I read this fascinating thread while listening to Qobuz and by sheer coincidence, this track came on and it seems horribly appropriate:
#IfYouTolerateThisYourChildrenWillBeNext Manic Street Preachers on Qobuz https://open.qobuz.com/track/55341288
https://mastodon.social/@sellathechemist/116075306722957554
@… - The Russians cannot be trusted. At best the Russians will buy time, and then have another go.
When will European governments call a spade a spade and really push to disconnect from Russian oil and gas? If that means buying it from the US interim so be it. But then really push hard for energy and military security.
Russia is NOT going away. Nor is its hatred of Europe which is why the've been waging war on us in myriad ways for the last 20 years.
4/end
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/14/alexei-navalny-poisoning-death-russia-frog-toxin
A: "I don't understand how you're so relaxed when you don't hear from the kids. Everyone in my family is like, 'msg me right when you get home!'"
me: "Ah, [13yo] is fine. He went home and is 100% watching videos when he's not supposed to be, hoping we forgot about him so that he can get away w/ as much screen time as he can. If he were stuck on the subway or something, he'd have messaged. Actually, I'd be more worried if he DID message.&qu…
from my link log —
Towards fearless macros.
https://lambdaland.org/posts/2023-10-17_fearless_macros/
saved 2026-02-15 https://
One of those things about claims of “AGI” is that to really build a human-like intelligence we’d have to simulate a human brain as whole because 1. it’s the only thing we know that produces human intelligence and 2. no one knows how it actually works.
Because of (2) it’s irrelevant what anyone says about LLMs or any other technology (with the exception of simulating a whole brain)—you can’t know if a technology is intelligent like a human because we don’t know what that means or how that works.
Fun thing, it turns out it’s impossible to simulate a whole brain with the resolution required (basically quantum physics level), and you’d have to emulate a chemical and physical environment for the brain as well (it will also need a body etc.).
You’d also have to simulate other humans with brains from which the brain can learn; but to simulate those you’d have simulate evolving humans from single-cell organisms first etc etc ad infinitum
More than 500 writers, actors, and technologists launch the Creators Coalition on AI to push standards for how AI is trained and used across creative industries (Chris Gardner/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/gen
Personal information associated with airport operations, vendors, and potentially some traveler-facing services may have been exposed in a breach at Tulsa Airports Improvement Trust (TAIT).
The official announcement, however, is disconcertingly vague.
https://flytulsa.com/news/notice-of-da
While helping my mum with something recently, I've noticed that her #GMail started featuring a banner that she ran out of space, and mails will stop arriving in less than a month. As expected, she never even noticed it. On the other hand, I had two thoughts about it.
Firstly, of course, #Google are shameless assholes (Microsoft's even worse, as I boosted at some point before). Mom's new phone came with Google Photos preinstalled in place of vendor's gallery, and of course it automatically started making backups of her photos and movies in the "cloud", or as I'd like to call it, to pedophiles. The photos finally filled up the free space, and Google started doing everything to convince her to buy more space. I honestly doubt she'd be able to figure out that she needed to turn these backups off and wipe them; if anything, I suspect she'd just start hopelessly removing photos from the phone, which might not have helped at all.
Secondly, it's that if such a thing happened to me, I probably wouldn't even know, because I'm reading my mail via a mail client. So I wouldn't ever have seen their banner. Well, unless they also send a mail about it, and my mom missed it among all the spam.
#GAFAM
I have written a little arrangement of "Comptine d'un autre été: L'Après-midi" (aka "the Amelie song" by Yann Tiersen), for a mixed ensemble (flute, piano, violin and cello), in the rare case someone needs one tomorrow (I actually needed it):
https://musescore.com/user/79969672/sc
from my link log —
Connecting an ASR33 Teletype to an ESP32.
https://www.revk.uk/2020/12/connecting-asr33-teletype-to-esp32.html
saved 2020-12-08