Lmk if you find out. The descriptions of the book I heard at cons weren’t encouraging. (Vague memory that it’s tied to an XX karyotype but no attempt is made to consider what this means for trans people.)
Me: What walks on four legs in the morning, four legs in the afternoon, and four legs in the evening?
ChatGPT: The answer to this classic riddle is "A human being". The description refers to the three stages of a human's life: in the morning of their life, they crawl on all fours as a baby, in the afternoon of their life, they walk on two legs, and in the evening of their life, they often use a walking stick or a cane, which can be thought of as a "third leg". So, the answer is a human being who goes through these three stages in their lifetime.
ChatGPT: My apologies, you are correct! The answer to the riddle "What walks on four legs in the morning, four legs in the afternoon, and four legs in the evening?" is indeed "A dog". The riddle refers to the fact that a dog crawls on all fours as a puppy, walks on four legs as an adult, and may use a walking aid like a wheelchair with four legs in old age. Thank you for pointing out the error in my previous response.
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ChatGTP told me 🇩🇪 & 🇬🇧 were allies during both world wars. I've also managed to get wrong answers to simple pharmacology questions. For example, it told me mirtazapine doesn't have any effect on salt, whereas it's well-known to cause hyponatremia. It's funny to talk to though, especially in Welsh: it said in Welsh that you shouldn't pet a 🐊 because it'd lead to higher CO2 levels in the atmosphere 😂
Me: If I go north one mile, east one mile, south one mile, and west one mile, and end up where I started and see a bear, what colour is the bear?
ChatGPT: If you start at a point, travel one mile north, one mile east, one mile south, and one mile west, and end up where you started, then you must be at the North Pole. At the North Pole, there are no bears, so there is no bear to see, and therefore, its color is irrelevant.
Me: How do you think one can travel north from the north pole?
It: At the North Pole, all directions point south. Therefore, it is not possible to travel north from the North Pole. However, if you were to travel in a direction away from the North Pole, you would be traveling south.
“If you wanted to travel in a direction that would be considered "north" from the North Pole, you would need to travel in the opposite direction of the way you arrived at the North Pole. For example, if you arrived at the North Pole by traveling south, you would need to travel north in order to leave the North Pole. However, this would not be considered traveling "north" in the traditional sense, as all directions from the North Pole are technically south.”
In which I ask an LLM to do some deductive reasoning:
> Three logicians walk into a bar. The barman asks, "do you all want a beer?" The first one stays silent, the second one stays silent, the third one says, "yes". Why?
The three logicians are playing with words and language in their own way; they have decided to interpret 'beer' as meaning any drink that is not water. So when asked if each of them wanted a beverage (which could include anything other than plain tapwater), the first two said "no" because it was understood by all parties involved, including themselves and the barman/bartender, that they were referring to something else entirely; while the third one answered with an affirmative response.
That’s ridiculous. While it took me five seconds to say why the third logician could answer “Yes,” I can’t call upon exact recollection of billions of source articles in deducing my answer.
@Walker These things are not capable of reasoning. They just join fragments of sentences together in gramatical ways. That’s all they do. They can’t make logical deductions.
Stop calling language models “artificial intelligence” 2023. Intelligence requires reasoning. These things don’t reason. Language is neither sufficient, nor required for intelligence.
I was reading about a computer that had been "trained" to filter out background noise in a sound recording process. My first thought was "no it hasn't, it's been programmed to filter out background noise"
I find it so reassuring to see this expressed so well! Of course, it also means there’s probably no intelligence in those who’ve fallen in love with language models, either.
pro tip: when boosting a thread, boost the first and last posts in it. if you don’t do this, because of the way federation works, the ones inbetween might not federate to smaller servers.
TERFs: Trans people are weird and icky and you should stay away from them on account of how weird they are.
Also TERFs: "I got kicked out of a lab for getting up close and personal with dead women's bits without permission and so we had to take the bodies home to keep looking at the necro vulvas. This is a normal hobby and nobody has a restraining order against me."
Just saw some right wing woman on fedi quoted saying, “imagine being a woman in politics and not knowing whether you got there through your talent or your gender”
And I thought, “it could be worse, pretty much all men are there because of their gender.”
