Saw someone hyperventilating over LLMs “passing the mirror test”, so …
TL;DR This short program “recognises itself”: show it a file containing its own source code and it will print “This is me!”
Underwhelmed? You should be! But I did have to type a lot of backslashes.
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“Mrs Jones lost her husband” “Has she looked down the back of the sofa?”
The remarkable witness statement of Johnny Mercer
How a government minister tried and failed to get to the bottom of serious war crimes allegations
By me, at Prospect
prospectmagazine.co.uk/politic…
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Without being cynical, this is SOP for the MOD. Can you find any Army deployment since 1945 that didn’t come with a huge coverup of war crimes?
Mercer is merely the latest officer to find he’s been surrounded by criminals in uniform. I’m sure the FCO and the MOD have busily reclassified everything as ‘retained materials’ and not searchable under the FIA.
It’s ironic that Cameron is back covering up at the FCO after his Golden Temple mess in 2014.
ukconstitutionallaw.org/2024/0…
Jeff King: The House of Lords, Constitutional Propriety, and the Safety of Rwanda Bill
The Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill will receive its second reading in the House of Lords on 29 January 2024, having cleared the House of Commons unamended. There are a great many p…UK Constitutional Law Association
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The dreaded barnyard puddle has returned, and the goats would like you to know they are really annoyed about it. I'm a little surprised they didn't make use of the plank, but goats have very strong opinions about getting their feet wet.
(Every year this puddle appears and I want to dig a trench, but the ground is still too frozen, and then the puddle soaks in by the time the ground is workable and I forget to do it)
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I've worked out when the Firefox developers plan to retire.
(Of course there seems to be an off-by-one error, it's javascript. Kwality is its watchword. I'd expected it to be on an IEEE754 boundary, but it looks like a magic constant).
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Me: "I don't think I know $person"
Friend: "I think they know you because you did a politics near them once"
That should be my epitaph. "Did a politics once"
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Sensitive content
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Do cis people in the UK actually think there has ever been a point at which transgender medicine was widely and routinely available on the NHS?
Guys, it never has. When they exist at all, the services are chronically underfunded with waiting lists that literally stretch for decades.
To a first approximation, if you want to medically transition in the UK, you are on your own, unless you want to fight a war of attrition for years.
TERFs like to pretend that you can easily access NHS gender identity services as if it were just a thing people do.
It appears some people have believed their fairy tales. However badly you think trans people are treated by the medical establishment in the UK, I promise you that the reality is worse, and always has been.
“Children on puberty blockers”. Fucking state of it. There are no children on puberty blockers. Not because they’re trans, anyway.
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@Isabel Ruffell I transitioned with a lot of people who tried and were unable to access it.
Even at the peak of trans acceptance in the UK, being able to access ANYTHING depended on your postcode at least, and probably a few other things. Some PCTs as we’re basically refused to refer anyone for anything at all.
At which point, you either had the money to go round them, or you found ways to get it 😞
“NHS to end practice of back rubs for Godzilla”
If you think the NHS was ever actually giving trans children puberty blockers, then I’m afraid you have fallen for a TERF fairy tale. The NHS has never actually done decent treatment for trans children. news.sky.com/story/children-to…
Children to no longer be prescribed puberty blockers, NHS England confirms
The decision follows a review after a sharp rise in referrals were recorded at the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) run by the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, which is closing at the end of March.Sky News
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@David Matthewman Ok. Credit to her parents for fighting that battle, and maybe the Tavistock might have considered possibly doing it on a trial basis at some point (“maybe” is doing a lot of work there), but they basically don’t do that, and never have. Their standard mode of operation is to just keep talking until people age out of their service and can join an adult GIC waiting list.
The headline is literally just a reaffirmation of the way the NHS has always behaved. It’s giving the impression that it’s ending a practice of medical intervention for trans kids.
But to end something, it has to have started in the first place.
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I'll give up my privacy, when...
