“helping” seems like an odd word to use for “threatened at gunpoint”.

As we saw with the COVID pandemic, even in “1st world countries”, poorer people were disproportionately affected. Fewer humans won’t help when the majority of harm to the Earth is perpetuated by a small fraction who would be disproportionately represented in a world where the majority of people died.

I sympathise with your sentiment, because it often does feel like humans are the problem, but the reality is that we’re not. Although it can feel weirdly comforting to think of humans as inherently and innately destructive, thinking this way is a pipeline to eco-fascism, which doesn’t offer productive ways forward.

The lettuce.

It’s great because it started out as a sarcastic joke, but as her premiership progressed, there was a sense of dawning hilarity as we realised that she actually wasn’t going to outlast the lettuce.

I had to do it for the first time last year and I was slightly giddy from the novelty of it.

Once upon a time, a thing happened. And then there was a facsimile of narrative conflict, but everything worked out in the end, because that’s how all the short stories by LLMs seem to work.

This is an excellent comment, thanks for writing this up

I didn’t know that. Thanks for sharing.

It’s a bit more complex.

The bacteria causing this (Streptococcus pyogenes) causes hundreds of millions of illnesses each year, ranging from the mild “strep throat” to the extremely severe scarlet fever. Whilst there have been a few outbreaks of antibiotic resistant strains of this bacterium, that doesn’t appear to be what’s going on in this outbreak, so thankfully the underlying streptococcus infection should be treatable with standard antibiotics.

Unfortunately, the condition that’s actually killing people (Streptococcal Toxic Shock Syndrome (STSS)) is caused by exotoxins released by the bacteria, and killing the bacteria only stops further exotoxins from being produced — antibiotics can’t do anything about the exotoxins that have already been secreted by the bacteria. If you’ve ever wondered why we can’t cook spoiled food to make it safe to eat, this is a large part of why — exotoxins are often better at sticking around than the bacteria that produce them. It doesn’t help that exotoxins are often super potent toxins (Botulism is a particularly potent and well known example).

It’s not clear what causes some cases of Streptococcus pyogenes to escalate and non-eventful cases of strep are common enough that treating every case with antibiotics is implausible. It’s tricky because if symptoms are severe enough to warrant a diagnosis of STSS, then things will have already progressed enough that the exotoxins present s risk to health even if antibiotics are administered. This outbreak of many cases of the severe STSS is concerning because it might indicate that the strep bacteria has evolved to be more deadly, but we really don’t know why there’s such a cluster of severe illness in one place.

I wonder what would facilitate people to make their own solutions in this way. Like, I have made a few apps or automation things myself, but if I look at my “normie” friends who don’t have the level of tech familiarity that I do, they struggle with whatever out of the box solutions they can find. Poor IT education is a big part of this, and I’ve been wondering a lot about what would need to change for the average “normie” to be empowered to tinker

When I was at university, the student union had a small fund for creative projects that weren’t related to your degree. Many of the people who applied for cameras also included Adobe licenses on their funding application, because many of them were new to film or photography so they defaulted to what is “industry standard”, because that’s what the majority of online tutorials are available for.

That was very cool, thanks for sharing.

I would argue seeing the barn makes it even sillier, but in a good way.

Oh my gosh, that’s hilarious. It’s a baby shredder. What gets me is imagining a bunch of people in an office figuring out what scale to print out the UN charter so it would fit in the tiny shredder.

It reminds me of an article I read recently about Ukrainian porn actress Josephine Jackson, who used her notoriety to raise money and awareness for disabled veterans

https://www.politico.eu/article/josephine-jackson-ukraine-porn-star-yulia-senyuk-raise-fund-war-amputees/

That’s where you’re wrong, kiddo

This may be an inappropriate comment given the context of the article, but her eyeliner is excellent, it looks great. I hope I can look half as elegant if I’m ever arrested for resisting authoritarianism.

That reminds me of a fairly recent article about research around visualisation systems to aid with interpretable or explainable AI systems (XAI). The idea was that if we can make AI systems that explain their reasonings, then they can be a useful tool, especially in the hands of domain experts.

Turns out that actually, the fancy visualisations that made it easier to understand how the model had come to a conclusion actually made subject matter experts less accurate in catching errors. This surprised researchers and when they later tried to make sense of it, they realised that they had inadvertently dialled up people’s likelihood to trust the model because it looked legit.

One of my favourite aphorisms is “all models are wrong, some are useful.” Seems that the tricky part is figuring out how wrong and how useful.

Site wasn’t loading for me, so here’s an archive link https://archive.is/2Xx69

Thank you for adding this link.

I really enjoy how whenever I find a paywalled article, I can usually head to the comments and find someone like you helping out. This also means that when I find that no-one has added an unblocked link yet, there is an organic sense of it being “my turn” to help out, like I’m taking out the bins in a shared house. I like having a space where I don’t mind doing chores, and the key to that is feeling like the load is shared

“The fact that Kratos isn’t the same person he was in the old series is basically the entire point.”

I always feel a little bit sorry for rage bigots like this, because of how dull their world and experiences must be. Like if he felt that the new Kratos felt narratively unsatisfying, or that his journey felt unsatisfying, that’d at least be an opinion with the potential to be interesting. But nah, it’s just “things are different”, with embedded implication that different = bad.