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No one understands electricity and anyone who says they do is in the pocket of Big Volt

[while I'm on my soapbox: the number of people I see claiming to love books, value writing, but also say they only buy books from second hand stores, or borrow from the library... 😐]

I mean the average professional UK author earns £7k pa, down 50% in a decade. I don't see how anyone realistically believes they should be able to purchase flawlessly factchecked literature brimming with primary sources from an industry built on sub-living wages www.theguardian.com/books/2022/d...

My old stats professor made us do all the calcs by hand, which taught us well what the tests actually measured. That said, I expect the volumes of work expected of young people, and the paltry wages offered, means an AI-free career is up there with defined benefit pensions, a thing of yore

Data from EFFIS / MODIS, with Sentinel imagery. Circle size corresponds to fire intensity (logFRP). Fires seems to start simultaneously as they are only recorded when the satellite passes overhead - MODIS only records incidence not persistence, animation decay is set to 7 days.

France has already lost 86000 ha to fire (10x the average) in 2026. I mapped every significant fire recorded this year - over 300 fires, four times the average.

further evidence to my hypothesis that many people do not understand how LLMs work. If you treat ChatGPT like Google - an information retrieval tool - you will run into problems. (it doesn't help that AI companies actively obfuscate this)

sure, here or me@frankswain.com

You’re not wrong - in 2025 EU signalled it would shift away from a reactive firefighting strategy (though growing the EU Civil Protection Mechanism which pools resources) toward greater land/community management; this is the new normal

interesting example of how prediction markets and the ability to mass produce scrapers / hacking bots with AI are incentivising attacks on sites as marginal as a compendium of movie statistics stephenfollows.com/p/what-just-...

*walks into room of mathematicians* Have you considered DOING A BREAKTHROUGH.

I was going to raise the exception of a microwave manual, but then, why _shouldn't_ a microwave manual have joyous prose? (the jury's still out on scientific papers, which should probably be written by AI simply because humans are intent on making them as unreadable as possible)

I was offered a spot on a flagship TV show, should have been a big break, except I was expected to research/write/pitch stories against other writers all week in London, yet only get paid for the on-camera time if/when my stories ran. Which is... not tenable if you aren't already rich

This disingenuous commentary doesn’t help anyone. Frauds start unravelling pretty quickly. That you apparently cannot afford to put your oven or treat yourself is quickly undermined by the question “so why are you spending £50 per week on petrol?” Then, it turns out, she has an agent and /1

IANAL, but if my dog jumped my fence and bit someone, I think I could be held liable in both a criminal and civil case - even if I didn't know my dog could jump the fence or intend it to

Integral theory posits explicit levels of human development, from pure instinct through magical thinking> conquest> morality> rationality> self-awareness; characters in stories operate at one level, with chars operating level above/below as antagonists. It's an interesting writing model.

With The Odyssey in theatres, it's a great time to revist this v. interesting video which uses Ken Wilbur's integral theory of development to explain why some stories set in history "feel" authentically old, and others "like your peasant knows what an iPhone is" www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2P8...

nothing says "green energy" like hundreds of rocket launches

these are all solved problems

I genuinely don't understand why anybody is taking this idea seriously. Which do you think is a cheaper way to have solar energy on demand: 50,000 space mirrors, or one battery? www.nature.com/articles/d41...