I suppose people who were his age then may have been healthier than people his age now.
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I suppose people who were his age then may have been healthier than people his age now.
The “problem” with vaccines? They so effective at preventing deaths that they create generations of people that question whether disease was a problem in the first place because they have never experienced the horrors of a world without vaccines.
Trump demanded proof of the efficacy of COVID vaccines, and Pfizer responded by thanking President Trump for Operation Warp Speed. The press release is a work of art. www.pfizer.com/news/announc...
I assume that was largely driven by the increasing size of ships so Bristol dock eventually became untenable.
If I’m being honest, I’m feeling pretty crap about my small business. It’s so bloody difficult at the moment with rising costs, US tariffs, Brexit nonsense and the threat of AI. Please have a look at what I do and repost to spread the word gailmyerscough.co.uk
You can still sail up the Avon to Bristol docks (at high tide). They will open the swing bridge for anyone that asks — even if it holds up the rush hour traffic. The SS Great Britain is permanently moored in a dry dock and is a fantastic museum. And there's a replica of Cabot's ship, the Matthew
Well, if it is designed for Mr D Trump of Florida …
Is this just another case of Trump believing the last person he spoke to? RFK Jr lies, says there is no data that vaccines work, Trump believes him. The drug makers show him they are safe/effective and Trump believes them. The only way he can square this is to assume that RFK Jr never got the data 🤷
The Trussification of the Labour Party
RFK Jr cut half a billion dollars in research funding for mRNA vaccines. He & Marty Makary claim mRNA vaccines are “risky” so they’ll shift to “traditional, older” vaccine tech that’s “safer.” Guess what? We used to immunize people by blowing powdered smallpox scabs up their noses. 1/
this is my favorite technique for learning the proper term for something in a different language. you can guess the actual word(s) all you want, and you can spelunk through dictionaries, but nothing quite beats looking up "how does [language] wikipedia talk about it"
RFK jr *rubs hands together* “Who shall we kill next…”
I thought the sign said “Hundred Midget Trolls”
Old Soviet joke: Every day a man buys the newspaper, looks at the front page, swears under his breath and immediately dumps the paper in the bin. One day, the seller asks: What are you looking for? Man: An obituary. Seller: The obituaries aren't on the front page. Man: this one will be.
Don’t trust the experts”? That’s not democracy, that’s recklessness. On a plane, I want a pilot. In a hospital, I want doctors and scientists who understand the evidence. Expertise isn’t religion or authoritarianism — it’s training, accountability, and data. Ignore it and we all pay the price.
I was also disappointed. I hoped there would be a synopsis, at least
I did say “little bit” (I guess there would be more info available in Russian, for those interested)
There is a little bit more info about the film here m.imdb.com/title/tt0054...
Vaccines have one of the highest reward to risk ratios of any medical intervention in human history. This sociopathic conspiracy theorist is literally killing people, causing the deaths by vaccine-preventable diseases of people who could have lived.
there is no question in my mind that rfk jr is the most dangerous person in this administration and that his eugenicist ideology threatens the lives of millions of people www.advocate.com/politics/dem...
As we've seen across history, the populist playbook used by Farage is ugly, powerful and incredibly destructive. We know where it will lead if we don't stop it.
One of the things I hated about Brexit was the way 99% of the politicians who were against it suddenly switched to “it’s a great idea because people voted for it.” Why couldn’t they be honest and say “it’s a shit idea but you voted for it so we’re going to give it to you”
Even if that is not what they are deliberately optimised for, the purpose of a system is what it does
Instead, I think the capabilities of LLMs gives us some clues about what we might need to do to separate the superficial _appearance_ of intelligence (as in the Turing Test) and somehow identifying real intelligence/consciousness
If that were the case, it would say something pretty depressing about our conception of ourselves as conscious individuals when maybe we are just machines for regurgitating new combinations of words.
Some form of AI could have consciousness (with all the caveats about how we could ever know) but I can’t see any way that consciousness could be ascribed to LLMs which, by definition, have no knowledge of anything other than the the probabilistic relations between word tokens.
For the person by the person
📌
A day of shame for the UK. A political party proposes mass deportations and the response from other political parties is not to condemn this as going further than even Mosley or the National Front.
“We wouldn’t normally waste time on a party with 4 MPs but because they are fascists we’ll make an exception”
Reform UK, which has a grand total of four MPs, was just given an uninterrupted platform for an hour and a half on the BBC and Sky News channels, in order to talk about its plans for mass deportations When was the last time the Greens (with four MPs) or the Lib Dems (with 72) were given the same?
I started on an OU humanities degree (before it got too expensive to continue) and trying to reconcile critical thinking skills and logic with Rousseau’s Social Contract was a mind-bender
And then only in the very narrow sense of modelling human language use.
Here we go again. For the love of God can some journalist actually ask him, "Does that mean the pharmaceutical companies are going to pay us to take their drugs."
Philosophy of Cosmology sounds interesting 👀
Same but it says “device offline”
Scientists who study climate don't automatically attribute all changes to human activity. Rather, we carefully investigate every possible natural factor that could explain the planet's warming. Could these be the real culprits? The evidence is in--and the answer is NO. This thread explains! 🧵
I like to point out that “decimate” should only be applied to Roman centurions
GK Chesterton country
Apart from the problems with postal and proxy voting, overseas voters will not have proper representation while they are lost as a tiny number in each constituency.
“your working” (singular) sounds more natural to me
“I told Putin he is a great president and he agreed. Then I said we were both the greatest presidents that our countries have ever had. And he laughed. I think he agreed.”