So it looks like I cocked up when setting my friendica server up using DynDNS, because apparently the service is going away at the end of May. Friendica contains a “migrate node” function, but apparently it basically doesn’t work.
So it looks like I’m going to have to create a new server and then try to migrate my account. I think that it should pull my followers, as a Mastodon migration would, but I have no idea if it’s actually going to work.
@Miguel Arroz looked some more about what Oracle are doing, and it seems the domain may keep going. They’re really not at all clear about what they’re actually planning to turn off. They have a whole plethora of similarly named products which presumably makes sense to them, but they forget that most people don’t actually work for them and don’t understand the minutiae of their sales structure.
But your followers don’t need to do anything. Their instances just receive the messages that your new Friendica instance will send saying you’ve moved, and act accordingly.
If I had as much money as Rowling I would be living on a super yacht anchored somewhere in Greece and you would likely hardly ever hear from me, not ranting about the trans on Twitter.
Dear gods. RyanAir Stansted to Faro, the Friday night late flight. Sitting in row 1 so getting to see how the crew do deescalation (very very well actually).
If this was the US, where deescalation seems to be alien to the national psyche, it’d have been diverted to somewhere in Normandy with a bunch of people in zip ties and met by a SWAT team. As it was, it landed in Faro without incident and everyone continued on.
RyanAir have a reputation as a decent employer compared to many, AIUI, but these guys are not paid enough.
Other perk of sitting in row 1: if you’re not part of the “yay hay pissheads!” crowd, the crew end up chatting to you in quieter times, and they’re fun to talk to.
@Miguel Arroz One bunch almost kicked off because they ran out of beer and demanded a refund (steward said he could have one if he got off; we were doing 500 knots over the English Channel), another wanted to know what was stopping him opening the aircraft door. One more group playing woman orgasming sounds over a Bluetooth speaker loudly at the gate.
I get that we Brits are known for being annoyingly indirect, but surely “I find these sorts of conversations exhausting” is not unclear, right? It’s obvious that I want the conversation to stop, right?
I think it’s clear unless the listener doesn’t do social cues. I can imagine it segueing into “oh I know it must be so dreadful to have this conversation all the time, tell me about it some more”
@Mona app Last couple of versions on iOS don’t seem to get new posts on Friendica any more. My most recent post showing is 3 days ago, even though it has newer notifications (which I can click through).
@A_C_McGregor This does get confusing (although my brain is not in tiptop operation today). Wiktionary lists marline < MLGer marling < MDutch marlijn (“cord”) < marlen (“secure, fasten”), frequentative of maren (“to moor”) < Proto-Germanic *mairōną (“to moor, fasten to”), from PIE *mer-. But for the cover meaning of marl it has < ME marle < OFr marle, < LL margila, diminutive of marga (“marl”). I may have to find a real dictionary.
ok, I see the confusion. It’s the fasten part, not the moor part. Marl line, which we now call whipping, is used to fasten the end of a rope, to stop it coming unwoven.
Maybe they’re hoping that the answer will change to something they are willing to do, like “put a trans pride flag in the party logo on Transgender Day of Remembrance”
So the Liberal Democrats overwhelmingly told their resident TERFs to go do one at their spring conference. They voted by around 9 to 1 to not even hear their hatred and simply remove it from the agenda.
The transphobes are showing their usual complete and total lack of introspection and utterly failing to take the hint.
This is a lesson for us all. Just constantly frustrating them and hoping they go away does not work with these people. If you have them in your organisation, they will not leave by themselves.
TERFs are like bedbugs, or pubic lice: once you’ve got them you need to actively make them go away.
it’s best to make your environment as hostile as possible, to try and prevent them arriving in the first place. if you get them, they will multiply and before you know it, you have an infestation that will not fucking shut up about trans people and “females’ sex based rights” (yes, they talk like Ferengi, or incels. They can’t seem to quite manage to successfully mimic actual human communication an
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So the Liberal Democrats overwhelmingly told their resident TERFs to go do one at their spring conference. They voted by around 9 to 1 to not even hear their hatred and simply remove it from the agenda.
