Nick
@nick@shore.me.uk
179 following, 254 followers
“OpenAI admits AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering flaws – Computerworld”
> OpenAI’s own advanced reasoning models actually hallucinated more frequently than simpler systems.
An observation I made in my book, even in the first edition two years ago, was that research gave us reason to believe that hallucinations got worse with increasing model size
So, y'know... I literally told you so
thinking about plumbing the coffee machine again
@0x47df it needs plumbing?!
@bloor it doesn’t, it’s a £50 delonghi. maybe this is the coffee machine equivalent of fitting a ferrari air filter to a corsa
I just have had enough of the water being so horrible, and ended up with a small filter. And some hoses. And fittings. And a tee to borrow the washing machine’s connection point so the while setup is a bit more landlord friendly
to do this on my current coffee machine i think i will be needing a pressure reducer to not hurt the pump, and also a solenoid valve so i can turn the water on and off at the same time as the pump.
additional fun will be required to replace the drip tray, because the overpressure valve from the pump dumps to the tank. i need it to dump to a drip tray if the tank is going.
i don't feel like opening this machine up again though. it was horrible last time i tried to replace the steam valve.
but i also don't want to buy a nicer machine, because the ones ready for plumbing are too big, too expensive, and take too long to warm up. i am not a commercial operation. i just need coffy sometimes.
so i ponder smaller machines, and voiding their warranty to fit a solenoid valve and pressure reducer to these. some of them might have space to work with.
for now? maybe i will just place a filtered water tap somewhere.
it doesn't solve my machine dumping dirty water back into the tank, but it at least tackles the scale.
Another old friend let me know he and his partner are expecting a kid soon.
Meanwhile I'm figuring out what coating to apply to the sticks of the geodesic dome that I'll be installing over my hot tub.
To each their own, I suppose.
But the notion that I thought my life was "maximally different" to that of others when I was young is still being challenged. The gap probably actually gets wider and wider as we all get older.
I don't feel sad or happy about it. Just interested. It's notable.
As Modest Mouse once said, "We all float on."
@bloor I'm convinced some of us are more use to society as crazy uncles/aunts :) In all seriousness, someone your siblings'/friends' kids can get a different perspective from, etc.
I never thought I would ever have children. I have a son who has just started University this week. Yep, empty next syndrome is here in force.
I was late starting, and there is a very good reason why parenting is best done while you are young, and not getting older.
I would suggest to anyone that if you have any intentions of being a parent that earlier in life is better than later 😉
@simonzerafa I never really have had intentions of being a parent and still don't.
@bloor @simonzerafa Neither did I, and somehow I suddenly found myself with two. Skipping the gruelling baby/toddler years was probably a good thing.
@bloor It's interesting, isn't it, when events or news or even just idle thoughts make you stop to consider the series of coincidences and decisions that's got you to where you are right now.
Sometimes I wonder how many "Sliding Doors" moments I've had. Impossible to know for sure. But kinda fun to mull over every now and then.
@gilester45 I am not sure there really are sliding door moments, per se. Either there are none, or they are continual; never ending life as continual sliding doors moments.
Seems a bit simplistic. What if they lose the whip, or resign and become an independent?
Or what if an independent joins a party? Or starts their own party?
Well done Channel 4. Now do Farage..
"More than 100 of Donald Trump’s inaccurate statements are to be dissected by Channel 4 to coincide with his state visit, in what it described as “the longest uninterrupted reel of untruths, falsehoods and distortions ever broadcast on television”.
Just seen the news and am holding my head in my hands. Who'd have known this country had 100,000 people willing to stand up and boast about how pig thick and cretinous they are.
Protesters have attacked police officers, says The Met
Police officers have been attacked by protesters at anti-immigration activist Tommy Robinson’s ‘Unite the Kingdom’ event in central London. Scotland Yard said on X: “Officers were attacked with projectiles and have had to use force to avoid their cordon being breached.”
Am I being thick? #uspol
So Trump deported a few hundred South Koreans that were there to train US workers in a new factory set up.
Surely that means they were not even immigrants - let alone illegal immigrants? I assume they were only there on a contract to train people - not planning to more to US. And surely they would not be in any way illegal in doing so?
Or did the company not have the appropriate paperwork for them working in the US?
Maybe I am missing something.
boosted@revk According to South Korean news media there's a loophole in temporary Visa documents for South Korea citizens in the USA.
There's no Visa allowing people to enter the USA with a temporary work permit.
Skilled professionals training local employees so far have entered with a travel Visa and this practice has been tolerated for years. Until now, apparently.
