The situation on Terf Island is pretty grim, but it’s a little encouraging if the British people are not mostly transphobic. All the British people I know are extremely sympathetic to trans people. I hope this really isn’t too unusual.

Yep, for some of us Clippy never went anywhere.

I keep a Windows 2000 machine with Office 97 for distraction-free writing, but I might try this. WordPerfect for DOS was always a pretty relaxing way to write.

No motive has been given, although police have said they are “confident” it was not an act of terrorism.

I wonder what makes them confident of that. It certainly resembles a terrorist attack.

Someone who used to wear an onion on his belt, which was the style at the time.

Everyone’s distracted by all the fascism. And the billionaires who profit from climate destruction probably like it that way.

I wonder how much his actions were about believing in the Russian cause and how much about rebelling against his CIA parents.

Is there even any suitable “confidence” measure within the LLM that it could use to know when it needs to emit an “I don’t know” response? I wonder whether there’s even any consistent and measurable difference between times when it seems to know what it’s talking about and times when it is talking BS. That might be something that exists in our own cognition but has no counterpart in the workings of an LLM. So it may not even be feasible to engineer it to say “I don’t know” when it doesn’t know. It can’t just straightforwardly look at how many sources it has for an answer and how good they were, because LLMs have typically worked in a more holistic way: each item of training data nudges the behaviour of the whole system, but it doesn’t leave behind any sign that says “I did this,” or any particular piece of knowledge or behaviour that can be ascribed to that training item.

Use the free Rider for home and ask any new employer for a commercial license. It’s a pretty mainstream piece of software. There’s really no reason an employer should force you to use Visual Studio.

For those times I need Microsoft tools, I keep a Windows VM handy on my Linux PC. I feel much better keeping Windows contained and mostly turned off.

The UK is likely to leap to the right next time they have an election too. They had a decade and a half of terrible right-wing government then voted for something else, but what they got was terrible centrist government and they’re frustrated. The centrists expelled all the left politicians from the Labour Party, so now the choice in England at least is Labour’s centrism-with-bigotry, incompetent Conservative, neo-fascist, another fairly directionless centrist party that appears to be led by a clown, or Green. Because people are angry, it’s likely to flip far right.

Big Balls 2028!

Actually, please no. But we’re headed that way.

It’s what Jesus would do.

I think at this point it’s “so it continues.”

VS Codium to the rescue.

It’s the only way to be sure Microsoft won’t sneakily turn it back on.

When ICE are kidnapping people and trafficking them to foreign concentration camps without trial, it’s a judge’s responsibility to defend the rule of law and protect people from being unconstitutionally disappeared. This is Trump’s Gestapo trying to intimidate the judiciary for taking actual action they can’t just ignore.

Sources have told the Journal Sentinel that ICE officials arrived in Dugan’s courtroom on the morning of April 18. When they went to the chief judge’s office, Dugan directed the defendant and his attorney to a side door in the courtroom, directed them down a private hallway and into the public area on the 6th floor.

Perfectly reasonable behavior for a judge, given that the ICE Gestapo are kidnapping people and sending them to concentration camps without trial. But it’s enough to get the judge arrested by the ICE Gestapo. Trump’s regime doesn’t respect judges or the law.

I’d imagine the $20K price is for a model so basic many people won’t want it. it will be interesting to see what the price is for a model most people would consider an acceptable basic car or truck.

This is how it works all over the world. They wait around the corner until the global bathroom camera system shows you taking a dump, then they zoom up to your door, knock quietly and leave. But if you don’t take a dump they don’t knock and just leave the “sorry we missed you” card instead.

The only catch? You’ll need an interposer to set up an Ai Pin for use with OpenPin. You can either buy one or make your own.

Even more junk for landfill, to salvage a device that is inherently quite useless. It’s good to keep the original hardware running but it’s a shame this requires more hardware.