« first day (5208 days earlier)   

01:38
Travel prohibition to the Nord-Kivu province of DR Congo.
Not a fun time for people there.
01:53
@DannyuNDos Shit, I was going to take the family for a vacation ...
02:13
And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light;
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly!
But westward, look! Aw shucks, there's Trump.
 
1 hour later…
 
6 hours later…
09:51
Hi, guys. Can I check with you these sentences? Do they sound natural enough to say?

1. Turns out it wasn't the pipes. The water was just off.
2. Do you have evidence that it was him who did it?
3. Seems like India is having a breakthrough in massage technology.
4. Upon visitng Spain, I bought myself anti-tanning cream because the sun was scorching.
5. Tradition has it that when you visit Russia, you get yourself an ushanka hat.
6. This is the place where real work gets done!
 
3 hours later…
12:48
@MichaelRybkin I don't think I've ever heard of "anti-tanning cream". We normally just call it sunscreen these days, and don't usually mention cream or lotion after it, either.
It used to be called "suntan lotion", but that didn't necessarily protect you at all.
Sometimes it's called "sunblock".
 
1 hour later…
13:58
Strands #347
“It's in the cards”
🔵🔵🟡🔵
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Connections
Puzzle #613
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14:26
Cool archaeological find: Londinium's first Roman basilica dating from 70-80 AD! in a good state of preservation (Dailymail article can be trusted with pictures) buried under 85 Gracechurch street in Cheapside (the section of London derided by Jane Austen snob character Caroline Bingley, see article about it).
@Cerberus Yeah, unfortunately the target audience seems to be those who watch popular American movies, TV series, and songs. I wouldn't have guess it until the reveal reminds me of it, and purple never heard of it either. But today's Connections is very easy:
Connections
Puzzle #613
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@alphabet I'm glad that Claudia Sheinbaum handles TCG very well by not playing the courting game like other leaders and keeping a cool head by not pushing him into a corner (we know invariably what's gonna happen). And on the Gulf name issue, she countered with "América Mexicana", a defensible name in a Mexico founding document from 1814, rather than out of someone's whim.
15:12
#travle #792 +0 (Perfect)
✅✅✅✅✅
https://travle.earth

#WhenTaken #352 (13.02.2025)

I scored 539/1000🎗️

1️⃣📍2.1K km - 🗓️10 yrs - 🥈134/200
2️⃣📍9.4K km - 🗓️23 yrs - 🥉45/200
3️⃣📍256 km - 🗓️2 yrs - 🥇189/200
4️⃣📍8.9K km - 🗓️26 yrs - 🥉35/200
5️⃣📍2.3K km - 🗓️8 yrs - 🥈136/200

https://whentaken.com

Wordle 1,335 4/6

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@MichaelRybkin "Do you have evidence that it was he who did it?"
'he' is more natural (and also follows the grammatical rules for nominative case). I might use 'him' because it matches my informal way of speaking, but most English speakers would use 'he'.
@Mitch Most? Really?
Hyphenated, non-hyphenated. Oh the irony.
Connections
Puzzle #613
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Strands #347
“It's in the cards”
🔵🔵🔵🟡
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15:36
Daily Octordle #1116
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9️⃣4️⃣
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Score: 60

Daily Sequence Octordle #1116
4️⃣7️⃣
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Score: 74

Daily Extreme Octordle #1116
9️⃣🔟
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3️⃣5️⃣
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Score: 64
Wordle 1,335 4/6