We are getting a heat pump later this month, replacing an old dying, leaking gas boiler.
Hivemind! Predict the outcome :
| Literally fine, works amazing: | 26 |
| Minor issues that get resolved: | 52 |
| Catastrophic, end up returning to gas boiler: | 0 |
Closed
@bloor upgrading rads and piping too?
@ret one needed replacement, two were marginal, we will see and replace later if needed. Not replacing pipework.
@bloor I'd take a fair bet on the installers looking at the plan, looking at your floor and doing it differently 8)
And the weather compensation curve will be wrong, because it's 99% magic.
@nick our most expensive day of gas cost us almost £17 in one day earlier this year. My hope is that it is not /too much/ worse than that.
@nick so that represented 270 ish kWh of gas. Factoring in a pessimistic cop of 3, and factoring in the higher unit cost of electricity, I’m slightly worse off but only slightly.
@penguin42 @bloor @nick move some of the green/social tariffs from elec to gas, tax gas a bit and use it to subsidise elec. With prices as they are, a heat pump does not feel like a clear financial win, given the upfront cost.
@steve @penguin42 @nick I am under no illusions that it won’t save me very much money right now ongoing, if any at all. However: once I get solar and batteries, then it really@really makes sense.
@bloor @penguin42 @nick yes, that makes sense. But from a policy point of getting the country off gas, I think the financials need to be much clearer.
@nick @bloor
And balance all rads/towel rails to hit suitable return water temperature. The biggest waste of energy on wet systems is returning hot water back to the boiler/heat pump because ofvexcessive flow rates. Decorators, diy and builders always mess it up. Plumbers sometimes aren't much better.
@bloor Voted option 1 as I will be getting one too and hope your good luck will rub off on me. Not sure what kind of mysticism this is 😂
Today's trip was to Hurst Castle - a 19th Century fort built around a 16th Century fort.
Well worth visiting and if Mother Nature has her way (having been given a helping hand by us), it won't be around for much longer.
Alt...
Octagonal old stone building surrounded by a more modern structure.
Replacing Sky / Virgin media with a Freeview recorder. Looking good so far, it integrates well with all the catch-up setvices, and a software update just added YouTube. #manhattant4r #cordcutting #freeview
"Ivan replied that code is either correct or incorrect; there’s no subjective determination of whether it’s high or low… if a coder writes code poorly, the program simply won’t run"
If an engineer ever says that to you, run the fuck away.
The fact it runs doesn't mean it's:
- right
- secure
- maintainable
- efficient
or can handle anything except the single case you've tried.
Every time you scratch the surface of a vibe coder, you'll find delusionally low standards.
Our nice IT admins have fixed the Mastodon instance, thanks guys!
Mic check one two, is this thing on now?
Cool cool. A load of 50 because Facebook/Meta thinks it needs to hammer the server like crazy.
2a03:2880::/29 blocked.
so far so good...
Alt...
A munin graph showing the average load of the DokuWiki server for the last 24 hours. A sharp drop is visible at the time where I banned the Facebook IP range.
Guess who's back? Back again... 🎶
Yes, it's Facebook. This time via IPv4.
Blocked.
Alt...
A sudden spike in server load this morning, caused by Meta's bots again.
Running a single user (or small) instance in the Fediverse? Relay instances acting as a spreading proxy can help you to find your content and also to make your posts visible to others - and you can easily join with #Mastodon, #snac and many other ones!
The https://fedi-relay.gyptazy.com relay is mostly for tech related content and just got updates to the manpageblog design.
#mastodon #snac #relay #activitypub #fediverse #federated #bsd #devops #proxmox #ipv6 #opensource #community #debian #python
Alt...
Image of the activity pub relay instance by gyptazy
See also https://delightful.coding.social/delightful-fediverse-experience/#activitypub-relay-servers
If you are not on the list, there is a repo to PR to, linked from the top.
Wow. Not sure what this is from, but QR codes are “fun”.
1. QR is URL that is an IP not a domain. Wow!
2. QR is not as compact as could be.
3, QR may not have required white space.
4. This is the biggie… How the fuck does anyone pick which QR they are scanning?! Most devices make that really hard.
Well done stating the crazy URLs in text though, even if text too small to read!
Have one (sane) URL and a select language option on that page.
This is special!
Alt...
A hand holding a printed instruction manual with QR codes for multiple languages. The manual includes warnings and disposal information, as well as website links for detailed manuals. The background shows a wooden floor and a small patterned rug.
@revk reminds me of barcode scanner programming books that were just page after page of barcodes you had to scan in order to configure the scanner lol.
