Torbjörn Björkman

man in cap Everything is potato.

Mood.

Australian history to scale a very long line that says aboriginal australia and a very small line that says 1788-2014

Probably the loveliest thread you will read today, full of beauty and kindness and improvised owl physio

Sean Connery in Dr No’s lair, about to go up a short flight of stairs when he spots a portrait of the Duke of Wellington on a stand. The original had been stolen from the National Gallery the previous year, and this was a joke by the Bond production team

Today is the 63rd anniversary of the London premiere of Dr. No, which means (well, obviously) it’s time to tell you a ridiculous shaggy dog story about the theft of not one but two portraits of the Duke of Wellington

Incidentally, if you want to know a little more about the casting of the first Bond film (and assuming one long, slightly silly thread of weird history isn’t enough for you for one day), I can help with that

Computer is not person. Person is meat. Meat is not computer. Computer is computer.

(chicagoan full disclosure: I have nothing to do with the place, except i've landed at o'hare once and my great grandfather once lied on his entry card to help build it for a few years)

As Chicago now, or Chicago then, and how deep is you experience with either, really?

THANK YOU!

Screed sorely needed, and I've heard it's echos from all sorts of people who were around in the 1990's, when the term AI was last in vogue (or was there another wave between then and now? I forget.)

Do I care that a tree may have fallen in a forest and nobody heard it?

"it might be conscious but unable to express it! You can't know."
O-kay... That sounds like you are trying to argue for existence of a soul. Why have you never argued this for animals or other objects that didn't have multibillion dollar marketing campaigns?

Part of same thing "it seems like in humans consciousness just appeared when sufficiently complex systems. So you can't rule it out for LLMs"

Yes we can. The way it makes mistakes is exactly indicative of nonconciousness.
Of a lack of any sense of comprehension of its inputs.
And of self awareness.

as a girl with a PhD in natural language processing and machine learning it's actually offensive to me when you say "we don't know how LLMs work so they might be conscious"

I didn't spend 10 years in mines of academia to be told ignorance is morally equal knowledge.

We know exactly how LLMs work.

is there linguistic desceptivism?

There's something so incredibly incongruous of seeing all of these regime guys with carbines while none of them are actually fully kitted up nor conducting themselves in anyway that suggests they think they will need those weapons

Motherfucker you are carrying an AR and wearing a baseball cap

It's very funny to assume that the work ethic you need to be an astronaut should be the work ethic of everyone.

Does everyone who wakes up at 4:30 am get to walk on the moon? No? Then fuck off.

Holding up a sign that says "human nature is contingent" and all the tech bros and evo psych clowns hiss like vampires seeing a cross.

"Does you mother know" for a remake of Psycho.

#LifeGoals

When a party gets to try to form the next government, the job they have is basically to buy the votes of sufficiently many other parties, and the currencies they deal in are policies and ministerial portfolios. Which sometimes leads to the minting of new portfolios.

I have seen some headscratcher cases here in Scandinavia too, and I think it is also somewhat generic to parliamentary systems with proportional representation. When the coalition building starts, there is a need to balance not just power, but also raw numbers of portfolios between the parties.

good explanation on the rash of weird Israeli ministries - had been wondering about this

Solar becomes main source of electricity in the EU for first time More than half of the EU’s electricity in the second quarter of 2025 came from renewable energy

#Solar becomes main source of electricity in the #EU for first time. More than half of the EU’s #electricity in the second quarter of 2025 came from #RenewableEnergy
www.independent.co.uk/tech/solar-p...

Perfect. Alas.

@cathywilcox.bsky.social

Yup

Apple did something very similar to the people of Hong Kong in 2019, removing an app that allowed protesters to track police movements via crowdsourced information:

gizmodo.com/apple-sells-...