MouldyCat

But you're right, as aliens often are. These things are like dry herb vapes, that people use for vaping herbs, like parsley, sage, rosemary and cannabis. The idea of these things is to vapourise the chemicals in the dry plant matter, rather than burn it.

They presumably don't contain the carbon monoxide you get from burning tobacco, and the amount of tar could be lower.

They are certainly worse than ecigarette vapes, which heat a PG/VG ejuice that has had nicotine added in trace amounts, as this ejuice does not contain anything like the amount of shite found in tobacco (formaldehyde and all that crap).

I don't see the point in having these. If people need a good substitute to replace cigarettes, they should use ecigs. Not these half-way-house things which still expose them to lots of the same dangerous chemicals. But I guess this heated tobacco helps keep the tobacco producers in the market?

The tech behind the tool conceals the fact that messaging is taking place at all. It makes the communication indistinguishable from data sent to and from the app by our millions of regular users.

That is very clever.

So, by using the Guardian app, readers are effectively providing ‘cover’ and helping us to protect sources.

And of course they take the opportunity to push their app! I generally hate apps, especially for things like newspapers. This is the first reason I've seen that might make me install one.

I commend this guy for sticking by his principles. I remember feeling shocked and let down when walking into my uni's computer department for the first time and finding out that the main lab was the Windows lab, with the Linux lab being smaller and hidden away.

He must have tried the patience of his professors though, with his refusal to even use non-free JavaScript - for instance he wouldn't use the Zoom video conferencing web client. Given that you don't have to install anything on your machine and JS is heavily sandboxed, that does seem a bit too idealistic!

But hopefully he made his professors think a little and maybe they'll even opt for true FOSS solutions in future. Like this Jitsi Meet that I'd never heard of before - I'm looking forward to trying it instead of Google Meet next chance I get.

In case you haven't seen it, the paper is here - https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/illusion-of-thinking (PDF linked on the left).

The puzzles the researchers have chosen are spatial and logical reasoning puzzles - so certainly not the natural domain of LLMs. The paper doesn't unfortunately give a clear definition of reasoning, I think I might surmise it as "analysing a scenario and extracting rules that allow you to achieve a desired outcome".

They also don't provide the prompts they use - not even for the cases where they say they provide the algorithm in the prompt, which makes that aspect less convincing to me.

What I did find noteworthy was how the models were able to provide around 100 steps correctly for larger Tower of Hanoi problems, but only 4 or 5 correct steps for larger River Crossing problems. I think the River Crossing problem is like the one where you have a boatman who wants to get a fox, a chicken and a bag of rice across a river, but can only take two in his boat at one time? In any case, the researchers suggest that this could be because there will be plenty of examples of Towers of Hanoi with larger numbers of disks, while not so many examples of the River Crossing with a lot more than the typical number of items being ferried across. This being more evidence that the LLMs (and LRMs) are merely recalling examples they've seen, rather than genuinely working them out.

I think it's an easy mistake to confuse sentience and intelligence. It happens in Hollywood all the time - "Skynet began learning at a geometric rate, on July 23 2004 it became self-aware" yadda yadda

But that's not how sentience works. We don't have to be as intelligent as Skynet supposedly was in order to be sentient. We don't start our lives as unthinking robots, and then one day - once we've finally got a handle on calculus or a deep enough understanding of the causes of the fall of the Roman empire - we suddenly blink into consciousness. On the contrary, even the stupidest humans are accepted as being sentient. Even a young child, not yet able to walk or do anything more than vomit on their parents' new sofa, is considered as a conscious individual.

So there is no reason to think that AI - whenever it should be achieved, if ever - will be conscious any more than the dumb computers that precede it.

If you like cheaper and nicer, the next step is making your own wraps. There's a bit of a knack to it, so they'll get better with practice. Basically just flour (plain white flour is fine, or add a variable portion of maize flour (I'm avoiding calling it corn flour because that generally means corn starch, and here you want actual flour made from ground dried corn)), drop of oil (optional), salt & water.

Noticeably better than the off-the-shelf ones, due to all the preservatives and what-not that you don't need to add if you're not planning to keep them on a supermarket shelf for 3 months.

Definitely looks pretty cool! Never heard of it before, I got this from their "about us" (although I still feel I don't fully know who they are or what their goals are):

About Mapcarta

Explore the globe with Mapcarta—the open map that unites the world through the collective knowledge of OpenStreetMap, Wikipedia, Wikidata, and other open projects.

Contributions

Help us improve our map—edit our open data sources directly. Your updates typically appear on Mapcarta within a few weeks.

Our Mission

At Mapcarta, our goal is to provide intuitive maps and insightful guides crafted from shared open knowledge—to foster curiosity, connection, and understanding.

Open, Independent, Sustainable

Mapcarta is built on open data and Creative Commons resources. Your contributions to projects like OpenStreetMap and Wikidata directly improve Mapcarta and support open, sustainable mapping for all.

Could be a type of emotional dysregulation? Sensitivity to emotional stimuli can lead to disproportionately angry outbursts, breaking down in tears or other inappropriate behaviours. A naive way to try and fix this is just to suppress all response i.e. sit there and stew.

There are better techniques for learning how to appropriately express and regulate emotions though, such as CBT and DBT.

«There has been "a full and comprehensive investigation" which came to the conclusion that "the errors that had been made had not been deliberate" and that "there had been no misleading or lying", MI5's barrister said.»

Bull-fucking-shit. They are still trying their best to cover up and save face as much as they can.

Cute pic, but what is going on with those cat biscuits in the background? At first I thought that cat must be spoilt if the monks are shelling out for those fancy cat-bix. But they look like supermarket shelves - did the monks meditate in a supermarket? I even did a reverse image search hoping to find the original image, but just found lots of the exact same, with that same background.

The police even have the audacity to try and moralise about this: "As a result of her selfish actions that day, she is now behind bars and her four children will now be without their mother for a considerable period of time."

No, it's a result of our useless coppers choosing to waste taxpayer money harassing adults for entertaining themselves in ways that cause no harm to anyone else. Selfish actions my arse. You guys are the ones who have kept those kids from seeing their mum, nobody else. How about the police do something more worthwhile with their time, like investigating burglary and other anti-social criminality.

I guess it's just not easy to make it harder for fraudulent claims without throwing up more and more obstacles for genuine claimants. It's especially problematic when dealing with health benefits, as genuine claimants tend to have less energy and drive for filling out applications and attending assessments than fraudsters who are in good health. Fraudulent claims is a real problem and something does have to be done - there have been cases where gangs have been siphoning off tons of money by creating claims on an industrial scale.