Before sunrise, dark mountains and an orange sky.
05:00 this morning... how it looked... and how it sounded (the first cuckoo has arrived from Africa, on exactly the same date as last year).
stevecarter.com/Cuckoo26.mp3
Victorian Shooting Lodge with mountains behind.
07:00 this morning, looking over Upper Loch Torridon towards the Torridon Hotel. Low tide.
If you think the nuclear-powered supercarrier USS Gerald R. Ford is the most powerful ship in the world, you are wrong. It's actually the German cruise ship Mein Schiff 4 (pictured), which successfully transited the Strait of Hormuz over the weekend
open.substack.com/pub/rorycell... Getting an AI bot to triage phone calls to my local GP surgery seemed like a great idea – but faced with a complex case it turned into another case of NHS communication failure
He Warned About the Dangers of A.I. If Only His Father Had Listened. Ben Riley was already writing about the risks of chatbots when his dad started trusting A.I. over his doctor.
Ben, panicked, quickly clicked through more records. The oncologist had been recommending treatment for 10 months. His pleas seemed to grow more desperate by the page. But Joe was convinced the drugs would do more harm than good. “We discussed that treatment can slow down and possibly halt the progression of his C.L.L. which will give him more time to be with his family as he so desires,” another note read. “He answered that he doesn’t plan on starting treatment even if his disease continues to progress.” Ben knew better than to confront his dad, a retired neuroscientist who bristled at anyone questioning his intellectual judgment. He needed more information, a plan, to persuade Joe, who was — apparently — dying of cancer thousands of miles away in Seattle. He was anxiously monitoring his dad’s patient portal, trying to decide what to do, when a new message popped up. Joe had sent his oncologist research he had done with A.I., the apparent evidence for his decision to refuse the treatment. Jesus Christ, Ben thought. The morbid irony of the situation was not lost on him. A year earlier, he started a newsletter to help people make better decisions about when and how to use generative A.I. He wrote about how the tools had sent people into delusional spirals and helped a teenager end his life. Now, it appeared that A.I. had led his own father astray.
A heartbreaking story.
On the other hand, the books we sell you will go on working pretty much forever…
www.wired.com/story/amazon...
Oh so now copyright matters.
I’ve watched this four times and will not be stopping anytime soon
Doing my morning read of the trade press, and my only question here is whether Ms Roberts-Wood came up with that analogy on the back of personal experience or not. Weird stuff does happen in Reigate, after all.
(LGR, for those not steeped in these things = local government reorganisation)
please tell me this is The Onion
The trailer for EVERYONE IS LYING TO YOU FOR MONEY. In select theaters starting April 17th 🍿🤑🤣
Exclusive
Counterterrorism police raided the home of a journalist in Cardiff on Wednesday afternoon as part of their probe into individuals suspected of spying for China, according to people familiar with the matter
www.ft.com/content/b1cd...
If their trade body isn't called the Amalgamated Union of Dentists, I want to know why
Good evening
British diplomatic staff have been temporarily withdrawn from its embassy in Tehran.
Hannah Spencer walking into Westminster, sucking her teeth, tutting, and muttering "tell you what, you've had some cowboys in here."
world-historical levels of wholesomeness
🤦♀️
NEW
Land and Expand - how Palantir captured the Ministry of Defence
What a close reading of public domain documents tells us about two concerning contract awards
Detailed post by me, following-up on my FT column
emptycity.substack.com/p/land-and-e...
This is super interesting.
The last one I can read fluently is 1600.
I can then still read it and figure out (almost) every word, with some puzzling, but then lose it almost completely at 1200.
www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-far-ba...
Turns out (says @jburnmurdoch.ft.com) it's not so much an oversupply of graduates in the UK (the same would be true of other similar countries but it's not) as an undersupply of the kind of jobs that a better-performing, more productive economy would supply.
👀 Well!
Do entry level baking (let them lick the spoon) then pull on wellies and let them run in the rain. Take them to the closest swimming pool to tire them out, and they have their baking to eat later. It can be a lovely day!
It's not exactly a conventional Valentine's Day experience, but, on February 14, a group of people will visit the atomic bomb shelter at Bervie Brow on the north-east coast. It's a remarkable place, a throwback to the 1950s when Cold War tensions were high!
www.pressandjournal.co.uk/fp/lifestyle...
🌧️ En los primeros ocho días de febrero se han acumulado en España 75 mm. Es una cifra cuatro veces superior al valor normal de ese período.
➡️ En poco más de una semana ya ha llovido casi un 50 % más de lo que suele llover en un mes de febrero completo.
Just did a quick tally of how many tickets are left on the WRU web for Wales v France on Sunday. I make it 16,638, which is more than a fifth of the Principality's capacity.
Grim times.
Saltire Sessions: Gerda Stevenson
The Saltire Society talks to Gerda Stevenson – actress, writer, director & musician – about storytelling, the Scots language, loss, & Gerda’s new #shortstory collection CAT WUMMIN, published by @luathpress.bsky.social
www.youtube.com/watch?v=l93G...
By-election bar charts, off-licence edition
Received this text message from my father yesterday. Panicked that he had had a stroke, or similar.
Turns out it was my iPhone trying to transcribe the Irish language.
This is why Shakespeare is the greatest genius who ever lived. And this is just from a few pages he wrote in someone else's play.