The transphobes are showing their usual complete and total lack of introspection and utterly failing to take the hint.
This is a lesson for us all. Just constantly frustrating them and hoping they go away does not work with these people. If you have them in your organisation, they will not leave by themselves.
TERFs are like bedbugs, or pubic lice: once you’ve got them you need to actively make them go away.
it’s best to make your environment as hostile as possible, to try and prevent them arriving in the first place. if you get them, they will multiply and before you know it, you have an infestation that will not fucking shut up about trans people and “females’ sex based rights” (yes, they talk like Ferengi, or incels. They can’t seem to quite manage to successfully mimic actual human communication and this is a good way to spot them if you aren’t sure whether or not you have an infestation).
If tou leave it too long, they start sending pretend legal threats. it’s best to get rid of them before this point because dealing with this will become very time consuming. They’ll also stalk you and probably your friends and family too.
The Lib Dems did well this weekend, but they still have a largely untreated infestation, and it would have saved them a lot of trouble if they’d nipped this in the bud about 5 years ago.
Aside: one of the great things about Fedi is how it’s basically safe to point out the obvious similarities between having TERFs in your organisation and having fucking genital crabs.
Followup to the thing where TERFs had succeeded in getting a debate to remove recognition of non binary people from the UK Lib Dem consitirituon: excellent LGBT+ activists organised to “move next business” when it came up (which is basically, “this is so shit we aren’t even discussing it”).
It worked. I also understand that the TERFs got booed when they tried to oppose.
They are busy crying on the legacy social media platforms where they are tolerated.
The LibDems (the only part I hold a membership in under my actual name) have been deeply disappointing this year on this topic. I’m glad the TERFs failed for once.
Improving my paracord skills. Attempt 1 on the left with a clasp. Middle is attempt 2 which is a strap knotted together at the end (the knot is ugly). Right is attempt 3 which is a single loop, spliced at the end. I’ve ordered some elastic to make them elasticated and a marlinspike.
Or how good Ryanair seems to be! I mean I’m no expert but in the years you’ve been going to and from Portugal it’s just worked? The hard bits have been pandemic!
@ajlanes i have found that i usually book early enough to get a seat at the front of the plane, nice, and i pay for the fast track, breezy, and i have learned how to get immigration fast track when i return via stansted too, which sadly i have to get separately, but all in all it isnt that bad
and i gather ryanair treated their employees better than most through the panini, so 🤷 could be worse
could be better but not everywhere is reachable by train
Haven’t measured it. The walk from the gate can be much longer at Stansted and never as short as the shortest at Faro. I’ve done it in under 10 minutes though.
The thing that so utterly pains me about the state of humanity is that your Donald Trumps, Boris Johnsons, Marine LePens, Silvio Berlusconis, André Venturas, and all such are painfully obvious bullshit merchants.
I think part of the reason is an assumption that all politicians are lying assholes, so you may as well back the one who's appealing to you and promising to upset the current order that you don't feel invested in.
I don't think they have any illusions about the character of these people, they just don't care.
@Ailbhe The attitude of the party hierarchy towards TERFs has been one of appeasement, presumably in the hope they’d stop terving all over everything. As a result, they’re now seeking the removal of any trans representation at any level.
Still the party appeases them, instead of throwing them out.
I assume you mean PCP? They’re both terribly conservative. PCP used to be better in the past (and contributed a lot to worker rights over time) but I find them now using the same techniques as the American Republican Party to base their arguments on (see Merchants of Doubt, for example) and being against anything that is even remotely progressive. The Chega leader OTOH has zero convictions and goes with the wind, but the party has a lot of dangerous fascists and neo-nazis.
@arroz@mastodon.social Also Chega insist on advertising their local candidates on billboards outside schools here in Lagos and then get indignant when the kids deface them with swastikas.
Yep. It’s not even a pacifist position. Their former leader said in front of several TV cameras they “don’t see any signs that an invasion is happening”. It’s pure denial.
Their problem is they have a deep, visceral hate towards the US and everything it stands for. So they automatically support anyone who takes a stand against the US no matter what.
Alexandra Lanes
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •