I just registered for a hotel with this pop-up for the title of the person / people staying. It's nice that they tried. They have some combinations, like Dr and Mr, which are often omitted, but they have some weird omissions. Lesbian couples are welcome as long as exactly one has a PhD, but they can't express the option where either both or neither has one. Maybe they know something about correlations between educational levels and sexuality that I don't?
More seriously, there is absolutely nothing in the provision of accommodation that requires you to know the gender of people staying (or whether they have any kind of doctorate), so the easiest way of getting this right is not to ask.
It still mildly annoys me that every hotel I've stayed at for ages has required me to select a title, I've entered Dr, and they then address me as Mr when I check in: why bother collecting data if you're not going to use it?
The only thing I can guess is that maybe they're still clinging to the convention that addressing someone by first name is overly familiar, so they have to use something like "Mr." instead.
Devastating review of the degrowth literature (561 studies):
- 'few studies use quantitative or qualitative data...' - [those that do] 'tend to include small samples or focus on non-representative cases' - 'large majority (almost 90%) are opinions rather than analysis'
It astonishes me that people expected LLMs to be good at creating summaries. LLMs are good at transforms that have the same shape as ones that appear in their training data. They're fairly good, for example, at generating comments from code because code follows common structures and naming conventions that are mirrored in the comments (with totally different shapes of text).
In contrast, summarisation is tightly coupled to meaning. Summarisation is not just about making text shorter, it's about discarding things that don't contribute to the overall point and combining related things. This is a problem that requires understanding the material, because it's all about making value judgements.
So, it's totally unsurprising that the Australian study showed that it's useless. It's no surprise that both Microsoft and Apple's email summarisation tools discard the obvious phishing markers and summarise phishing scams as '{important thing happened}, click on this link' because they don't actually understand anything in the text that they're discarding, they just mark it as low entropy and discard it.
Intel CEO will reportedly present plans to cut assets at an emergency board meeting — chipmaker may put $32B Magdeburg plant on hold and sell off Altera tomshardware.com/tech-industry…
Verizon agrees to buy rival telecom operator Frontier Communications for an enterprise value of $20B; Frontier had a revenue of $5.8B in 2023 (Christopher Palmeri/Bloomberg)
En la#Audiofoto de hoy nos vamos de viaje a Milán. Suenan las campanas, muy probablemente de su catedral. ¿A qué os recuerda la melodía? Y no se vale mirar en la descripción, o al menos antes de escuchar, que ahí yo pongo a lo que a mí me recuerda.😉 #Milan, #Soundscape, #Bells, #Campanas
And I thought "wait, didn't @mntmn's MNT Reform have a great Operator Handbook"? So I went and looked it up, and damn! It's even better than I thought.
Not only does it explain how to charge the laptop and turn it on. It introduces you to Linux, has exploded-view drawings of components, includes schematics and even a bill of materials! Magnificent.
LibreOffice 24.8 is our new major stable release, but we're also maintaining the previous 24.2 branch for a while longer, to give people time to upgrade. And today we're announcing LibreOffice 24.2.6, a bugfix update: blog.documentfoundation.org/bl… #foss #OpenSource
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Musk's X announced it would feed Twitter users' content to train their Grok AI model. This was illegal under EU law. The DPC took them to court. X said that it would fight the DPC.
Looking for a productive workspace tomorrow? 💻 Join us at HSBXLfor our open co-working day! Enjoy a collaborative atmosphere, fast internet, and great coffee. No need to book, just drop in! #hackerspace #coworkinghsbxl.be/events/open-coding-da…
... ein aufblitzendes Messer im trüben Schein einer rostigen Straßenbeleuchtung könnte man sonst als Warnblinkleuchte vor der Gefahr eines Angriffes deuten ...
Das Lesen des Tatherganges im Urteil – schon vom 20.6.2024 – erzeugte bei mir ein Geschmäckle nach versuchten "Ehrenmord" und dass die Anstifter und wahren Täter unbehelligt bleiben!
🔎 POLITICOEurope published a new report on how European Paliament President Metsola is not exactly leading by example when it comes to the relationship with her lobbyist husband Ukko Metsola
Even though a new code of ethics requires senior MEPs to declare conflicts of interest, including those involving their family, European Paliament President Metsola didn't declare her top EU lobbyist husband ‼️
Ukko Metsola works, in fact, for major corporate polluter Royal Caribbean Group.
Matt Campbell
in reply to David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*) • • •