Meanwhile in the UK pedestrian deaths are down despite the number of miles walked increasing.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casualties-great-britain-pedestrian-factsheet-2024/reported-road-casualties-in-great-britain-pedestrian-factsheet-2024

The phrase “is linked to” should be a massive red flag.

If it was smuggling Iranian oil it would say, “is smuggling Iranian oil”, not “is linked to smuggling Iranian oil”.

until this administration is long gone

Based on past performance, the next Democrat administration will repeal maybe 50% of these changes at most.

Did you read the text? She told him she was 14. This isn’t one of those “hey it’s legal in my state” cases.

I’d be down with banning everyone from social media

The kind of people they’re pissing off with this, are the same people most likely to switch to bittorrent.

Not even a good film.

One quirk of github copilot is that because it lets you choose which model to send a question to, you can gaslight Opus into apologising for something that gpt-4o told you.

I recently had an interaction where it made a really weird comment about a function that didn’t make sense, and when I asked it to explain what it meant, it said “let me have another look at the code to see what I meant”, and made up something even more nonsensical.

It’s clear why it happened as well; when I asked it to explain itself, it had no access to its state of mind when it made the original statement; it has no memory of its own beyond the text the middleware feeds it each time. It was essentially being asked to explain what someone who wrote what it wrote, might have been thinking.

My 3rd generation iPad became functionally useless after only 6-7 years even though the hardware was pristine. Almost half of the apps on it, including some major ones like YouTube, started refusing to run because they had a mandatory Update, and the App Store wouldn’t provide updates for the newest iOS version that the 3rd gen could support.

Meanwhile my Windows laptop that I bought at the same time is still in service after 12 years. Windows going out of support just means you don’t get the security updates; Apple going out of support means they’ll brick your machine.

Fuck Apple to infinity.

They spend over £50,000,000/year on care, research, and conservation.

A significant portion of what we know about the ancient world is a direct result of their research sharing and activities; for example when the Rosetta Stone was in French hands they kept it to themselves, when it was in Egypt they did nothing with it, but when it came to Britain it was shared with research departments across Europe as well as in Britain, resulting in our ability today to read hieroglyphics and demotic script.

Think about that for a second: if the Rosetta Stone had been left in Egypt, there’s every possibility that Egyptians today would still have no idea about most of their own history or how to read their own ancient texts. You might dismiss this as paternalistic or white-savioury, but it’s true nonetheless.

Even as recently as last year we had researchers finding things like https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/babylonian-map-world-0021631 that simply wouldn’t have happened without the British Museum’s work. So, I’m inclined to cut them some slack.

People give the British Museum a lot of shit, but it’s free all year round for everyone.

In some ways it’s just as well to occasionally get a reminder that loyalty to a brand is a fundamentally bullshit concept in the first place.

Epic Boss Tim Sweeney can go fuck himself

If you can’t get your LLM to not deny the holocaust, then your LLM is not ready to get platformed on a major internet site.

LOL

Hard disagree, because it’s like with all the other forms of AI-created slop - with the real thing there’s layers of meaning, and you spend time and mental energy digging into that and getting something from it. But as with AI art and AI prose, you try looking closer at it and it just makes you feel hollow and frustrated at having wasted your time.

There was no meaning, there was no symbolism, there were no clever literary allusions, there was no interplay between the melody and the lyrics, it’s just superficial garbage that tricks you into giving it attention by sounding good on its first listen.

(Edit: lol touched a nerve with some shit talentless musicians)

I dunno, say what you will about fascists, they were snappy fucking dressers.

The old lot were I mean, the current batch look stupid and weird

unimpressed with the ability to talk fluently with an AI computer.

That fluency is a pure illusion. Either he doesn’t know this, or he thinks we don’t.

Literally every time I hear the “actually if you read between the lines what Jesus meant is…” trope it turns out that the person saying it is exactly the sort of person that would wear a MAGA hat.