Doug Clow

Well done everyone, you've all done really well this week! It has been yet another of those very difficult weeks, in so many ways. But you have been very brilliant, in so many ways, and made it through. Well done, and all the best for the weekend.

Ha ha, yes. Relatedly I was talking recently about the likelihood that pretty much everyone who would describe themselves as polyamorous is connected in a single world polycule, if one has loose definitions of a link. There is certainly a giant component in that network.

We are living in surreal times; hyperreality abounds. We beleaguered existentialists, clinging to materialism despite it all, sometimes strike the table to assert its existence, as Johnson refuted Berkeley ... and appropriately a table is one of the many incongruities in this photo.

This is fascinating study of an extraordinary dataset. Norwegian registry data captures marriages and long-term cohabitation. 8% of Norwegians are connected! I would have felt awkward dating an ex of my ex's new partner but hadn't clocked this is a widespread (but softening) implicit taboo.

www.maptap.gg March 13
100🎯 98🔥 100🎯 94🏅 93🏆
Final score: 959

Feel like I got lucky with the last two, literally never heard of them.

Great that NHS waiting lists are falling, but I note that if this rate of progress can be sustained (374k in 18 months), to clear the 7.25m waiting list it will take nearly 30 years.
The big picture puts it in context: www.bma.org.uk/advice-and-s...

Lost Doctor Who and the Daleks episodes discovered in 'ramshackle' collection The Doctor's assistant Peter Purves was invited to a screening of the episodes in Leicester.

I quite like Doctor Who but have friends and family who *really* like it and it is making me so happy how excited they are about these recovered lost episodes. It is good when things people like happen.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Turns out "sunshine" pushes it towards informal, which I suppose is similarly technically correct, but is potentially misleading. It gives "mon rayon de soleil" which is a literal rendering but fails to capture the idiomatic sense.

Yeah I was just thinking "pal" is a very particular form of address that inflects the sentence not on the formal-informal axis but on the friendly-aggressive one.

I'm completely unconvinced by the power of hypnosis to effect such a change but hormones absolutely do work and the guy was on stage at Trans Mission last night calling for trans rights now so he is working on it.

Oh for sure, the interesting thing to me isn't that this LLM can solve Sudokus, it's as an example of an LLM being able to run (very simple) computer code within its own transformer weights rather than having to run computer code using an external tool.

Yes, think you’re right - famously there aren’t great examples in English of formal gender-neutral forms of address that aren’t context-specific. “Ma’am” works though.

Good point :) It also seems to work with “Jane” vs “Mrs Smith”, or “dear friend” vs “esteemed guest” but those take longer to type.

This is great - if you want to force formal or informal second person in Google Translate to a language where they differ (eg French, German, Spanish), simply add “buddy” (or “mate” worked for me as a Brit) to get informal (tu, du, tú) or “sir” to formal (vous, sie, usted).

At the moment I have this rated as somewhere between “neat idea” and “bigger than the transformer” in terms of impact, which is quite a range. I’m sure if the latter it’ll become clear soon enough.

This is really interesting, if you are interested in LLMs. I am not in a position to evaluate how transformative (sorry) it will be but, as a non-expert, making LLMs much better at computation natively seems to me to open up a step-change in capability.

I think (long) term limits would be an improvement - and indeed a fully elected system.

Not sure about a fixed age limit: there are plenty of 80 year olds who are extremely capable. But if you don’t have term limits then most of them are going to have a period of not being able to discharge their duties properly before they die, and relying on them voluntarily stepping down won’t work.

I was hoping someone would make this: Minesweeper for the Strait of Hormuz in the browser.

Same! I'm on the large side so for some of them I can't even get my shoulder inside the straps. Happily, if the straps are too short for my shoulder to fit, I can carry them in my hand without scraping on the ground, and if they would scrape on the ground, I can fit them on my shoulder.

Yes it is an improvement to have it restricted to direct patronage rather than the (sometimes very distant) descendants of patronage, but we could definitely do a lot better!

And of course we retain the 26 Lords Spiritual (CofE archbishops plus 24 bishops), maintaining our distinction with Iran as (arguably) the only legislatures with seats reserved specifically for clerics.
(If you count the Guardian Council as part of the legislature - it can and does veto the Majlis.)

Hereditary peers to be removed from Lords as bill passes The bill abolishes the 92 seats reserved for peers who inherit their titles through their families.

The last hereditary peers will go from the House of Lords. A sensible move but does mean we lose the process for replacing individuals within the 90+2 remaining hereditary peers, strong candidate for the silliest byelections in the world. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

This drives me mad and I can't find a way to do it either, short of using specific sleep apps for the alarm. I have it set up for reminders to do key tasks, and I don't want the alarm going off if I've started on the task already, but I don't want to cancel it for tomorrow or the rest of the week.

You can read that from the data. Here are you results, transposed:

Bears 20 - 6 Sharks
Hippos >50 - 14,000 Snails

Convincing home win for the Bears and the Snails have completely smashed the Hippos and remain favourites for the quarter finals.

So what I'm taking from this is that if we want to defeat the mosquitoes we're going to have to team up with the snakes and the dogs at minimum and probably need to recruit a bunch of invertebrates to our side as well. Snake charming and dog training are fine but how do you command snails & bugs?

Very much not. The joy of being a habitual pessimist is having things turn out better than I expected.

*super quiet voice* And I still think the markets may be underpricing the down side

This is correct according to the International System of Units (SI) - but it’s worth noting that centipede and millipede are the older names by several centuries, or even a millennium or two if you count Latin.

Sorry, sorry.