Behold the Splendor!

Ah fuck. Just as I’m about to be RTOd into the Chelsea office. The only respite was walking over to Battersea Park at lunch.

I’d buy you a beer for that summary. That is exactly SPOT ON.

Anthropic right now are the good people.

That probably won’t last. But out of a bad bunch they’re the least bad.

To call AI useless is quite a strong statement.

There’s a million places to use it!

The problem is that the market thinks there’s a billion places to use. And right now we’re funding 999 million places that shouldn’t be using AI but have the funding to do that dumb thing so we can figure the one million places where it makes fantastic sense.

Aren’t we saying exactly the same? Give it an MCP server or a native skill that CAN track time.

Everyone’s getting their knickers in a twist over nothing here.

Of course an AI can track time, if it’s given access to a timer MCP server.

Can we track time without tools, just in our heads? Certainly not very accurately. We can, however, track it reasonably accurately if given access to a quartz stop watch (typically +/-15 s/year)

A language model is based around language and reasoning by words/symbols. It’s not a surprise it doesn’t have timing capability.

What Altman SHOULD be embarrassed about is that the model lies about its capabilities. That implies that the context is still not right - it should be adequately trained and given context to prevent the lying. That implies a much more worrying issue - and something that Anthropic handles far better, IMHO (when asked if it can track time, if says “no, not on my own”, and then proceeds to build a JavaScript timer that it offers up to track time).

The numbers are obviously wiiiiildly off but it’s certainly true that there are some STIs that condoms aren’t adequately able to protect you against (HSV, HPV, syphilis).

Just because we agree with the news doesn’t make it correct.

The ban was brought about in December 2025. It’s clearly far too early to draw any conclusions about the impact.

If we are going to cherry pick data let’s make sure to cherry-pick data from both sides: https://yougov.com/articles/54334-new-yougov-research-shows-cautious-optimism-as-australians-assess-impact-of-under-16-social-media-ban

This is probably just me, but I think any ire should be directed towards the governments that make these requirements.

I don’t get mad at truck manufacturers for building the capability to record speed in the vehicle if the government requires it (as many do).

IMHO Apple is intending to comply with the law of a democratic country. It’s hardly Apple’s fault that the law is what it is.

So, wait, you were working in an office. Then COVID and remote work. Then fully remote. Then they move the office. Then they demand that people now return to the office?

That is constructive dismissal right there, unless you have a mobility clause in your contract. Even if you do, you could make an argument that it’s constructive if the mobility clause hasn’t been exercised before.

Seek legal rep. IMHO, IANAL, this is an offer of redundancy if I ever saw one.

Nej, nej, ulven er stresset og har brug for ro, står der!

Busy, but good. Oldest got a couple of offers for degree places next year, so she now has some solid choices. Got a callback for the one she really wants, so she’s happy.

All the (4) kids were part of a Stagecoach production last night - I swear someone was cutting onions in the theatre!! Got home late and lost an hour overnight so was in a rush to get youngest to a birthday party.

Cleaned out my car, after getting a £90 quote to have someone do it. I wasn’t even trying to negotiate but I spontaneously started to laugh and said “if that’s where we’re starting, we are wasting each others’ time” and then left. £90?!?! I mean, yes, kid cars get rather mucky, but come the f*** on! I was expecting £30. Took me a couple of hours and now it’s as good as new. I would have accepted £15/hour but £45/hour is a good wage so I was happy about that.

Landed a new job back at my old company (I joined a scale up turnaround and it didn’t turn-around, so lost my job and had to go looking again). It’s not 110% what I wanted to do - going back - but in this economy I know I must be grateful to have work at all.

Also, my most rage-inducing pot hole in town has FINALLY been fixed. Only took the council 4 months. So that’s a celebration if nothing else.

Hope everyone else is doing fine.

With the greatest respect, and trying my very best to not sound like an arrogant jerk, if you need to have Calc’s lacklustre FILTER function, which often just spits out Error 533 into cells and which can’t quite figure out if it wants to be an array formula, further explained then I dare posit that you may not be a heavy spreadsheet user and therefore spending a large amount of time explaining it does rather reverse the burden of proof. For goodness sake, try and do anything serious with FILTER is Calc and you’ll very, very quickly see what I mean.

No, definitely thinking specifically of data tables in excel.

Oh boy!

Lack of proper table support.

FILTER is borked.

MAP functions and their ilk aren’t there.

The DBASE functions have serious issues.

Array formulas sort of work but often results in issues.

Calculation speed is super slow. I’ve tried converting a pension forecast tool and it just ran so incredibly slowly.

As someone self hosting my own Nextcloud with Collabora, I can tell you that living with LibreOffice is easy - but living with Libra Calc is impossible. It is not a workable, serious solution.

Ii can thoroughly recommend “A Brief History of Intelligence” (by Max Bennett), which explains how intelligence has taken steps through evolution, what those steps were etc.

Spatial intelligence requires spatial understanding and it’s not something that can be solved through a large language model, IMHO.

I’m excited to see how these are solved. And I’m terrified to see how these will be solved.

I think I’m about 90% dad here.

With four children, I think it still means I have to parent them all.

Are you suggesting that Linux doesn’t attempt to comply to local laws?

That’s a serious question, by the way, not trying to ragebait you.

My point was mostly that the concept of a router can be executed by any computer with more than one NIC.

Trump isn’t disallowing computers from outside the US, surely, only stuff that looks like routers. They’ll have a hard time defining what a router is.