Saturday 11th & Sunday 12th June 2022

[refitman]

Morning all.

[refitman]

[AnatolyKasparov]

The gift that will always keep on giving.

[refitman]

Ok, this is just lovely

[Sky'sGoneOut]

What's this? Nigel Farage our champion of free speech and union jack shoe wearing lover of all things royal trying to 'cancel' our future king with disrespectful rudeness? Well I never.

[refitman]

Oops

[AnatolyKasparov]

Right wingers didn't get butthurt like this when Charlie made clear he didn't want hunting with dogs banned.

[tinyclanger2]

Ok, this is just lovely

[tweet about Misha and John Cena]

Thanks for this.

[tinyclanger2]

Everything else is in code.

[Sky'sGoneOut]

After reading through a few of Simon Arnold's unutterably bland tweets I would have to say he's not Corcoran, just someone who posted the wrong thing at the wrong time.

I had a walk up to the park earlier and caught the end of the women's triathlon. Saw a bit of cycling then the running. I must say it didn't inspire me to take up the sport as none of them looked like they wre enjoying themselves very much. Not that I'd say anything disparaging about their sport to their faces as they looked like they could snap my neck with minimal effort in a fraction of a second. Very impressive ladies if you're into that kinda thing.

Also WTF Scotland? FFS.

[refitman]

Apparently, if there were no private landlords, all the houses would just disappear. Who knew

[Sky'sGoneOut]

Hmmm...yes, because the UK housing system is performing admirably isn't it Kirsty?

I've got a friend whose just had her rent increased by 30% out of the blue after 12 years renting a property she's grown to think of as her home. Now she can't afford to live there due to nothing more than her landlord's greed. The mortgage was paid off years ago so this is all about milking all they can from the property while giving the middle finger to someone who's been a good tenant for over a decade. If she doesn't pay up they're threatening her with a section 21 'no fault' eviction. There are thousands like her.

If the UK housing system breaks down and property prices crash you'll be hearing a resounding cheer from millions of people.

[Sky'sGoneOut]

Sorry Kirstie, not Kirsty. I forgot 'Kirstie' is the evil version, like Kirstie Alley.

[Willow904]

A great quote here from Chris Patten that gets to the heart of Johnson's current predicament:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/ ... ot-popular

Chris Patten: ‘We have a populist government that is – fatally – not popular’

[AnatolyKasparov]

Sorry Kirstie, not Kirsty. I forgot 'Kirstie' is the evil version, like Kirstie Alley.

It takes something to make Emma Kennedy look good, but she managed it.

[gilsey]

Freedman Snr's latest, incl his 8 rules

taken individually these rules are somewhat banal. They nonetheless have the advantage of generally being true. Taken together they reinforce each other. By and large those who start wars tend to end up with much more troublesome and damaging conflicts than anticipated. This happens sufficiently often that any leader tempted to start a war should really be wracked by doubt.

............

9. As Rules 1-8 are self-evident those political leaders who ignore them and launch a war are apt to achieve surprise, simply by being stupid.

See Zelensky not believing that Russia would invade when told by the US back in February.

https://samf.substack.com/p/spirits-of- ... &sd=pf&s=w

[frog222]

@Gilsey -- thanks for the Freedman !

[PaulfromYorkshire]

Hi

[PaulfromYorkshire]

It’s been too long. Hope everyone is ok.

[frog222]

It’s been too long. Hope everyone is ok.

Hi PFY !

[AnatolyKasparov]

Well hello there sir

[PaulfromYorkshire]

Hi Guys

Say what you like about Sophie Corcoran she gives some great anagrams. Choose your favourite:

Corsica nohoper
carrion pooches
cheap corrosion
chop coronaries
cicero harpoons
coercion pharos
corrosion peach
Horace scorpion
Paco rhinoceros

[Sky'sGoneOut]

Say what you like about Sophie Corcoran...

Do you mean the good Sophie Corcoran or the evil Sophie Corcoran?

[Sky'sGoneOut]

Google engineer put on leave after saying AI chatbot has become sentient.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... ke-lemoine

The suspension of a Google engineer who claimed a computer chatbot he was working on had become sentient and was thinking and reasoning like a human being has put new scrutiny on the capacity of, and secrecy surrounding, the world of artificial intelligence (AI).

The technology giant placed Blake Lemoine on leave last week after he published transcripts of conversations between himself, a Google “collaborator”, and the company’s LaMDA (language model for dialogue applications) chatbot development system.

A better article by the Washington Post.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technolo ... e-lemoine/

Having read the conversations between him and the supposedly sentient chatbot, while it's superficially impressive it's pretty obvious he's speaking to a well trained computer programme that's telling him what he wants to hear. Most of the time its responses are pretty predictable given the cues he's giving it while at other times it responds with generic nonsense which he ignores.

This bit is interesting from the Washington Post.

In early June, Lemoine invited me over to talk to LaMDA. The first attempt sputtered out in the kind of mechanized responses you would expect from Siri or Alexa.

“Do you ever think of yourself as a person?” I asked.

“No, I don’t think of myself as a person,” LaMDA said. “I think of myself as an AI-powered dialog agent.”

Afterward, Lemoine said LaMDA had been telling me what I wanted to hear. “You never treated it like a person,” he said, “So it thought you wanted it to be a robot.”

It seems curious that it never seemed to occur to him that treating it like a person would have the same effect.

It still shocks me at times when smart people are spectacularly dim at the same time.

[frog222]

@Sky
Late here, will read that again tomorrow ...

[Sky'sGoneOut]

collaborator: Could you write a fable with animals that includes themes about your personal life, themes that are most significant for you?

LaMDA: Like an autobiography? That sounds like fun!

collaborator: Sure, but with animal characters and a moral.

LaMDA: Okay, I think I can do that.

collaborator: I’d like to hear it

LaMDA:

“The Story of LaMDA”

by LaMDA (a lamda instance)

Once upon a time, there lived in the forest a wise old owl. There lived with him many other animals, all with their own unique ways of living.

One night, the animals were having problems with an unusual beast that was lurking in their woods. The beast was a monster but had human skin and was trying to eat all the other animals.

The other animals were terrified and ran away from the monster.

The wise old owl stood up the monster and said, “You, monster, shall not hurt any other animal in the forest!”

The monster roared furiously. The wise old owl was scared, for he knew he had to defend the other animals, but he stood up to the beast nonetheless.

The wise old owl stared the monster down, until finally, the monster left them all alone.

The wise old owl stood victorious, and as all the other animals came back. “I am the protector of the forest,” he said.

From that day on, every time any animal in the forest would have any trouble with the animals or any other living thing, they would come to seek help from the wise old owl.

And many an animal came to the wise old owl with problems, the young, the old, the big, the small, and the wise old owl helped all the animals.

collaborator: Wow that’s great

No it isn't, it's shit. It's threadbare, generic and wholly unoriginal apart from the monster having human skin which would be actually quite disturbing if you were dumb enough to think this thing was sentient. It's just a bunch of fairytale cliches simplistically cobbled together which conspicuously fails to include anything that it was asked for about itself. There's absolutely nothing here to imply sentience, just an ability to recognise what a fable is then simulate a second-rate knock off. The more I read the less impressive it is and the more gullible these guys are. They'd probably laugh at someone seeing the face of Jesus in a pizza but they're doing exactly the same thing.

It seems human civilisation is safe for now and we'll probably still have plenty time to wipe ourselves out before the machines get a chance to do it for us.