jodrellblank

a) I went to a Talon Voice cheat sheet and copied them out because I didn’t remember them. Is plex not right?

b) Talon Voice is a configurable voice engine, the commands are something you setup and people use common shared starter packs and then edit their own, so there isn’t a formal standard, plex might be different in some setups?

c) they just have to be sounds you can vocalise which are distinct from each other, and it helps if they are one syllable when using them often; there’s no reason they have to be dictionary words or mean anything.

NATO phonetic is to be understandable over a noisy radio channel, if you want just distinct sounds then Talon Voice users settled on shorter ones easier to use all the time:

    air a
    bat b
    cap c
    drum d
    each e
    fine f
    gust g
    harp h
    sit i
    jury j
    crunch k
    look l
    made m
    near n
    odd o
    pit p
    quench q
    red r
    sun s
    trap t
    urge u
    vest v
    whale w
    plex x
    yank y
    zip z

Why is a dehumidifier either a hack or a lie?

smartvacuums.co.uk says a dehumidifier collects 10 - 20 litres of water a day. dehumidifier-rentals.co.uk says 8 - 20 litres a day for a domestic compressor type, or 0.5 - 10 litres per day for a small domestic type. upgradedhome.com says about 4 litres a day.

Sounds plausible for a mop water bucket to fill usefully full between, say, twice-weekly moppings.

"but that core kernel of shared values is truly universal."

Which values? "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." does not seem to be upheld very strongly in the USA.

What about women's rights and abortion upturned by the current government, why are Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality needed 50 years after Martin Luther King, what about thousands of people disappeared by Trump's ICE, what about the enormous wealth inequality where the wealthy seem to be a lot more 'equal' than the plebs, what about nobody being punished for the 2008 financial crisis or the Epstein events or the Jan 6th attempted coup? Or the unwillingness of so many people to wear masks during COVID out of respect for their fellow Americans?

How can you claim a "core kernel of universal shared values" without nation-wide universal health care, workers rights, liveable minimum wage, things that demonstrate a fundamental belief in equality and shared values??

The irony of (teacher) reciting a pledge in support of 'liberty and justice for all' and then falling apart because a child has tried to use some of that liberty, then wishing and perpetuating injustice upon them in retaliation, is strong.

If one's ideals fall over so easily, what would happen in the event of an actual serious attack on those ideals?

"where's the amazing product that couldn't have been done without AI?"

My phone can search my photos with text based on what's represented in the photo. That wasn't a thing for computers from 1950 through about 2012, and now it's just normal. Google Lens will tell you what a plant is, Merlin app will identify birds from birdsong.

In 2000 we had Dragon Naturally Speaking and Kurzweil VoicePad, now we have voice recognition and machine transcription that works usefully well. 'Now' being sometime after 2012.

I don't remember what we had for human language translation, but since transformers and LLMs and GP-GPU, we have Google Translate and a lot of competitors, such that usefully good translation is everywhere - in the right click menu in FireFox, for example. Google translate will take a photo with foreign text in it, translate the text, overlay it on the photo.

Useful programming language porting, it's gone from basically impossible or unusable, to very usable.

Text synthesis, my employer has an AI generated newsletter. It's not something I want, but it's also not something you could do at all ten years ago.

Script synthesis, it's now easy to one-shot a few lines of script or command line to do something, faster than opening the ffmpeg man pages or whatever. "that didn't work, here's the error: <>" "the codec is not supported in this mode, try --work-please" and

Image synthesis. My local daily newspaper has at least one full page AI image, that's not something you could do at all ten years ago.

Camera drones, now they can clock onto your face, fly while following you and keeping the you in shot, and respond to gestures for things like landing.

"By now we should have seen some major new invention"

There's no law of the Universe which says this, "you should see a new invention k years after the invention of a transformer architecture". Solar electricity generation was first noticed in 1839, first commercialised in 1954, and it's only just (give or take a few years) become a significant percentage of world power generation (6% in 2022) and the cheapest form of electricity.

"AI" was considered a hundred years ago with 'Robots' and Turing Tests, wasn't usefully progressed until computers in say the 1950's with LISP and chess, the 1970s with Prolog, but had a huge shift around 2012 with GP-GPU and powerful enough video cards to crunch large amounts of data and with the internet providing large amounts of data, then again with transformer architectures and LLMs, and then with tensor flow and TPU/NPU dedicated accelerators.

Do you expect the world will look the same in 2036? 2046? That all this investment in AI datacenters will just stop and go away? That all the dedicated cores in mobile devices will fall unused? That Waze and Tesla Full Self Driving will just stop where they are even if processing power 10x's? That Amazon will stop rolling out warehouse robots because humans are better? That drones and robo-mowers, robo vacuums, Alexas and OK Google's are going to be no different? That nobody will train anything else, connect up any other inputs or outputs, try any new uses, or make use of any changing costs?

