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Kind of miss the trains from Cambridge that used to tell me about Blundon Kings Cross


Alexandra Lanes 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:

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in reply to kæt

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.

This entry was edited (10 months ago)
in reply to kæt

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.



When he's done travelling the Clapham Omnibus the reasonable man turns out to be handy for my mental health. I am very harsh on myself and very strict when I'm interpreting instructions and deadlines others give me in words, so it's useful to have the reasonable man point out that it isn't quite so cut and dried.



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.

in reply to Alexandra Lanes

It occurs to me that on a small scale politicians know it’s not a good idea to agree with your opponent too much. Remember “I agree with Nick” from the first leaders’ debate in 2010? IIRC Clegg got a bounce in the polls and public estimation after that debate. “I agree with Nick” was not uttered again.
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

The real problem to me is the left/liberal pretending the populist far right is just another player in the democracy game, when it obviously isn’t. They’re treating equally something that is not equal. They’re debating something that can’t be debated, with people who go to debates do everything but debating. It’s like history taught them nothing and they don’t understand this is something that needs to be eliminated while we can, before we need to do it with guns and bombs again.

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Xelä is a cheap smart lightbulb that can change colour or brightness but not both.



Somewhere in my past there is an officious bystander trying to point out that I obviously didn't intend to be doing a law module, a Portuguese course, and a work project all at the same time.

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).

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Colin Watson
@xdydx You mean X-style selection? The behaviour is configurable, but I thought it was that way by default on Linux, and the.earth.li/~sgtatham/putty/0… seems to agree.
in reply to Colin Watson

@xdydx But if you mean "select to copy to X's CLIPBOARD selection", then there's an "Auto-copy selected text" section on that page that describes how that can be configured.




One entertaining detail from last night's bad dream: the loo doors in the building were labelled with various chromosomal makeups. (Wasn't a "plot" point, just something people tutted and said "yeah I know" at.). Anyway, one of the doors was labelled ZW.

Alexandra Lanes reshared 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

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in reply to Sarah Brown

@John_Loader that makes sense. I was thinking if it was a real problem I would have seen one of the activists somewhere mention it at least once.
in reply to Sarah Brown

Wow. He was a bit OTT, but a lot of early rights campaigners in various movements felt obliged to be that way to force change and get people to sit up & take notice.



in reply to Adam

@ifixcoinops I get this from my dad. He's been a computer professional since it was punched cards and I was brought up ab ovo that every extra function on a device is just another opportunity for it to go wrong.
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

@ifixcoinops This may be a good time to mention my new Sony TV came with two remotes, and I wish I was kidding. There’s the traditional TV remote, and the “smart” one. Where, and I kid you not, some buttons work via Bluetooth, others via IR.

I’ve never seen such a great example of what results from stitching two products together in something barely sellable. Sony is a shadow of what it used to be. Just like every other electronics brand.



#ukpol Suppose you wanted to institute some form of right to buy for private tenants. Possibly without the ludicrous discounts you see with council RTB. You'd presumably have some sort of time period a tenant would have to have lived in a place before they'd qualify. How do you stop the landlord evicting the tenant just before the tenant becomes eligible?


I’m an IT professional. Do I turn back into an IT amateur when my contract is up? Or do I enter some liminal IT dilettante state?

Simon Landmine reshared this.



I wonder if the higher than usual number of American accents I’m hearing in the Algarve is connected to the recent election results.
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

Possibly? Although emigrating from the US isn't that easy and Portuguese isn't a commonly taught foreign language.

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


Mouin Rabbani on What Really Happened in Amsterdam Between Israeli Soccer Fans & Local Residents
youtube.com/watch?v=ttS8pKwvoI…

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Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


Dear Apple, when the device is localised (see that S there?) into British English, "chips" does NOT go under "confectionary" in the shopping list.

Goddam fuckmuppet seppo nonsense.




youtube.com/watch?v=jN7bQ0MnP3…

This is Porterbrook's protoype hydrogen train. It's kind of nice but to me it begs the question: why not just electrify the lines in the conventional way? Producing and transporting the hydrogen for these things is surely going to consume many times more energy than conventional electric traction.

in reply to Cyberspice

@Cyberspice Reopened Varsity line. The bit between Bedford and Cambridge is going to be on a different route and will be new build.
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

Ah yes, the south, where they spend three times as much per capita on transport infrastructure than the north!


I have nobody to shout this at right now but it seems like a shame for it to go unrecorded. So I offer this as a free piece of clichéd rage to anyone with occasion to use it.

Breathe my incinerated dick dust!

Sion [main] reshared this.

in reply to Alexandra Lanes

There are more refined ways of saying it. youtu.be/17rOl7i55ag


Day made less good by the (male) cleaner who shouted at me in the ladies’ at St Pancras. “This is… woman!” he shouted. I calmly replied “indeed, and so am I” and shut the door of the cubicle. Gave him a cheery wave in his cleaning cupboard on my way out.