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@Cerberus yeah this was tricky for me
15:49
Strands #347
“It's in the cards”
🟡🔵🔵🔵
🔵🔵🔵
Connections
Puzzle #613
🟪🟪🟪🟪
🟦🟦🟦🟦
🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟨🟨🟨🟨
perfect game!
16:16
@Robusto That's my impression. But your questioning it makes me doubt. What do you think?
@Mitch It's a matter of register. Informally many people will say "him".
16:49
@MetaEd Yes, I pointed that out exactly that in my first reply.
@MetaEd And a lot of people never speak formally at all. Perhaps most. Not in our circles, perhaps, but somebody elected Trump.
@jlliagre Does that sound bad to you? It sounds so... nice to me.
@MetaEd Are you saying we should view social networks a lot less? How is this a rebuttal to my point?
@Mitch OK, now you're just gaslighting me.
16:58
(which of course is only writing, but still)
@Robusto Dude, there's nothing wrong with the lights. Maybe you should lie down.
But then there's also that movie with Bette Davis where she really -is- sick and she thinks the lights are going down but they're not and her friend starts crying.
@Robusto It's not a rebuttal
@Mitch might also be interesting to compare AME and BRE charts of the same thing
@MetaEd OK, then I don't get the relevance.
@Robusto this person suggests that Trump was elected, in part, through this kind of election interference
@MetaEd American English:
British English:
wow, I would have imagined the opposite
17:04
I don't know what to imagine anymore.
I let ChatGPT do all that for me now.
wtf happened to the queen's english. oh that's right, the queen is dead, long live crappy english
@MetaEd I still don't understand why you think it applies to me. But whatever.
@MetaEd Which is "correct"? "Let him/he who is without sin cast the first stone"?
Some things I just can't reconcile:

1) Holy crap, it's already February?

