Tony Hoare was rightly famed for his big chair in Oxford, but is less celebrated for his earlier stint at Queen's University Belfast, in spite of the preponderance of red and white Prentice-Hall textbooks whose authors happened to be academics at QUB.

He was HoD at QUB back when my father was doing his PhD, and I'm told had the alarming tendency to invite individual PhD students to no-warning lunch.

Tony inculcated a culture in QUB of rigorous mathematical clarity, a culture which survived long after his departure, thanks to people like Maurice Clint. I grew up in that milieu. QUB was my playground: its banisters, its computing machinery, its people who knew a hungry mind when they met one and fed it.

if someone absolutely categorise me as coming from a particular generation I insist on being designated as Generation 0x. It fits because 🐂, and also because it designates a hex number and we were the ones fooling around with machine code and hex listings back when you had to speak to machines in their own language to get the most out of them.

Pronounced Generation Hex. Or Generation 🐂, that'd do nicely too.

(actually I think the idea of 'generations' is a load of old smeg anyway).

In France, we don't say "vibe-coded contribution" but "merde request" and I think it's beautiful 💩

#AISlop #ChIAsse #NoAISlop