Dan Davies

"It's called transfer learning if it works and overfitting if it doesn't."

I am possibly just in a bad mood after seeing so many professional writers and people with degrees re-tweeting that story about a funeral home offering to generate obituaries and eulogies for bereaved families and going oh how vulgar I could never

"look he hasn't memorized anything, he's not embellished anything, it is just a machine which reproduces an single original text presumably stolen from a real bard without compensation! My students just use wax tablets for everything, some of them can hardly memorize even 700 stanzas"

There must also have been quite a long period during which anyone reading a poem out of a book or from a scroll was treated with the kind of disgust and mockery that people get for using chat gpt today

If you want the world to take climate change seriously, acknowledging that areas are uninsurable as a result of climate change is a very basic step. You're going to see 'you must offer insurance' mandated largely by *the right* in an attempt to deny climate reality.

"initially I was rather scared, but it quickly turned out that he doesn't seem to understand what the word 'race' means, he just has strong and idiosyncratic opinions about various English counties and cities"

I occasionally tease the Bluesky Terminology Gardaí by saying that Éire and Môn are the only remaining British Isles, the rest having been conquered by Saxons Vikings and the liking

Presume that means British and Irish people of colour

probly down the quayside drinking prosecco or something yeh

a) because c)?

I mean, yeah, but, *sigh*, the Saudis killed 15,000 civilians in air-strikes on Yemen, & drove a "Civil war" that killed more than twenty times that number overall, and everyone went "pfft" about that, too...

caat.org.uk/homepage/sto...

Too much FOMO, not enough FOFU

"What we want from the butcher, the brewer & the baker are beef, beer & bread, not for them to be fabulously wealthy shop owners. What China wants from BYD & Jinko Solar are affordable EVs & solar panels, not Trillion-Dollar Market-cap stocks."
asiatimes.com/2024/07/chin...
bsky.app/profile/did:...

"joint pain! That's another thing that's got worse. When did you ever hear about someone not being able to play football because of their knee operation?

"there used to be a sense of community in this place 30 years ago, we would all talk to each other at school pick up time and hang around chatting at the playground in the park. Nowadays people can barely be bothered to stagger down to the over 50s coffee morning"

"when I was 24, the town centre was safe, you could have a right raucous night out with your mates and then stagger home. Now I'm 55 and it's a scary place, full of thugs drunk out of their mind and shouting"

same vibes

The point is not so much to get an effective treatment-response model, but to stop a part of the media environment for which there is clearly a lot of demand from being the exclusive domain of fascists.

Whenever I am tempted to see her as an aberration, I remember that Nice And Surprisingly Liberal Matthew Parris is the only columnist I have seen call for the extinction of a British ethnic group, in so many words.

Used to work with a Malaysian guy who told me that most of the secret island martial arts systems had names which basically translated as "how to hide a knife until you're ready to stab someone with it"

Sparring is its own dangerous illusion, because in sparring, when you see that your opponent is in trouble or getting tired you start going easier rather than harder. It's my go-to example for explaining wrong way risk in training courses.

Y'all BBC and Times pundits are so racist they've constructed Islamo-Judeo-Bolshevist terrorist conspiracies about New York Jews.

The manosphere is a conspiracy to prevent men from doing the things that actually are attractive to women (locking in and spending 18 hours a day posting on Bluesky)

I found this post while looking for something else and belatedly realized it is half man half biscuit lyrics

let me throw some fuel on the fire that is the discourse about boys getting laid!!! current-day manopshere content is not good at getting boys laid and that's an effect of the incentives at play. you cannot build an audience of resentful little virgins if you succeed at helping them to have sex

Remember this tweet:
"Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you're the one filming it.”

What if someone made a movie out of that? And, inexplicably, cast Ice Cube?

A mates of mine who coaches MMA reckoned that of all the university martial arts clubs, the one who would win in a fight are the capoeira society, because although their actual martial art is a bit of a joke, they are all mad keen and spend hours every day doing handstand push-ups

I would mainly be setting my hopes on them getting bored and doing increasingly bizarre Harlem Globetrotters style flips and tricks to see how extravagantly they could stunt on me before saving it

As you can confirm with anyone in the door keeping profession, the very most fearsome troublemakers in a licensed hospitality situation are scaffolders, because the nature of the job means they are incredibly strong and utterly fearless.

"paratrooper versus labourer" was practically a weekly feature due to the use of Snowdonia for training exercises, and much more of a sporting proposition than you'd think