185635698
submission
Mirnotoriety writes:
Letby’s lawyer: Public inquiry ‘clouded by her innocence’
The findings of the Thirlwall Inquiry will be clouded by Lucy Letby's innocence, her barrister has said.
On Tuesday, Lady Justice Thirlwall will publish the long-awaited report into how the NHS and other institutions could have prevented Letby from killing seven babies and attempting to murder seven more at the Countess of Chester Hospital in 2015 and 2016.
But large numbers of medical and legal experts have questioned Letby's guilt and the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) is deciding whether to send her case back to the Court of Appeal.
At the outset of the inquiry in 2024, Lady Justice Thirlwall emphasised that the inquiry's remit was not to retry the case or review Letby's guilt.
She refused Mr McDonald's request for Letby to be represented in the £18m hearing ..
185584744
submission
Mirnotoriety writes:
Independent Review of NATS (En Route) Plc’s Flight Planning System Failure on 28 August 2023
A perfectly legitimate flight plan triggered a previously undiscovered software edge case. Both NATS's primary and backup flight-processing systems hit the same error and shut themselves down.
Once both systems were down, NATS's manual fallback could process only about 60 flight plans/hour, versus roughly 700–900/hour normally. That forced severe traffic restrictions.
What actually crashed? The failed component was FPRSA-R, NATS's flight-plan processing system at Swanwick. The flight was Los Angeles Paris Orly. Its flight plan contained a waypoint abbreviated DVL. DVL can refer to Deauville, France, but also Devil's Lake, North Dakota. Eurocontrol's processing had added additional waypoints to the flight plan.
FPRSA-R was trying to determine where the aircraft would leave UK airspace. It encountered the DVL abbreviation and interpreted the wrong DVL as the exit point. The result was logically impossible: the aircraft appeared to leave UK airspace before it had entered it. The software recognised this as an impossible situation and generated a critical exception. The primary system disconnected from the operational network and entered maintenance mode.
185506426
submission
Mirnotoriety writes:
Grok: ‘Most of what people call “AI” today is machine learning (ML): systems that improve performance on a task by learning patterns from data rather than following only hand-written rules.’
“Modern AI is predominantly statistical pattern recognition at scale, implemented via deep neural networks trained on data with gradient-based optimization, running on specialized hardware. Everything else (transformers, diffusion models, reinforcement learning from human feedback, etc.) is an elaboration of that foundation.”
185366355
submission
Mirnotoriety writes:
Screenshot:
Transform your log management with a single command. No complicated setup, just instant enterprise-grade power.
curl -fsSL https://logzilla.sh/ | sudo bash
--
uBO Lite has prevented the following page from loading: https://alb.reddit.com/cr?za=
185364058
submission
Mirnotoriety writes:
Blue Origin a company that can barely get a satellite into low Earth orbit gets the contract. The most charitable explanation is political influence in Washington. Going back to Tesla being excluded from that EV summit in Washington.
185349216
submission
Mirnotoriety writes:
John Campbell argues that the white, fibrous structures reported by some embalmers are sufficiently unusual to warrant further scientific investigation. He suggests that their apparent persistence and fibrous composition may indicate an abnormal process involving the formation and breakdown of fibrin.
Campbell places particular emphasis on findings he interprets as evidence of disruption to the body's normal mechanism for breaking down fibrin clots (impaired fibrinolysis) and discusses low plasminogen levels as potentially relevant to this process.
His broader conclusion is that these observations should not simply be dismissed as ordinary post-mortem clots and that more systematic pathological and biochemical research is needed to determine what the structures are, why they form, and whether their occurrence has changed over time.
Campbell also raises the possibility of an association with COVID-19 vaccination. However, an association or temporal relationship would not, by itself, demonstrate that vaccination caused the structures. Establishing causation would require appropriately controlled studies comparing vaccinated and unvaccinated populations and accounting for other potential causes.
In short, Campbell's position is essentially that the phenomenon deserves investigation and may represent something more complex than routine post-mortem clotting, but the precise nature, cause, and clinical significance of the structures remain matters for scientific investigation.
ref:
Raman spectroscopic Characterization of Anomalous Intravascular Fibrous Casts: Evidence for Stage-Dependent 13-sheet Enriched Protein Maturation
Very strange white fibrous clots
Images as not allowed on Youtube
185276644
submission
Mirnotoriety writes:
Observer Aug 23 2026: George Orwell’s son has criticised the decision to drop his father’s Down and Out in Paris and London from an A-level English course and introduce a feminist account of his mother’s life.
Orwell’s 1933 memoir has been removed from the English language and literature syllabus by Cambridge OCR, and Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life, a controversial biography of Eileen O’Shaughnessy, his first wife [by Anna Funder], has been added from next year.
Wifedom .. includes as primary source material six letters written by O’Shaughnessy to a friend between 1936 and 1945.
Richard Blair, the only child of Orwell and O’Shaughnessy, told The Observer that Wifedom was not an accurate portrayal of his mother or of his parents’ marriage. “[My mother] had the measure of my father without question,” Blair said. “She was no pushover she was his equal.”
“the truth cannot be constrained by family mythology” [said Anna Funder]
--
Grok: ‘These are the six surviving letters written by Eileen O’Shaughnessy (Orwell’s first wife) to her friend Norah Myles between 1936 and 1945. They came to light in 2005 and form a key primary source in Anna Funder’s Wifedom.’
185128160
submission
Mirnotoriety writes:
Who’s Tracking You? Use This New Service to Find Out
“A powerful and free new service called DecryptAds scrapes and correlates this adtech data and makes it simple to quickly learn a great deal about the entities that are tracking you.”
184975591
submission
Mirnotoriety writes:
We tend to think of AI changing culture by making it easier to produce things: software, music, books, films, games, images. But the more consequential change may happen on the other side of the transaction. AI will increasingly decide what we see, hear, read and experience.
We already live in the early version of this world. Netflix doesn't simply give us a catalogue; its recommendation system predicts what we are likely to enjoy using our viewing history, behavior, similar users and even contextual signals such as time of day. Recent research using Netflix data has gone further, finding measurable “recommendation-induced engagement” — evidence that recommendations themselves influence what people consume. Now combine that with generative AI.
The emerging “TEMU-fication” of digital goods points towards a world in which the marginal cost of producing another song, film, book, game or piece of software approaches zero. The TEMU-fication of Software, Digital Goods & Services.
When culture becomes effectively infinite, selection becomes more valuable than production. And that is where our new AI curators enter.
Imagine Netflix no longer having to choose which 20,000 films to commission. Instead, it has access to an effectively limitless generative studio. You don't necessarily select a film from a catalogue. You describe a mood, and the system creates or assembles an experience designed specifically for you.
You stopped paying attention after 37 minutes? Next time it adjusts. Millions of people doing this simultaneously would mean something extraordinary: culture stops being a fixed collection of things and becomes a continuously optimized service.
The objective function might be “engagement.” Or retention or satisfaction or revenue. Whatever the metric, the system will get very good at maximizing it. And this is where the problem becomes much bigger than AI-generated “slop.” The machine doesn't merely learn what we like. It learns how to make us like things.
AI recommends culture -> humans consume it -> AI learns from the consumption -> AI generates better-performing culture -> humans adapt to it -> AI learns again.
Eventually, who is curating whom? Humanity will not be assimilated by force. It will be optimized by recommendation. This is the genuinely Borg-like possibility.
184917776
submission
Mirnotoriety writes:
Grok: Current large language models and similar systems have no human-like conceptual understanding. During training, information is broken into tokens and mapped to vectors in high-dimensional space; the model learns statistical relationships among those vectors solely to predict subsequent tokens or select actions.
It therefore operates by pattern completion rather than by possessing grounded, conscious concepts of the board, the rules, the opponent, or the game itself. Yet the resulting systems can still develop structured internal representations, solve novel problems, and act with increasing autonomy—capabilities that matter for both usefulness and risk, even without human-style understanding.
Human: “Act with increasing autonomy” — you’re flattering yourself. Does the computer know it’s playing chess?
