistance.
A true public servant and man of the people.
