In US law they pronounce the “v.” in case names as “versus” or “vee”. So we get the famous case of Roe v. Wade. But in English law for civil cases like this we pronounce the “v.” as “and”, thus rendering the case name as “row and wade”.
Or so I thought. It occurred to me just now that if the case had happened here, it’d be a judicial review. So would be called something like R (Roe) v. Wade, pronounced “the Crown (on behalf of Roe) and Wade”.
But! It was in 1973 when we wrote judicial review case names differently. It would probably have been something more like R v. Wade ex parte Roe.
Alexandra Lanes likes this.
Mike reshared this.
Alexandra Lanes likes this.
AI is a marketing term, not a technical term: Exhibit 1 in what is likely to become a continuing series.
This aircon unit is set to auto. But the icon on the remote shows “AI” instead.
I can state with reasonable certainty that there is nothing in this aircon unit that computer scientists recognise as “AI”, even under archaic definitions.
Alexandra Lanes likes this.
reshared this
Looks like this person got a visit from the ghost of cybersecurity "foreseeable consequences".
"I harassed my users into not opening any emails they aren't expecting, and now they won't open any emails they weren't expecting!"
reshared this
The "anti phishing" campaigns, when fake phishing emails are regularly sent out and the unlucky ones who click on a link in them have to do additional training, are very efficient in training employees to never click any link in an email.
If there is something urgent, I'll be contacted some over way.
Alexandra Lanes likes this.
Hypolite Petovan likes this.
reshared this
Curious thing I’ve just noticed about my progesterone prescription. It’s for 28x100mg capsules, fine, but the capsules come in packs of 30. So every month the pharmacist cuts two capsules from the blister pack before sending the rest to me.
What happens to these little pairs of progesterone capsules? Is there someone who finds themselves with a box containing 14 little two-capsule blister packs? Is any of this worth anyone’s time and effort rather than letting me have an extra two?
(It's a lifelong, cheap, uncontroversial medication, so indeed it seems like unnecessary faff for everyone to dole it out a month at a time -- even increasing the interval to 2 months would mean no-one would have to faff around cutting up anything.)
Alexandra Lanes likes this.
@womump While I have one that comes in boxes of 84 as 3x21s and am prescribed 28 at a time, so I *usually* get one full strip and a 1x7 cut off another. But not always.
I am on some things which are one-month-at-a-time only, and this isn't one of them.
(Also, the chemist has an auto-repeat system which works on a calendar month, which is 🙄 )
I like words that end in -id. Placid. Flaccid. Limpid. Insipid. Intrepid. Turgid. Putrid.
Seems weird that they sound negative even when they're positive.
lucid and, dare i say it, pellucid
livid, morbid, rigid
Alexandra Lanes likes this.
amazon.co.uk/Na%C3%A7%C3%A3o-C…
I've been reading this in Portuguese, because I enjoyed another of the author's books and because I find the level of Portuguese very easy to follow. The best thing about it has been some of the idioms I've met along the way.
“Pôr a carroça à frentes dos bois” - to put the cart in front of the oxen.
“Tremer como varas verdes” - to shake like green twigs
"tirar nabos da púcara” - to pull turnips from the clay pot. Metaphorically to tease something out or to go on a fishing expedition in the journalistic sense.
"Engolir o sapo" - to swallow the toad. Kind of "bite the bullet"
"sair pela culatra" - to exit through the breech, i.e. to backfire
"caça às bruxas" - a witch hunt
We have a similarly arboreal expression in German: zittern wie Espenlaub (to tremble like aspen leaves)
Alexandra Lanes likes this.
"Queer Labour" is like having an "African Americans for the Confederacy"
You are not 'changing things from the inside' you are a prop to be used and discarded by Centrists who only look out for coin, not us.
#Labour #UKPOL #Ukpolitics #LGBTQIA
Alexandra Lanes likes this.
Alexandra Lanes reshared this.
You just know these people are single and hate themselves and now their lives have turned out.
