University I was at in the 90s had a Cognitive Sciences department that was computing + psychology, because their big research speciality was AI. And yet... I didn't hear much about it for the next 20 years. I'm hoping we can go back to that, working out how it's useful, not how to grift with it.
I thought Ed Davey *liked* silly things?
(Meanwhile here in NZ we have the various significant people on one side and animals / nature on the other, with no automatic monarch. Is that more or less silly? Sir Edmund Hillary *and* a little blue penguin?)
Any time I take Te Huia between the Tron and Auckland, there's plenty of nice countryside views, but my favourite bits are where the train runs parallel to the road and I can look at all the traffic I'm not stuck in. Driving fixed-route distance like that feels so *futile*.
... Which means less grandstanding and more, just, stuff, thoughts, even though they mainly are politics or comedy. Comedy because it's fun, and politics because that's people and people matter, rather than using these as crampons on the greasy influencer ladder.
Main feed with occasional side-quests / rabbit-holes. I never got into Twitter - it felt like lots of people trying to prove they could have gone into comedy, or politics, which, why do I want to read that? But Bluesky is clearly a temporary gathering, not a place to try and accumulate status...
Nah, we already have Andy Zaltzman :D
Full-on sporfling in the lunch room at the expression on his face. He's clearly just never spoken to someone who doesn't already agree.
I'm really feeling this at the minute. I'm an R&D person who moved to NZ a decade ago, because there was interesting work in my field and now... Well, I have a job, but I cannot find an R&D one, and the people I know who have them are worried. Why waste so many people's skills this way?
I think Kiwis are more default-aware of this, because of how often it's tomorrow here, or yesterday elsewhere - Superbowl Sunday is on Monday morning - and because so many have family overseas. Plus in our nearest neighbour, it's 8:45, 9:30, 10:15, 10:45, 11:15 *and* 11:45 AM right now :D
I'm going to be That Person: putting women on a pedestal is still sexism. Sometimes called 'benevolent sexism', though it isn't kind to anyone. Can we just be allowed to be... human beings? Maybe accomplished, maybe not, maybe all the things, maybe none? Fuck.
See also US-centrism on the internet, where my partner thought the clocks were changing on March the 8th here in NZ, because he'd seen so much mention of it online, but it's not until April the 5th here. (And they're going the other way :D )
From the story updates, it sounds like it really helped out sales at the waterfront brasserie it was stuck in front of :D
Is this the charismatic leader of a new hircine cult?
I had to explain to some people in NZ the other day that the UK does not even come close to being self-sufficient in food. I think people here are so used to it they assume it's just normal to produce *this* much food.
But mostly, I don't think people *are* dying on that particular hill. And I don't think isolating one case where the conformist imagination-crushing technology doesn't use as much energy as you might think! Compared to things it is not like! is really offering much.
Many people who are not the people complaining about how much worse search is these days? (I'm one of them. I'm not usually searching for capitalism-friendly things like 'where's the hottest new coffee place', and the ability to search for anything else has really suffered.)
Plus there's how much of this is building the infrastructure for adding unwelcome almonds to every meal. If no-one remembers life without almonds, we can start selling them meals entirely made of Brazil nuts! Grown in space!
I think people are mostly complaining about almonds they didn't order but keep having to pick off their dinner, or shrug and eat anyway. Unwelcome almonds are all waste, and looking at their water use is a way to quantify how much of one.
I think it's the overall impact people are looking at, though - like all the per-query numbers don't take into account the high, ongoing energy cost of training models and their replacements. Is it useful to cherry-pick the lowest numbers for comparison?
And do you have numbers for that, not a narrative on that?
Have you got numbers on that? The ones I saw were oddly tilted, like they compared a typical day's highest-res YouTube use to a single LLM query.
Here's a useful guide to setting things up to default to the 'web' results tab - no AI or shopping results at the top, though you can switch to other tabs if you want. It's made my life less shit, anyway.
tenbluelinks.org
Bah, it thinks a blackbird and a thrush are the same thing. USian?
Very much enjoying the kΔkΔpΕ nest cam at the moment. There's two chicks! And lots of feeding happening!
www.doc.govt.nz/our-work/kak...
I was adopted, into a family that did business and languages and was mystified by all the practical sciences I was into. Later I got in contact with my birth family... Yep, my bio parents met while (both) volunteering on a preserved steam railway. Engineers for generations back there.
One of my grandmothers was the (pseudonymous) face of the family business's cook book, promoting their brand of flour - not sure how that counts in terms of in or out of the home, but either way it was a significant contribution! (Plus all the home-making for husband, sons etc.)
International woman of mystery!
I'm oddly fascinated by the '5x stretch' claim. Very stretchy fabrics like lycra-mix knit have 100% stretch, as in they go to 2x their width. 5x does not sound... dimensionally stable.
And another big station named after one of the Australian states - nice to acknowledge their independence, by taking on some of their culture.
In which the world is not a video game, with a cheat code for infinity ammo. Who knew?
