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The discussion of Large Language Models reminds me of Joseph Conrad's insulting remarks about language students and Russians in "Part First" of "Under Western Eyes".
Did Conrad like anyone?
"To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot"
...
"The illogicality of their attitude, the arbitrariness of their conclusions, the frequency of the exceptional, should present no difficulty to a student of many grammars; but there must be something else in the way, some special human trait—one of those subtle differences that are beyond the ken of mere professors. What must remain striking to a teacher of languages is the Russians’ extraordinary love of words. They gather them up; they cherish them, but they don’t hoard them in their breasts; on the contrary, they are always ready to pour them out by the hour or by the night with an enthusiasm, a sweeping abundance, with such an aptness of application sometimes that, as in the case of very accomplished parrots, one can’t defend oneself from the suspicion that they really understand what they say. There is a generosity in their ardour of speech which removes it as far as possible from common loquacity; and it is ever too disconnected to be classed as eloquence.... But I must apologize for this digression."
gutenberg.org/cache/epub/248…
There are many ways to draw the distinction -- none of them fitting neatly into a Twitter post -- and there is a lot we don't understand well.
But “stochastic parrot” is the wrong way to do it. It suggests that what fundamentally distinguishes LLMs from human brains is that the former are probabilistic prediction engines and the latter are not. Yet the most influential models of the human brain describe it as doing something strikingly similar. slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/0…
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Rat check: Rats are getting smaller:
Cat check: The National Centre for Information Defence will be tasked with tackling Russian disinformation. It's unclear why Farage, whose former colleague Nathan Gill is currently in prison for accepting bribes to make pro-Russian statements, is against this.
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Most people fear social ostracism, especially women.
If people were not previously aware of how social human beings are then the response to isolation in Covid-19 lockdowns should have educated them. It was less of a problem for the socially anxious and for men.
But because I have lived in a dictatorship, I have nothing but contempt for those people in the West. There is pressure to comply, but they don't face anything like what people face in Vietnam. They throw others under the bus not out of fear, but for their own gains. Despicable.
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Security guarantor?
It is widely believed that in the second world war the Americans only started taking the British seriously after operation Catapult.
America will most likely act in American interests. American support is most likely if we take our defence seriously.
The US got Denmark to promise to not do something it was never going to do. In exchange it burned down the bilateral relation permanently and made the entirety of its alliance stop trusting America as a security guarantor. Good win.
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Reminds me of an "Alex" cartoon where Alex and Clive's plane is about to crash into the Amazon jungle. Alex tells Clive to fasten his seatbelt. Clive replies "What's the point, we're all going die!". Alex replies "Yes, but my body is going to be found strapped into a first class seat!".
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A very clever man, but quite mad.
It’s a very Scottish perspective yes, we value clear thinking and direct honest purpose.
piped.video/VZ_ViQxKYL4
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I've not seen one of the newer Penguin paperback vending machines. I'd be interested to know of any sightings and experiences.
This from 2023:
sharpweb.org/sharpnews/2023/…
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Attack of the 17 foot woman.
Meet London’s new ‘Everywoman’: Striking blue sculpture unveiled on Trafalgar Square’s iconic Fourth Plinth lbc.co.uk/article/londons-ne…
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Will we next see a return of the Barber Surgeon?
We've all been there. You wake up feeling unwell, try to get an appointment, and before you know it half the day has disappeared.
When you're sick, the last thing you should be worrying about is how you're going to get the help you need.
That's why we're expanding Pharmacy First. The idea is simple:
Qualified pharmacists can assess patients, dispense medicines and prescribe treatment for a range of common conditions, helping people get care quickly and close to home. So you don’t have to go to hospital, and you don’t need to book a GP appointment. Just walk into your local pharmacy and get the treatment you need right there, right then.
These services make a huge difference, especially for older people and those who are vulnerable.
That's why we invested a further £340 million in community pharmacies, including to deliver Pharmacy First.
Six million consultations have been delivered since the launch of the scheme.
GPs and NHS 111 have referred three million people to their local pharmacy.
And pharmacists have provided more than three million urgent medicine supplies.
