perahlberg.bsky.social
Palaeontologist at Uppsala University. Early vertebrate enthusiast. Moderately effective gardener. Views my own.🇸🇪🇺🇦🇨🇦🇬🇱
2,145 posts
4,555 followers
3,778 following
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Bishop Beesley (IYKYK)
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‘Cat fight’ suggests a symmetry that doesn’t exist in this case. ‘Deranged stalker’ is a better fit.
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How many seconds of Hattie Jacques / Kenneth Williams do you think they could endure?
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You think?
"The blushing bride she looks divine,
the bridegroom he is doing fine,
I'd rather have his job than mine,
when I'm cleaning windows"
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Do you think we should try to explain George Formby to our American readers, or just give it up as a hopeless task and leave them mystified?
Oh and:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfmA...
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www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KQ6...
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www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0qy...
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Drs Dunning and Kruger will see you now.
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That's brilliant! In the long run, maybe it would be a good idea to introduce beavers as well?
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You should have told him William of Ockham always carries a cut-throat razor.
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Too late for that, it has already consumed his brain. That's not "Brendan" speaking, but the xenomorph.
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The way that aircraft carrier belches smoke whenever the engines start up, you'd be hard pushed to tell whether it had been hit. You would literally have to watch it sink to be sure.
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“Land of the Free “, eh?
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Yes and yes.
In particular, I think he would see generative AI as Saruman-esque.
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"The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real things of its own. I don't think it gave life to [these artworks], it only ruined them and twisted them."
- Frodo Baggins, predicting generative AI
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Sure, but there's a difference. A human artist knows what a hand IS, and will produce something that in key respects looks like one, even if it's badly drawn. An AI knows NOTHING, there's nobody inside, and it will generate a hand that's a flesh-crawling collage of incoherent 'handishness'.
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'Twas the night before Christmas...
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Yes, that's easy to see. The one on the right is shit, it's creepy AF and her hands don't work.
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I had a serious falling-out with another senior academic about this. At a staff meeting about how to handle generative AI he said "We should embrace it, as its triumph is in any case inevitable" and I responded "In the existential battle of our time, you have chosen the side of satanic evil." Boom!
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That graph is actually really important. Note how temperature, precipitation and number of frost days - all strongly linked to climate change - have little effect. This suggests global warming is not the key factor here. Something else is at play. Artificial light? Pesticides? This really matters.
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Given that the Austronesian language group extends not only eastwards across Polynesia, but also westwards as far as Madagascar, I wonder whether the 2.7% might not have arrived to the ports of southern India, millennia ago. Austronesian speakers were the greatest seafarers the world has ever known.
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Why do you think it's boring? It looks like a really interesting pattern - especially that 2.7%, likely representing early seafarers on the Indian Ocean.
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Feels wrong to 'like' this post, but it needs to be acknowledged.
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Exactly. These two countries are not the same.
Indeed, using the term 'country' for both is misleading. Ukraine is a country in the modern sense, like e.g. Poland or Sweden, with stable borders and stable relations to its neighbours. Russia is a predatory expansionist empire like ancient Assyria.
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Ukraine attacks Russian long-range bombers. Russia retaliates by attacking Ukrainian civilians. That’s all you need to know right there.
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Their new names will be Graf Spee, Tirpitz and Bismarck.
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It really is deeply worrying. In the tropics, part of the problem may be very narrow temperature tolerance limits in species used to a stable climate. In temperate regions I suspect other factors are at play.
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The original 'reactionaries' were those who sought to reverse the French Revolution - not just halt it but return everything to how it had been. That's where the term originated.
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It's those tiny flashes of red on the edges of some of the petals...
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Festiva Maxima?
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I'm so sorry! That's just awful. Here's a small consolatory greeting from my garden, taken over the weekend.
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And then what happens? Complete collapse of the middle class (which is what this implies, down the road if not immediately) means not only social unrest but also loss of the customer base. I can't see how a 'pretend economy', of AIs serving other AIs while humans live in penury, could function.
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These should be a small "not to scale" disclaimer in a corner of the poster, that would make it perfect.
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???
What’s that got to do with it?
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Shout it loud:
The fuel for generative AI is COPYRIGHT THEFT.
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This is a fake image. Reported and blocked.
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I’m just stunned (and horrified) by the way the developers of generative AI are effectively able to assert that intellectual property law doesn’t apply to them, without significant pushback. The world seems to have gone mad.
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The sentiment is widely shared. Not by everyone of course, Orban for example is very much in favor, but there is broad resentment at American interference in our politics - even on the right, interestingly enough.
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They have already come out hard against Europe, spouting this shit, brazenly trying to interfere in our politics.
They . can . fuck . right . off
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I get that. Welcome to my living room! I had been struggling to find a good color scheme, working with the usual tasteful pale tones, but then I went to an exhibition about the houses of Pompeii. Red and yellow! I never looked back.
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Rust as a decorative surface finish.
Also, I’m not big on grass gardens.
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In the bottom right image he's wearing an accurate representation of his own brain.
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Hands across the ocean for parallel slipper orchids! That's what we need right now.
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Yay! Are they blooming now or has the season finished?
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Amazing! Calypso bulbosa occurs here but is very rare and only found in old-growth coniferous forest in the far north. I've never seen it.
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You forgot polio. The gift that keeps on giving.
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In short, I think the hummingbird and the polar bear show us how evolution really works. The popular mythology of slow stately progress is substantially mistaken, and is ultimately rooted not in scientific evidence but in a progressivist wish to see the present as better than the past.
END
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of the Devonian period, there's a lively debate about exactly what they did for a living and what functional capabilities they had, but I'm absolutely certain of one thing: they were GOOD at it. As good at it as any inhabitant of a modern-day mangrove swamp is good at what IT does.
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there is equally no reason to think that the organisms of [insert time period here] were not as savagely fine-tuned survival machines as those of today. The idea of the deep past as a home of maladapted animals lumbering about in complacent mediocrity is laughable. Returning to the early tetrapods