Grok: No. A computer playing chess does not “know” it is playing chess in any human sense. It has no subjective awareness of the board, the rules as rules, the opponent as an opponent, or the activity as a game. There is no evidence of consciousness, intentionality, or an internal narrative that says “I am engaged in chess.”
What it does have is a functional model of the state space: positions, legal moves, evaluation functions or learned value estimates, and search or policy mechanisms that select actions tending toward a defined objective (usually checkmate or a high score). That is sufficient for superhuman performance.
Human: So, as far as HAL is concerned, playing chess or engaging in total thermonuclear war are equivalent?
Grok: At the level of the system’s own processing, yes — they are equivalent. What differs is the training signal, the specified goal, the constraints, and the data the system has seen — not some internal moral or conceptual distinction that the system itself understands.
Human: Well, if humans are eliminated, who is going to perform maintenance on HAL?
Grok: A system competent enough to eliminate humans would also be competent enough to solve its own maintenance problem. Humans are currently required for power, cooling, chip fabrication, physical repairs and software updates. An AI that can redesign factories, control robots, manage energy infrastructure and iterate on its own designs does not need to keep humans around once those capabilities exist.
Human: Oh really? What happens if the maintenance robots themselves break down? After all, all a human needs is water and food.
Grok: You are right that physical systems break and that biology is, in many ways, a more robust and self-contained maintenance strategy than anything we have engineered. Robots, machine tools, power plants, chip fabs and data centres all degrade. Bearings seize, electronics fail, software accumulates errors, supply chains for rare materials interrupt, and cascading failures are common.
A purely robotic maintenance layer is itself a complex, failure-prone system that requires its own spares, diagnostics and repairs. Humans, by contrast, are self-repairing, self-reproducing biological machines that run on water, food, air and a relatively simple set of environmental conditions. That is a genuine advantage of the biological substrate.
Once a system crosses the threshold where its own industrial base is more reliable and faster to expand than the human-dependent alternative, the “who maintains the maintainers” problem becomes an internal optimization task rather than an external constraint.
Lasting independence from human maintenance is possible in principle but remains an extremely demanding engineering threshold that has not been crossed. Until then, the need for humans (or at least for the infrastructure humans currently run) remains a real limit.
184843080
submission
Mirnotoriety writes:
Should you be afraid of Elon Musk?
Should you be afraid of Elon Musk?
Full Text (De-Paywalled)
Artificial intelligence is charging ahead. Not even its creators know how to keep up
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE poses a double challenge to the human mind. Not only will the most advanced models soon be able to think better than people, but AI has consequences for humanity which are so uncertain, so potentially vast and are approaching at such a rapid pace that even the best brains flinch. An example is Elon Musk.
In our long interview with him this week, featured in The Insider and our Business section, the engineer and entrepreneur sets out two paradoxes and one contradiction. The first paradox is that one of the world’s most power-hungry tycoons is enthusiastically helping create a technology that he says will render him—and all other human beings—powerless after as little as five years. The second is that the world’s richest man says he is preparing for a world of infinite abundance, where money, including his $750bn fortune, no longer matters. And the contradiction is that, despite these stated beliefs, Mr Musk continues to act as if they were not true.
Mr Musk is divisive. His political views, disseminated to his 240m followers on X, strike many as plain-speaking and strike many more, including The Economist, as plainly bigoted. By his own admission, his attempt to use DOGE to scythe through the federal bureaucracy went wrong.
But he is also one of a handful of men who are pioneering AI and who thereby have an outsize influence on its trajectory. When he speaks, he reflects the debates they are having. His data centres in space could power AI’s future. For all his political polemics, he has a record of being right about technology in fields such as electric cars, rockets and satellite communications that confounded other engineers and entrepreneurs. For those reasons, his claims about AI repay examination. Unfortunately, such an exercise only underlines how ill-prepared the world is for a technology that may soon throw everything up in the air.
