Thiago Carvalho @cyrilpedia@qoto.org

Just spotted that the new Govt. has withdrawn from defending the decision of the previous Govt. to grant permission for the development of a new coal mine in Cumbria, which reaches the high court next week.

Offering no defence (due to the recent recognition by the housing department of an 'error in law') the appeal against the decision to go ahead will succeed & the coal mine will be no more.

For those wondering about Keir Starmer's green credentials, this looks like a good first step.

#coal

Joan Didion, 1988
'When we talk about the process, then, we are talking, increasingly, not about “the democratic process,” or the general mechanism affording the citizens of a state a voice in its affairs, but the reverse: a mechanism seen as so specialized that access to it is correctly limited to its own professionals, to those who manage policy and those who report on it, to those who run the polls and those who quote them, to those who ask and those who answer the questions on the Sunday shows, to the media consultants, to the columnists, to the issues advisers, to those who give the off-the-record breakfasts and to those who attend them; to that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life.'
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1988/10/27/insider-baseball/

Behold!

'The mayor wheeled the new NYC Bin down Gracie Mansion’s driveway and, with his characteristic swagger, demonstrated how the innovative new technology works: you open the lid and you put the rubbish in. It’s highly intuitive technology.'

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/10/new-york-city-trash-cans-nyc-bin-eric-adams?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

'However, we found through a chance encounter that some unscrupulous actors have added extra references, invisible in the text but present in the articles' metadata, when they submitted the articles to scientific databases. The result? Citation counts for certain researchers or journals have skyrocketed, even though these references were not cited by the authors in their articles.'

https://phys.org/news/2024-07-scientific-fraud-uncovering.html

First was an excellent talk by Kyle Mahowald on using language models for #linguistics at UQAM | Université du Québec à Montréal. LLMs are considered to be very good at syntax and grammar, but is this due to memorization, heuristics, or building up a decent model of language? Through a systematic review controlling training data on smaller models, Mahowald convincingly demonstrates that it's the latter, exploring implications for linguistics. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8SwDlv0jx4 (2/7) #AI

Of course Russia.

#ClarenceThomas Accepted Yacht Trip to Russia, Chopper Flight to Putin’s Hometown https://www.thedailybeast.com/clarence-thomas-accepted-yacht-trip-to-russia-chopper-flight-to-putins-hometown-democrats

https://phys.org/news/2024-07-scientific-fraud-uncovering.html