2) It's been ten years since a week ago

3) it's only been 5 years since 1994

4) 1995 feels like it's 5 years in the future to me
@Mitch I meant my second comment for you, not Ed.
@Robusto you seem to be seeing attempts to argue a point, where I'm making conversation. Not sure why
17:33
@Robusto Sure.
> Two things I hate: 1. The status quo 2. Change
Correction to my message above. It came out wrong. I meant to say "Dailymail article can be trusted to provide pictures". I didn't mean to endorse a tabloid to be trustworthy.
@GratefulDisciple I'll just say what I think you're thinking (and what I think)... the Daily Mail is trash.
@Mitch My daily mail is mostly ads, solicitations, and bills. I never get love letters anymore, and I suppose that's a good thing.
@Mitch It's a tabloid just like The Sun; no way I trust the implicit editorial narrative, but when it comes to reporting on accidents, terrorism, acts of God, you cannot beat them. And celebrity news, I just ignore. It just happens sometimes they bring science / archeological discovery news to the top (headlines), but like that famous James ossuary we also need to source what the experts say themselves.
@Robusto Ever consider an AI agent to be your secretary for emails? I wonder whether there is a service like this, upgraded with GPT-like model.
At work, a consulting team is using app.read.ai, which automatically seems to provide not only transcript, but also a meeting report consisting of Summary, Chapters & Topics, Action Items for attendees, Highlights, Key Questions, Participation Score (engagement, sentiment, charisma, bias), keywords, percentages of how much someone speaks, video snippets from the meeting, etc. Quite scary if people rely on AI to unthinkingly accept the "narrative" of the meeting.
18:00
@GratefulDisciple I wouldn't trust it. Would you?
Daily Mail is one of the news sources I always try to filter out of any news feed.
@Robusto My fear is for executives to trust it. As for me, I have my independent judgement, similar to accepting its work for translation and transcript (which is known to mess up when the terms require subject matter expert). I have a feeling that humans will need to compete with AI agents like that, that the survivors would be humans (like us here in the chatroom) that are used to think for ourselves.
@MetaEd I only go there when I am baited by a headline from a news aggregator, based on the topics I'm interested in which I visit "on demand". I don't use news feed since I want to steward my stream of consciousness in a healthy way.
@GratefulDisciple Look, if I accidentally deleted an important email that I later needed (+30 days later), I'd blame myself. If some AI deleted an important email that I later needed ... I'd blame myself.
@Robusto In a sense, wouldn't Gmail's automatic "Spam", "Forum" and "Promotional" filters already doing that? In Office 365, Outlook also provide a UI for separating "Focused" from "Other" emails that we can influence from our feedback to individual emails. So I think as long as the AI agent don't delete them permanently and has a good feedback feature to complement its model, I would be okay with this, just need to remind myself to check the emails set aside by the AI agent periodically.
@GratefulDisciple There are worse things AI can do with my emails than delete them. I already know Google is spying on me, but that's kind of a given in this day and age. But I see AI "help" as a whole new level of spying on me.
18:13
@Robusto Yeah... that's a critical point to be sure, that Google (under orders from a political dictator) can weaponize AI analysis of a citizen's emails to serve "actionable items" like FBI investigation! Orwellian in the works (shudder). Maybe I need to go back to possessing my own email server.
@GratefulDisciple Or you could use something like Proton mail for privacy on important matters.
One way to STILL use an AI agent whose provenance I control from its very inception (such as the generation of its model, fully hosted in my own server, etc.). So this AI agent fully works FOR ME and no-one else. Unfortunately, given the cloud service IT model, it's becoming harder and harder to not use services. Even using Google speech recognition can potentially generate unwanted log similar to Google tracking my search history.
@Robusto I can disclose that I have nothing to hide from a legally sanctioned spy; NSA can listen in my phone calls or scour my emails and files for all I care. But this presumed the authority of a competent human who respects natural law freedoms sanctioned by the Christian view of man. A Christian conscience should not fear an understanding of God who (if Ps 139 to be trusted) "spies" on everything we think and do.
18:41
> By using AI to interpret MEG signals while participants typed sentences, researchers were able to pinpoint the precise moments when thoughts are converted into words, syllables, and individual letters. techspot.com/news/…
@GratefulDisciple 1) there's no fully autonomous AI agent yet to 'handle' your email box for you
@CowperKettle That's a cool finding that actually also bolster my trust in Thomistic analysis of human nature, in this case about how the active intellect (however it is implemented) abstracts from the phantasms recorded by passive intellect (from bodily senses) into some kind of non-verbal understanding which then becomes the true location of someone's perception of a truth before being encoded into words.
2) there are many companies working on making that for you right now, small ones and big ones (eg Google)
3) you could probably cobble together one with existing tools right now.
4) They will suck terribly at first, and for a lot of the sucking, you won't notice because you won't see the effects it has on people who are emailing you.
@Mitch Maybe by using GPT service as an API in your own programs that also use an API of an email program.
