Posts by I ain't Spartacus

Re: Great pics

Surely marketing blurb created by text and picture generating algorithms from IP that you own yourself is a perfectly legitimate use of the technology? It's putting a few very low level marketing copywriters out of a job, assuming it works - but I'm not sure it's much of a threat to anything.

I'm a lot more impressed by the image-generating tech than the text stuff - although I strongly suspect there's a lot of selection bias. People generate a bunch of images and only show the best ones. But nonetheless that seems technically a lot harder than summarising text.

Re: Capt Kirk with sonic

Anon,

If I click on your Rick Astley link and it doesn't lead to William Shatner "singing" 'Never Gonna Give You Up' on the Youtubes, I'm going to be sorely disappointed.

Maybe that could be even "better" than his interpretation of 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds'?

Re: Facebook isn't used as much by the younger genertation(s)

Jamie Jones,

That's great news! I'm definitely not expecting to make 120 - but I'll take it anyway...

When my Nan hit 80 she started saying things like, "I'm not buying a new coat now. I might die before I've got full use out of it." But then she was already signing all her grandchildren's birthday cards on January 1st each year (with £5 inside) - so that if she died part-way through the year, nobody would miss out on their birthday money. Which would have been odd if we were all under 10, but by the time I was in my 20s, £5 was only a couple of pints, and I can't imagine how creepy it would have been to receive a birthday card from beyond the grave...

I think I'll have to wait a few more years before i can become properly eccentric. I'm looking forward to having a walking stick to wave at people though.

Re: Facebook isn't used as much by the younger genertation(s)

I think age-group is very important. Unless I expect to make 100, I can no longer call myself middle-aged. Gulp! And I remember the costs of making calls in the 1990s - had my first smartphone in 2003 (Sony Ericsson P800), and data was ruinously expensive. Fortunatly it was a rubbish smartphone, so I couldn't use much data on it anyway. I've quickly listened to a band's latest song on Youtube or quickly brought up a TV clip to show someone on mobile data, but I wouldn't use it for video. But da kidz think nothing of it. They're used to data being cheap. In my case, I've got very poor eyesight, even watching video on my iPad is uncomfortably small - but most people I know about my age also don't watch video on mobiles much. Even at home on WiFi. There's the TV, laptop or tablet for that.

Although I get the impression tablet use has dropped off. The kids go for big phones, and older people also use their phone, or get out the laptop for bigger things. For most people a phone is big enough for web browsing or email.

I think cities are different though. Because of better data and more (plus richer) people using public transport. You see more people on trains and buses in London watching video than on the bus in my large market town in the South East.

I tend to use about 1GB a month on tracking public transport, mapping, email, a bit of mobile web and work VOIP.

I was surprised by the article:

We find it surprising that Twitter isn't included in the top 10

Even before Musk, Twitter was a minority activity, dominated by a few niche areas. Now that he's put it behind a paywall you don't come across content in casual web searches anymore. So it's even less relevant to those not terminally-online.

It's another thing, like podcasting, that people involved seem to assume is universal, but actually isn't. I'd say that no more than 10% of my friends and family have ever listened to a podcast - and regularly using Twitter is under half that. Whereas over half are on Facebook.

Most people use the interent for a few things and then go off to do other things. And really treat the internet almost in the way they treat TV or newspapers. As a broadcast medium they tune into for a bit, then turn off. Joining forums, playing online, getting and discussing news on Twitter is a minority activity, like writing to the letters page of newspapapers. Facebook changed that for many people, but they treat facebook as its own separate thing.

Greggs is fine. It's nothing special, but not terrible. And sometimes I really do fancy a cheap sausage roll - and a good quality one doesn't taste right. I think it's the mixture of the bland sausagemeat, the hot fat and the flaky pastry.

When I lived in Belgium there were cheap lunch places of a similar quality - and then there were some bakeries that were absolutely amazing. Belgium has excellent food - and I could go to some great bakeries and patisseries. Not to mention the chocolatiers. Yum! Did I mention all the lovely beer and chocolate?

