Tim Ward ⭐🇪🇺🔶 #FBPE

@stux@mstdn.social I found that with WFH my shoe consumption declined to pretty well zero. I used up slippers rather faster though.

@VeroniqueB99@mastodon.social We came across one of those on a Greek island. It met us as we go off the ferry, accompanied us for a mile or so along the coast path until we got to our destination taverna, where it settled down as if it owned the place. We reckoned that probably it did, and it just didn't like walking home alone, so it waited for us to be going that way. Or maybe it was just touting for the taverna and got paid in fish for bringing in our group of punters.

I have only just learned that Arthur C Clarke invented (as well as communications satellites and his many other inventions) modern LLM text generators. The story is The Steam-powered Word Processor, 1986, and includes: A vicar bored with writing sermons, which he realised consisted of subsets of the same text rearranged in slightly different ways each week "... conceived a machine which would automatically reassemble massed of text in any desired order ...". And to train it? "Before the machine could be used, [he] was faced with the laborious task of punching not only the Bible but the whole of Cruden's Concordance on to Jaquard cards ..."

@VeroniqueB99@mastodon.social Well yes, that makes sense from the petrol company's point of view. Otherwise the punters will buy an electric car instead and stop buying petrol.

@TheBreadmonkey@beige.party Something on the radio today about analysing swabs from subway stations across the world. Did I hear correctly that 94% of the viruses in the samples were previously unknown?

@VeroniqueB99@mastodon.social Just an "only in #Cambridge" everyday life.

@VeroniqueB99@mastodon.social In the UK it'd be "Have you got a postcode for that?" But sometimes you get operators who do know what they're doing. Like the last time I called 999: Them: "Which service do you require?" Me: "I don't know - there's a cow in the river." Them: "OK, I'll call the pinder. Which bridge is it near?" Me: [names bridge] Them; "Thanks, I'll get onto it, bye." (It's not that rare for a cow to get into the Cam. The pinder is the guy who knows how to persuade the cow to move to somewhere it can be rescued.) #Cambridge

@h4890@merovingian.club @kibcol1049@mstdn.social Two much cheaper alternatives to "stop the boats": (1) Send someone to Calais to hand out ferry tickets. This will cost peanuts. (2) #RejoinEU . This will *make* billions.

@VeroniqueB99@mastodon.social UK mayors, like other layers of UK local government, can do what, and only what, central government permit and fund them to do.

@revk@toot.me.uk Tesco have things on their web site which you can add to your deliver order but which never turn up, because the software at the store end won't allow them to be picked. The delivery driver then says "I haven't got this item, because it's shown by the computer as having run out, but I know perfectly well that it's in there because I've seen it on the shelves; I'm afraid that if you want one you'll have to go to the shop yourself".

@plutarch@gotosocial.plutar.ch @alice@lgbtqia.space @crouton@aus.social Take a look at Lock Picking Lawyer on YouTube. There are some that have survived quite serious assaults with guns. Though there's nothing much he can't pick in a couple of minutes.

@kwas_na@mastodon.social Disposable ladders are cheaper, I'm told ...

@technicaladept@techhub.social No (it's only a very short story). And yes, Clarke would have read 1984.

@gentle_tech@infosec.exchange @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange These days if it's at all complicated I go to the station and buy a ticket from a human being, asking for "the cheapest ticket which lets me do such-and-such". So if they sell me the wrong ticket I've got consumer law protection.

@MissConstrue@mefi.social "talking about LLM like it's a mind, and not a computer with an OFF switch" Once it's learned to copy itself around in the cloud good luck finding the OFF switch! (SF authors have done this one yonks ago.)

@hardingar@mindly.social @kibcol1049@mstdn.social @X31Andy@mastodon.green Yes, quite. These press releases are marketing, designed to send the share price higher.

@EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu When I stopped working I switched off the work laptop. Simples. OK, so in the case of an emergency they would have been able to get in touch with me by non-company channels, but no employer ever did.

@EugeneMcParland@mastodon.ie Ain't gonna happen. Not while Putin still has the pee tapes.

@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange We once (a long time ago) went for a train ride with a non-trivial choice of routings, something like Cambridge to Ardrossan harbour. We picked one way to get there (because we wanted to break our journey at a particular point) to be told by a ticket inspector "you shouldn't have gone this way, you should have gone that way". We went "that way" on the way back, as we had no break of journey to fit in, only to be told by a ticket inspector "you shouldn't have gone that way, you should have gone this way". Since then it's only got more complicated, so the chances of even the *staff* understanding the rules must be even lower.

@VeroniqueB99@mastodon.social Our kid: I'm not interested in politics. [In reaction to me talking politics all the time, being at the time an elected politician.] Us: What are you interested in? Kid: [list of things - education, potholes, etc etc, basically a list of public services] Us: So how do you think decisions about providing such things get made? Kid: [after a short pause - but only short, he's not stupid] Oh.

@grickle@mstdn.social Yeah, it's winter already. My first day today wearing a long sleeve shirt.

@VeroniqueB99@mastodon.social It's a broken system, though, if people have to rely on the randomness of the benevolence of an employer to make up for a non-existent state health service.

@NatureMC@mastodon.online @foolishowl@social.coop @overholt@glammr.us I wonder what the copyright libraries do with the vast deluge of self-published AI-written slop? BTW for anyone who doesn't know: copyright libraries have the RIGHT but not the DUTY to request a copy of any book from the publisher. So they are likely to choose not to acquire all the books they have a right to.

