David Hamilton

@davidneilhamilton

Consulting software engineer. Politically homeless; radical centrist; anti-fascist; advocate of electoral reform. Collector of cognitive biases + reasons why world is messy.

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David Hamilton@davidneilhamilton· 21h

It’s funny how people trot out a random economic mythology (in this case that was can continue building new houses ad infinitum) and when you query it they break into a fake rage, and pretext to block. I’ve been blocked a number of times for the crime of querying some economic belief.

David Hamilton@davidneilhamilton· 6d

Almost 2/3 U.K. in drought. Yet this is a sprinkler being used yesterday on an entirely irrelevant patch of grass in front of a lorry wash at Taunton Deane services on the M5. What goes on in people’s heads?

David Hamilton@davidneilhamilton· 19d

Creators of Tom & Jerry want a word

Tom cat, of Tom & Jerry cartoon, with makeshift wings attached and flying through the air

David Hamilton@davidneilhamilton· 21d

Tesco plastic clothes pegs, apparently designed to break within a year. Also: plastic Haribo packets so strong they require a knife to open them.

Two new plastic pegs, both snapped in two pieces.

David Hamilton@davidneilhamilton· Jul 17

By comparison, solar panel prices. Note the log scale needed to avoid current prices disappearing.

Graph of solar panel prices, in US dollars per watt, dropping from $128 in 1975 to $0.26 in 2024

David Hamilton@davidneilhamilton· Jul 17

This amazing photo was taken by my wife at one of the @hawkconservancy.bsky.social flying shows

David Hamilton@davidneilhamilton· Feb 24

It’s almost as if our technology companies are going out of the way to do everything in the worst possible manner. Carmakers push toward ‘eyes-off’ driving, raising questions of safety, liability - www.reuters.com/business/aut...

Excerpt from a Reuters article. Clip reads:

The question of who might be held responsible in an accident involving
Level 3 tech - the driver or the carmaker - is murky today, according to an article published last year in the Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal.

David Hamilton@davidneilhamilton· Feb 24

Variant of the classic cartoon meme: Our Blessed Homeland / Their Barbarous Wastes

The new text satirises Anthropic’s complaints about “industrial-scale distillation attacks”

New text on left side of river reads:
- OUR BLESSED MODEL TRAINING
- OUR GLORIOUS SAFETY RESEARCHERS
- OUR GREAT "FAIR USE" DOCTRINE
- OUR NOBLE PRE-TRAINING CORPUS
- OUR HEROIC DATA CRAWLERS

New text on right side of the river reads:
- THEIR BARBAROUS DISTILLATION ATTACKS
- THEIR WICKED API HACKERS
- THEIR PRIMITIVE TERMS-OF-SERVICE VIOLATIONS
- THEIR BACKWARD PARROT SCRIPTS
- THEIR BRUTISH MODEL CLONING

David Hamilton@davidneilhamilton· Jan 25

Just tap on a photo on your phone and it should auto-select any writing and offer to copy it, see example:

Example of iPhone offering to copy auto-detected text from a screen-shot or photo containing writing

David Hamilton@davidneilhamilton· Jan 18

Astonishing by the two leading right-wing tabloids that their front pages lead with domestic olitical talk and don’t mention Trump’s attack on NATO over Greenland AT ALL:

Mail on Sunday front page headline: “Jenrick’s bizarre plot to be ‘new sheriff in town’”
No mention of Trump’s tariffs on European NATO countries over Greenland.

Sunday Express front page headline: “Farage: This is a Historic Moment”
No mention of Trump’s tariffs on European NATO countries over Greenland.

David Hamilton@davidneilhamilton· Jan 12

If you looked regularly at About Us pages for organisations, you’d recognise that pages as transparent as this are very rare:

Funding principles

Bellingcat does not solicit or accept funding or contributions directly from governments. Bellingcat can solicit or accept contributions from intergovernmental institutions such as the European Commission or the United Nations.

Bellingcat can accept or solicit funding that is distributed by a private foundation that accepts government funds, so long as it is independent from any national government. We will not allow any funding relationship to constrain us from criticising any bodies or individuals that provide funds, exposing any wrongdoing in which said bodies or individuals may be involved or impact our editorial independence.

Bellingcat reserves the right to research any donor of an amount of €5,000 or more based on available open sources according to our principles.

You can review our full fundraising policy here.

David Hamilton@davidneilhamilton· Dec 15

“APPEARS to mock”?!!!!! 🤯 What on earth does Trump have to say/do for the press to plainly state what he’s actually done?

Bloomberg news headline: “Trump Appears to Mock Rob Reiner Death In Social Media Post”

David Hamilton@davidneilhamilton· Dec 14

Just seen this update from the National Snow and Ice Data Center, who monitor the status of the polar ice caps.. The inconvenient truth is that the US government doesn't want to know what's happening in the natural world and, more importantly, doesn't want you to know. nsidc.org/data/user-re...

User Notice: Sea Ice Today Services Reduced
Effective October 15, 2025, due to non-renewed funding, NSIDC has suspended or reduced several Sea Ice Today tools and services.

Discontinued:
- New monthly and mid-month analysis posts
- Sea ice analysis tool
- Sea Ice Volume
- Sea ice extent spatial comparison tool

Persisting:
- Daily Arctic and Antarctic sea ice images
- ChArctic Interactive Sea Ice Graph
- Links to Sea ice analysis data spreadsheets from the NOAA Sea Ice Index
- Reduced user support
- Sea ice annual maximum and minimum announcements (typically occurring in March and September)

Previously-published Sea Ice Today analysis posts will remain online. The discontinued Sea Ice Today products will no longer update or be maintained, and will be removed in the next several weeks.

