Tony Durham

UK-China talks "dangerous" - Trump.
Dangerous would be if the Royal Navy anchored off the US coast and Starmer told Trump, stop making nuclear weapons and killing protestors or we start shooting.

Brighton and Hove is introducing separate food waste bins. They argue that 38% of general waste is food, and it's better to compost it than burn it. Does that justify, economically or environmentally, the new infrastructure, extra truck journeys and two new plastic containers per household (+ bags)?

A silk worm is a clothes moth travelling backwards in time.

God bless America.

All known examples of consciousness are biological. Seth identifies some differences between living systems and *current* artificial ones. But without a good theory of C we don't know which of those differences are crucial.
Nothing here rules out the possibility of conscious robots.

Facebook offers two options: personalised ads or a paid, ad-free service. There isn't the third option of non- personalised ads, that some other sites offer.

If anyone wanted or needed this training the govt would not have to make it free. And if the AI was any good, users would not require training.

It's actually the Competition and Markets Authority. Sad that no actual dogs are involved.

BBC News says a watchdog will be investigating vets' prices.

Hard to describe something I could possibly hate more than “Machine that destroys books to consolidate corporate information dominance”

2/2 If brains were literally von Neumann computers this would be unremarkable. Data can be shoved around in RAM or disk, no probs. But in neural tissue? Easier to imagine concepts as *processes* which maintain their integrity as they move around, like little tornadoes or something. But how?🤔

It was an interesting interdisciplinary evening. My take-home fun fact was about neuroscience, not DNA.
Mice have populations of 'concept cells'. They're not interested in Jennifer Aniston so think 'cheese' perhaps. The patterns move around. The cells don't, obvs. 1/2...

A lot of people mistook those secret desert nuclear tests for the sun rising.

Well I guess predictive theories have an answer for this, mumble mumble efference copy mumble mumble... Whatever the mechanism, it is very effective!

I agree the 'stabilised image' account fails if there is no image. But surely a saccade could generate spurious optic flow? If not suppressed, it would make the world appear to be spinning around your head.

For once, the day brings some potentially useful updates to the software I use. With PDF annotations in Chrome, I hope I can sometime avoid firing up big, clunky Xodo. And the semantic search in Evernote might prove to be the first AI tool I actually incorporate into my daily work.

Only a person who has not read Orwell could call it the Board of Peace.

Google maps screen showing Greenland and North America. Search text is "lithium"

Partridges. Easier to carry the traditional 'brace'.

Grammelot. Another new word I have learned. Yesterday it was tomalley, which Rick Stein says is a lobster's brain and Wikipedia says is its hepatopancreas.

Wow, I had no idea anyone was analysing jazz tracks as quantitaively as this. These are the stats for Cannonball Addeley's 'This Here'. From the Jazzomat research project in Weimar, Germany. jazzomat.hfm-weimar.de/index.html

Fibre optic cables carrying sensitive financial data run close to the site of the new Chinese embassy in London. Should we panic?
(1) fibre is physically much harder to tap into than copper
(2) the financial data is strongly encrypted... I mean, it is strongly encrypted, isn't it??

Picture or it didn't happen.

Renewing an insurance policy which has gone up 20% year on year. Shop around, they say. But most of the brands are owned by the same people.

Probably more to do with Greenland's mineral resources than its perceived size. Of course property developer Trump likes the idea of owning lots of land, but the pressure for acquisition comes from corporate interests with their eye on lithium and stuff.

An interesting finding though hardly shocking or unexpected. The AIs are doing their job uncomfortably well.
Moral: don't try to shoehorn AI into traditional copyright law. If you want the law to control this kind of thing, new concepts are required.

Trying to text a friend, sent it by mistake to someone I met on a Latin music course about 10 years ago. He was surprised, called me back and we ended up having a nice chat.

I have only seen Greenland's featureless white wastes while flying LHR-SFO over the pole, but it looked like the kind of place where an invading force could be seriously inconvenienced by jamming GPS.

Lt Gen Leopoldo Galtieri in a white ceremonial uniform in 1981. Image from Wikipedia.

With Trump threatening to take over Greenland I am surprised we don't hear more comparisons to the 1982 invasion of the Falklands by Argentina's dictator Leopoldo Galtieri.

Suppose it could identify the bot that generated the sample, and reconstruct the prompt...