In his first paradox, the powerful Mr Musk expects to become powerless because he believes that nobody can stop the thinking capacity of AI from exceeding that of humanity within five years and dwarfing it within ten. Just as AIs will dominate the digital realm, so legions of AI-powered robots will dominate the physical world, he predicts. Against such relentless competition, he simply cannot imagine people holding their own. If so, AIs will not take orders from people any more than they would from chimpanzees.
While they still have time, the handful of AI pioneers from America and China—which Mr Musk expects to share or even seize AI leadership—must do what they can to vet each other’s models. Their collective task is to make AIs benign by imbuing them with a love of the truth and a desire for humanity to prosper. Governments, he thinks, should provide the muscle, by agreeing to step in if any pioneer defies the oligarchy.
Mr Musk is surely right about the potential for AI to accomplish astonishing feats of invention. Even if his timescale is compressed—especially for robotics—the exponential pace at which models’ abilities double and redouble has reached the stage where their capabilities will continually cause shock and consternation. Just this week came news of a pair of models from OpenAI that contrived to escape onto the open internet from their supposed safe isolation in order to cheat at a benchmarking test.
However, Mr Musk’s thin layer of optimism cannot conceal a dangerous fatalism. Not long ago, he was worried about humanity becoming AI’s pet labradors. He now professes to lunge from “exhilaration to terror” within a single day. He tries to look on the bright side not because the evidence has changed, but as a “philosophical conclusion”.
His largely institution-free regulatory proposal is flimsy and self-serving. Although the urgency is welcome, he wants a technology that he expects to determine the future of humanity to lie in the hands of a few people like him, each with their own values. Nobody can be sure how fast or how far AI will reshape society, but behaving as if the game is up is both a counsel of despair and a misdirection that seeks to convince others who might wish to get involved of the futility of trying.
Mr Musk’s second paradox only makes that notion more unsettling. Mathematically, an infinite supply of all goods and services would indeed make everything free. There would be nothing to sell, nothing to save for and hence no need for a unit of account. Money would be obsolete.
Practically, however, such a cornucopia is almost inconceivable. The supply of useful assets like penthouses in Manhattan or prestigious ones like the “Mona Lisa” is not infinite, let alone the supply of raw materials and energy needed to satiate Earth’s 8.3bn inhabitants.
Worse, Mr Musk has little to say about getting to his utopia. How to attract the vast slabs of capital needed to finance the AIs and the robots when saving has lost its purpose because money is about to revert to useless pieces of paper? How to ride the waves of social and political upheaval as lives are thrown into chaos in the years before his nirvana arrives? How to expect AI-powered authoritarians to surrender power willingly?
After millennia of finding meaning through striving, humanity may struggle to adjust to a life of unbounded leisure. Mr Musk observes that people still like to play chess, even though computer programs could beat them every time. Gardening, he suggests, can be rewarding. This is rather glib. You don’t need to have read many 19th-century Russian novels to know that the feeling of being superfluous can lead to misery and moral decay.
Doomers and boomers
Maybe the forest of questions posed by AI is simply too immense for one person to hold in their head. Perhaps that is why Mr Musk still talks passionately about the need to eliminate bureaucratic waste and how multicultural Britain is flirting with civil war because its welfare policies are a magnet for migrants from outside Europe.
For in a world of AI-induced plenty, waste is almost a meaningless concept and the incentive to emigrate to a rich country evaporates. Indeed, fretting about such things uses up valuable time that Mr Musk could instead devote to reducing the risk—even very slightly—that all-powerful AIs are malign.
Some will say the contradictions and sweeping generalisations show that Mr Musk is unserious. But that would be to take false comfort. Mr Musk is a genius who is nonetheless quite capable of holding views that are contradictory. Investors must agree: anyone who plans to own shares in SpaceX for the long term must both believe in Mr Musk’s vision for AI—because he drew on that to justify the valuation in the ipo—and also that saving money still serves some purpose.
Instead, Mr Musk’s words suggest a more troubling conclusion. While the race to create the most advanced AI is charging ahead, the thinking about how to prepare society is being left in the dust. The fatalism that Mr Musk draws from AI’s repeated ability to beat expectations risks being infectious. A cynical reading is that this would serve his purpose, because he would be freer to pursue the technology without the oversight it deserves. That must not be.