Yet
But a white guy with a COVID conspiracy manifesto isn’t news at this point. After all, that’s who runs the government now! The CDC is a part of Health & Human Services, headed by RFK Jr., whose conspiracy-addled ideology is indistinguishable from the motivations of this terrorist.
Thoughts ahead of Trump’s meeting with Zelenskyy & European leaders. First, Trump wants both sides to stop fighting, but is only prepared to put pressure on Ukraine. If Putin had any worries on that score, the Alaska summit will have reassured him. Sanctions are postponed, again. 1/16
Heard a BBC reporter talking about Trump's "points of agreement" as if they were real, rather than vague things like "we want to make Russia/America great again", "killing people is bad", "Trump is very clever", "Putin is very strong"
I don’t remember that but I do remember Bush(?) throwing up on the Japanese prime minister at a formal dinner
He could have been a hero, stopped the war, and gotten a Peace prize if he'd just arrested Putin and flown him to the Hague.
I came across an app that uses streaks to help you use your phone less (didn’t work for me because it only tracks apps and I don’t have any apps that take up too much of my time)
1. "'Trusting the experts is not a feature of either a science or democracy," Kennedy said." It's literally a vital feature of both science and of representative democracy. I've written a fair bit about trust in expertise as a vital mechanism in the collective epistemology of science.
Pearl Barley
RFK Jr. doesn’t like that a study of every child born in Denmark from 1997-2018 showed no link between aluminum in vaccines and 50 adverse health outcomes. This study included more than a million kids. RFK Jr. wants the study retracted. The journal, which is a very prestigious one, refused.
It will be interesting to see if the systems are robust enough in 2026 or if they have to take the same phased approach with ETIAS
For me (for decades after I started working) it was the horror of "back to school"
I think they will notice when they are asked for their fingerprints (if they aren't expecting it)
That would be my understanding too, although this sort of case is not something I am familiar with
Although GHIC only provides for emergency cover. It wouldn’t cover the cost of repatriation for example. So travel/health insurance is still a good idea
That I is exactly what you should do. And that will show you are exempt from EES. The bigger challenge will be British residents in the EU who have not been able to obtain a residence card (this is a big problem in some parts of Italy)
bsky.app/profile/stev...
I suspect a lot of people are going to be surprised by biometrics being taken at the border even though it has been talked about for years
They have agreed to do a phased introduction so countries can start using the system when they are ready so I think this time they will stick to the timetable
EES is starting in October with ETIAS to start a year later
The EES system starting in October is new
Your final point is pretty fucking generous, tbh
Also, it took me a while to work out that "the neighboring state" meant Idaho
Had a mild cold, got the first shingles jab and was knocked out for the next two days. Interesting, though, because it's a "two part" vaccine (vaccine & adjuvant) mixed in the syringe. And then the box with the second dose had my name written on it and put in the fridge, like a Japanese bottle-keep
Snap!
I asked ChatGPT and you are wrong about this
Maybe we need to get in the habit of always telling it that its first answer is wrong even if it isn't. (I just tried it and got a slightly patronising "Well actually..." response)
There's probably a trendy restaurant joke to be made as well
You should be able to configure any standard email client to access gmail, which would bypass the AI features. There are email clients that run on your device as well as web-based ones
Surely that should be “when the temperature rises above” — like a thermostatic contro). (There are other similar errors in the paper that suggest it wasn’t proof read very carefully)
Oh you absolutely useless wankers
Toothpaste I won’t work with
Amen Gus
it has been said over and over but it’s worth reiterating in the face of this horrifying decision: RFK is quite literally joining the war on cancer on the side of cancer
Venn diagram with Nempnett on one side, Thrubwell on the other, and Nempnett-Thrubwell in the middle
It gets its name from the merging of the two villages of Nempnett and Thrubwell — maybe they didn’t exist either
It does sound like he thinks the entire US economy is his own personal petty cash account
I hope you are already planning an update to your book to include these
Fovea suggests an almost black blood-red colour because that’s what it looks like when the optometrist takes a photo of the retina. As for the others 🤷 I don’t think we can even blame AI for this. They are just random words picked out of the dictionary
White South Africans welcome
We can't know anything about an external universe so believing it is there is purely an act of faith. As a "naive realist" I disagreed but could not disagree with any of his arguments
Back when I spent a lot of time on science forums, one of the members was a philosopher who would argue for pure idealism: our only knowledge of the world comes only from our senses, so our internally-created universe is the only one that exists.
And now you have reminded me of one story with fluid/plasma based intelligences where calculus (involving continuous flows, etc) was absolutely basic to them, but integer arithmetic was advanced math.
Well, your comment about not understanding a (real) AI got me thinking about the (few) good stories about encounters with intelligent but incomprehensible aliens.
And, echoing your point, when we ask what that better thing is, it will be incomprehensible
I guessed from your latter comments that we might be largely in agreement
Interesting. My view is that we will recognise it because, when we ask it to solve a problem it will say "sod off, Ive got better things to do"
I agree that LLMs (and other current approaches) can never replicate the creative or inventive processes of humans. In that sense, they are a dead end. However, I have never seen a convincing argument that artificial intelligence, along with consciousness and creativity, is not possible in principle
With RFK playing the role of Lysenko
“Finally complete that novel you have been thinking about for decades with this one weird trick”
As someone significantly older I can confirm this is even more true the further back you go
I wonder how they will feel when that proselytising at work includes atheism or Islam
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“Hey boss, productivity seems to have fallen off a cliff since we replaced all the programmers with NPCs”