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Two Russian Su-27s allegedly taken out by Ukraine in Crimea last night.

https://x.com/bayraktar_1love/status/2002306368535941132

There’s been quite the ramp-up in Ukranian strikes on strategic assets in the last few days.

Nice to see the Ukranians responding to Mr Putin's plea for respect.

It might have more affect if they disabled civilian airliners. That would impact the Russian population because sanctions would drastically limit their repairability. Only a handful of generals know or care how many warplanes Russia has.

Russian warplanes drop glide bombs on Ukrainian cities daily. The Ukrainian population certainly knows about Russian warplanes. Plus they're also used to shoot down Ukrainian drones and cruise missiles.

I am struggling to get my head round how weird your comment is.

I thought the point was that targeting empty civilian airliners would cause far more damage to Putin’s reputation among his people and lead to him possibly being forced out?

I have to say I think that’s optimistic but somebody may have said that in December 1916 (as John Buchan had the Princess say in Huntingtower).

The one thing the UK could do that would put significant domestic pressure on VVP would be to stop granting visas to Russian citizens under any circumstances. The Russia That Matters greatly prizes foreign travel. Starmer seems about as keen on that as he is on seizing Russian assets frozen in the UK. Not very.

The nativity is the first public sorting most children experience, and it’s definitely sorting rather than sortition.

Some parts have lines, others don’t. The narrator, Joseph, the innkeeper, the wise men and the angel Gabriel have meaningful lines.

There are no female parts with dialogue. As I discovered when our daughter was given the seemingly plum role of Mary only to discover it’s a completely silent part. You just sit there looking demure. Hence the most articulate young girl tends to get the narrator part, and/or they treat the Angels as ladies.

Those vote shares are pretty close to what you’d expect with current class and educational differences in party support, but there’s something else going on too. Look at the Lib Dems: Joseph the top performer, but narrator way down. I would hazard a guess that says something why some people become Lib Dems. We are Josephs, rather than narrators.

My teachers realising my greatness cast me as a wise man.

I was an innkeeper. The only “baddie” in the story.

King Herod surely...

Herod was only taking targeted and proportionate action against terrorists.
#themostmoralpalaceguardintheworld

The nativity is the first public sorting most children experience, and it’s definitely sorting rather than sortition.

Some parts have lines, others don’t. The narrator, Joseph, the innkeeper, the wise men and the angel Gabriel have meaningful lines.

There are no female parts with dialogue. As I discovered when our daughter was given the seemingly plum role of Mary only to discover it’s a completely silent part. You just sit there looking demure. Hence the most articulate young girl tends to get the narrator part, and/or they treat the Angels as ladies.

Those vote shares are pretty close to what you’d expect with current class and educational differences in party support, but there’s something else going on too. Look at the Lib Dems: Joseph the top performer, but narrator way down. I would hazard a guess that says something why some people become Lib Dems. We are Josephs, rather than narrators.

I find it amusing when people delight in the imperfection of AI; what kind of natural intelligence is perfect? Were they expecting humans to have invented godlike intelligence immediately?

Thank god that it still requires human surveillance!

I’ve just been discussing my upcoming walk in France with free Google AI. I started by asking it to tell me about it with a link to Google maps of roughly my route. It replied with the distance and a recommendation to look at Mappy for more details

I asked more specific questions, and gave it some more details of me and my holidays, including my holiday motto (Je marche partout, et Je bois comme un trou. Which it loved and told me was original)

The answers became better and better, and more tailored to my previous requests. It gave me the same advice as @kjh has about Arachon Bay

It occasionally tells me obvious nonsense, but politely apologises and gives me seemingly better information when I point out the mistakes

I asked it about possible future extensions to my walk (which it, on its own, calls the Grand Loop) into Spain or Portugal. It gave me interesting beer/wine/food/history/walking information on its three proposed routes

And, unprompted, it came up with possible Spanish and Portuguese idiomatic boozy walking holiday mottos

AI is so useful if one remembers its limitations

This is quite an interesting project.
What do our PB historians made of it ?

https://x.com/joachim_voth/status/2001688613055267204
How did people in 1913 see the world? How did they think about the future? We trained LLMs exclusively on pre-1913 texts—no Wikipedia, no 20/20. The model literally doesn't know WWI happened. Announcing the Ranke-4B family of models. Coming soon: https://github.com/DGoettlich/history-llms

This is what makes diaries so amazing. Pepys's (1660-1669) having no idea until 1666 that the fire will render the City of London he writes about for six years mostly non existent. For pre WW1 and how it felt running up to it in ignorance my favourite is a real obscurity, the diary of Bishop Edward Lee Hicks (1910-1919), a boring teetotal bishop of Lincoln who stalks his diocese by train.

(NB He visited Algarkirk on 12th March 1914).