On the other hand the supermarkets were a lot less good than British ones. With much less variation. You couldn't get nice yoghurt or decent fruit juice at all, and even foreign stuff like peanut butter was hard to get and expensive, let alone the makings of a decent curry or chinese food. Much of which I can pick up in the main supermarkets here. But they had good bread and own brand chocolates to die for. Even the cheese selection in the supermarkets was worse than the UK - although you could go to a nice fromagerie and fill your boots.

I think the author is both wrong and right:

an inexplicable national fetishization of Greggs that has, to this writer's mind, appeared from nowhere. There is nothing particularly grabbing about the bakery's food, though it is certainly in line with Britain's extremely bland palette.

It wasn't a thing until a few years ago. But I think people partly only continue it to annoy the kind of peole who get all smug and superior and bang on about how poor the food is there.

And Britain's extremely bland palette has been widening massively since the 1970s - and food here is vastly more diverse than it's ever been. With loads of artisan options easily available, as well as pretty good variety in the supermarkets - but there's still plenty of cheap bland crap out there. As there is in every country. The food culture in Britain has changed beyond all recognition in the last 30 years.

Re: Modern slavery

trindfo,

Modern slavery could mean a lot of things too (such as parents owning their infant children), but I satisfied myself that in the second link the criteria for selecting who is a modern slave sounded reasonable: forced labor or marriage with no real chance of escape.

I clicked on your 2nd link again (the first time it looked a bit confusing so I didn't bother with it.

So according to it, the UK has 1.8 enslaved people per 1,000 - which would give 122,000 in modern slavery.

And as you say, for modern slavery we're including forced marriage and forced labour.

And those figures are plausible. I was looking for a flat, and came across at least one where the landlord was selling, and there were non english-speaking people living there - who were absolutely terrified when we went in to view it. It was one of the most uncomfortable experiences of my life. The poor kid ended up hiding in the bathroom. I'm guessing he'd not warned them we were coming, and it's of course possible that they'd come here illegally and were now being exploited - or that they were legally here but stuck in rubbish housing or even that they'd been brought here agains their will - and they were terrified of the landlord - not us. People in that situation are incredibly vulnerable. Worse people-traffickers have no scruples - so paying someone to get you across borders illegally could end up with you in terrible trouble when you arrive.

My feeling is that this kind of people-smuggling is a relatively modern phenomenon. I'm sure it's always happened, but the world is more mobile, over longer distances than ever before - and they expect money up-front that probably wasn't possible to get in the past - and so the scale of this problem has increased vastly.

But all the other forms of "modern slavery" happened in the past. Forced marriage, indentured working (either to settle debts or in less exploitative ways like apprenticeships) - and the past also had serfdom and feudalism (people tied to land they mostly had to pay rent on as well). But the groups who claim slavery now is at an all time high, don't go back and include those numbers - because that would make their figures look ridiculous.

So on reflection, on this second post, I'm more convinced I'm right that the headline-grabbing we've got the most slaves ever is a straight lie. And the people making the figures must know that. It's deliberate. But we're lying in a good cause, so it's fine. I know the saying, "you can prove anything with statistics" - but there's a point where you're using one definition for your modern figures, and a different one for your old figures - and at that point you've moved from "spin" or "raising awareness" to lying.