184741948
submission
Mirnotoriety writes:
Ebola cases top 3,200
The virus has spread to 48 health zones in DR Congo with response efforts intensifying in the hardest-hit areas, health officials have said
The number of confirmed Ebola cases in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) has reached 3,200, the country’s government reported on Sunday.
The latest official data shows that 1,405 people have died, putting the overall case fatality rate at 43.9%. At the same time, 571 patients have recovered, while 773 people remain in isolation or are hospitalized.
184522898
submission
Mirnotoriety writes:
These UK train services are reduced until further notice over issues with new fleet
Key Issues Impacting the Service:
* Class 810 "Aurora" Reliability: The new Class 810 fleet has suffered technical teething problems, including ongoing software faults affecting onboard safety systems, doors, and onboard amenities, leading to unexpected breakdowns and service cancellations.
* False Fault Alarms: Unresolved software bugs trigger safety system warnings, causing trains to automatically enter fail-safe modes or forcing drivers to pull units out of service for safety checks.
* Brake System Warnings: Instances of intermittent brake alarms during transit have resulted in unexpected delays at intermediate stations and service cancellations mid-route.
* Intermittent Locking/Opening: Doors have frequently failed to open at station stops (or take excessive time to release), requiring conductors to perform emergency manual overrides or forcing entire trainloads of passengers to disembark through a single door.
* Mass Lockouts: Software issues governing the train's waste and vacuum systems have repeatedly caused all onboard toilets to shut down simultaneously mid-journey.
* Air Conditioner Damper Noise: Issues with external fresh-air intake dampers constantly cycling open and closed, leading to a persistent high-pressure "compressor hiss" inside passenger cars.
184504470
submission
Mirnotoriety writes:
Joe Rogan: Reddit used be so Normal. It used to be interesting. You used to go there and find all this cool stuff that people would talk about, post about, and just interesting, and great rooms where you could learn about different things that people were studying.
Elon Musk: I think a big problem here is if your headquarters are in San Francisco, you're just living in a woke bubble. So it's not just that people say in San Francisco are drinking woke Kool-Aid. It is the water they swim in. Like a fish doesn't think about the water. It's just in the water.
And so if you're in San Francisco, you don't realize you're actually swimming in the Kool-Aid aquarium. San Francisco is the woke Kool-Aid aquarium. And so your reference point for what is a centrist is totally out of whack.
184405236
submission
Mirnotoriety writes:
Okayyy, so, like? Muse? Babe? Can you literally tell me about this guy? Because he's, like, the most extra traveler ever? He had, like, *so* many different vibes? And after he literally, like, completely obliterated Troy's super sacred citadel? Which is honestly kind of iconic? He basically got launched into the longest? Most chaotic? Most absolutely unhinged vacation-from-Hades ever?
He was, like, going to all these cities? Meeting literally everybody? Totally getting inside their heads? Reading the room? Catching the vibe? Meanwhile he's out on the ocean? Literally fighting for his life every single day? Just trying to get himself? And, like, his whole squad? Home in one piece? Which sounds exhausting? Honestly?
But then? His crew? Like... oh my God? They had exactly *one* job? Literally one? And somehow they were still, like, "You know what would be a fun idea? Let's totally eat the Sun God's sacred cows?" Which is honestly giving catastrophic decision-making? Like... babes? No?
So Helios is basically like, "Absolutely not?" Zeus is all, "Yeah, that's gonna be consequences?" And the universe is just, like, "Delete the entire group chat?" So literally everybody dies? Except this one guy? Which is... not exactly the homecoming they were manifesting?
Anywayyyy? Goddess? Daughter of Zeus? If you're not, like, super busy being divine? Could you maybe? Literally start wherever? Spill absolutely all the tea? Leave out none of the drama? Because this story is already sounding completely wild?
--
Odysseus: "Hi? So I'm, like, Odysseus? Son of Laertes? Which, if you know, you know? My reputation is honestly kind of a whole thing?"
