David Hood

Thank you. Today I learned.

Here is where I am just not placing what book Whitcombe is referring to. Could you give my memory a jog?

This is the 2nd time a major government report from Deloitte has been found to contain errors likely generated by AI.

First in Australia and now, as The Independent has confirmed, in a major healthcare policy paper for the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador #nlpoli #AI #deloitte

Seasonal Climate Outlook October - December 2025 ENSO-neutral (El Niño – Southern Oscillation) conditions remain present in the tropical Pacific, but a La Niña Watch is in effect.

👀

Seasonal Climate Outlook October - December 2025 | Earth Sciences New Zealand | NIWA share.google/YJQeLHGbdxvo...

The Shift #2: COP30 in a multipolar world These are my reflections on COP30, the first climate COP that I have attended. I would like to thank the Toha Network for supporting my travel, Brazil's Ministry of Finance for the invitation to pre-C...

I’ve written about #COP30 for The Transition(s) Lab.

When the gavel came down in Belém, there was no major diplomatic breakthrough, but that’s not all that COPs are about these days. In a multipolar world, that’s likely a good thing.

Read more here: the-transitions-lab.ghost.io/the-shift-2-...

The ‘Danish model’ is the darling of centre-left parties like Labour. The problem is, it doesn’t even work in Denmark | Cas Mudde This week’s local elections are the latest reminder that when social democrats move rightwards, they’re making a mistake, says academic and author Cas Mudde

Cas Mudde spells out what has become largely the consensus among researchers: moving right on immigration will not weaken the far right nor strengthen social democracy. If your reaction is "but in Denmark" please at least familiarize yourself with Danish politics

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

That should, of course, have read the delicate art of fitting the place name Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu on a map.

Map showing Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu

I am putting out #30DayMapChallenge Day 24 - Places and theirnames - early, as the next few days may be complicated.
The delicate art of fitting Map on a map (made in Inkscape)

I have a live example/object lesson in AI sessions I run of "read the points from this graph into a table with X and Y columns" - "Sure thing" - "Make a chart of the data in the table" - "Sure thing" and the audience can see that it is not the same graph (accompanies lesson about trust/verify & AI)

Stop worrying about terraforming Mars and start preventing the venusification of Earth.

In various meetings, I have been trying to encourage people to steer away from using the term AI, as a next to meaningless term that obscures more than it illuminates, in favour of naming the specific technologies.

Well, the source that kicked it off is saying they misread what was going on bsky.app/profile/erni...

CORRECTION: A *third* potato has been named after Prince.

Update November 22. We’ve updated this article after realising we contributed to a perfect storm of misunderstanding around a recent change in the wording and placement of Gmail’s smart features. The settings themselves aren’t new, but the way Google recently rewrote and surfaced them led a lot of people (including us) to believe Gmail content might be used to train Google’s AI models, and that users were being opted in automatically. After taking a closer look at Google’s documentation and reviewing other reporting, that doesn’t appear to be the case. Gmail does scan email content to power its own “smart features,” such as spam filtering, categorisation, and writing suggestions. But this is part of how Gmail normally works and isn’t the same as training Google’s generative AI models. Google also maintains that these feature settings are opt-in rather than opt-out, although users’ experiences seem to vary depending on when and how the new wording appeared. It’s easy to see where the confusion came from. Google’s updated language around “smart features” is vague, and the term “smart” often implies AI—especially at a time when Gemini is being integrated into other parts of Google’s products. When the new wording started appearing for some users without much explanation, many assumed it signalled a broader shift. We’ve revised this article to reflect what we can confirm from Google’s documentation, as it’s always been our aim to give readers accurate, helpful guidance.

If you have been sharing that Malwarebytes article on the Gmail thing, you should note the giant correction up top.

www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/20...

Anglo-celtic could be a thing, I guess, if you were the type of English racist who is still mad about the Roman, Norman, Viking, and Saxon invasions, and yearn for the once Celtic Britain but even then, you should also be mad about the Angles, so nah, Not a Thing

since the "google is now training gemini on your email contents" thing keeps bumping around here: it's _not happening_. I say this not to defend google but because I know a lot of people that have broken their filtering and made their lives much more annoying from sheer misinformation.

so apparently corningresearch.com ...

... is the new jutktmicronics

this from a terrific WSJ story about Aidan Toner-Rodgers, an MIT student who published a seemingly groundbreaking paper on AI and productivity -- on data that now seems utterly sketchy

(gift link): www.wsj.com/economy/aida...

Full post:

mikemales.substack.com/p/social-med...

A visualisation of the lighthouses of the Pacific

#30DayMapChallenge · Day 21 · Icons. Lighthouses of the Pacific. Yes...I've done lots of lighthouse maps but not in this projection. I still like it—there's nothing like path-traced points of light realistically rendered.

#rayshader adventures, an #rstats tale

Please retweet this. It is not good for this sort of misinformation to spread as wide as it already has.

Trans Young People Face 50+ Tests and Hours of Intrusive Assessments in the PATHWAYS Puberty… The publication of the PATHWAYS puberty blocker trial protocols reveals how trans young people are required to complete more than fifty…

This piece from @mimmymum.bsky.social on the UK trial is worth reading for folks in NZ - the trial is coercive, beyond intrusive, and mirrors conversion practices. medium.com/@mimmymum/tr...

For #30DayMapChallenge Day 23 - Process - One of the suggestions was write a tutorial about making another day's map. My Day 16 map had the most things I wanted to note to remind future me, in particular some #DuckDB in #rstats and using NZTM2000 as a coordinate system.

github.com/thoughtfulbl...

Perth / WA: Continued community transmission of BA.3.2* at the local prevalence minimum.

There is no departure, so far, from the prevalence minimum discernible in the epidemiological data. One third of clinical specimens in the week ending Nov 9 were BA.3.2.

bsky.app/profile/domi...

Trigger warnings abound, but this is an important read.

No, because I started school and didn't know what other kids were talking about.

For those felling nostalgic for the radio stories, A number of libraries have the the Don Linden radio story compilation CDs put out about 20 years ago (we bought them at the time)

Later in the 70s I think (but we didn't get a TV until around 74 so earlier is a mystery to me)

Sat 21 Nov 1970 TV listings

Sun 22 Nov 1970 TV listings

Papers Past is a source of TV program listings

Oh so when an owl only shows up sometimes it’s “irruptive” but when I do it I’m “unreliable.”