Best Of

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).

Somewhat belatedly, it is time to go and get the Christmas tree. Then put some decs up. Our son is coming home in the early hours for Christmas. Looking forward to that.

This has been a very unhappy hear for me in politics. I feel an orphan. I have nothing but contempt for the SNP government in Scotland and I am in despair about the Labour government in London. My enthusiasm and even interest has waned sharply. I may have a break from PB for a while.

We're in a dull phase right now.

That's certainly part of the problem. Sometimes, as with the bug going round at the moment, the only answer is to hunker down and wait for nature to do its thing. The current personnel aren't ideal casting, sure. But if the alternatives are worse, what are we to do?

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Besides, how did we get here and then get out? Part of the problem, I'm sure, is that we're demanding leadership qualities that go well beyond what we have any right to demand. Since Blair, we've had seven PMs, all of whom failed fairly unambiguously and fairly quickly. What was the sliding door moment where we could have avoided all this?

If David Cameron had not called and lost the Brexit referendum, we'd not have had Theresa May and Boris, and Nigel Farage and Dominic Cummings would have left the stage. So it's Ted Heath's fault for taking us into Europe.

If Alfred the Great hadn't fought off the Vikings, we'd have the Norwegian Sovereign Fund instead of all our national debt.