@revk I have seen a lot of QR codes (and other 2d bar codes expected to be scanned with a phone) that are unnecessarily small, and have left wondering if anyone actually tested them with a variety of devices. To pair my phone with my car, I ended up using an SLR and macro lens to scan the code and then zoomed in so I could scan it with my phone!
@revk And for some reason, they have a Belgian version that looks identical to the Dutch one. What are the French-speaking Belgians supposed to do?
“We will always work to facilitate peaceful protest and protect the democratic right to assembly, however the actions of this group were unlawful.
“Our officers’ role is to prevent disorder, damage and disruption in the local community and they will use their powers to do this. Any breaches of the law will be dealt with.”
What damage, disorder and disruption? All I witnessed was a peaceful protest
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/16/police-arrest-protesters-palestine-action-norwich
‘Police arrested 13 people at a protest in #Norfolk on Saturday on suspicion of showing support for the proscribed group Palestine Action.
A group assembled outside City Hall in St Peters Street, #Norwich, holding placards referencing the organisation, Norfolk police said. The force said they were arrested on suspicion of displaying an item in support of a proscribed organisation, contrary to section 13 of the Terrorism Act 2000.’
Where will this end?
I was curious to see what #BBC Look East had reported on the protest…as their studios are literally within spitting distance of City Hall and the last arrest which I must have witnessed was outside the Forum where they are based.
They have literally just cobbled together press releases from Norfolk police the Met.
They felt no need to view this peaceful protest happening on their own doorstep with their own eyes…
‘You don’t see many locals at anti-migrant protests’: #Kent residents work for community cohesion | Immigration and asylum | The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/aug/16/you-dont-see-many-locals-at-anti-migrant-protests-kent-residents-work-for-community-cohesion
@nick @Geri I used to live in SE London (was born in the area) and remember a lot of racial tension there.. I suspect half the folk at these protests are angry white people from that part of the capital who are still pissed off at the *legal* immigration that has occurred over the decades and made London a multicultural city (and the paranoia about a relatively miniscule number of refugees in a country with 60 million is a proxy for decades of prejudice/racism..)
I may have pigged 4 ice cream things today.
What's worse is they come in packs of 3.
Probably 10000% of my RDA of various things
So morish though they were fruit ones its like sorbet but in magnum form
This is not a joke... A press release from the UK government about a meeting of the "national drought group", in order to "save water at home", suggests to:
"Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems"
... while the government also pushes for full-blown investments in, and adoption of, "genAI" (e.g. here ) with absolutely no mention of the environmental costs.. which are surely orders of magnitude worse than whatever a server uses to store old pictures, and for what?! 🤦🤦🤦
This is, to put it mildly, utter bullshit.
You can store a decade of email for a million people—call it 10-20Gb each—in a 10-20Tb NAS box that costs about £2000 and sucks less electricity than a laptop.
The environment agency are gaslighting us. One wonders who put them up to it?
https://social.lol/@robb/115016579150112511
@cstross to put some numbers on it, one of our hosting VMs has ~1200 mailboxes using 1.5TB of SSD. Accounting for the CPU + RAM to allow the mail to be usable and searchable, you can get ~20 such servers on our standard 1U VM host, that uses ~250W. Approx 24k mailboxes on a server. A standard DC with adiabatic cooling would evaporate at most (likely much less) than 3500l of water per server per year or 145ml per account. We're in Telehouse South which uses 40x less water ~ 3ml/mailbox/year.
The new ChatGPT is apparently "PhD-level".
I submitted the standard question I have for every LLM chatbot.
As with every other LLM-based thing, the answer was wrong.
You do not need a PhD to answer it.
You need a web browser and an understanding of the logical implications of English words like "and" and "or", and phrases like "one or more of the following conditions".
It also subtly changed meanings of various things in the answer. Also, really financially inadvisable to follow the answer.
I must stress: the definitive answer to my test question is publicly available on a government website which is kept up-to-date and is ranked highly in search results.
This does not require delving through complex scientific articles that are only available as PDFs behind an institutional paywall and which require years of study to understand in context.
Every single LLM I've tried either returns out-of-date information, subtly makes it less accurate, or both.
This technology is dogshit.
@tommorris are you able to share your question?
Seems an unhappy time for pc/hobbyist components suppliers
https://coolcomponents.co.uk closing
https://eBuyer.com going under today
Also Pi supply and nebra gone !
https://overclock3d.net/news/misc/is-ebuyer-no-more-staff-told-to-go-home/
https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/08518826 @Ryanteck
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