Mike Knell

@mawhrin To misuse an old engineering joke, is an LLM a Turbo Confabulator?

@gnomicutterance There’s also a handy-dandy map there showing how in the “developed” (I use the term advisedly, as usual) world the English-speaking countries are obvious outliers.

@gnomicutterance @VirtualOdour Well, exactly. For the benefit of Mr Odour here, I’m in Austria (that’s the one without the kangaroos) where although physical punishment of children was first made an explicit offence in 1989 the “right” of parents to hit their children was removed from §145 of the Allgemeine Bürgerliche Gesetzbuch in 1977. Here’s the 1811 text that was deleted. Happy now?

@V0ldek @self And not just the song title - the lyrics are so on point all the way through:

You still think swastikas look cool
The real Nazis run your schools
They’re coaches, businessmen and cops
In a real fourth Reich you’ll be the first to go

@froztbyte @AcausalRobotGod “So the tablecloth is the Internet routing mesh, right? Now imagine that this squeezy bottle of ketchup is a provider in Pakistan who just got ordered to block access to Twitter in the country but isn’t quite sure of the right syntax to blackhole traffic from a particular AS…”

@Soyweiser @gerikson Plus the sets of “people who can DJ competently” and “people who are convinced that they should be allowed to DJ in public” do not, unfortunately, overlap completely.

@dgerard @froztbyte I always tell people that the reason so many systems nerds (I don’t use BOFH any more as that’s… not really an attitude I like identifying with, it hasn’t aged well) use Macs. It’s because once you get back from work, frankly, the LAST thing you want to do is system administration on your home machine and OS X is just *nix enough.

@gerikson Eh, I grew up in a family of doctors. They’d discuss their workdays at the dinner table. I fear nothing. Let’s have a read, see what all the fuss is ab… (turns green, excuses self)

@Tar_alcaran @V0ldek That’s why you need the good guy with a hammer!

@fasterandworse @dgerard sorry, too busy dealing with my brain short-circuiting at the idea that anyone would think any of this was intended to benefit the poors.

@andrew_bidlaw For most people who suffer from paedophilia in the ICD-11 sense (which is a mental health disorder) and undergo years of treatment and therapy while living in terror that they might one day give in to their own instincts and do something unspeakable… it’s not surprising they prefer to not give interviews.

@grumpybozo @swlabr We’re more of an exclusive ore, I like to think.

@swlabr To be fair to the authors, they found that pretty horrifying too.

@swlabr As a ten year veteran of the SRE mines I’ve always tried really hard not to do this, but I did once leave a job partly as a result of the CTO justifying a decision with “But it says here in the SRE book that that’s the way they do this at Google!” and completely ignoring my protestations that god no, that certainly wasn’t how we did it at least in my bit of SRE.

@self There’s a definite “Sir, this is an Arby’s” air to his posts.

@blakestacey More fool them. Wytham Abbey’s basically just a big house, not fortified at all, and it’s close enough to the centre of Oxford that they’ll be easily overrun by the first wave of pitchfork-wielding mathematicians who decide they’ve finally had it with their faux-intellectual bullshit.

@Soyweiser He’s also oddly reluctant to disclose in his polemic that his ongoing association with Oxford is as a research fellow at the tiny Blackfriars Hall, which is a combination Dominican friary and heavily Catholic college. Not wholly out of the question that the post is funded by, you know, “a group of concerned individuals”.

@dgerard looks like Dr Miller here is completely rationally and altruistically examining the issues despite being one of the go-to “sciencey words” providers of various fundamentalist organisations in the UK.

@self This was the point where I started wanting to punch things:

“At one company where I worked, someone got in trouble for using HipChat, a predecessor to Slack, to ask one of my colleagues a question. “Never HipChat an engineer directly,” he was told. We were too important for that.”

Bless his heart. That, dearie, isn’t “engineers are so special”, it’s managers wanting to preserve old-fashioned lines of communication and hierarchy because they fear becoming irrelevant. Gatekeeping access to other people’s knowledge to make yourself important goes back millennia.

@froztbyte Ah, the mighty Big Clive has spoken on the subject. https://youtu.be/6DlfLthx89E?feature=shared