But.




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Americans: if you're thinking of leaving, beware before considering an asylum claim.

"Safe" countries have treaties recognising each other as safe, and do not recognise asylum claims from each other as valid. So if you as an American try to claim asylum there, at the moment you will be automatically rejected.

Instead, travel on a tourist visa. If things get bad for US trans people, this may eventually change.

#trans #TransRights

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Trans Rescue
EU pol regarding refugees (it's bad)

Sensitive content


Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


Unfortunately, our university is discontinuing personal web pages for academics for incomprehensible reasons.

Fortunately, our department was allowed to set redirects to external web pages, so that the existing links still work.

My web page is now at gihub, accessible from the original links.

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

in reply to Conor Mc Bride

@pigworker @johncarlosbaez

Honestly I remember one university who's main IT help desk was comically incompetent, and incredibly user hostile. For example, you could customize parts of your user experience on lab computers, but the settings would never stay.

The CS department handled their own IT at the time, and it was a _much_ more tolerable situation.

I've yet to understand why IT departments are typically so incredibly user-hostile, like they forget what purpose they actually serve.

in reply to Leon P Smith

@leon_p_smith @johncarlosbaez They want to get away with the lowest common denominator and address nobody's specific needs. A CS department obviously has specific needs. (I used to specialise in manufacturing specific needs. In fact, I still do.)
in reply to Conor Mc Bride

@leon_p_smith @johncarlosbaez Essential context is that my father ended his university career as Director of Information Services at the Queen's University of Belfast. I have so seen both sides of this game.
in reply to Conor Mc Bride

@pigworker @johncarlosbaez

> I used to specialise in manufacturing specific needs. In fact, I still do.

Nice quote. That's certainly true of myself as well, to greater or lesser extent depending on whatever tends to capture my attention at that moment in time.

That's probably also why I found it pretty easy to get a bit crosswise with IT departments of all stripes.


in reply to mathew

@mathew i think zmodem’s lack of congestion control might be problematic or at least very rude 😈 and you would need to invent an encryption layer 😭

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


This is a brilliant take by Gianmarco Soresi on the absurdity of comparing any criticism of #Israel to antisemitism

youtu.be/jhST1Q230zI

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Big fan of Bernie Collins on Sky F1. Whereas usually a lot of the presenting team is drawn from former drivers, she used to be a strategy engineer for several teams in the paddock, so she brings a lot of insight from the "behind the scenes" part of the sport. Also unlike some of her counterparts she doesn't feel the need to chip in when she has nothing useful to contribute!
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

Leena Gade is similarly good in the Le Mans commentary (which we're about four hours into watching).


Advantage of intelligence: being able to catch up an OU unit and a Portuguese language unit in an evening

Disadvantages of procrastination: having to



Today's law study amusement. "Even taking into account that the bird had travelled from Leicester in a box on British Rail its condition was rough"

(Partridge v Crittenden [1968] 1 WLR 1204)


Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


Janey Godley has died.She's been going to do so sometime soon for a while now, and very soon indeed for the last couple of weeks, and now she's gone.
She was always a proper ally, and the world is poorer for her absence.
Long may she be remembered and celebrated.

Trump is still a cunt.

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Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


So I know it’s all very funny, ha ha, but here’s why the orcas don’t go after the boats of the ultra rich.

Two photos. One a multi million euro luxury yacht. Notice it has two props. They steer by vectoring the thrust. There is no rudder.

The other, my boat. It costs what a new car costs (like if you were buying a low end Tesla. Expensive, but not stupid money). It has a rudder because it’s a sailboat. It can’t rely on thrust being present.

No rudder - no orca attack. People who can afford sailboats, which the orcas are attacking, cannot afford luxury motor yachts, which they aren’t.

A sailboat is like a mouldy caravan, but floating, and slower.

in reply to Mike J👹🐀 🤘🏻

@Mike J👹🐀 🤘🏻 same. I run the gauntlet next summer. Somewhat worried. I have a life raft and a phone that can do satellite distress, and I don’t taste like tuna.

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


On my quasi-blog: "Separation of concerns in a bug tracker"

A thought about bug trackers I've used, how they make some kinds of database query difficult, and how one might be designed more sensibly.

chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtath…

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in reply to Simon Tatham

@jackv the other almost unrelated question is: does a bug describe a user-visible misbehaviour, or an error in the code? They don't match up 1–1, because sometimes one code error can lead to what _looks_ like three separate bugs. And I've seen people have arguments about whether to merge them in the bug tracker, because some people want to count the errors in the code and others want to document all the user-visible badnesses.
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Simon Tatham
@jackv ah, I see – you're distinguishing the notion of 'bug' vs 'feature' as users see them, from the strongly correlated but not identical idea that 'bug fix' means finding one small typo or missing statement or whatever in the code, whereas 'feature' means writing a whole pile of new stuff or massively refactoring things?