As a child I read Groosham Grange from Anthony Horowitz, and when I first heard a description of Harry Potter, I thought that they were describing that book from Horowitz. I can’t believe no one else noticed. But I also think that most people active in children’s literature will have an attitude of “anything that gets a child reading, is a good thing”, so they’re not that upset about poor quality being popular and they’d rather keep the positive vibe going.

This is a prime example of voter suppression through legal means. The article is worth a read just for that, even if you’re not from the region.

It’s been regressing much longer than that. My impression is that the high point of integrity in Belgian politics was the late 1990s and early 2000s, so after Willy Claes got ousted and prior to Verhofstadt 2. Back then top politicians would step down even when something wasn’t their direct fault, but Belgium has regressed a lot since then. Politicians and government administrations again act as if they are above the law, which they obviously are, since none of them ever get convicted for corruption or abuse of their position. The only thing that makes them behave somewhat, is admonishments (+fines) of the European commission.

I wonder if the ballroom will contain a throne and will thus actually be a throne room.

Brilliant. This also needs a night time photo.

It used to be that the first result to a lot of queries, was a link to the relevant Wikipedia article. But that first result has now been replaced by an ai summary of the relevant Wikipedia article. If people don’t need more info than that summary, they don’t click through. That Ai summary is a layer of abstraction that wouldn’t be able to exist without the source material that it’s now making less viable to exist. Kinda like a parasite.

Usa republicans are such a weird alliance of values. It seems that on one side there’s a bunch of xenophobes who don’t care if someone is a lying corrupt grifter, as long as their skin has the right color and they profess the right racist + misogynist values. And on the other side there’s a bunch of lying corrupt grifters, who don’t care what skin color or sexuality someone has, as long as they’re also lying corrupt grifters.

As I understand it, the public perception of Trump was distorted by how he was portrayed on The Apprentice: https://www.psypost.org/new-research-sheds-light-on-the-influence-of-the-apprentice-on-donald-trumps-political-rise/

The producers at NBC had to jump through a lot of hoops to make Trump appear competent. Their chief marketing officer from that time is very sorry for what he did: https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2024-10-16/we-created-a-tv-illusion-for-the-apprentice-but-the-real-trump-threatens-america

Once Trump became the republican candidate, the right-wing media took up the responsibility of filtering and distorting what their audience got to see and hear about Trump.

One of the other replies said that: “1”+(2+3) is “15” in JavaScript.". So my last theory as to what was going on, was that the creator of the meme had as cell contents =“1”, 2 and 3. And then copilot used python code to sum those, not sum() which would have answered 5.

But since the answer is a black box, who really knows. This blind trust that open ai+ms expect, makes it unusable for anything that needs to be correct and verifiable. Indeed incomprehensible that they think this is a good idea. I’ll have to try finding something better on lm studio the next time that I have a math problem, thanks for that tip.

It is theft though: they are taking something that would otherwise belong to someone else (the wealth difference that would have been accumulated), and they’re keeping it for themselves. That fits the definition of theft. The method may be more indirect, but the end result is the same. Inventing euphemistic terms to describe something that can be described with a simple existing word, will only end up muddying the waters in my experience.

Republicans really have something against the cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency, it seems to get targeted at every opportunity.

Edit: as it turns out, republicans really do have a grudge against the agency, they’ve been targeting it since before Trump got reelected: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/22/conservatives-cyber-cisa-politics-00122794 Countering misinformation campaigns was a bridge too far for republicans.

It’s not going away any time soon. There’s currently 2 to 3 times as many humans as what would be long term sustainable with the way that we live. That means that it’s going to be a problem for at least many decades, but more likely a few centuries. It’s definitely not yesteryears problem. And sustainability should always remain a concern, in everything that we do. Many countries (not the USA obviously) are already taking steps to be more sustainable, but it’s baby steps compared to what is needed.

To sustain the current amount of humans, we are using unsustainable methods. That makes us unsustainable as well.

Some estimates from Wikipedia: “Climate change, excess nutrient loading (particularly nitrogen and phosphorus), increased ocean acidity, rapid biodiversity loss, and other global trends suggest humanity is causing global ecological degradation and threatening ecosystem services that human societies depend on.[9][10][11] Because these environmental impacts are all directly related to human numbers, recent estimates of a sustainable human population often suggest substantially lower figures, between 2 and 4 billion.[12][13][14] Paul R. Ehrlich stated in 2018 that the optimum population is between 1.5 and 2 billion.[15] Geographer Chris Tucker estimates that 3 billion is a sustainable number, provided human societies rapidly deploy less harmful technologies and best management practices.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_population

Would the outcome have been the same without people in the media repeatedly bringing this to everyone’s attention? Probably not, because there would have been no public pressure against it, while the shadow groups that want this would have still been lobbying the politicians.