We’re making it possible for qualified prescribing pharmacists to treat five more common health conditions this autumn, like migraines and ear infections, so access to treatment is easier than ever. And what we’re announcing today will make it easier to see a GP for those who need it.
I know how hard our NHS works, how much pressure staff are under and how tough it can be for people to access the care they need from my time as Health Secretary. And I know things have only got tougher in the last 15 years.
As Mayor of Greater Manchester, I saw firsthand how important it is to put more firepower in the frontlines and give people more control over their own lives.
Every place and every person matters. So we’ll make sure people can get the care they need, where they need it. That’s what this is all about.
Faster treatment. More services. Better care for patients. And less pressure on hospitals and GPs.
One less headache for people to worry about.
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I think I understand your strength of feeling, but many British people will have read the argument of the popular historian @holland_tom that secularism, as a separation of religion and politics, the sacred and the profane, the limit of human memory and the eternal, is largely a product of Christian civilisation.
The argument seems to be that ideas like "give unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's" and "the Kingdom of God is not of this Earth" were 'acorns' that grew into this separation.
My understanding is that he argues that even belonging to a "religion" is a product of Christian civilisation, where previously most people would have more simply thought of themselves in terms of their lineage and would have made due reverence to a God or gods was in which doubt played little part.
If there is anything to this perspective then perhaps there is not so much a collapse of the sacred into the secular for the first time, unlike any other religion, but instead a complete abandment of the Christian sacred and a move to the worship of something else.
However, I suspect that Tom Holland would argue that we are going through another reformation of Christianity with its fundamental assumptions unchanged.
Word has just come down that St. Paul’s Cathedral in London—the second most important church in the Anglican world—has imitated Canterbury Cathedral in permitting “raves,” nightclub-like entertainments, to take place in its confines.
The usual reasons for acquiescing to this have been trotted out: reaching out to the young, trying to get with the times, etc. But this development simply shows that the leadership of the Church of England has lost any sense of the crucial distinction between the sacred and the secular.
Across the centuries and across the cultures, our ancestors seem to have intuitively grasped the importance of this demarcation. Whereas the secular is the arena of ordinary experience and activity, the sacred is another realm, a different dimension.
Accordingly, in the properly sacred space, one is lifted out of the conventional and introduced into the numinous. This is why Christian cathedrals are filled with images of the saints and angels and why their interiors are meant first to disorient us and then to reorient us toward the divine.
It is also why, in the initiation rituals of primal peoples, a young person is purposely ripped out of the ordinary and introduced into the mythic and mystic dimension. And it is why, throughout the Bible, sacred spaces are carefully set apart from common spaces.
The contemporary West is, quite literally, the first culture in human history that is in danger of collapsing the sacred into the secular, or better, losing any sense of the difference between the two.
This is doing enormous damage, especially to young people, whose lives have been flattened into a preoccupation with money, worldly success, and material things.
The Church indeed should go out into the secular space to find those who have wandered away from God, but it should then lead those wanderers back to the holy.
Having “raves” in the nave of one of the most sacred spaces in the Christian world is, I’m sad to say, another sign of our pitiful surrender to ideological secularism.
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Four masked men.
Two minutes.
83-year-old woman woken in her own home and told to stay quiet while they ransacked it.
Judge Heath Lane, Hayes. 29 June. Jewellery and about £500 cash taken. One of them looked armed.
She wasn’t hurt. Still no arrests.
telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/08…
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"Then the engineers did what engineers do. They wrote to the brewery, Henty and Constable, asking for structural data on the barrels..."
Days after D-Day, British troops in Normandy discovered the supply chain had room for ammunition, fuel and rations. It had no room whatsoever for beer.
So the RAF took matters into its own hands and started flying beer to France under the wings of Spitfires.
This is the story of the flying pubs..🧵1/4
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Who remembers the German Ocean?
This is not a rhetorical question, I'm genuinely curious.
The name Lake Ontario comes from the Wendat word Ontari’io, which, appropriately, means “the lake is beautiful, the lake is big”.
The name is more than 400 years old, predating both the Confederation of Canada and the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America.
We know that America is changing. Their trading relationships, their foreign policies, their national monuments, their hydronyms.
Canadians also know that naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario – then, now and always.
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