Nor improve mood

erman cars are notoriously expensive to repair, but they are seen as reliable and cars in general are perceived to be time savers that simplify life and increase mobility.

But that assumes everything works smoothly all the time and that “third parties” don’t damage you, your day, your car, or even your life (fatality)

I’ve only just returned home from a run and a car near us got ‘knocked’ quite badly. It’ll probably cost a grand to fully repair/undo the damage. When I left there was no incident in sight, so it must have happened in the past 15 minutes or so. I saw another such incident near the same place only months ago. They put speed bumps, but they’re too low and don’t seem to be effective.

Optics at best.

I suppose the owner of the car will be one of two owners impacted by this collision, whose fault is probably one of them, not both of them. Now come a series of long tasks for both of them and probably no car for a week.

How does that translate into peace of mind and time savings?

What AWstat sees

raphs that say “traffic” can be misframed, as there are slop bots (scrapers) and all sorts of non-human activity in today’s Web. In relative terms, however, actively blogging this year has paid off and this domain rose in terms of reach. AWstat claims it can tell apart human from non-human, but its heuristics are outdated.

It says 1,336 people accessed this album this month (it is over a decade old!) and OS breakdown for August is as follows:

Remember “Pep”?

onight at 8PM BST we’ll know if Arsenal “goes top” or lags behind “City”. The “protege” of “Pep” (Arteta) had a strong start this season after winning last season and “Pep” is gone, he’s definitely not coming back.

It feels kind of odd, still, walking past the building with the face of “Pep” knowing he’s just some historical face like a long-gone dictator or dead war hero.

We really hope that Enzo will maintain the momentum and win again this coming weekend. The first season or “Pep” at “City” was a disappointment.

Last night I saw Ferguson in the United game (video of course, not in person). He’s alive in spite of lingering health issues (occasional hospitalisation), he looks a lot older than when I last saw him. Unlike “Pep”, he hasn’t got decades left.

Enzo is even younger, he’s about the same age and Carrick and not much older than myself.

It’s a choice

et up and do activism. The world needs it more than ever, as our downward trend towards oppression is very apparent and visible not just in the digital domain.

When I grew up I never knew and never planned to do activism. It just sort of happened.

Reading about (or from) other activists, it seems apparent they too had no such plans and activism was somewhat outlandish to them.

Saying stuff like “well, I’m not an activist” is a shoddy excuse. Did you even try?

Our vacation comes to an end

his morning we published this latest part in a long series, explaining why – as our Jewish solicitor at the time might put it – Garrett ended up in a broch. His online behaviour for many years made this inevitable – he was mingling with the wrong people to cause trouble to people more far qualified than himself.

There’s a lesson somewhere in all this.

They pretend to

ids of the 1980s did not have computers at home, except those born in the late 80s or mid 80s. People born in the early 80s seldom had a PC at home unless a parent needed one for work or was working in the “IT” or similar industry/occupation. Mobile phones did exist, but very few people had them back then. To us, the kids, phones were “on the hook” and TV was the thing to watch things on (with a remote control; some TVs didn’t have that yet).

Now, by contrast, kids grow up with skinnerboxes and computers, such as tablets. They’re being spied on, they get exposed to loads of rubbish, and politicians who grew up in the 60s get to decide if it’s OK or not OK.

Politicians don’t represent the public interest.

reat interview with Richard Stallman published yesterday.

Stallman on LLMs: “The reason LLMs so often generate text whose meaning refers to false supposed facts is that they never really understand the text; they don’t work with meanings or facts in the domain of discussion. The terms they merit are “pretend intelligence” and “bullshit generators.”

“To avoid being lured into supporting the marketing hype based on “AI,” please join me in reserving the word “intelligence” for systems that qualify for it.

“I surely didn’t say anything about whether LLMs are “open,” because, as I’ve explained, I do not advocate making software “open” or “open source.” Those terms are depoliticized substitutes for “free” and “libre,” and were coined to win the support of businesses by avoiding the issues of freedom and justice (for the users of software) that might lead to criticizing businesses on moral grounds. Since those are the crucial issues in my view, the question I always ask about a program is whether it is free or libre.

“The LLMs that people mostly hear about are not released as free software. In fact, mostly they are not released at all: copies are not available. They can be used only as “online services” — meaning that the program a user directs a question to is running on some company’s computer, and under the developer’s total control. Even to modify it by patching the binary is impossible.

“Entrusting your own computing activity to software running on someone else’s server inherently subjugates you, because you can’t possibly modify that copy — even if it is a copy of a free program. We call that scenario SaaSS, for “Service as a Software Substitute” and we reject it.

“Since January I’ve heard of one LLM which seems to be released with freedom, including the training inputs. If that checks out, we would describe it as “free.”

“Alas, that doesn’t make it “intelligence.””