@Mitch I wouldn't worry about this, because I don't let AI agent to write my email (yet). At most I let it generate a draft. The use case I'm imagining is secretarial, i.e. prioritizing, summarizing, grouping. Or being a more intelligent dictation agent that suggests things to you throughout the writing process.
5) an spam detector works perfectly great for getting rid of unwanted emails (Google's works pretty good for me... I don't think I've ever seen spam in my inbox, and only rarely do I have to check the spam filter for false negatives (or is it positives?) the one's I actually do want to see.
@CowperKettle 1) nice paper 2) it really shows how -little- we know about the brain (and here specifically language processing)
Interesting that it is using writing as the object of study, rather than speech.
@GratefulDisciple Rarely do I find the lookahead suggestion useful. And that's just the next word or so.
I find it hard to imagine letting it do an entire email.
But I'm old.
18:58
I'm old enough to remember Clippy
@MetaEd You may be older than me, but I experienced Clippy too. Didn't help me at all, just appear cute and smiley.
@Robusto It's like former East Germany with their arcane and massive filing system of notes on individuals and their proclivities and distastes and random things overheard, 1/6 of the population being 'information gatherers (ie snitches) and in the spring of 1990 after the fall of the wall and the communist government and they opened up the files so that anybody could see what had been gathered on them...
... and you take a day off of work to access what had been gathered and you go to one bureau and get sent to the next and then to the attic for the index and then to the basement for the file itself, and after row after row of shelves and finding a step ladder or two to reach...
... and you finally pull down your own file and you get a flimsy manila folder with only your driver's license picture (of all things, not a bad one considering) and an obituary notice of a distant relative, and stamped on the outside in big red ink is 'Mostly Harmless'
@Mitch I felt that the next generation AI agent will combine the best of both AI techniques: expert system forming a better level of understanding of your email history and your "bibliography" (citations that you are most likely use), and generative AI model trained on the literary style of your writing as well as incorporating what other people usually write given the same situation you are in.
@GratefulDisciple You shouldn't be scared that you've committed a crime and they'll find out, it's that you should be scared that you -haven't- committed a crime and you're accused of one via this online information, and you have no recourse or proof otherwise.
@GratefulDisciple 'best' doesn't mean 'good'
Yes, companies will create things that attempt to do these tasks marginally acceptably well, but they will be crappy.
19:15
@Mitch Yes, that's exactly what I'm scared about. That either a clueless AI-agent powered human misunderstands me, or under-orders to misrepresent me and forming less-than-whole depiction of me that (to a judge) can make me appear to be guilty. As opposed to God-like knowledge of the whole me as Ps 139:1-12 seems to claim.
BTW, v.4 is totally consistent with the paper: "Before a word is on my tongue, you know all about it, LORD".
@MetaEd And Pong. And CP/M.
@GratefulDisciple If I believed in God, that would be, I don't even have a word for it. Not just terrifying. Whatever you would feel if you were kidnapped and chained to a bed for years with a camera on you constantly, never knowing if your tormentor was watching.
@Mitch Completely agree with you there. There is something irreducibly human that no AI agent can ever do, even someone who has Stasi-level dossier on me.
@MetaEd Of course, but the Psalmist assume that his God is a good God who wants the best for you, not a tormentor. And a Christian philosopher turns this into a "feature": God who mind reads you to sympathize and in solidarity with your innermost being.
@tchrist Epoch for the Apple II. Or should I write Apple ][
@MetaEd First time I used Apple it was already a Macintosh, and I need to learn how to do assembly programming and debugging on it.
19:21
@GratefulDisciple if I was terrified of my captor, I would probably pay a million compliments to try to stay on his good side ;)
@MetaEd That's unfortunately the bane of bad religions making people to do child sacrifice and stuff.
@MetaEd I think this is the debugger I used in class. They even have a marketable name for it: MacsBug!
@GratefulDisciple I grew up with the story of Abraham and Isaac. Even "child-friendly" treatments of that story were icky. As an adult I am terrified with Abraham.
@GratefulDisciple I never got to use that.
@tchrist Thank you very much.
@Mitch Thank you very much.
@Mitch Yeah, but up until then everyone had to fear what was in that folder.
@MetaEd Yeah, maybe since when Kierkegaard made a big deal of it, the Binding of Isaac has become one of the biggest issues in Christian apologetics. Of course my dad immediately brought this issue up when I was trying to update him on newer readings of Genesis from psychological and literary point of views:
1) Psychological. Abraham was playing a "game of chicken" with God trusting, that God will not follow through since earlier (Gen 17) He promised that Isaac WILL be the one through whom his descendants came, so Abraham played along knowing that this is just a test. 2) Literary. This story was the basis of a law against child sacrifice since in OT writings stories also serves as the narrative and etiological context of a law.
But yes, I can relate that it has some icky-ness. I heard jokes about how Isaac became traumatized that he wouldn't leave his locality, even his dad's servant needs to find a wife for him.
