I’d be interested on a study there.

I lot of therapy is taking emotions and verbalising them so that the rational part of the brain can help in dealing with things. Even a journal can help with that, so talking to an inanimate machine doesn’t seem stupid to me.

However therapists guide the conversation to challenge the patient, break reinforcing cycles, but in a way that doesn’t cause trauma. A chatbot isn’t going to be the same.

Watching Hong Kong get amalgamated into the rest of China after it was returned by the British has been so sad. They’ve raged. They’ve fought. But slowly they’ve been consumed.

It’s not sinking. It’s not a boat that sprung a leak. It’s staying exactly where it’s always been. It’s getting submerged by sea level rises.

Saying it’s sinking makes it sound like a local phenomenon. Sea level rises are global.

Otherwise known as “The collapse of the USA”.

It’s a sign that the AI companies are complicit in industrial level copyright violation. There was a recent US court decision that a book publisher brought again Anthropic. In it the judge rules that the use of the book contents was “spectacularly transformative” (and therefore “fair use”) because the resulting machine did not copy the work.

People are trying to prove the judge wrong. It does copy the work.

I don’t think Choke is as good myself. Still a good read but Survivor has stayed with with more in the years since.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

S to the I to the M to the P

You’re not alone. Exactly what I saw too.

“Pound of flesh” comes from Shakespeare. In “The Merchant of Venice” Shylock insists on being paid in flesh since the man that owes him money cannot pay. It’s normally used to signify somebody is holding a debt over someone’s head.

It’s nothing to do with violence on the rich. Just the opposite.

Of course, but the metric you choose for “effectiveness” is critical. In the current situation the metric must be “removal from office”.

Survivor by Chuck “Fight Club” Palahniuk.

After Fight Club I went on a spree of reading this guys work. Survivor was the last of his written before the Fight Club movie made it big. It was also released a couple of years before 9/11 which killed its chance of being made into a movie.

I think it highlights how being passive in the world isn’t enough to avoid doing bad things. You have to make your own choices to avoid a bad result. Interesting story structure and has some dark comedic moments too.

Add Brave New World by Aldous Huxley to the list. I think he actually managed to get closer to where we were heading before Trump. Things took a right turn though.

I agree. I’ve introduced it to a number of people and I find it’s a bit of a litmus test for me. If they come back with “that’s just stupid” I know they’re missing a sense of play that comes with messing with the rules of life.

We lost DA far too early, but he left us a wonderful gift.

You need to meet it’s bigger brother, the swan.

Where I live we get white swans, Canadian geese, and Egyptian geese. Egyptian are smaller and absolutely fine. Canadian will get angry and tell you to fuck off Swans are 50% bigger and will run you out of the county.

Space Ace!

Not some people.

At university I had an introductory C course where one assignment was to write a program that searched a 4x4 array of booleans for groups of cells set to true. Groups had to be rectangles, powers of 2 in width and height, and could wrap (i.e. they could go off the right edge and back on the left edge). We had to submit our programs by e-mail and printed form one week later. The prof. marked the paper versions and the TA ran and tested the digital. One slight problem, if you used the university owned printers, they charged for print outs. A few pence per page to cover costs and stop people abusing the rather nice high quality printers the computer faculty had.

I’d always enjoyed programming and whilst C was new to me, using another language wasn’t a big problem. As I worked on it I realised the problem wasn’t as straightforward as I first thought, but I spent a few hours on it that evening and had a solution I was happy with.

Penny was a student on the course whose approach to academia was memorization. She didn’t consume, process, and apply concepts. She just remembered them. Her favourite subject was maths. While the rest of us were struggling to derive some formula, she’d have just committed the process to memory.

Penny was complaining a lot on this programming assignment. She didn’t understand why the assignment was so hard for an introductory class. I didn’t judge. I know some people find programming hard, but I didn’t feel I could help her much without jeopardising my own mark. There’s only so much uniqueness in a small program and if she just copied my solution we’d both get penalised for plagiarism. I did mention to her the cases I’d found tricky to get right was when two groups overlapped. If one group completely covered a smaller one you’d only report the bigger one, but if not you’d report both groups.

I heard, through her boyfriend, that that week had involved many long evenings working on this assignment, but she turned up at the next class solution in hand. Obviously stressed, she carried a pile of paper of several hundred pages. She had written a program that consisted of an if-statement for every possible group size and location. About a hundred different possible groups. Each condition written with constant value indices into the array. To cope with the overlapping groups problem, checks for smaller groups also checked that no larger group also covered this area. No loops. No search algorithm. Just a linear program of if-statements.

Apparently debugging this has been a nightmare. Cut and paste errors everywhere, but when I’d told her about overlapping groups aspect it had blown her mind. There always seemed to be a combination she hadn’t accounted for. Multiple times she thought she was done, only to find a corner case she’d missed. And just to kick her when she was down, she’d paid for multiple printouts, each one costing about £10 only to find a problem afterwards.

This consistent A grade student who sailed through everything by relying on her memory had been broken by being asked to create an algorithm rather than remember one. She got credit for submitting a solution that compiled and solved some cases, but I doubt the professor got past the first page of that huge printout.

Penny had worked really hard for that D.

So I think, but I’m not sure, this is for group chats. Group chats are only encrypted to/from the server because the server broadcasts the message to each recipient. As the messages are unencrypted on the server, they can feed them to LLMs.

This is different to Signal. On Signal it’s your phone encrypting each copy of the message before sending to each recipient individually.