Guy Rixon

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• Commented on The Radiant Future! (Of 1995)
  "So my guess is that we'll just swap out the source of the hydrocarbons going into our aircraft from a bad one (that releases fossil carbon into our atmosphere) to a neutral one (powered by renewables, recycles non-fossil carbon)." Agreed;...
• Commented on The Radiant Future! (Of 1995)
  Doesn't correlate AFAICS unless the other timeline leads to a state without royal bodyguards or to a lot of terrorism (because the other incident with bolted cavalry horses that I can remember was an IRA attack). Neither seems obvious. BTW,...
• Commented on The Radiant Future! (Of 1995)
  "And on a side note, I started watching the TV series last night about the Horizon accounting system scandal at the UK (English?) Post Office. Is/was it as bad as the TV series makes it out to be?" It's worse....
• Commented on The Radiant Future! (Of 1995)
  "Geocities for your cat pictures and selfies, I would think." Possibly. But the image source is compact cameras, not smartphones. Those were not (in our timeline) uniformly internet-connected before smartphones swept them away. They were WIFI connected (and later Bluetooth...
• Commented on The Radiant Future! (Of 1995)
  If everybody is carting CueCats around, it follows that there are no camera-equipped smartphones. Either no cameras, or no mobile computing-platform worthy of the name. This could be a result of no Apple. Therefore, whatever internet social-media exists --- usenet...
• Commented on Announcement time!
  All the reports I've seen are about either acute or chronic COVID. Not much has percolated out about the cumulative damage from mild of symptomless COVID. It's probably difficult to measure the effects. So there's hope that the common kind...
• Commented on Announcement time!
  Another hypothesis: from here on in, the majority of people in rich countries will actually die of COVID19. That is, the majority of us who avoid cancer, RTAs, nutters with guns and such will die in our old age of...
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  In the UK, cost of rail tickets is a problem. Walk-up tickets on regional trains doubled, roughly, in price over the pandemic and in my region are now at the level where driving + expensive parking is always cheaper, quicker...
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  "...but have to travel for two hours in shitty local trains in order to reach any major main station, and then another two hours in shitty local trains in order to reach their actual destination..." When the overall system is...
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  When you incrementally upgrade a bird rather than developing a whole new one, the loss rate drops rapidly. Assuming that the incremental development is done properly. Ariane 5 was the extreme counter-example. On a personal note, my remaining career is...
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  In Pennsylvania, the way to Paradise is through Intercourse. Gordonville really should be renamed Climax....
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  Yes, but in the sense of "simpler is better". But I would be greatly pleased if the speech of USA citizens, which is fine, could just be called "American". No insult is implied, and I do know it's a collection...
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  As for "names to confuse Americans" There's also Magdalene college and bridge in Cambridge, pronounced "Maudlin" and anciently spelt Maudlyn. Very anciently: it predates the USA and probably the University too, so not actually devised by snotty academics to mess...
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  Yeahbut...one can sequence old DNA but not recover enough of the detail to clone the organism (IIUC). Very lossy. A while back, I met a researcher who was trying to do spectroscopy on freshly-harvested DNA. Apparently it's chemically extremely fragile...
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  It helps a lot if the text is in the language preferred for research publication across the whole planet. Currently English or American, previous Latin or Greek: all remain readable. Also if translations from sample works in that language are...
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  So the obvious enhancement is "read this text; using only information from the text, give me...". You can say that now, but I don't know if the LLM would understand what you wanted, or how to comply, or whether it...
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  For data and publications that are "just files" there is a solution. Some universities maintain a repository for academic results, where deposited files are kept indefinitely. The implied intention is to keep them for a long as the university library...
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  So this makes things easier and faster. Agreed. So perhaps it should be IA not AI: "Idiot Amplifier"....
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  I'm not sure that the use of LLMs is the real issue here. Somebody who screws up like this using an LLM will screw things up regardless. The root problem looks to be that either they don't know they're screwing...
• Commented on A message from our sponsors: New Book coming!
  Speculating wildly, it's the same reason that HDMI cables cost £25for a few grams of copper and two crimped-on connectors. It's a proprietary format and some utter genital is gouging over the license fees....
• Commented on A message from our sponsors: New Book coming!
  It may be that the 60s low-density estates are the worst problem for charging EVs. I'm in a 1965 terrace in a village. Out front, there is a garden, then a foot path, then a patch of grass owned and...
• Commented on A message from our sponsors: New Book coming!
  I preferred Runequest's way of balancing classes, where iron interfered with magic and magicians were stuck with bronze weapons (upgrading to Mithril if they were rich or lucky in looting). Regarding darts, I think there was a cavalry throwing-weapon in...
• Commented on A message from our sponsors: New Book coming!
  It's been done long ago. The First Folio of Shakespeare is copy edited from the author's drafts for several plays. It was done a few years after he died. The Old Testament of the bible seems to have collected from...
• Commented on A message from our sponsors: New Book coming!
  So Iris was an inmate at the time rather than a jailor? You said "administrator" above, I was confused....
• Commented on A message from our sponsors: New Book coming!
  May we know when A Conventional Boy is set w.r.t The Fuller Memorandum? Or would that spoil too much?...
• Commented on Same bullshit, new tin
  Israel is interesting because they do conscript women and the women do serve without (apparently) much complaint. And Israel does seem to fill certainly military roles mainly with women: the observation posts along the Gaza border are reported to have...
• Commented on Same bullshit, new tin
  No, not bollocks. It's gratifying to know that the slaughter lessened during the Somme campaign, but "not everybody died" is too weak a criterion for an effective army. As I understand my reading about that war, the whole Somme campaign...
• Commented on Same bullshit, new tin
  Did you read the last part of my post? I am not arguing that women make bad soldiers, or that no women wants to serve, or that women should not serve. I'm suggesting that most modern women would react badly...
• Commented on Same bullshit, new tin
  If renewed military service ever got serious consideration, gender equality would kill it. Back in the day, some female voters quietly approved of military service because it took annoying boys off their hands and returned men who'd grown up a...
• Commented on Same bullshit, new tin
  It took about 18 months to get a useful army that way. From January 1916, when conscription started, to the autumn campaigns in 1917. The British battles in 1916 were farces, fought by formations that couldn't do better than meat...