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silveradeptLet us begin with an expansion of types of tasks to include more of the gods, heroes, and villains of Greek myth and literature, such that there then can exist Penelopian tasks, Cassandrean tasks, and Pandorean tasks, among others.
James Earl Jones, one of the iconic voices of several generations, and prolific in roles, has died at 93 years of age. I first heard him as the chief of the Mathnet division on Square One TV, but he's known better for Darth Vader, for Mufasa, for being the announcer of CNN, for so many roles. And finding out that he was a stutterer is one of those "surely not," but turns out to be true. He will be missed.
Dora Richter, one of the first persons to undergo what we would recognize as gender reconstructive surgery, managed to outlast the Nazis, who thought the best trans person was a dead trans person. She had been presumed dead at the destruction of the Institute for Sex Research by the Nazis, but she managed to survive them and a whole lot more, to die in 1966.
Windows systems, especially those on Windows 10, are encouraged to run updates as soon as possible, because of a bug that meant several systems did not actually receive their monthly updates for several months at a time.
The use of LLMs to generate appeal letters to insurance company denials of claims, which, still not great that it's LLMs, but this seems to be one of those operations where it makes a twisted sort of sense to use them? Because odds are that the insurance company is doing the denial in routine, automated, form letter sorts of ways because that allows them to spend the least amount of money, and therefore the correct response is to show them the same contempt they show you, and preferably in as automated and time-saving a way as possible, so that the patient is not out much more time, effort, and energy in filing the appeal than the company was in making the denial.
This also feels like the kind of thing where both companies and patients will set up their automated agents and exchange automated warfare until one side gets what they want, and that this will become as normalized a part of doing insurance work in the US as mandatory appeals and reconsideration seems to be part of the PIP decisions for UK folks. Which is to say, the smart thing to do would be to stop doing auromatic denials and actually perform the function of an insurance company that collects premiums and distributes risk among the insured so nobody is bankrupted, but the profit motive always overrides any conception of actually doing what you're supposed to do or helping others. (Insert the beginning of The Incredibles 1 here.)
Israel is blamed for attacking members of Hezbollah through pagers that had explosives implanted in them, and then again through the explosion of other devices, such as walkie-talkies and solar equipment. If substantiated or responsibility is claimed, I'm fairly certain that not only could you classify these attacks as terrorism, since they are indiscriminate in their choice of who is injured and who is not, as well as the choice to use devices that can and have killed noncombatants when detonated, you can probably classify it as illegal under the Geneva Conventions, assuming, of course, that either of the belligerents have bothered to sign on to them or respect them in their operations. Thus does the cycle of violence perpetuate itself and open new fronts so that those caught in between have even more reasons to worry that they will soon be killed by someone else's decision.
An interesting book chronicling the history of Christian denominations and their relationship to sex, sexuality, and the ways in which churches tend to cling to the old, to the detriment of everyone, rather than find the places in the old that suggest the current obsession with a specific sexual standard was panned then and can be panned now.
A series of posts on Anthony Comstock and the damage he did with his intentions of outlawing anything he considered immoral, which were quite popular positions of the time, and supported by both federal and state legislation. Those laws were narrowed by Supreme Court decisions, but in our current era, as the introduction to the series on Comstock points out, where there are plenty of people who would be more than happy to revive the still-unrepealed Comstock Act and possibly expand it back to what it originally was, knowing what those laws and what Anthony Comstock and his allies wanted to do is important for those who might be affected by such.
Penzeys spice company has a specific position about trying to get Republicans to wake up from the place they've been led to by the previous administrator and his ilk, and in return for that, of course, those same folks are doing their best to try and make Penzeys no longer be an operating business. So there are some specials and other discounts available from said company as an attempt to weather the attacks. Such as $50 USD of gift cards for $35 USD and an apropros of nothing 50% off of any spices or seasonings that contain orange or have an orange color to them.
More people with weapons around a previous administrator, which could have been an attempt to hurt him, or could have just been a person with a weapon around a previous administrator. Still a bad situation, but it depends on what you believe about the motives of the person.
The current Democratic and Republican candidates engaged in a debate, one that seemed to showcase the weaknesses of the Republican candidate as solidly and strongly as the previous one had shown the weaknesses of both the Republican and the previous Democratic candidate. After the performance (and the expression of opinions about such things), the normally-eager Republican candidate decided that perhaps he didn't want to engage in any more debates, while the Democratic candidate seems more than happy to participate in more.
How poor laws that established the ability of even the poorest to buy bread, even in times of bad harvest and increased grain prices, managed to prevent famine from becoming a widespread problem in England, even as it continued to be a problem elsewhere in Europe, including in Ireland, where such laws did not extend.
