Sailor, software engineer, musician, terminally online.

Englishman in Wales.

  • 1 Post
  • 30 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 5th, 2023

help-circle









  • What worries me is people using it for safety-critical things without appreciating the danger, for a test some of my friends who sail for a living asked various chatbots some questions like ‘how would you approach a berth under sail when the wind is against the tide?’ and every single one but Claude got it dangerously wrong, and Claude wasn’t 100% either it just refrained from suggesting a sail plan that would lead to you crashing into the pontoon.

    Will give a shout out to Mistral which got the sailing element of the question very wrong but did sensibly suggest ‘turn your engine on and perform the manoeuvre under power’ which of course is what you should do if you can.




  • Why is stirring up conflict here beneficial though? I’m intensely critical of the current US government but me and the average American still have more in common with each-other than either of us have with our respective ruling elites in terms of material interest and daily life.

    Yes their crowing about being the most democratic country on Earth is a bit silly but that doesn’t mean they deserve to become an outright plutocracy, nobody deserves that. You can object to Washington’s lofty perch in the global pecking order and to Americentrism in general without wishing ill on a whole nationality the vast majority of whom have done nothing to wrong you personally. The only thing I wish for the Americans is for them to fix their backsliding democratic institutions and to adopt a more realistic view of their country’s place in the geopolitical landscape; I don’t doubt these are goals many Americans support at this point.


  • Yeah it’s a bit of a stereotype but I feel privileged to live where I do on an essentially invasion-proof island with no major tectonic hazards, cheap but decent grocery prices by international standards, and I can get on a train, plane, or ferry and be in one of dozens of other countries in under a day. Brexit did screw up a lot (like importing obscure fresh food on a whim…) but it can’t actually unanchor us from Europe.

    There’s a lot of structural issues and we hardly live in a utopia, in fact there’s massive own goals on housing and energy which probably won’t be fixed until NIMBY homeowners are no longer an electoral majority, but we’re too pessimistic to realise what a good hand we have geographically speaking.



  • So this sent me down a rabbit hole and it turns out they’re basically not available in the UK full stop as a fresh fruit, even via the European importer I found thanks to Brexit. I can import it dried, or otherwise I have to make a long weekend of it in France to try it!




  • Not played those games but to be fair in a nuclear wasteland you would expect fresh meat and vegetables to be more radioactive than the general environment. Animals and plants can accumulate radioactive fallout, if it’s diffuse in the soil it can be more concentrated in whatever lives off that soil. Radioactive contamination often consists of caesium-137 which behaves like potassium, and strontium-90 which behaves like calcium, so you’re getting screwed by conventional biochemistry as much as nuclear physics.

    This is a concern in the Chernobyl exclusion zone even now, there’s mushrooms and other forage that must be avoided for this reason.