You are comparing CLIs to GUIs.

Yes, and GUIs are winning again as they so often do, but also no I'm not; you can be in PowerShell CLI and run `Get-Help thing -Online` and have it launch a GUI web browser to the URI that `thing` declared as its help page. You can run `gci | out-gridview` and get a PowerShell object stream input to a GUI item picker. And on other machines you can run `ls | gvim -` and get a GUI that's reading from command line stdin.

But also no I'm not: look in this thread, part of the distinction is composability, part is interactive vs non-interactive use, part is whether the workflow gets paused, part is whether the output is desired by default or should be requested on demand, and part is whether the output stays on screen or is cleared. There can be no answer from all of these differing desires which pleases everyone, and that's a total failure of imagination.

CLIs can have jobs and background jobs and there's no official standard or de-facto standard for having the running job go into the background to display the help or paged output in the foreground. CLIs can have multiplexors, screen and tmux, and editors EMACS and VIM which have buffers and windows, and there's no official or de-facto standards for different output streams to open in either different buffers or split-windows, or in tiling window manager windows. There's options to export PAGER= but there's no standard way to indicate interactive vs non-interactive use, only trying to divine intent on a tool-by-tool basis by checking if a TTY is attached. Rustc and Elm and Odin and other language compilers have stretched to provide helpful error messages which make pretty good guesses what the user was trying to do, explain why it won't work, and suggest what to do instead, but shells and CLI tools in general have none of that.

Even without going to Alan Kay and Brett Victor extremes, Linux/Unix world has this widespread lack of imagination for what computers could be and do, and only this fruitless status bickering where computers are just another way to compete in the Suffering/Purity Olympics.

It's awful UX for a program to know that you used it wrong, to be able to print the help there and then, and instead to tell you off and instruct you to ask politely (with --help). People who think that's okay in CLI world hate that kind of uppity-C3PO-servant behaviour from an LLM.

    $ thing
    usage: -lscekm4urytmvjpq9i8u3o54ernymctpwi8eruymgv
    ah ah ah, <finger wag>, ask nicely for: --help

    $ thing -h
    ERROR! There is no option -h
    What could you possibly want?
    It's a mystery!
    What if -h was rm -rf /  did you even think of that?
    Could have printed actual help here,
    Filling up your screen with text anyway

This is yet another area where GUI programs on Windows 98[1] were better than today's Linux state of the art: pressing F1 opening a separate window with HTML-based help with contents, colours, fonts, text styles, hyperlinks, tables, pictures, an index, a search, is so vastly superior that it's unbelievable[2] that here we are in 2026 and Linux world is still infighting over whether a pager is a sign of weakness and low status, or whether showing help by default is a sign of a low quality programmer, for a problem that was completely solved during the Clinton Administration! (And presumably solved in a similar way earlier by classic MacOS, earlier by Amiga OS, and earlier at Xerox PARC).

Having a single output stream and trying to do everything on it is just bad design. Having the program guess what you want, or a toggle to change between working and being informative, or an environment variable to trigger the toggle, are downstream problems that can never please everybody, to avoid facing the bad design and dealing with it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Compiled_HTML_Help

[2] it's completely believable

“A rolling stone gathers no moss”, you say?

    ls | gvim -

    gci | ogv -PassThru

"I'd wager that if actually tested,"

https://danluu.com/keyboard-v-mouse/ - """The widely cited studies on mouse vs. keyboard efficiency are completely bogus ... <testing, reading, etc.> When I look at various tasks myself, the results are mixed, and they’re mixed in the way that most programmers I polled predicted. This result is so boring that it would barely be worth mentioning if not for the large groups of people who believe that either the keyboard is always faster than the mouse or vice versa."""

"Lots of disabilities cause physical activity to be extraordinarily painful or difficult."

Nobody claimed otherwise.

Nobody claimed that.

Nobody claimed otherwise.

Nobody claimed it was.

The UK is currently going through the analogue copper landline shutdown, with a scheduled cutoff of Jan 2027 (already pushed back once). The gov website says:

""Analogue networks have been in operation for decades and have reached the end of their serviceable life. The telecoms industry is finding it difficult to source the parts required to maintain or repair connections as suppliers are no longer manufacturing them. Ofcom, the telecommunications regulator, reported that 2023 saw 20% more service incidents on the PSTN compared to 2022, resulting in a 60% increase in the number of service hours lost to customers

...

If you have other devices connected to your phone line, such as alarm systems, telecare devices or fax machines, you should take steps to ensure they will continue to function correctly.

...

The analogue landline carries a low voltage power connection directly from the telephone exchange, which is sufficient to power some basic corded handsets without needing to plug them into the wall. This means that in the event of a local power cut, these corded handsets will continue to function as long as the telephone exchange still has power.