Using a specific dye compound, researchers have found they can turn mouse skin more transparent and see inside on the red spectrum, giving them greater insight into seeing the workings of mice without surgery and while the muce are alive and doing their thing. The dye apparently helps align the refraction of the tissue in question so that light can pass through more as a wave rather than get knocked about as a particle. But it doesn't work on thicker materials, so we haven't gotten a thing that can make human tissue transparent yet, and they're still evaluating the possibile toxicity effects over time and with more use.
The likelihood that birds seeking food have created wildfires by creating shorts in energized power lines, combusting from the energy coursing through them, and then catching the surrounding material on fire from their own flaming corpses. Oof.
In technology, A company founder learned the hard way that when there isn't data available, LLMs will still try to provide something to a person, and when video is requested, that sometimes means the LLM will rickroll the questioner. Because a statistically likely thing you would find in a dattaset of "what happens when the thing sought is a video and doesn't exist?" is a rickroll. And while you can do a certain amount of "if you don't know, admit you don't know and don't try to do anything" can be programmed into an LLM, there will always be the danger that the LLM will believe there is something there, and therefore will do that thing. They should probably be very relieved it was just a rickroll.
Extortion scams that attempt to panic you into believing someone else has put malware on your machine and is ready to send video of your pornography habits (and associated actions) to all of your contacts are now trying to put a Google Maps picture of your address to add verisimilitude to their extortion demands.
An in-depth series about how deeply embedded race and racial biases are into human medicine, which is what makes them so phenomenally difficult to remove from our technological systems and calculations.
The Starliner capsule did arrive safely back to Earth, without persons on board, and with problems still plauging it.
There are people who are chasing what they believe is the perfect smile, so much that they are willing to risk their own teeth for artificial implants, and the likelihood of meeting someone who will do it cheaply and not care about whether it's done well is pretty high.
Unity has decided they are reversing the decision to charge developers per install of their program, and is going back to a tiered system based on revenue and seats available for development. The question at this point is whether the damage has already been done sufficiently for Unity that they won't be able to right the ship, and whether they can attract back any of the people who abandoned them for other places and languages, some of which definitely were trying to tout their compatibility with Unity assets and code.
Last for tonight? It's September, and ideas for December Days should probably be entertained at this point, if you have any.
(Materials viaadrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
James Earl Jones, one of the iconic voices of several generations, and prolific in roles, has died at 93 years of age. I first heard him as the chief of the Mathnet division on Square One TV, but he's known better for Darth Vader, for Mufasa, for being the announcer of CNN, for so many roles. And finding out that he was a stutterer is one of those "surely not," but turns out to be true. He will be missed.
Dora Richter, one of the first persons to undergo what we would recognize as gender reconstructive surgery, managed to outlast the Nazis, who thought the best trans person was a dead trans person. She had been presumed dead at the destruction of the Institute for Sex Research by the Nazis, but she managed to survive them and a whole lot more, to die in 1966.
Windows systems, especially those on Windows 10, are encouraged to run updates as soon as possible, because of a bug that meant several systems did not actually receive their monthly updates for several months at a time.
The use of LLMs to generate appeal letters to insurance company denials of claims, which, still not great that it's LLMs, but this seems to be one of those operations where it makes a twisted sort of sense to use them? Because odds are that the insurance company is doing the denial in routine, automated, form letter sorts of ways because that allows them to spend the least amount of money, and therefore the correct response is to show them the same contempt they show you, and preferably in as automated and time-saving a way as possible, so that the patient is not out much more time, effort, and energy in filing the appeal than the company was in making the denial.
This also feels like the kind of thing where both companies and patients will set up their automated agents and exchange automated warfare until one side gets what they want, and that this will become as normalized a part of doing insurance work in the US as mandatory appeals and reconsideration seems to be part of the PIP decisions for UK folks. Which is to say, the smart thing to do would be to stop doing auromatic denials and actually perform the function of an insurance company that collects premiums and distributes risk among the insured so nobody is bankrupted, but the profit motive always overrides any conception of actually doing what you're supposed to do or helping others. (Insert the beginning of The Incredibles 1 here.)
Israel is blamed for attacking members of Hezbollah through pagers that had explosives implanted in them, and then again through the explosion of other devices, such as walkie-talkies and solar equipment. If substantiated or responsibility is claimed, I'm fairly certain that not only could you classify these attacks as terrorism, since they are indiscriminate in their choice of who is injured and who is not, as well as the choice to use devices that can and have killed noncombatants when detonated, you can probably classify it as illegal under the Geneva Conventions, assuming, of course, that either of the belligerents have bothered to sign on to them or respect them in their operations. Thus does the cycle of violence perpetuate itself and open new fronts so that those caught in between have even more reasons to worry that they will soon be killed by someone else's decision.
An interesting book chronicling the history of Christian denominations and their relationship to sex, sexuality, and the ways in which churches tend to cling to the old, to the detriment of everyone, rather than find the places in the old that suggest the current obsession with a specific sexual standard was panned then and can be panned now.