Secondly, writing this has made me think that we should be very carefuly about calling forced marriage slavery. Or at least we have to be incredibly careful to distinguish between forced marriage and arranged marriage - because both look dangerously similar to someone with a modern liberal Western outlook like me. And yet we've got quite a large poplution in the UK who have totally different views on the matter. Being liberal we've got to find a way to fit our society together that doesn't just tell people that their culture is evil - while also not allowing flat abuse to be tolerated in the name of not appearing racist. An impossible balance to strike I suspect.

i've known girls who've been taken by their parents to Pakistan at 18 for a "holiday" and been married off to some family friend / cousin from their parents' village they may only have visited a couple of

times in their life. And now they're married to some bloke who grew up in Pakistan with even more "old fashioned" views than their parents - who've at least lived here for a bit. And yet the poor kid has been through our schools and so picked up much more British views of life. Legally they can break out of it any time, but that might mean many of their family and community never speaking to them again. Plus sometimes threats of violence. There's a big Pakistani community in my town and this is really hard to deal with - though the laws have been toughened up in recent years. And it's not so easy to do this now, as just being married off like that doesn't automatically get the immigration rights it used to.

But then I've had friends with parents from the Gujurati and Punjabi areas of India who also had arranged marriages. There seemed to be much more of a tradition of getting offered a few suitable choices and picking one - than just "your family have decided you're marrying X". But the social stigma of divorce was just as bad - and one friend was getting beaten up by her husband (also British-born) and her own Mother refused to even let her come and stay for a few days for a break. "You're married and you'll stay married." She kicked the bugger out eventually and understands why her Mum and relatives behaved that way - don't think she'll ever forgive it. And one couple with a loving arranged marriage - where everything was wonderful.

150 years ago, arranged marriage was pretty common in this country - with equal social stigma (even ostracism) about divorce. There's a perfectly reasonable case to call a lot of that slavery - but I'm not sure it quite fits. Apologies for my long posts.

Re: Modern slavery

I like fruits,

One correction though - "Russian prisoners of war" should be "Soviet prisoners of war"

A good point.

The old deal between Russia and West of making other nations of USSR invisible is one of the causes of the current war.

I'm not sure there's any deal. People are just lazy - and either don't know or don't care about fine distinctions. Many people still talk about England when they mean the UK, because it's a habit. And if you don't live here, "it's all the same really." And that used to be the same case in the old days, talking about Russia / the Soviet Union. In the press and on TV the two were mostly used interchangeably - because Russia is quicker to write and saying "the USSR" takes just as long as saying Soviet Union.

It's such a difficult case to disentangle. That you went from the outright Russian empire, under the tsars to the Soviet Union - which was dominated by Russia - but Stalin was Georgian and Khrushchev was Ukranian. Although a quick Google to check that says he was actually born in Russia, so I guess it's more complicated - though the same search also says that Brezhnev and Chernenko were also Ukranian.

The Russians like to see themselves as the local hegemonic power, and so in some way the heirs to the Soviet Union - but how do they then cope with its massive faults? The oppression, the inconvenient alliance with Nazi Germany between 1939 and the invasion in 1941, the Gulag system, etc.?

But then if Ukrainians and Belarussians get credit for fighting Nazis with the Soviet Union, don't they also get blame for oppressing Eastern Europe for 50 years afterwards? Surely the whole Nazis thing is just an excuse and the reason the Russians are invading Ukraine is because their dictator daren't risk an increasingly well-functioning democracy getting richer directly on his border. Obviously the reason the war is popular with some Russians is that many of them seem to have channeled their nationalism into nostalgia for past "greatness". Somnething Britain is often accused of, but isn't actually true in our case - nobody wants to have an empire again.

Re: Modern slavery

trindflo,

Please fact check me. I'm more than a little aghast at what I found.

I can't quite manage that. I don't have the facts, but I am a suspicious, cynical and somewhat argumentative man. When you're shocked by a figure from a modern campaign group / charity / political party / think tank you have to remember that shocking you is the whole point. There's an awful lot of campaigns out there, and they need to be heard above the noise. And not a few of them, on all sides politically speaking, are therefore willing to basically make their numbers up. And even more are willing to mess with the statistics until they're meaningless.

We've got the obvious problem of global population now being over 7 billion, when it was around 1 billion in, say, 1800. So ideally you'd like to compare in percentage terms. But even if there were only as many slaves, that would still be shocking, given that it's illegal almost everywhere now.

