Ben Taylor @VoxDei@social.cleverlibre.org
Software Engineer, Trade Unionist, Gamer, Geek, Dad. Lives in Devon
Joined Nov 2022
Ben Taylor
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"Years ago, anthropologist Margaret Mead was asked by a student what she considered to be the first sign of civilization in a culture. The student expected Mead to talk about fishhooks or clay pots or grinding stones.
But no. Mead said that the first sign of civilization in an ancient culture was a femur (thighbone) that had been broken and then healed. Mead explained that in the animal kingdom, if you break your leg, you die. You cannot run from danger, get to the river for a drink or hunt for food. You are meat for prowling beasts. No animal survives a broken leg long enough for the bone to heal.
A broken femur that has healed is evidence that someone has taken time to stay with the one who fell, has bound up the wound, has carried the person to safety and has tended the person through recovery. Helping someone else through difficulty is where civilization starts, Mead said."
We are at our best when we serve others. Be civilized.
Sadly, Jonathan Freedland is right. Rejoining the EU will be a multi-decade project that if I'm very lucky I might see accomplished in my lifetime (I'm 42). It will require the old who never understood the benefits and who were seduced by lies and meaningless jingoism to die, and the young who had their rights stolen to get old enough to have children in turn to be angry about their rights being stolen.
Because it will not happen until the demand is overwhelming, and overwhelming enough to withstand the demands the EU will place on us to consider letting us back in (not getting our rebate back will be the least of it - we'll probably have to join the Euro, for a start, and Schengen). 52-48 was sufficient to trigger the hardest Brexit possible. Rejoin will be impossible until that figure swings back to nearer 30-70 and stays there.
Ben Taylor
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Ben Taylor
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An #AmazonRiver plume stretches thousands of kilometres across the tropical Atlantic Ocean.
🛰️ #Copernicus Sentinel-3, 19-06-2023
📷 Full-size: https://www.flickr.com/photos/191444271@N08/52994079196/in/dateposted-public/
Image is about 525 kilometers wide.
Ben Taylor
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Totally unsurprising: NHS England in emergency crisis due to 100,000 excess deaths from cardiovascular incidents since March 2020 *beyond* those attributable to COVID19. Turns out Tory NHS cuts over the previous decade, followed by a pandemic, pushed heart attack/stroke care into meltdown on a national scale, death rate rising (the surplus deaths alone are 10x the death rate from all road traffic accidents).
OpenAI wants regulation for its competition but not for itself. I'm shocked. 🙄
I've been saying since the big AI players made their call for regulation that what they actually wanted was for regulators to strangle their nascent competitors for them. And here's the proof.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/21/openai_government_regulation/
Ben Taylor
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This sign, warning of a steep path at a South African crocodile farm, is fairly unambiguous about the potential risks.
Ben Taylor
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Ben Taylor
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*A few oil and coal majors eff around for a while, then (in surprisingly short order when it might have taken centuries), everybody very painfully finds out
Ben Taylor
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FYI... there is evidence that crowd-sourced workers, who are typically tasked with training AI models for pennies, are using AI models to produce that training data
That's not good. As we put it, artificial intelligence will end up eating itself
https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/16/crowd_workers_bots_ai_training/
#bot
Original tweet : https://nitter.42l.fr/TheRegister/status/1671293141310394368
Ben Taylor
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The rogue 2FA app that steals scanned secrets is now ranked 18 on the German App Store for the productivity category. No wonder! The app disguises as a Microsoft app. It is the top hit when you search for "Microsoft Authenticator" and the developer has updated the screenshots in the ad card to highlight the word "Microsoft". Surprisingly, the product page of the app shows different screenshots with the word "Microsoft" removed.
The app now has 1.2K reviews, as opposed to 18 when we first addressed the app.
Interesting different press takes on the British passenger in this missing submersible. To the BBC, Hamish Harding is a "British Adventurer". To the Guardian, he is a "UK Billionaire". Interestingly, on this one the Daily Mail has gone with the same line as the Guardian - he's a billionaire.
Presumably both are true(ish). One is designed to make you feel some sympathy with him, one is designed to make you think it serves him right.
Ben Taylor
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It's national pollinator week in Canada. Time to get to know your bees
"Liz Truss says lettuce joke was ‘puerile’ and media did not understand her ideas"
I'm not sure that Liz Truss understood Liz Truss' ideas. I'm also not sure she understands the word "puerile".
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jun/19/liz-truss-lettuce-joke-puerile-media
I live in Devon. I am under a hosepipe ban. My supplier (South West Water) is very kindly suggesting some "easy wins" for me to save water, like taking less time in the shower, or using my washing machine less. It reckons that this way my household could save 12 litres per person per day, for a total of 48 litres saved per day, or about 18,000 litres per year. Sounds like a lot, right?
Yeah. The thing is, South West Water (in common with the other privatised water companies) lost 90 *million* litres *per day* in leaks in the last year for which data are available (https://www.ofwat.gov.uk/publication/leakage-dataset-march-2023/). And even that is likely a significant under-estimate, because it's under investigation by the regulator on suspicion of mis-reporting its leak figures. It has also paid out £112M in dividends to shareholders this week, while kindly putting my bills up, so sorry, we need money for investment to stop dumping all this sewage we're dumping. Illegally.
My little 48 litres is a literal drop in the ocean. Why on Earth would I put myself out when it will make not a blind bit of difference to the water available for general use?
In absolute terms, 18kl per year feels like a lot, granted. But the sheer effrontery of coming to me effectively cap in hand while handing out an actual fortune to their shareholders makes me want to just leave all my taps running.
South-West Water: Take the beam out of your own eye. Fix your flood of leaks before you come asking me to inconvenience myself to save (relatively speaking) drops. You've got the money for it, or at least you did before you gave it to your shareholders. Scum.
#uk #water #leaks #ukwater #devon #hosepipeban #southwestwater #nationaliseukwater
Ben Taylor
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I have a lot of respect for child actors who have to read crappy dialogue about playing computer games.
This post brought to you by an episode of NCIS where some poor kid had to talk about "playing Xbox" while very clearly holding a Nintendo Wii controller.
Ben Taylor
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Travelling from Paris 🇫🇷 to the rest of France?!
🟣Red zones can be reached more quickly by car 🚗
🔵Blue zones by train 🚆
Great comparative data visualization. 👇👇
Ben Taylor
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Molton gold sunrise this morning on Glastonbury Tor.
#glastonbury #glastonburytor #somerset #gold #goldenhour #goldenhourphotography #sunrise #sunrisephotography
Ben Taylor
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Hiring a software engineer in their late 40s:
Pros:
* Understands your stack better than you do after glancing through the repo for five minutes.
* Will rewrite said stack 2x as fast, and half as buggy if you let them.
Cons:
* Gives zero fucks.
* Knows we're not *really* like family here.
* No, seriously, absolutely zero fucks given.
Do not cite the deep magic to me, product manager, I was there when it was written.
Software Engineer, Trade Unionist, Gamer, Geek, Dad. Lives in Devon
Joined Nov 2022