Politician's conduct all interactions in public & on the record
Politician's publish their tax records, bank statements, shareholdings, w oversight by open forum
Politician's don't allow lobbying of any kind
All corporations pay their taxes in full, no offshore crap
Free healthcare, education, social care for all worldwide
When the industrial-miltary complex is dismantled
When all wars are abolished & nukes
Sorry, got carried away there, but its my list
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So, just in case you needed the heads up - noauthority.social is a fascist server; appears to be a refuge for nazis who got tired of having their previous server, noagenda.social, defederated by literally everyone. I just caught some nazi rando in my replies and after blocking him, hopped over to his timeline to see who he's talking to and it's literally all other fascists from noauthority.social. Strong defederate with extreme prejudice recommendation for admins but it's your life.
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just spent longer than I'd like to admit waiting for my mobile wifi hotspot to appear as an option because I forgot I renamed it "Searching..."
hoisted by my own petard!
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Here’s why the NHS were happy to vaccinate me with MMR the other day. From UK govt advice from
2019:
• individuals born between 1970 and 1979 may have been vaccinated against measles and many will have been exposed to mumps and rubella during childhood. However, this age group should be offered MMR wherever feasible, particularly if they are considered to be at high risk of exposure.• individuals born before 1970 are likely to have had all three natural infections and are less likely to be susceptible. MMR vaccine should be offered to such individuals on request or if they are considered to be at high risk of exposure.
Tl;dr: younger GenX and older Millennials in the UK were likely given inadequate protection against measles and none against mumps and rubella: vaccinate on sight.
Older GenX and boomers: just give them the vaccine if they ask for it.
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I'm easily better than the borrow checker, that's why I can write safe bug free C++ code.
[quietly shoving CVE list into a closet]
Went to an NHS vaccine drop in centre and said, “I had a single measles vaccine 49 years ago. Could I have an MMR please?”
No quibbles. I am now in the queue for an MMR.
I will not go blind because of Andrew sodding Wakefield.
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Heather is truly one of the most amazing queer writers I've had the pleasure of discovering.
Fellow nerdy sapphics (or anyone else, really 😅) who want to read more of her stuff: Check out Cattywampus at theheatherhogan.substack.com – you won't regret it. 💪 Maybe start with theheatherhogan.substack.com/p… or theheatherhogan.substack.com/p… or
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Anxiety is my constant companion. I’m always anxious and it only varies in degrees. It’s been this way my entire life. Nothing really changes that fact.
Do you deal with anxiety?
#AskingAutistics #ActuallyAutistic @actuallyautistic
image: @worrywellbeing
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Sigma
in reply to Greg Egan • • •Like, I get that the mirror test is probably not a good test for self-cognition - it isn't even for animals as far as I know.
But I think you are misrepresenting it somewhat. From what I read, the test was showing them a screenshot of their own interface, and them being able to deduce that it's probably an AI assistant. Of course, this is flawed in many ways. But it's still quite a bit different from a quine.
Greg Egan
in reply to Sigma • • •@sigmasternchen Recognising anything from a screenshot is a significant technical achievement.
My point is that there is nothing additionally difficult, or additionally significant, about recognising something (either with a trivial string comparison, or a sophisticated neural net classifier) that happens to pertain to the software performing the task.
Pete Carlton
in reply to Greg Egan • • •Σ(i³) = (Σi)²
in reply to Greg Egan • • •The value of current-gen LLMs is not their intelligence. They aren't intelligent. They're dumb as rocks.
The value of current-gen LLMs lies in rubbing people's noses in just how much of human action, reaction, interaction requires no smarts at all and can be performed quite adequately by something that is dumb as rocks.
Zach Fisher
in reply to Greg Egan • • •l'empathie mécanique
in reply to Greg Egan • • •Geoffrey Irving
in reply to Greg Egan • • •It's even easier if one uses a checksum:
```
#!/usr/bin/env python3
import sys
import zlib
if len(sys.argv) == 2:
print(('Not me', 'Me.')[zlib.crc32(open(sys.argv[1], 'rb').read()) == 1441602037])
```
Usage: ./self-crc self-crc
Dan Piponi
in reply to Greg Egan • • •Reid Ellis ☑️
in reply to Greg Egan • • •Chris Who
in reply to Greg Egan • • •In the 90s we had Eliza. Why couldn't we just have been happy enough with "Super Eliza" and watching ourselves drawn eating a twelve foot donut with Freddie Mercury?
Why did we have to jam this garbage machine into absolutely everything?