Protesting the high school dress code that banned slacks for girls in Brooklyn, circa 1940. www.tumblr.com/vintageevery...

I have become increasingly obsessed with fountain pens and nice ink. Only now does it occur to me that I properly fell into that hobby at about the time chatgpt caught on. Pure coincidence, I'm sure.

Yes, yes it is and yes, yes there is. All sympathies to your brother. The whole situation just makes me feel really, really tired now.

I couldn't possibly comment re the specifics, though I would say that I have certainly met a wide span of computer science academics, and views regarding a) what academic writing even is and b) what it is meant to achieve vary widely within and beyond the discipline.

Also see "why don't we get gpt to write the background and method of the paper"

Er... even if it were capable, leaving that to one side for now:
a) it doesn't know what you (presumably) knew when you designed the study?
b) it doesn't know what you did?

I guess that's what the stick is for ;)

New St Liphardus headcanon just dropped: the dragon's death was overstated for PR purposes. Once things calmed down, St. L. and the dragon opened a BBQ place in Meung-sur-Loire. The image here is actually a publicity still, but the dragon had just made a 'make it snappy' joke, hence that eyeroll.

When you put it like that, there really ought to be more dragon chefs!

For the bag that sounds good. Food-wise, looking at the dragon, impossible to be sure of course but to me they look like they'd maybe enjoy a nice curry or a nice Asterix & Obelix-style chunk of roast boar.

Consider the number of academics who are like 'but WHY can't we use gpt for peer review tho'.

and now you have me wondering whether one could successfully render a firebreathing dragon safe by providing it with a nosebag, and what exactly you would need to put in the nosebag (bearing in mind that asbestos nosebags are a non-starter, dragons deserve better than that).

We are looking at a painting of St Liphardus - a 6th-century lawyer, hermit and abbot in Meung-sur-Loire near Orléans, France. He is wearing bishops clothing including a surplus and mitre and is holding a crook. On a lead is a small knee high green and blue dragon.

We’re very sorry sir but you cannot bring your emotional support dragon in here.

I am rather ignorant about their history. How odd for a party originating in trade unions to focus on paternalist control strategies?! Would seem rather a toxic relationship.

I wonder if possibly a sort of web of trust approach might work, but then the technology on which to base it has to be robust to all the rubbish happening just now, which is difficult. Eurgh.

The Tories used to be even weirder in a way in that the same party seemed to house the most vocal campaigners for privacy and absolute authoritarians.

Labour especially puzzle me, as generally they sound aware that they have a todo list of vitally important things (which mostly do sound vitally important). Then the brain hiccups and suddenly it's all Privacy Is Bad Actually and We Deserve To Observe and Send More Data To Corporates.

Rare sighting of a column chart taking a dip at Hove Beach.

#dataviz

Whatever the technology was, it would still be deeply feckless behaviour. That the specific technologies being marketed span the range from somewhat useful (if rather overdramatised) to a bit mid to incredibly corrosive would be less problematic, without the disproportionate elements.

To me it's all about proportion, or rather the lack of it. We can't all thieve and hoard the whole internet. From a resources perspective we have champagne tastes and lemonade pockets and currently the industry response is to insist we are about to invent a perpetual champagne fountain.

The whole web is built on a primary grace: that the people visiting you are trustworthy. It costs a little something for me to serve my webpage to everyone who goes there. When the number of scrapers outnumbers the number of humans by an order of magnitude, this grace is fragile.

I went to London for a language exam mid covid: practically the only person on the train, even from Reading. Between exam sessions I found a deli garden, now sadly closed, & stayed in this weird empty garden until it was speaking-exam-behind-perspex-screen time. Day of the Triffids adjacent.

This Is Just To Say

I have turned off
the AI features
that were in
the update

and which
you were probably
hoping
to monetize

Fuck you
they were stupid
so unnecessary
and so annoying

After a deadly fungus wiped out much of New York City's bat population, a passionate new community of bat lovers is helping them recover. Hell Gate went to meet some of them at Gotham Bat Conservancy's most recent "bat walk" in Prospect Park.

Beyond that... wot Jacob said :)

pragmatically: afaict telemarketing is in fair part a failure of infrastructure (i.e. detection/blocking should be easier, numbers should be traceable, number spoofing should not be achievable/robust) so I'd like that addressed initially by fixing fundamental underlying technical flaws.

Yes, it's honestly rather strange. A whole world of alternative ways of spending one's life is within reach, but nope, it appears that loony authoritarianism just seems to exercise an irresistible fascination for these lads.

Also, slightly less dramatically but still imho worth noting, Mosley was a Tory councillor for a while, addressed the Tory conference and was shortlisted as a Tory candidate in 2017. Is described as "very well networked". Shades of PPE VIP lane , but with data.

4-panel comic by War and Peas Panel 1: Two green alien astronauts at an archaeological dig on post-apocalyptic Earth. One alien says to a crowned alien that's just arriving, "Commander, we've discovered an artefact. The humans called it 'Internet'." Panel 2: The two aliens stand beside a wheeled computer console on the ruined Earth surface. The alien at the keyboard says, "We were able to reconstruct some of the data." Panel 3: The crowned alien watches a screen showing an orange cat batting at a ball of yarn. Panel 4: Close-up of the crowned alien crying green tears. The other alien says, "It's pretty much all like this." The crowned alien replies, "Beautiful."

Not helpful I know. I just think it's odd that we are so drawn to/consent to trivialising quite fundamental skills by aliasing them to commercial relevance (English and Maths are good because with grade 4/C GCSE you can...)

Heretically, if there's a point to the whole, y'know, life thing, sharing of interesting/strange/useful things, knowledge, ideas, skills & perspectives sounds like it might be a fair candidate. Hard to imagine employment as the ultimate point, if there is even a point (I'm dubious on this one).