No photo, but my wife has just seen a mink in our urban garden in a Herefordshire country town. :-(

#alienwildlife #ukwildlife #mink

Same here. :-)

Such powerful performers. In a suit and tie.

But also how unwatchably enshitified #youtube has become.

Female singer-songwriter Charlie Dore with Gareth Huw Davies on double bass.

We're excited to have the legendary songer-songwriter Charlie Dore play at the Ale House, Colwall, on Friday May 8th, with the hugely talented Gareth Huw Davies.

Tickets from Pindrop Events:

pindropevents.co.uk

#livemusic

He'll probably end up being elected President.

Your phone is a futuristic supercomputer compared to the technology available to NASA in the '60s

That's a very powerful image. It speaks to me, being from the Black Country. Thanks for posting this.

I recently rediscovered this article. It begins with the assertion: "in high dimensions, the volume of a sphere goes to zero."

It really is an astounding mathematical fact, at least to me, and the article by Toph Tucker covers it so well.

observablehq.com/@tophtucker/...
#math #maths

Here in the UK, as in many countries, honeybees are essentially livestock. They are not native. They compete with the native bees, bumblebees as we call them here. Native bees need more attention.

Quite. Honeybees here in the UK are really livestock. It's the native bumblebees that we should be caring about.

Most welcome. Cover/recover: please tell me more. :-)

@dannybate.bsky.social has some fascinating posts on this kind of thing.

Right next to the teapot.

Please can I have some sunshine and some good news?

Pale Blue Dot

A rare closeup photo of us all:

An interesting article containing a classic misuse of the word "refute".

Agree. A case in point: bsky.app/profile/news...

🤎

Arts & Crafts All Saints Church Brochhampton, built 1902, red sandstone, thatched roof, showing wooden bell tower.

Arts & Crafts All Saints Church Brochhampton, interior, graceful curved arches.

Arts & Crafts All Saints Church Brochhampton, interior, small pipe organ

Arts & Crafts All Saints Church Brochhampton, built 1902, red sandstone, thatched roof.

A walk in the sunshine today ended at All Saints Church, Brockhampton. It's an unusual and beautiful little place: thatched roof, a wooden belltower, graceful curved arches, and a lovely little pipe organ. Built 1902.

This is really fascinating, and to me it fits well with Carlo Rovelli's Relational QM. It's a perspective where, as @amandagefter.bsky.social puts it: "There is my universe and there is your universe, but there is no 'the Universe'"

This is wonderful, brilliant, clear writing on, to me, the most interesting of all subjects. 👏

Are you going to make the water pick up silt by eroding the land, and deposit it as sediment, creating river estuaries etc? :-)

Probably a naive question John, but why do you post images of plots that are left-right inverted?

Yes. It's a panicked attempt to keep the hype pump primed, in the hope of preventing investors from waking up.

Thanks for posting it Philip. It's well written and makes its case clearly, and therefore lays itself open to rebuttal, as all good articles should.

Ask an LLM what it is like being a parent, flying an aeroplane or being stung by a wasp, and it will reply in similar words to those that a human would use, or more likely has used.
But this is not the same as having those experiences. General intelligence emerges from such experiences.

This is brilliant.

Canine and corvid general intelligence, for example, is non-verbal.
The article restricts its definition of human general intelligence so much that it becomes a trivial target.

"If you make yourself very small, you can externalise anything" as Daniel C Dennett said.

The article makes the argument:

"LLMs are better than humans at machine intelligence"

but fails to acknowledge that that isn't saying much. The vast majority of human intelligence is not verbal.

The closest an LLM can get is via the words written by people trying to evoke those experiences, which are not the experiences themselves.