However, you notice they give figures on your first link for the Atlantic Slave Trade. Which was probably the ugliest example of slavery because something like a third of the people died in the crossing and it was tied up with racism in a such a horrible way - which lead to the slaves being treated so much worse. Whereas in Africa at the time, slavery was practised quite widely. But slaves were treated much better, and wouldn't be moved that far from where they originally lived. Also North African (Barbary pirates and others) slave traders were operating widely in the 17th Century - and before. They were sending ships to capture people from the coasts of France, Ireland and England for centuries, and selling them into slavery (mostly in the Ottoman Empire) - which was a big empire, and allowed slavery. They even had a slave army, the Janissaries, of moslty enslaved children from South Eastern Europe who were trained as a permanent fighting force. In 1800 Russia had a population of about 35 million, of whom about 50-80% were peasants - a large majority of who were serfs. Unfree tenant farmers, not allowed to leave the land they were on, and who could be bought and sold, with that land. My Chinese history isn't up to knowing about how widespread slavery was in China (banned 1910) or India (banned 1843). Western Europe had pretty much outlawed slavery by the end of the Medieval period - or it had died out. By the Early Modern (Tudor) period English courts wouldn't alllow slavery on common-law tradition (I don't know if there was actual leglislation). The Portuguese ambassador's slaves managed to run away during the reign of Elizabeth I, and were freed by an English court, much to his disgust. Ironically just at the point that some English traders and *ahem!* privateers (English Pirates? No! We don't have any of those!) were starting to join in the slave trade in the Caribbean. Plus all the native Caribbeans and South Americans who got enslaved - and weren't part of the Atlantic trade.

What was the actual number of enslaved people globally in 1800? It was in the tens of millions (just in the Russian Empire alone), but don't now if it would make the low hundreds of millions.

As a straight percentage of global population I'd strongly suspect that the most slaves ever was in classical Greek/Roman times. Although in Rome slaves could own property, and in fact own other slaves, and good masters were expected to free their more educated slaves and set them up with a business or trade as clients in the Roman patronage system. You might take a Greek slave to educate your children, in the expectation that you'd set him up in business when your kids had grown up - it was even possible to sell yourself into slavery to get money for your family, though a hell of a lot of Roman slaves were caputred after battles. Julius Caesar's conquest of Gaul was estimated by Plutarch (a decade or two later) to have killed a million Gauls and led to the enslavement of another million.

I'm also rather suspicious about terms like "modern slavery". Because that suggests a bit too much wiggle-room in definitions, where they don't go back and use the same standards in the old figures. A medieval apprenticeship lasted 7 years, during which period you couldn't leave, work for anyone else or marry without your master's permission. But on the up-side you got pay, food and lodging, training, education and often the chance to join the master's business as an equal - or even take over from him. You could often marry into the family too. Not legal now, but not considered all that exploitative at the time - because the rewards were so good.

Finally let's look at World War II. Nazi Germany had the Organisation Todt, slave labourers from occupied territories. There were 1-2 million of them, plus a similar number in concentration camps being slowly worked to death producing goods for the SS, plus up to five million Russian prisoners of war who were mostly worked to death as well. The Soviet Union were also working a couple of million people to death at any one time in the Siberian Gulags. But a bit of quick searching when I thought of this suggests the numbers aren't enough to offset slavery being mostly banned in the 19th Century.

Rambling here, but I'd bet a small amount that in absolute numbers slavery probably peaked in the early 19th Century - and that the peak in percentage terms was probably in the classical period - and that 100 million is an over-estimate for now - but that the numbers now are depressingly high. I'm also fully prepared to be told I'm wrong by someone with proper figures - but I think I have good groundsn for my scepticism.

Re: V'Ger

Spoiler alert!

If I were being harsh, I'd say that the people that spoiled Star Trek the Motion Picture, were the ones who made it.