Digital landlines cannot carry a power connection, which means handsets and routers must be powered from your home power supply, and they will not function in a power cut unless you have a backup power system such as a battery or generator. Telecare devices connected to a digital landline network may not work during a power cut.

Communications providers are required by Ofcom to take all necessary measures to ensure uninterrupted access to emergency organisations for their customers, including in the event of a power cut."""

- https://www.gov.uk/guidance/uk-transition-from-analogue-to-d...

from L'Affaire Siloxane? ( https://mceglowski.substack.com/p/laffaire-siloxane ) (subtitle: "How antiperspirant fumes nearly got NASA to evacuate the space station")

There's arguing from fictional evidence[1] and there's being "driven nuts" by the suggestion that more people are entertained by fighting than by stoic political discussions. Look at current day TV and stadiums (boxing, wrestling, glatiators, Mixed Martial Arts, martial arts generally, action films) and audience sizes (and engagement) versus how many people go to local council meetings, it's hardly an extraordinary claim that needs extraordinary evidence.

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/w/generalization-from-fictional-ev...

A low-effort comment from a new user account which I remember from this other low-effort comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48734579

either you're still fat, or at 45 you should be long past boasting on the internet about your muscle gains. "SOME of the 8 billion people on Earth aren't adequately described by a system with only four outputs"? See comedian physicist Dara O'Briain saying that comedically:

"""Racism is way better than Astrology - Racism is one of the worst social evils they can imagine. “How dare you do that?” they say. "How dare you ascribe to me personality traits? You don’t even know me, but you tell me that you know me, and you know these things about me, and you say I share these personality traits with this huge group of people, and I don’t know them, you don’t know them, and you say not only do we have the same character traits, but we have some sort of common history and some common destiny, and you make all of these horrible presumptions on the back of what? On the back of a fluke of birth. How dare you do that?

What? Ooh, Capricorn.""" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhCWw0E_mVY

Come on, try commenting something more effortful, interesting, or substantial than "do you really believe <strawman they didn't say>?" or at least, something funnier? We've all got to while away the time until death arguing on the internet forever, at least give it some oomph.

"They assume they're right so disagreement is a sign of a defect"

Take a step back and look at the original linked blog post through this lense, and you'll see an article where the author is a priori correct and other people are only wrong because they are too irrational and emotional to accept the author's flawless logic. There's no mention that author might be wrong about anything, e.g. for the author to argue so that they can learn things and change their mind. There's no room for the author failing to change someone's mind because the author's communication skill, reasoning, logic, isn't strong enough, only because the other person is defective and cannot be reasoned with. (Having taken those positions, the author declares themselves humble).

(Let's quickly address "the moment you insist on standing on the high ground, you’ve created the low ground someone else must stand on" by observing that we can all stand on "murder is bad" and nobody needs to stand on "murder is good"; and wonder how the author managed to miss that. (My answer: because this isn't about logic; if not-arguing is doing other people a favour, then it's a virtue and the author can feel good about it. It's a defense so the author doesn't need to change)).

[article] "Worse, most people don’t learn from advice at all. They learn from consequences. They have to touch the stove themselves. Words bounce off; pain sticks"

That this is an example which applies to children. Adults do not have to jump off a cliff to accept that jumping off a cliff is a bad idea. But it's still a weak argument. The experience of being burned by a stove includes the sensation of hot metal, pain, burnt skin, burnt hair smell, lingering pain, blistering, scabbing, healing... to suggest that the words "it will burn you" is the territory, and that the words adequately communicate the lived experience to someone who has not had that experience, is the Detached Lever fallacy[1]; it's something that a person who lives with text would argue.

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zY4pic7cwQpa9dnyk/detached-l...

but you don't need to be a subject matter expert on wind turbine material strength and recycling options to accept that President Trump's claims that they kill whales is nonsense: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-66928305

"I want to be a whale psychiatrist" - President of the United States of America Donald Trump, interviewed on The Joe Rogan Experience, October 2024.

And you don't need to be an expert on wind turbine placement to have an opinion on whether putting one in view of Donald Trump's golf course, and then having President Trump scupper them for revenge, is a sensible way to govern the world's most powerful country's energy economy: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c15l3knp4xyo

From that article: "Before making the transatlantic crossing for his Scottish summer jaunt, the US president urged the UK to "get rid of the windmills and bring back the oil".". The Conservative government under David Cameron made a change to planning policy in 2015 where a single objection could block a whole wind farm - and those planning changes only applied to wind turbines and no other structures - a situation described as a "de facto ban" of on-shore wind farms in England (not Scotland), which lead to a 96% drop in on-shore wind development compared to previous years 2011 to 2015. It continued until Rishi Sunak eased it in 2023 and Labour removed it in 2024.

