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.
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 🤷?
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.
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!
Libertarian party believes wolves should be in charge of our sheep. No surprise there. www.rnz.co.nz/news/politic... for more details.
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!
@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)
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.
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.
I’ll be on there radio at 2:30 with You, Me, Everybody. Dang I must have left my hair behind.
Current state: watching Claude lurch closer and closer towards a lobotomy.
How does this chart make sense? It was not -10 in Broken Hill. It's from www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01...
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.
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.
"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."
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.
First time I hit the Claude limits. Can't tell if this means I'm bad at what I'm doing or good ...
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)
"enfant terrible Maurizio Cattelan." "Born: 21 September 1960 (age 65 years)" Pretty sure that he's a terrible old man now. Viellard terrible?
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". 🤷
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.
le sigh on all fronts Even when correctly spelled, the answer is "nothing".