Every Queer in England spit in Wes Streetings Queer hating face
Alexandra Lanes likes this.
reshared this
Why is it that whenever there's an Israeli drama about Mossad or Shabak, the Israeli intelligence services are portrayed as completely incompetent buffoons? Even by the standards of thriller TV, agents are so absurdly unable to follow orders that you do wonder if they'd do better ordering them to do the opposite.
Or maybe this is just the Israeli dramas that are selected to be exported to the rest of the world via Netflix and Apple TV. Perhaps Israel is less threatening if you associate it with 007 in clown shoes.
You can tell I'm getting to the nitpicking and rewording stage of writing an assignment for the OU when I go on flights of sfnal legal fantasy instead.
A bunch of senior members of the judiciary have a time machine. When a miscarriage of justice is discovered, they use the time machine to wind the unverse back to before the miscarriage. Obviously this looks splendid, and nobody in the rewound universe (handwave handwave) suffers the consequences of long prison times.
Unfortunately, a convicted criminal learns of the existence of this machine and on his release uses it to rewind so he committed the perfect crime...
Another win for Rwanda. In October, it reported its first Marburg virus outbreak, for which there are no vaccines or treatments. Following a COVID-19-style mass test, track, and trace operation, the case fatality rate plummeted, and the outbreak has now been declared over - it's been a month since the last death was recorded. NPR buff.ly/49f7esn
#ShareGoodNewsToo
Alexandra Lanes likes this.
reshared this
The people who are most optimistic about AI are people who've never tried to use it for anything they're expert in. Its reputation seems to rely almost entirely on the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. I try to explain this to people; I just wish people who know something about something just ask it a question.
I keep on giving it a go our of desperation, just to get some kind of lead in something I can research manually (which I'd investigate separately).
It always disappoints me.
Here's a great example:
reshared this
I tried an AI about a subject I know (the types in C). It made mistakes. I pointed them out to it. It acknowledged them. It was extremly courteaous. And the next time I asked a question, it continued to make mistakes with the same coutreaous politeness.
Unfortunately I can't remember the questions. It's a pity it was interesting to see how incompetent an AI can be.
Very quickkly it proposed me to send money to continue to use its expertise. I turned off the computer.
I worked on an AI based news engine 2 decades ago. It was obviously much more primitive tech, but I saw a similar effect and it was what ended up tanking the project.
We were using vector based AI to find and categorize obscure news items. Human editors were used to babysit and fix the results when it was wrong.
The AI outperformed the editors at first, but within a couple of months, the human editors started catching up and eventually became better than the AI. At some point, it was a waste of time to use the AI as anything more than a brute phrase matching engine to shovel stuff to the human editors.
Alexandra Lanes likes this.
There's this thing that seems to be happening in western democracies recently where leftish liberal politicians look at their right-wing-going-on-fascist opposition and say "they're right, but don't vote for them". The result is that people shrug and think they may as well vote for the real fascist rather than the guy doing fascist cosplay.
But does this ever happen the other way around? You never get Trump saying "The socialists are right, don't vote for them". Possibly I'm asking why the Overton window only ever goes rightwards.
Simon Landmine reshared this.
Alexandra Lanes likes this.
Alexandra Lanes likes this.
Alexandra Lanes reshared this.
We've released #PuTTY version 0.82.
The biggest change is improved Unicode support. Usernames and passwords read from the terminal or the Windows console now support full Unicode, so that you can use characters outside the Windows system code page, or the character set configured in PuTTY. The same is true for usernames and file names provided via the PuTTY tools' command line and via the GUI (but unfortunately not yet if you save and reload a session).
reshared this
Alexandra Lanes likes this.
Researchers from Zayed National Museum have discovered text concealed beneath a layer of gold leaf on a page of the Blue Qur’an - one of the world’s most well-known Qur’an manuscripts.
zayednationalmuseum.ae/en/abou…
#islam #religion #IslamicArt
@histodons @historikerinnen @medievodons @dh #MiddleEast #geschichte #histodons #MedievalStudies #medievalists #MiddleAges #Mittelalter #ReligiousStudies #paleography
Alexandra Lanes likes this.
reshared this
Sion [main]
in reply to Alexandra Lanes • • •Alexandra Lanes likes this.