A series of posts on Anthony Comstock and the damage he did with his intentions of outlawing anything he considered immoral, which were quite popular positions of the time, and supported by both federal and state legislation. Those laws were narrowed by Supreme Court decisions, but in our current era, as the introduction to the series on Comstock points out, where there are plenty of people who would be more than happy to revive the still-unrepealed Comstock Act and possibly expand it back to what it originally was, knowing what those laws and what Anthony Comstock and his allies wanted to do is important for those who might be affected by such.
Penzeys spice company has a specific position about trying to get Republicans to wake up from the place they've been led to by the previous administrator and his ilk, and in return for that, of course, those same folks are doing their best to try and make Penzeys no longer be an operating business. So there are some specials and other discounts available from said company as an attempt to weather the attacks. Such as $50 USD of gift cards for $35 USD and an apropros of nothing 50% off of any spices or seasonings that contain orange or have an orange color to them.
More people with weapons around a previous administrator, which could have been an attempt to hurt him, or could have just been a person with a weapon around a previous administrator. Still a bad situation, but it depends on what you believe about the motives of the person.
The current Democratic and Republican candidates engaged in a debate, one that seemed to showcase the weaknesses of the Republican candidate as solidly and strongly as the previous one had shown the weaknesses of both the Republican and the previous Democratic candidate. After the performance (and the expression of opinions about such things), the normally-eager Republican candidate decided that perhaps he didn't want to engage in any more debates, while the Democratic candidate seems more than happy to participate in more.
How poor laws that established the ability of even the poorest to buy bread, even in times of bad harvest and increased grain prices, managed to prevent famine from becoming a widespread problem in England, even as it continued to be a problem elsewhere in Europe, including in Ireland, where such laws did not extend.
Using a specific dye compound, researchers have found they can turn mouse skin more transparent and see inside on the red spectrum, giving them greater insight into seeing the workings of mice without surgery and while the muce are alive and doing their thing. The dye apparently helps align the refraction of the tissue in question so that light can pass through more as a wave rather than get knocked about as a particle. But it doesn't work on thicker materials, so we haven't gotten a thing that can make human tissue transparent yet, and they're still evaluating the possibile toxicity effects over time and with more use.
The likelihood that birds seeking food have created wildfires by creating shorts in energized power lines, combusting from the energy coursing through them, and then catching the surrounding material on fire from their own flaming corpses. Oof.
In technology, A company founder learned the hard way that when there isn't data available, LLMs will still try to provide something to a person, and when video is requested, that sometimes means the LLM will rickroll the questioner. Because a statistically likely thing you would find in a dattaset of "what happens when the thing sought is a video and doesn't exist?" is a rickroll. And while you can do a certain amount of "if you don't know, admit you don't know and don't try to do anything" can be programmed into an LLM, there will always be the danger that the LLM will believe there is something there, and therefore will do that thing. They should probably be very relieved it was just a rickroll.
Extortion scams that attempt to panic you into believing someone else has put malware on your machine and is ready to send video of your pornography habits (and associated actions) to all of your contacts are now trying to put a Google Maps picture of your address to add verisimilitude to their extortion demands.
An in-depth series about how deeply embedded race and racial biases are into human medicine, which is what makes them so phenomenally difficult to remove from our technological systems and calculations.
The Starliner capsule did arrive safely back to Earth, without persons on board, and with problems still plauging it.
There are people who are chasing what they believe is the perfect smile, so much that they are willing to risk their own teeth for artificial implants, and the likelihood of meeting someone who will do it cheaply and not care about whether it's done well is pretty high.
Unity has decided they are reversing the decision to charge developers per install of their program, and is going back to a tiered system based on revenue and seats available for development. The question at this point is whether the damage has already been done sufficiently for Unity that they won't be able to right the ship, and whether they can attract back any of the people who abandoned them for other places and languages, some of which definitely were trying to tout their compatibility with Unity assets and code.
Last for tonight? It's September, and ideas for December Days should probably be entertained at this point, if you have any.
(Materials via
adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
no subject
Date: 2024-09-21 07:20 am (UTC)Minor link error on the AI/Rickroll link: your URL, and the headline, say "not to Rickroll" but the actual URL says "to not Rickroll": https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/21/this-founder-had-to-train-his-ai-to-not-rickroll-people/
My guess is that they messed up the headline when posting the story, then fixed it but couldn't easily fix the autogenerated URL slug.
no subject
Date: 2024-09-21 02:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-09-21 02:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-09-21 02:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-09-22 10:21 am (UTC)And although I think it's remarkable that Czechoslovakia changed her birth certificate I would like to point out that Czecheslovakia is not part of the USSR. Czecheslovakia was an Eastern bloc state.
no subject
Date: 2024-09-22 02:05 pm (UTC)And thank you, I'd had it in my head that Czechoslovakia was an FSR, rather than very close to them.