There's even a joke about how only the even numbered ones were good. Which is odd (if you'll pardon the pun), because the Wrath of Khan is, but I'm not sure about many of the rest. Maybe some of the later TNG ones?

And then JJ Abrams turned Kirk into a hyperactive whiny teenager in search of a bloody good slap. Although I did like the opening scene of his first film.

Re: Perspective

They'd have done that. But the bloke with the big reset-hammer had his credit card rejected, when he tried to fuel his van to get out there.

Apparently there weren't enough noughts on the diesel pump.

So they tried swearing at it. But in space, nobody can hear you scream, "work you bastard thing!"

So now they've been reduced to debugging it. I must say I'll be disappointed if they're analysing their newly downloaded data on computers, rather than massive stacks of fanfold paper as God intended. Was that an earhquake in California? No, just JPL's daisywheel printers...

Re: Impressive horns

Otherwise why not make a smaller sheep so it is more of a challenge - even with a semi-automatic.

So you want to cross-breed sheep with mice, to create mini-sheep that are better at hiding?

Re: If you have the weights, you have the model.

Membrath,

Thank you for, as you say, a helpful reply.

From what I've read, the models are trained on an initially highly-curated set of training data. That gives a bunch of weightings. But then an even huger bunch of much less categorised data is put in, and that gives you your LLM. For example ChatGPT4 was created with 2021 data - and isn't currently searching the web, so isn't learning more data. So "attacks" on it by researchers to make it disgorge copyright data were there to see what had originally been put in.

I'm sure OpenAI are using derivatives of that model to process more data - and maybe will build a model in future that can keep taking in training data - but I didn't think that had happened already.

So have I got that wrong?

I can imagine how the weighting of the data could be the model if it's just a set of probabilities, that say the word "course" is more likely to follow the word "of" - but as one of the uses of the models is to say summarise and compare two legal opinions / academic papers / novels - then surely in that use-case the models include the data?

Re: Noise

Is it annoying? No, it's just British noise.

It's called language, dear boy. Which is simply a bunch of noises that we've put together over the the years, to convey a set of agreed meanings.

Boffins in english is a slightly archaic bit of slang. Much more a WWII / 1950s thing - often used in a mixture of wonderment or ironic bemusement / irritation. As in: "Whatever will those boffins come up with next?" But also used in a very respectful way when talking about, "the boffins who came up with radar."

Barnes Wallis is portrayed in 'The Dambusters' as a classic boffin. Smokes a pipe, does a bunch of weird stuff nobody understands, often in a shed, comes up with marvellous weapon. Actually he was much more of an insider than the film portrays. He designed a successful inter-war airship, the Wellington bomber, the bouncing bombs (of various types) and also the Tall Boy and Grand Slam massive "earthquake" bombs that were incredibly accurate from great heights at a time when accuracy was bloody hard to come by. A lot safer for the crews dropping them as well, apparently he never really got over sitting in the control room during the dams raid and listening to 40% of the crews getting shot down on a mission he'd been so closely involved with. So I suspect that may have influenced his design choices later in the war.

It's also sometimes tabloid shorthand for scientist. Boffin being almost half the length and therefore fitting the page better in a large typeface. As many tabloid stories about science might not be favourable, this might mean the term isn't always positive.

Re: Sorry????

If there's one thing that Trump has proved in his life, it's that giving him money doesn't mean you own him. Once he's got the money, you're dead to him and he can't wait until he can steal that money - or seemingly in a lot of cases lose it when the business goes bust. But as long as he made his percentage of what came in, he was a happy bunny.

Re: Trump isn't planning to invade Russia in winter

aerogems,

That sounds like a great idea for a TV series!

The imprisoned crime boss who rules the prison because of all his henchmen is a well worn theme. But what if we have a person sent to a prison who has a boss, but that person is guarded by a team of Secret Service agents who decide to take over the joint?

The crims have got prison experience, guile and cunning. The Secret Service have got guns (or maybe not) and combat training.

