There’s a book be Greg Egan called Permutation City which postulates something similar to this.

There exists a simulation. It works well but, due to the unbelievable complexity it runs something like 10 times slower than the real word.

They do a series of experiments on someone in the simulation. They count to ten a number of times and ask him if he perceived anything unusual. He didn’t. But what happened outside the simulation is that they did the computations for the simulation in various different ways. They parcel out the data in all kinds of ways and, for example, send different packets of data to different locations in the world, process it in each different location and then send it back and recompile it. Or they run the data packets in reverse temporal order before recompiling them.

Since the guy in the simulation didn’t notice anything unusual, they determine that time and space is irrelevant when it comes to processing the data of a simulation, at least to the people in the simulation.

So, either through some very clever realistic physics that i didn’t pick up on or, as is far more likely, some science fiction hands-waving, they decide that you can treat every point in space and time as a bit and the presence of matter as a 1 and the absence of matter as a 0. And you can then consider them one giant stack of code and data and how far each point is separated in time and space can be ignored, and therefore you can use all of time and space as one computer and run an effectively infinitely large simulation with it.

It’s a pretty silly idea, but also a clever one. And it makes for a good story.

To be clear, this isn’t happening because now the royal family knows. It’s because it’s too public for them to pretend they don’t know.

Microsoft just had a push for CoPilot in Excel. Its own promotional material said that for the tasks it was most suited to it had a success rate of 56%. For other tasks the success rate was 20%.

Imagine relying on that for anything even halfway important.

They’re useful, but not anything like to the degree that’s being claimed. It’s being pushed as if it’s going to be able to do everything.

For one example, does generative AI have a use in coding? Absolutely. If you’re a coder who knows what they are doing, it can help you have ideas and it can do some of the tedious stuff. But you still need to know what you’re doing, use it as a tool, and absolutely do not use its code without checking it all. And that’s not how it’s being pushed. It’s being pushed as if you can just type in “pretend it’s 1999 and code me a Doom sequel” and you’ll get a full, working programme out.

Even getting it to do things in chunks seems to be a trial. There’s a video I watched a day or two ago (if you’re interested, I’ll look for a link when I’ve got more time) where a guy tried to get ChatGPT to code for him. He had a specific end goal in mind and asked it to do things step by step. While there were several occasions that he was impressed by what it produced, he kept getting stuck because it would seemingly only fix problems in one area of the code by eliminating another area entirely. He found that most of his time was spent going round in circles trying to ensure that it actually did what he was asking of it. It hallucinated, too, and at one point he had to solve the problem for it by referring to a specific repository, which he said he himself only knew about because he’s got more than a decade’s experience.

That’s the biggest issue - what LLMs are capable of is far, far below what they’re sold as.

https://youtu.be/qaNIJg9A9Kg

Always check the veracity of any online quote

• Albert Einstein

There’s no way Microsoft support hand-writes each email. This would be a form letter, written by corporate, which they then insert relevant details in to.

Oh come on! I’m sure that all genuine Microsoft support emails start with “Greetings [customer name]”…

When I was in school a teacher told us that washing powder manufacturers would have a way of getting around “advertising needs to be true and accurate” laws. What they’d do is gradually reduce the strength of their product over time (normally by just cutting it with something cheap). Then they’d revert it back to its original strength so that they could announce “Now TWICE as strong!”

Shorn

Reaper is the GOAT

Several years back when it seemed like there was a rash of news stories about cops killing black people and white people trying to get them swatted and the like, I think it was Will Smith who said “racism isn’t increasing, racism is being filmed”

If you’ve got some spices, as suggested above, you can basically make your own. Add a tin of tomatoes, some tomato puree, and maybe have a slightly wider selection of spices (sumac, mace, cardamom, cloves, for example) and you can have a wide variety of curry flavours without having to spend the extra on pre-made sauces.

There’s a strong case to be made the Rise Of Skywalker was the shit-show it was because Carrie Fisher died. The idea for the trilogy (as little of a plan as there actually was) was for the first film to centre Han, the second to centre Luke, and the third to centre Leia.

Then Fisher died and they had to rework the entire film without any change to the release schedule. And they reanimated her corpse in the most unconvincing and disrespectful way.

I’m not saying the film would have been good - because it probably wouldn’t have been - but I don’t think it would have been the silly, incoherent mess that it actually was. And it’d have been nice for Fisher to be able to give Leia a proper send-off, especially as the character was what catapulted her into stardom in the first place.

It is mutually-assured destruction. The idea is that there are enough nukes to end all life on earth. Because if there are that many nukes, then nobody would ever use them.

That’s how the US and USSR came up with these figures when they were disarming at the end of the Cold War.

Pop Culture Detective has a video on a trope he calls “born sexy yesterday” about female characters who are extremely naive (often because they’re newly-created, or somehow new to Earth/human society) and how this allows a thoroughly mediocre male character to impress her mightily by having very ordinary knowledge that she doesn’t. A couple of examples given are how the alien in My Stepmother Is An Alien is incredibly impressed by the idea of putting extra cheese on microwave mac & cheese, and how the lead in Alita: Battle Angel is similarly blown away by a guy introducing her to chocolate.

It’s a way to have the fantasy of an incredibly (physically) attractive woman fall head-over-heels in love with you without you actually having to do anything. Just having the same knowledge that everybody else does is enough, because you’re the first person she met.

Of course the issue here is what people do or do not consider “good” varies from person to person.

The most likely candidates are Pete McTigh and Kate Herron. McTigh is the most probable, given that he’s showrunner of the upcoming Sea Devils miniseries and has had his name linked longer than anybody else.

Both of those names would be new blood (even though they have both worked on the show). Unless Moffat or Chibnall are going to come back again (and they’re not), then the only Fitzroy Tavern regular left who’s qualified is Mark Gatiss, and he said long ago that while he’d have been interested in the 00s he’s very much not interested any more.

That’s the closest we’re going to come to a new take, realistically. One thing’s for certain - nobody is going to take it back to any pre-JNT era.

This is awesome, but things like how the paper score is calculated should probably be on the website itself, not some scrolling and a couple of clicks away on the GitHub page. Maybe a single link or pop up on the chart itself?

Okay, I’m completely lost now. You read my comment and said that it was unhelpful becuase the fact that my comment existed means that it was unnecessary for me to add my commnet to my comment?

I honestly have no clue what you’re trying to say at this point or whether you even think that stating that US elections are in danger is a good, bad, or neutral thing.

How about the bit in Hackers where the bad guy hacker is being overpowered by the good-guy hacker, so another bad guy hacker steps in to help, with both of them typing away on the same keyboard?

That film truly is a masterpiece.