You don't need to be an expert on wind farm placement or capacity to have a valid opinion on that.

"But if those standards of mine are met..."

"Biblically accurate angels descend onto earth, to everyone, and submit themselves to scientific testing, which conclude they are made of something non-physical."

You would easily agree that something which can be seen, touched, measured, interact with the sky, your eyes, and measuring equipment is "non-physical"? You wouldn't suspect the angels are instead aliens?

"Divinity is proven to be a measurable and testable attribute of reality."

At this point, if it happened then it's unlikely to be in the macro-scale world that we could all test with an easily available and usable thermometer or film camera or alkalinity measuring strip, because we would probably have noticed that by now. Imagine instead it's a paper from CERN and the Large Hadron Collider where in some extreme situation there's a deviation of 0.0000000<whatever>% from an expected value and experts in Quantum Theology claim that's a testable, repeatable, measure of Divinity. Are you tempted to believe this could happen, or are you already full of reasons to dismiss it?

"Reality warping magic, demonstrated to not be any sort of trick or technology, and limited to those devout to said religion."

Mass warps spacetime and curves light rays. That's neither trick nor technology. It's arguably "limited to those devout to physics" in the sense that Flat Earthers might not accept it and primitive/uneducated tribes have no grounds for understanding what it means at all and no ability to build machines to test it. Similar with Young's double slit experiment, Lorentz contraction, entanglement, and others (reality warping, or brain warping?).

"God shows his ass to everyone, the only part of him that - according to the bible - won't make a human insane."

What would it take for you to agree that that's whose ass it was?

That is a false claim. Voting for taxation to support the less wealthy is almost a defining feature of what it means to be 'left'. Voting for taxation to support international aid and outreach and healthcare is very common. The 'left' supporting colonial- and war reparation payments is common. Donating money to charity, tithing, nationally and internationally is common across the board.

"from people richer than them"

You may want to spend some time reflecting on where that money came from. How much lobbying and market manipulation, employee abuse, bullying, exploitation, wage theft, government (taxpayer-funded) grants and infusions of cash, bribery, corruption, dark patterns, law-breaking were involved, and how much tax avoidance and evasion was involved.

I don't know where the logic "we're supporting horrible things, but if you look down on us for it that makes you worse! Yeah!" came from, but it's not very good.

92 years is 33,000 days of being alive, that's plenty of time to rack up damage without doing anything for "too long".

If she had tooth decay or dentures would you say she must have been "chewing for too long"?

"relatively large player in the British DefenseTech space via QinetiQ"

After he donated £1m to The Office of Boris Johnson, £270k to the Conservative Party, and the Conservative government gave QinetiQ an £80m defence contract. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Harborne#Political...

Christopher Harborne isn't Russian, and Thailand isn't Russia.

I see no mention of that in the picture I linked for me to have 'forgotten'? Or in the longer article where it appears: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jdv.17660

That seems to be something you have 'hallucinated'?

I have no idea what the numbers were, I took it in as a system idea: more time in sunlight, more UVB, more Vitamin D. Then UVA breaks it down slowly, so more builds up in the skin, more is being broken down, acting as a control-feedback brake on the increase.

"unless they supplement"

I have seen plenty of claims that low levels of Vitamin D correlate with many diseases and overall mortality, but that supplementing Vitamin D hasn't been proven to help. Is there any consensus on that?

"as long as you're accounting for the calcium".

Vitamin D helps bodies absorb calcium but has concerns about high blood levels of calcium. Taking Vitamin K2 as well helps redirect that calcium to the bones instead of the artery walls, apparently. But high levels of Vitamin A could also be causing loss of bone calcium into the blood:

"""in the industrialized world excess of vitamin A has been suggested to be a risk factor for secondary osteoporosis and enhanced susceptibility to fractures. Preclinical studies unequivocally have shown that increased amounts of vitamin A cause decreased cortical bone mass and weaker bones due to enhanced periosteal bone resorption. Initial clinical studies demonstrated a negative association between intake of vitamin A, as well as serum levels of vitamin A, and bone mass and fracture susceptibility. In some studies, these observations have been confirmed, but in other studies no such associations have been observed. One meta-analysis found that both low and high serum levels of vitamin A were associated with increased relative risk of hip fractures.""" - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11070503/

which could be a confounding factor with Vitamin A and its precursors in so many animal and plant foods and fortified into more, and in daily multivitamin supplements, skin creams, moisturisers and such.

UVB makes it.

UBA denatures it[1], which I thought was how we avoid overdose levels building up in the skin when outside, but can't find a source for that.

Suggested as a reason why fair-skinned indoor workers are getting more melanomas, (ref glass blocking UVB and passing UVA): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03069...