I'm thinking of a cross between Porridge and a martial arts movie. So a comedy / drama / satire / horror?

The Fifth,

What surprises me isn't that Putin still has popularity. But that people would bother to vote at all.

Putin's team are coming to the limits of a hitherto successful strategy. His political message to Russians has been a combination of, the ecnomy will keep getting better and if you stay out of politics, politics will broadly leave you alone. With the state-controlled TV working on keeping the majority of the population (especially older people) who get their news from TV in line.

While at the same time telling people who might support the opposition that we are too powerful to be challenged, and we can kill or sideline anyone who gets too dangerous, so there's just no point in getting involved. Up until the invasion of Ukraine, there was still a lot of freedom - so long as it didn't become too public, noticeable or popular.

While Putin always used to do his 6 hour phone ins and take calls from grannies in Siberia who couldn't get the local council to fix her drains - and publicly get the problem sorted. To show that the Tsar was doing his job, even if sometimes he had to chastise the evil Boyars who'd stolen the money from the people. To use a very old metaphor. In England or France the forumla was always the peasants petitioning the King who had been misled about the state of things by his "evil counsellors" - and if only he would come and do justice for his loyal subjects.

But surely there's got to be a point where telling one lot of people that opposition is pointless, so why bother, why not just shup up and get on with life - has got to bleed across to the other lot of people who might genuinely (if reluctantly) support you, and lead them to not bother to vote either? It's not like there's a threat of anyone else winning the election, so why not just stay at home?

Re: Attacking Russian voting systems ?

I'm seeing it as them setting up a scapegoat,

My-Handle

You'll notice that the quote from Dmitri Peskov talked about the US ordering NGOs to do this stuff. So as well as this being part of the excuse-preparation phase of the election, I guess it's also part of the Kremlin's long-running campaign to de-legitimise civil society organisations within Russia. If you took any foreign money at all, you had to register as an evil Foreign Agent - just to remind all Russians that you were part of a mass conspiracy against them.

Obviously no good, patriotic Russian could object to Putin or his disastrous war glorious 3-day Special Military Operation in Ukraine - so therefore anybody who does must be a foreign agent.

To some extent it's possible he even believes his own bullshit? For a man haunted by the collapse of the Soviet Union (and his beloved KGB's failure to stop it) - like the good spy he is, he sees enemies everywhere. I've seen several people suggest that he just can't believe people could self-organise in order to bring down their betters. Therefore the Arab Spring, the Maidan protests in Ukraine in 2014, the Orange Revolution there 10 years before - must have all been caused by the West to do down the poor Russians. The fact that Western governments were as suprised by the Arab Spring as everyone else, and had no policy prepared doesn't matter - because like all good conspiracy theorists if something bad happens to me, someone must have done it deliberately. It can't have been my bad luck or (horror!) my bad choices.

Putin used to be genuinely popular.

I'm sure he'd have found it harder to win if he'd not used various electoral tricks ("political technology") or actually allowed any serious opposition. They even allowed a mostly free (ish) press - just no freedom on prime time television. But there was still a certain legitimacy to be had from winning elections. Much easier when you've co-opted the "opposition" parties (or made fake ones) and banned or murdered the real opposition leaders of course.

I think he'd like to win with the minimum of vote rigging. It's a bit too obvious if nobody bothers to go out and vote, and then you win by 90% with a 90% turnout. Even dictatorships need some kind of popular support, or you end up with the late Soviet economy. The time of the old saying, "the bosses pretend to pay us, so we will pretend to work".

Plus it's good for his self-image. I assume that Putin still thinks of himself as a Russian patriot - doing his best to save his country from an evil West that is always scheming to ruin it, because they can't bear to think that Russians are as good (or better) than they are. The mass casualties in Ukraine and the hideous cost of elite (and his) corruption to ordinary Russians are I presume a price that any patriotic Russian would gladly pay in order to Make Russia Great Again™.