Fork Level Zero [KJ5ELX]

"During our retrial earlier this year, further restrictions were placed on the scope of evidence. The jury was told that in that courtroom, Justice Johnson was the law – and in a courtroom, the law is tantamount to God. We were found guilty of criminal damage. We had never been charged with terrorism, yet Judge Johnson sentenced us as terrorists on 12 June. I am serving six years in prison and will face a further 15 years on notification once I am released, during which time I will have to regularly check in with the authorities, and will have to register any new device, bank account, telephone number, email address, vehicle, relationship and overseas travel plans with the police for the rest of their lives. The UK abolished the divine right of kings long ago; but it is alive and kicking in our legal system. The privileged few in the upper echelons are permitted to bend the law to breaking point to further the government’s political agenda. The same people are trying to rob the British public of the right to a jury of their peers by blaming jury trials for our backlogged court systems. It is not juries that are the problem; it is our courts that are beleaguered by pressure from those in Parliament, the intelligence services and the police. The Home Office has interfered with our case again and again in a bid to shore up its proscription of Palestine Action by using us as political scapegoats. Yet, for his work in defending me, my barrister may be disbarred and potentially face prison time himself." https://www.opendemocracy.net/palestine-action-filton-24-charlotte-head-rajiv-menon-kc-contempt-of-court-judge-johnson/ #UK #PalestineAction #Activism #RuleOfLaw #Justice #Genocide #Israel #Palestine

I see LLMs as a continuation of the Silicon Valley obsession with 'problem solving' and their specific definition. Back when I was an undergrad, the refrain we heard from big tech recruiters was 'we're not interested in specific skills, we want to hire problems solvers'. This always struck me as odd: everyone in my year could solve problems, it wasn't a rare skill, the difficult thing was identifying the correct problems to solve. Digging a bit deeper, it turns out that they didn't even want people capable for solving generic problems, they wanted people who had learned a load of problem-solution pairs and would do closest-fit matching. People who would look at a problem and say 'ah, this looks like this well-known problem, the solution is therefore a variation of this well-known solution'. Not people who would create novel solutions but people who could pattern match and apply off-the-shelf solutions with small tweaks. They wrote books about how to hire people with that skill, all without being explicit that this is what they were looking for. And now they have machines that can do this: ingest a load of problem-solution pairs and match problems to some space of problems and infer a solution from the nearby solutions. It's not surprising that they believe this is the same as novelty, because they've spent three decades incentivising their employees to avoid true novelty.

Ukrainian drones struck another Wildberries logistics center in Russia, this time in Nevinnomyssk, Stavropol region. The facility is completely on fire.

From the website of the company that’s destroying books to feed them into the ravenous AI maw. “A physical book is a delivery mechanism for information. Once that information has been extracted and encoded into an AI model, the delivery mechanism has served its purpose. What remains is paper, ink, and binding material. The book is not destroyed. Its value has migrated. The paper returns to the material cycle; the knowledge enters the intellectual one.” https://www.news.com.au/technology/online/internet/ai-labs-buy-scan-shred-millions-of-rare-books/news-story/0c3b45a67093ab462a587a0348538ce9