@agowa338@chaos.social @EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu Depends how good your typing is. Verification of payee will catch you getting a digit wrong in the account number. Which I don't do very often, but it's nice to have a check that I'm not sending tens of thousands of pounds to the wrong person by accident. Yes it would in most cases get sorted eventually, but it wouldn't half be a hassle.

@penguin42@mastodon.org.uk Well, in between the boss and the code there's a procurement process and a supplier and the supplier's engineering function. If the procurement process is completely broken and the boss hasn't noticed that they don't perform due diligence on the supplier *then* it might be their fault.

@fesshole@mastodon.social I take "not testing on animals" to mean "we haven't a clue whether or not it will kill *you*", so I don't buy.

@ossobuffo@triangletoot.party Yeah, like that'll stop them. The US system appears to let them get away with murder and rape as they please - what notice are they going to take of a notice??

@fesshole@mastodon.social You can add chopped tomato to the chopped egg and salad cream. I never make this any more because it's not worth keeping salad cream in stock just for that (we never use it for anything else).

@VeroniqueB99@mastodon.social Implausible. We see "it's" for "its" all the time, but "its" for "it's" hardly ever.

@2legged@mastodon.ie @geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml @Kajika@lemmy.ml They gave that impression at the time, and they said "yes" when I asked them to confirm or deny. Sorry, I no longer have that email from last century so there's just my memory to go on.

@selfcare@hachyderm.io I'm supposed to be reading the papers for my meeting in a few minutes.

@fesshole@mastodon.social Two of ours - in their thirties - will be joining us for a holiday later this year. Though they'll spend some of the time doing their own thing without us - multi-day jungle hiking.

@tallpaul@mastodon.scot One of the benefits of taking a holiday in Norway is that my webmail interface started asking me questions in Norwegian. Yes, quite possibly that's what the browser in the internet café said it spoke, but FFS the webmail system should have known that *I* speak English.

@penguin42@mastodon.org.uk All that. Which will take time to determine. So journos asking the boss right now whether he will resign is, it seems to me, bollocks.

@Em0nM4stodon@infosec.exchange You could have included Visa and Mastercard.

@agowa338@chaos.social @EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu "Oh or when basically everything on your statement is just the name of some random payment processor instead of the actual company." For sure that doesn't help.

@NEBylines@mastodon.social One reason for having a meeting with an officer is that you want to say things that you are not comfortable putting in an email, in case they get published, and are not even comfortable saying on the phone. A recording can be FOIed - an in person conversation with no minutes can't. I see that all the councillors interviews in the piece (including the Reform one!) made sensible comments. Any councillor who did consider recording a meeting, secretly or not, should be aware that it could be subject to an FOI request. (Yes, I know, it's likely to be covered under one of the exceptions, but if it doesn't exist you don't have to bother to argue about it.)

@VeroniqueB99@mastodon.social Land Of The Free! In the USA you are free not to have a baby if you can't afford one. Oh wait ...

@2legged@mastodon.ie @geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml @Kajika@lemmy.ml I don't suppose they've kept a copy of that email either.

@technicaladept@techhub.social I think the Clarke one is a little closer to the LLM - you train it on a large volume of text and then its output is completely automatic.

@Natasha_Jay@tech.lgbt I think we have eight (or nine) different shapes/sizes/colours this year, but I'm not sure we've got a picture of them all on the same day.

@cdarwin@c.im Does anyone know WHY the USA hates Cuba so much?

@VeroniqueB99@mastodon.social Yeah, we've just done that. Ended up getting a number of sample pots and painting blotches on a spare bit of wall. We've now, having redecorated a number of rooms, got quite a collection of different not-quite-white pots of paint.

@fesshole@mastodon.social BTDTGTTS Customer specified a system. We said "You're also going to need feature X." They said they didn't. We said they would. They said they didn't. We said they would. They said they didn't. So we built the system including feature X anyway, with a switch, so it was initially invisible. And after delivery the customer came back and said "we need another feature, X". So we quoted them a month's work, waited a month, billed them for a month's work, and threw the switch.

@penguin42@mastodon.org.uk And the BBC headline: "NATS boss will not resign over outage". FFS. *Nobody* knows how to ensure that there are zero such bugs - why would anyone ever imagine that getting rid of the boss would make a blind bit of difference?

@coldclimate@hachyderm.io Pretty sure I'd leave. I'd be paying cash anyway (or borrowing somewhere else cheaper than from the dealer, which comes to the same thing from the dealer's PoV) so there's no way I'd spend an hour talking about finance.

@geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml @Kajika@lemmy.ml Some decades ago they were soliciting support so I asked them "do you still support IRA and PLO terrorists?" (you can tell how long ago this was). "Yes," they said.

@twigpi@mastodon.social @jwz@mastodon.social Absolutely. Few would object to the AI that helps detect bank card fraud, or the AI image analysis that helps diagnostic screening, or the AI protein folding that helps develop treatments for disease.

@mcnado@mstdn.social Yeah but those are what you and I would call "facts", and therefore irrelevant to gammons who don't use things like facts, truth and logic as inputs to their decision making process. They simply don't see these things as being relevant to their lives.

@2legged@mastodon.ie @geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml @Kajika@lemmy.ml At least two emails, because I checked a few years later whether they'd changed their position, and they said no. I don't know the individual who sent it, but it would have been an advertised public email contact address, so the individual doesn't matter - they were officially speaking for the organisation.