David Hamilton@davidneilhamilton· Oct 3

BBC: What on earth?!! You regularly platform Farage and Tice, given their extreme politics an air of mainstream respectability… … but when you give the Greens any publicity at all, it’s to make them deny being “radical”.

BBC News headline: “Green Party leader rejects ‘radical’ tag”

David Hamilton@davidneilhamilton· Sep 25

Stephen Miller with a brilliantly self-referential post: “This language incites violence and terrorism.” Stephen saying out loud what most have already been assuming about his and his regimes’ objectives.

Stephen Miller: “This language incites violence and terrorism.”

David Hamilton@davidneilhamilton· Aug 25

Hi @skywriter.blue Your sign up page is no longer working, always says email address is already registered. Just wasted 30 minutes trying to find my existing account, but have found that even if I sign up using a masked, generated, email address I get exactly the same error.

David Hamilton@davidneilhamilton· Jun 25

Cartoon of patient, in hospital bed with operation scar on stomach, talking to a robot dressed in surgeon's green outfit.
Patent: "But why is the scar on the left if the appendix is on the right?"
Robot Surgeon: "Dude, you're 100% correct! Your hawk-eyed brilliance has saved us all! Let me try this one more time! 💪🔥"

David Hamilton@davidneilhamilton· Jun 23

Interesting: your graph indicates that that huge surge was in the second (Delta) wave. The ratio during the first wave in India (Sept 2020) was proportionally low compared with the number of cases globally. Surely that supports my point? images.thespinoff.co.nz/1/2021/04/Ca...

David Hamilton@davidneilhamilton· Jun 23

Seems testing remained relatively constant after 1st wave peak (September 2020), although we don't know the areas being tested. However it is notable that although testing rates leading up the 1st wave peak were much lower, 1st wave positivity rate was half 2nd wave. cdn.who.int/media/docs/d...

Graph of COVID-19 testing rates and positively percentage from WHO situation report, 22 Sept 2021. It shows
1st wave:
- positivity peak of around 13% late July 2020
- testing ramping steadily to reach 1 million per day in September 2020, declining to 750 thousand per day in March 2021
2nd wave:
- positivity peak of 22% in early May 2021
- testing ramping to 2 million per day in late May 2021

David Hamilton@davidneilhamilton· Jun 23

This subsequent paper discusses the phase when COVID seemed under control and the subsequent very rapid 2nd wave spread. To my original point, it is very clear from this graph that the 2nd wave spread much more quickly than the first (4x peak in shorter time). www.researchgate.net/publication/...

WHO COVID-19 Situation Report graph for India, dated 26-SEP-2021 showing numbers of new cases.
The graph shows two distinct waves, with rates dropping down to a much lower level in between.
The second (Delta variant) wave is visibly bigger (peak of 4X the first one), but also the rate of increase looks much faster than the first wave, with the time to reach the peak being much shorter for the second wave).

David Hamilton@davidneilhamilton· Jun 9

More evidence of US scientific research being impacted by the Trump administration. Note on the NSIDC (National Snow & Ice Data Center) Sea Ice News website:

Notice on NSIDC website reads: "Recent delivery from the US Navy of the SSMIS passive microwave data that this sea ice product uses has become more sporadic. The Defense Department has informed NSIDC that they will reduce the priority of processing the SSMIS data, resulting in likely daily data gaps. NSIDC will explore switching to a different sensor, the JAXA Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 (AMSR2). We expect to be able to continue our regular analyses after calibrating between sensors to keep the time series as consistent as possible. However, this transition will take time. We apologize for any inconvenience and appreciate your patience during this transition."

David Hamilton@davidneilhamilton· May 31

Meme of Chuck Norris saying:
“I don’t always test my system… but when I do, I test it in production”

David Hamilton@davidneilhamilton· Apr 10

Nope. I asked ChatGPT for the list of legal guns invented since 1791. Here’s the table, with dates, should you wish to verify

David Hamilton@davidneilhamilton· Apr 2

Well, what on earth did the American Right expect?

Reuters headline: US officials object to European push to buy weapons locally

David Hamilton@davidneilhamilton· Mar 12

Donald Trump: making a success of the European defence industry

Graph of Rheinmetall AG share price, showing sharp rise in last couple of months

David Hamilton@davidneilhamilton· Mar 7

@charlesarthur.bsky.social Seemingly palomar is a test account

Screenshot of feed homepage for bsky user palomar showing just 3 posts with messages "test", "test2", and "test3"

David Hamilton@davidneilhamilton· Mar 1

Handy guide

Drawing showing various raised straight-arm positions, with the following labels on angles at which the arm is raised (this text is using hours of the clock face to identify each angle):
12 (straight up): "CALL WAITER"
6 (straight down): "REST"
5: "PET DOG"
4: "PET CHILDREN"
3: "CALL TAXI"
Between 12:30 & 2:30: "NAZI"

David Hamilton@davidneilhamilton· Feb 25

Wow. What’s the explanation? That social change encounters pushback if too much occurs too fast? That that old East has received to majority of migrants? That people can easily fall back to old authoritarian ways?

Map of East and West Germany (DDR & BRD) - 1945 to 1990

David Hamilton@davidneilhamilton· Feb 16

Sorry, what? You’re just a dishwasher! What does this even mean, Bosch UK?

David Hamilton@davidneilhamilton· Feb 6

Might have to start reading the Daily Star 😂