Nat Torkington

@gnat

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.

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Nat Torkington @gnat· 14d

I don't know enough about the standing rules and the Speaker's policies to know how lopsided that is. Although this passed (heh) so 🤷?

Nat Torkington @gnat· 15d

Also in that day ... bollocks got a smack.

Nat Torkington @gnat· 15d

Ok, so NZ's Temu Trump fired off a racist diatribe that will leave you slackjawed. It's awful. AND ... you've got to see what set him off. He was moaning about NZ's COVID response again, and dog-whistling vaccination risks. This is the first time in that debate that he spoke.

Nat Torkington @gnat· 18d

Right there with you. I ordered the $18 ribs meal at a food truck on Friday night. Happy to be supporting local business but ... goodness. I can't do too much supporting at those rates!

Two ribs, a small pottle of sauce, a dollop of coleslaw, a bun, and ... something pink.

Nat Torkington @gnat· 19d

Libertarian party believes wolves should be in charge of our sheep. No surprise there. www.rnz.co.nz/news/politic... for more details.

Headline from Radio NZ News: ACT wants hunters in charge of game animals, not DOC [Department of Conservation]. The party says it wants to give hunters a "real stake in managing and looking after our conservation estate."

Nat Torkington @gnat· Jun 17

I see this and I immediately think "what did they think about NFTs?" and that turns out to be a great "gullible pawn of the invested class who somehow has a megaphone" detector. Soon, Erik. Soon!

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).

Nat Torkington @gnat· May 25

Tay on seeing a massive gay trans anarchist pirate flag while cruising.

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

Nat Torkington @gnat· May 19

@stevemartin35.bsky.social is right. I just had a banjo weekend -- a Catalan, a Russian living in Czechoslovakia, a Manchester Brit living in Philly (US), and me from New Zealand. No drama, no stress. All agreed that what the world needs now is Banjo, Sweet Banjo. (Burt Bacharach was close)

Nat Torkington @gnat· Apr 8

Nice! I just built a system tray app that watches my Claude Code sessions and heckles me like Waldorf and Statler. I’m using a cheap model to generate the heckles so the “jokes” are appropriately bad.

Nat Torkington @gnat· Mar 19

Just saw this in a Little Library. I used to read 580 pages of this at a time. I wonder how much of my existing brain rot is age vs childhood blunt sentence trauma.

Nat Torkington @gnat· Mar 8

Coming soon to a PM near you ...

Nat Torkington @gnat· Mar 5

Remember this when you hear "we shouldn't charge GST on food."

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.

Nat Torkington @gnat· Feb 26

I’ll be on there radio at 2:30 with You, Me, Everybody. Dang I must have left my hair behind.

Nat Torkington @gnat· Feb 23

I have a bad feeling about 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…"

Nat Torkington @gnat· Feb 6

Current state: watching Claude lurch closer and closer towards a lobotomy.

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

Nat Torkington @gnat· Feb 5

(sets a timer until someone says "but the Beatles!")

Nat Torkington @gnat· Jan 31

How does this chart make sense? It was not -10 in Broken Hill. It's from www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01...

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!

Nat Torkington @gnat· Jan 11

Started the day with a kayak, a snorkel, and a gentle trot back to the car. It was a triathlon with none of the athleticism. It's worth remembering that the world can be shitty in the macro and still lovely in the micro.

Nat Torkington @gnat· Jan 6

I'm working on Steve Yegge's Gas Town. "Ironic - the sling itself hit the bug we're reporting. Convoy created though." Can't win for all the winning going on.

Nat Torkington @gnat· Jan 2

"Now, unfortunately, it turns out that the thing does move the way your naive, untutored, and actually incorrect argument would indicate, but that's just a pedagogica misfortune we are always running into."

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-

self back in that swimming pool under molasses and move
around very, very slowly. Your intuitions about pushing
water backwards are irrelevant. That's not what counts.
Now, unfortunately, it turns out that the thing does move
the way your naive, untutored, and actually incorrect
argument would indicate, but that's just a pedagogical
misfortune we are always running into.

Nat Torkington @gnat· Jan 2

I have a fondness for dry academic humour.

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

Nat Torkington @gnat· Dec 16

Fucking drongo. A drongo whose lawsuit against a decent social media researching academic and against Television New Zealand is being funded by the Canadian billionaire who purchased the NZ Herald and a bunch of other media outlets.

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."

Nat Torkington @gnat· Dec 13

First time I hit the Claude limits. Can't tell if this means I'm bad at what I'm doing or good ...

Nat Torkington @gnat· Dec 3

Tell me again why some vehicles cost more than others to register? It's a row in a database and a sticker for the windscreen, right? What service am I paying for that costs more to deliver with my electric vehicle? (This is rego, not RUCs, fyi)

Nat Torkington @gnat· Nov 19

"enfant terrible Maurizio Cattelan." "Born: 21 September 1960 (age 65 years)" Pretty sure that he's a terrible old man now. Viellard terrible?

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"

Screenshot from Wikipedia. The important line is "Born: 21 September 1960 (age 65 years)"

Nat Torkington @gnat· Nov 17

Front page headline: "NZ could become dumping ground for EVs". Actual story headline: "NZ could become dumping ground for high emission cars, EV advocate says". 🤷

Nat Torkington @gnat· Nov 5

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"

Nat Torkington @gnat· Nov 4

I feel like the response to the perception of 'virtue signalling' shouldn't be to double down on 'malice acting' in the form of budget cuts, rushed policy and legislation changes, and the Speaker's infinite cuntitude with Parliamentary rules -- all removing the explicit goal of fairness to Māori.

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

Nat Torkington @gnat· Nov 3

le sigh on all fronts Even when correctly spelled, the answer is "nothing".

Nat Torkington @gnat· Oct 23

Because nothing says “New York” like AI-generated poutine.