Raef Meeuwisse

2025 spelt out in disco lights with a mirror ball inside the "0". AI generated image.

Wishing everyone a much better 2025 than they are expecting.

2024 was 'hard-won and free,' Zelensky says in New Year's Eve message "We Ukrainians know what it means not to wait for what tomorrow will bring, but to fight for every single day, and every year of freedom," President Volodymyr Zelensky said.

⚡️ 2024 was 'hard-won and free,' Zelensky says in New Year's Eve message.

"We Ukrainians know what it means not to wait for what tomorrow will bring, but to fight for every single day, and every year of freedom," President Volodymyr Zelensky said.

With what seems to be a predominantly American platform, I’m not sure everything travels between here and the other side of the Atlantic.
I’m enjoying the new flavour enormously, but we are going to need a little time and tolerance.
Love and understanding.

Being opinionated sure isn’t a walk in the park. 😄

"...his wife flew on a 737..." which had a bird strike that caused one total engine failure, with the plane then unable to sustain circuit altitude.

Clearly there must be *some* edge cases where the 737 cannot sustain altitude on one engine.

Possibly. My wife's 737 incident, which also suffered a single-engine bird strike. The aircraft was unable to maintain its altitude and continued to lose height with each circuit, even while circling for around 20 minutes. It was a fairly full flight, which likely added to the challenge.

👇
bsky.app/profile/raef...

Plane loses too much altitude during downwind inspection pass.

Pilots aimed to fly over runway for inspection pass.

Plane starts to scrape runway part way down it.

Pilots try to pull up as they recognise too little runway left to stop safely.

If plane was in a downwind pass for visual inspection, gear would be in to help power needs (no landing expected).

Tailwind component adds to power requirements & causes plane to have insufficient power to hold altitude.

I am just a lapsed PPL H with a wife who was once on a 737 with single engine bird strike - but the evidence seems to point to the following possible scenario:

737 would struggle to sustain altitude with one engine out and a full flight, hence clean configuration with no flaps.
...

Yay!

Trending is here on Bluesky.

Finland-Estonia power cable hit in latest Baltic Sea incident The Finnish electricity grid’s head of operations says sabotage can’t be ruled out An undersea power cable linking Finland and Estonia broke down on Wednesday, Finland’s prime minister said, the latest in a series of incidents involving cables and energy…

Finland-Estonia power cable hit in latest Baltic Sea incident

AI generated cartoon image of a man in a loud jacket spraying fragrance around at a party.

Saw this bloke at a party spraying perfume everywhere. I think he was just trying to be the scenter of attention.

On the way to my first ever driving lesson. I'm getting even more nervous, now I've seen the instructor.

My wife told me this is the new dog Uber service.

Very large dog at driving wheel of very small parked car.

The driver does not look sufficiently qualified to me, but I am not going to say anything.

BBC One - Morning Live, What scams are currently happening on WhatsApp and how you can avoid them Hayley Hassall talks through WhatsApp scams around right now.

I am not on WhatsApp.

It's a great way to avoid data tracking too...

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p...

Scientists find new forms of life inside human bodies Researchers find obelisks, mysterious RNA molecules in human bacteria that challenge our understanding of viruses and microscopic life.

Have you heard of the tiny "obelisks" that live in us and no one really understands yet?

Scientists are still debating whether they're more like thetans or midi-chlorians.

www.earth.com/news/scienti...

It’s being reported tonight that Reform’s Treasurer Nick Candy is planning to visit America to meet Elon Musk after reports he could donate £100m to the party. The meeting could apparently come within days.

We need to make BlueSky the biggest social media platform on the planet

Text which reads: "Most systems marketed as 'AI' today are just advanced analytics, like a powerful calculator predicting outcomes based on patterns in data. True AI, capable of reasoning, learning independently, or acting autonomously, is still far from widespread. Many so-called 'AI risks' being discussed are actually issues with flawed programs that analyze data poorly or reinforce biases. These aren't AI risks—they're human errors amplified by technology. The real AI risks—systems making unchecked, complex decisions—will emerge when we move beyond analytics to actual intelligent autonomy. Until then, we need to stop confusing statistics with intelligence."

This appears not to have been a genuine AI system, but just a software program loosely leveraging rudimentary machine learning analytics.

The problems coming down the track from real AI systems will be much worse and potentially impossible for humans to deal with - legally or otherwise.

House

As China weaponizes the drone supply chain, Ukraine builds more parts at home Some 25 miles south of the Russian border, explosions rumble off in the distance more or less continuously. “We don’t even hear them anymore,” Zhenya chuckles from under first-person-view (FPV) goggl...

Imported Chinese drones are often laden with defective parts, and China is actively cutting off its exports of components and materials critical to drone building.

In the face of these threats, Ukraine’s drone industry is increasingly onshoring the production of more ambitious components.

AI Will Turn Our Lives into The Truman Show — Scientific American Large language models can create muddled, misinformed multiverses Technology Imagine a dystopian not-too-distant future, in which we each inhabit our own AI-driven digital filter bubble, crafted for u...

Could #AI isolate us in filter bubbles, fracturing shared reality for profit? A must-read.

A bookshelf organised into the shape of a Christmas tree by turning the books around, topped with a ribbon garland

I don't know who did this but I approve 📚🎄

#books #shelfie #Booksky 📚💙 #reading #bookshelf #holidays

I feel seen

A small study involving 50 doctors found that ChatGPT outperformed all doctors at diagnosing medical conditions, scoring an average of 90% compared to 74% with human doctors.

Surprisingly, the group of doctors allowed to use AI only did slightly better at 76%.

www.nytimes.com/2024/11/17/h...

Work in progress, but here you go. Lemme know who I've missed.

go.bsky.app/LjEKcMW

The brain microbiome: could understanding it help prevent dementia? Long thought to be sterile, our brains are now believed to harbour all sorts of micro-organisms, from bacteria to fungi. How big a part do they play in Alzheimer’s and similar diseases?

Interesting stuff.

www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

Cate Blanchett 'deeply concerned' by artificial intelligence impact The Australian actress says the threat of AI is

Cate Blanchett turns out to be very wise when it comes to #AI.
It is the impact on everyone and everything that is being underestimated. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

New book: The psychology of artificial intelligence This is a relatively short (35,000 words) single author book, first published in July 2024, and intended for the general reader interested in artificial intelligence and its similarities to human i…

In case you are wondering what "The Psychology of AI" is about I have put a summary on my blog tonyjprescott.com/2024/11/23/t...