Something bad is going to happen.
Some people advocate to stop that bad thing.
Even more people are holding their clutches that the bad thing might happen.
Because of public pressure, action is undertaken to prevent the bad thing from happening.
Thanks to those efforts, the bad thing is successfully averted.

Some random person: that bad thing was never going to happen, look at all those gullible people who were panicking over nothing, we could have just done nothing and the outcome would have been the same.

Also known as the “preparedness paradox”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preparedness_paradox

I found a moment to look up that edible part that you found: "For the purposes of this part, ‘meat’ means edible parts of the animals referred to in points 1.2 to 1.8 of Annex I to Regulation (EC) No 853/2004, " So no, they do not define meat as the edible parts of the animals, they define meat as the edible parts of the animals referred to in points 1.2 to 1.8 of Annex I etc. You can’t just ignore parts of a definition.

1.2 to 1.8 of Annex I to Regulation (EC) No 853/2004 is:

“Meat” means edible parts of the animals referred to in points 1.2 to 1.8, including blood.

1.2. “Domestic ungulates” means domestic bovine (including Bubalus and Bison species), porcine, ovine and caprine animals, and domestic solipeds.

1.3. “Poultry” means farmed birds, including birds that are not considered as domestic but which are farmed as domestic animals, with the exception of ratites.

1.4. “Lagomorphs” means rabbits, hares and rodents.

1.5. “Wild game” means:

—

wild ungulates and lagomorphs, as well as other land mammals that are hunted for human consumption and are considered to be wild game under the applicable law in the Member State concerned, including mammals living in enclosed territory under conditions of freedom similar to those of wild game; and

—

wild birds that are hunted for human consumption.

1.6. “Fanned game” means farmed ratites and farmed land mammals other than those referred to in point 1.2.

1.7. “Small wild game” means wild game birds and lagomorphs living freely in the wild.

1.8. “Large wild game” means wild land mammals living freely in the wild that do not fall within the definition of small wild game.

Afaik fish is not considered meat, definitely not in colloquial language. With a quick search I found another EU article which mentions meat and fish, and they list meat and fishery products as being different things: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/hygiene-rules-for-food-of-animal-origin.html

What that article includes under meat: “Meat, including domestic ungulates (bovine, porcine, ovine and caprine species); poultry and lagomorphs (farmed birds, rabbits, hares and rodents); farmed and wild game; minced meat, meat preparations and mechanically separated/recovered meat; and meat products.”

From the eu Parliament document: *3. ‘Meat products’ means processed products resulting from the processing of meat or from the further processing of such processed products, so that the cut surface shows that the product no longer has the characteristics of fresh meat. Names that fall under Article 17 of Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011 that are currently used for meat products and meat preparations shall be reserved exclusively for products containing meat.

These names include, for example:

• Steak
• Escalope
• Sausage
• Burger
• Hamburger
• Egg yolk
• Egg white*

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/A-10-2025-0161_EN.html Use ctrl+f “burger” to find it in the text.

This not only affects vegetarian food, but also salmon steak for example. It’s a populist political move that doesn’t seem to be backed up by any linguistic science, as if mystery sausages haven’t been a thing for centuries. As long as it looks like a sausage, it is a sausage imo. It’s also not law yet, the member states still have to approve those amendements.

Ps, this gave me an idea for possible vegetarian branding: names like “not a burger” seem to still be allowed, so a line of foodstuffs called “not a sausage” etc might be fun.

This is going to depend on the country that you’re in. Germany for example is pretty notorious for also going after the small fries.

I assume you mean DeepSeek? And it doesn’t look like it, according to what I could find, their biggest innovation was “reinforcement learning to teach a base language model how to reason without any human supervision”. https://huggingface.co/blog/open-r1

Some others have replied that chatgpt and copilot are already modular: they use python for arithmetic questions. But that apparently isn’t enough to be useful.

I hadn’t heard of that protocol before, thanks. It holds a lot of promise for the future, but getting the input right for the tools is probably quite the challenge. And it also scares me because I now expect more companies to release irresponsible integrations.