Although when we read the story itself (Gen 22) there are a LOT that is not told. Maybe Abraham told Isaac to play along. And there is nothing like the dramatic moment that paintings sometimes show, v. 10 simply says "Then Abraham reached out and took the knife to slaughter his son."
19:58
@GratefulDisciple Reminds me of that bon mot attributed to Steven Weinberg. "With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil—that takes religion."
@MetaEd I agree with him to some extent, but I don't want to overgeneralize: there are good and bad religions. Bad religion makes people do horrible things but good religion makes people to be saint, with most good people are in the middle. I disagree with Luther than non-believers cannot be good. And yes, Christianity itself has a checkered history, but when one evaluates the teaching in its best representation, there is value in it to help people to flourish.
20:13
@Robusto Frankly, a lot of mostly harmless people had thick folders because people are jerks.
Mostly jealousy by informers.
@Mitch I wonder whether the informers were named. If so, they have more to fear!
@GratefulDisciple Good point. In some sense, you don't want to have unnecessary retributive backlash against informers.
Also, "mostly" harmless suggests worth keeping an eye on.
Except I'm sure if I had found that my life had been changed for the worse by an informer (a neighbor, a disgruntled relative) that I'd have unhappy thoughts about them.
@Robusto I was going for litotes.
damning with faint praise.
they're totally harmless but maybe just maybe they'll show some spirit that we'll have to cut down.
frankly most people who are not in the 'mostly harmless' category are mostly harmless.
@Mitch I wonder whether they redacted the informers' names before giving the dossier back to the subject being spied on.
20:19
sure there are guys manufacturing ammo in their basement late at night and supplying cells with them, but that is mostly rare.
@GratefulDisciple I can't remember from what I've read about it if that is the case.
@Mitch Is manufacturing ammo for personal use common? Like people making their own beer? I wouldn't manufacture my own bullets. It can literally backfire on me when I use it unless I'm a trained ammo maker.
It's been thirty years. I can't imagine anybody thinking now "Hey, I wonder if anybody said anything bad about me when I was 8 years old! I should try and find out who that is.'
@GratefulDisciple I have no idea. It's a thing I saw in a movie once. Presumably the author of the screenplay wasn't making it up out of whole cloth, but then also, I don't think it's a common thing.
It's easier to buy from a manufacturer.
@Mitch I would be upset if I know the informer is spreading libelous rumors on me, but if Stasi didn't injure me, I suppose I can forgive them although I would be very watchful for future libels that ex-informer may do to me.
@GratefulDisciple ONce the apocalypse happens, we'll only have ourselves to do such things... which is the doomsdayer way. If you think things will fall apart, maybe you'll plan ahead for that kind of nefarious behavior.
@Mitch I see. So they can be tagged as a prepper.
20:47
@Mitch My point is, if they were seeing "mostly harmless" in their file it would not exactly be a clean bill of ... what, health? Loyalty?
@GratefulDisciple 'anti-tanning lotion' -i don't know what tagged means here but making your own ammo does hint at being a pepper.
@Robusto I was going for the Douglas Adams hit to the ego that no you're not that important.
I'm just waiting ...
till ...
Oh?
20:50
the concrete sets ...
or cures ...
or whatever ...
to list this interesting retort.
that...?
@Robusto yes I can't edit
But thank you for noticing
snarf
cringes
20:52
What, you didn't know Dr. Pepper was hoarding ammo and food and all?
@Mitch I think that secretly you're a pepper too.
21:06
@Mitch I do love your free-association mind (tagging -> tanning), but yes, I meant "hint" (bad choice of word on my part).
@GratefulDisciple I think more importantly there are dangerous specific religious beliefs. For example the belief that doubt = unending hell fire. People who believe this do terrible things to protect their children from doubt. Terrible things to their children, and terrible things to other people who might put doubt in the minds of their children.
@Mitch And maybe you hinted that Preppers love to drink Dr. Pepper? Maybe they manufacture their own Dr. Pepper :-) ?
@Robusto not a real doctor
Because who wouldn't do anything to keep their children from unending hell fire.
@GratefulDisciple sometimes I free associate, sometimes I have to pay for it.
Usually it's just a mistake. I blame auto correct -and- my lack of attention and poor eyesight in a small screen.
@MetaEd the whole 'hellfire' stuff is just parents trying to get their kids to stop doing stupid things.
Also rush people trying to get poor people in line.
21:14
@MetaEd Yes, fear is the worst motivator to subscribe a religion. Love for God properly understood as The Ultimate Lover should be the primary motivator. The association of Christianity with "unending hell fire" is well deserved but I personally (along with many Christians) understand "hell" in this sense.
To your second point, I acknowledge that this is a problem with Christians who don't trust scholarship and reason to have enough ammo for their children to construct their own Christian worldview, by unproductively insulating them in a protective echo chamber. This is sad.
@Mitch What? But it says he is right there on the can!
@Robusto oh. My bad. Credentials right there for all to view.
Right?
@GratefulDisciple so you're saying that Christianity hints at being soul-preppers.
@Mitch Yes :-) Without qualification. But what I pointed out in my second point is the bad way a lot of Christians do it.
21:16
@Robusto accredited by the Coca-Cola company
@Mitch You can't acknowledge a higher authority than that.
Soul Prepper will be the name of my Christian punk-jazz band
A trio of bass, theremin and castanets

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