That's a interesting observation on Spiegelmann, although I don't know how that could have been incorporated into the story, without him actually challenging his father in that way. There is a reference somewhere that the animal metaphors were inspired by the racial caricatures in American vaudeville and theatre, so there was some recognition there, aside from the complications that animal metaphor itself added to things.
a) everyone is "susceptible" to marketing - so what
b) therefore a preference for Claude is marketing - complete bollocks
Either the tasks you chose were well below the capabilities of top models, or meaningful differences for preference are elsewhere, or both.
Your comment is probably energy-efficient and sustainable, however, because you could use it again and again when another comparison comes up, like Vim vs Emacs, or tea vs coffee
Top man, lives up on Richmond Hill and absolutely loves it - when asked about his travels and adventures and where he would choose to live, he replied, "I already live there"
Fairly well-known locally is that my favourite bookshop, The Open Book in Richmond, stocks signed copies of all his books. They used to be signed directly on the page, but since he got to the mid-to-late nineties in age, tons of hardbacks are too much, so Helena wanders up there to get a load of bookplates signed these days.
Apart from that, I order all my books from them when I'm in London and a subsequent chat with Madeleine usually lasts ten times as long as the book shopping.
Anyway, I digress, yes, Sir David, amazing body of works and the books are wonderful.
Whilst we're doing random anecdotes that vaguely link to him, my late grandfather remembered David from his Wyggeston days as a good rugby player, which is a funny way to imagine him. Apparently he had the voice even then, but not so much to say about the world.
I always find it really weird when somebody on the anonymous internet talks about local places as if we're all neighbors or something. Googling "Richmond Hill" gave me multiple pages of results that had nothing to do with the one that Attenborough lives at.
Not to sound hipster about it, but if it's done in this way I find it charming. I also had to piece it together, which took me on a little virtual travel tour, and had me wonder about what Richmond Hill means to the locals. Rather fitting in context, too.
The "everyone on the internet is American" stuff in e.g. politics or job market convos is a lot more grating.
You had context, it piqued your interest and you did a tiny amount of work to figure it out. You could have quit without all three but you didn't; I wish the internet had a lot more of these types of experiences. It's only in the last ~25 years when the Internet became an anonymous place where we aren't all neighbours, and I mourn the loss.
The hill offers the only view in England to be protected by an Act of Parliament—the Richmond, Ham and Petersham Open Spaces Act passed in 1902—to protect the land on and below it and thus preserve the fine views to the west and south. Two years before the wooded isle centrepiece of the view, Glover's Island (also known as Clam Island), was bought by a local resident and given to the Richmond Corporation (Borough) in return for the latter noting against its records that it and its successors would not develop the isle.
In hindsight it maybe should have also been obvious from the language alone. "Richmond Hill" feels a bit like saying "Rich Hill Hill" which is basically like saying "Wealthy Desirable Area."
BTW there is a linguistic tradition of “hill hill”. When new immigrants come to an area and ask the locals what that hill is called, the locals say “big hill” in their language. The newcomers call it “bighill” hill in their language. I forget the examples but this has happened enough in England that there are places whose names are five hills deep (Brythonic -> Latin -> Saxon -> Norse -> Norman).
One of my favourite quotes from the late Terry Pratchett:
> When the first explorers from the warm lands around the Circle Sea travelled into the chilly hinterland they filled in the blank spaces on their maps by grabbing the nearest native, pointing at some distant landmark, speaking very clearly in a loud voice, and writing down whatever the bemused man told them. Thus were immortalised in generations of atlases such geographical oddities as Just A Mountain, I Don't Know, What? and, of course, Your Finger You Fool.
I get where he's coming from, Attenbrorough is vocal about being a londoner to the point he has a whole documentary about the city, and he's very present in UK media.
I get why it doesn't seem so obvious from the outside, but for British people it's as obvious as Apple headquarters being in California.
Just around the corner from The Open Book is Richmond Green. And that's where David Attenborough's brother lived; Richard Attenborough. Jurassic Park at the bottom of Richmond Hill and Blue Planet at the top of the hill.
Oh and if you were at Richmond Green today, you could have gone to the May fair.
Decades of terrible decision-making, governance, and avoidance, not to mention ignorance. Oh well, at least it was all democratic, almost.
I visited the worst Katrina-hit areas in 2009 to interview some of the people involved in cleanup, prevention, and planning. The stories of stonewalling never ended.
They're laughing all the way to the bank, the US has locked Europe into so many long-term petrochem supply contracts courtesy of two energy crises, and the US have stated point-blank that the supplies (of LNG, in this case) are tied to the US-EU trade treaty plus whatever changes the US wants to make.
Same protection racket plus a foot on the brake of the EU's push to renewables.
I don't mind buying from china, as long as they're not irreplaceable essentials (like oil). Solar panels and -batteries are fine as long as they meet safety standards and don't have backdoors, and for all the fearmongering that Chinese made tech has backdoors in them, nobody seems to have found any evidence of that. And since it's electronics, any chip and any software can be investigated and taken apart by both amateur hackers and government funded (IT) security bureaus. Nothing. Unless I missed it, but I don't think something as big as that would go by quietly.
> [..] for all the fearmongering that Chinese made tech has backdoors in them, nobody seems to have found any evidence of that. [..]
Are you asserting no backdoors were found in Chinese made tech? I'm not sure how it'd happen in solar panels (which sucks, since I own a couple of these). Another thing to keep in mind is plausible deniability. If you don't patch software, it will be vulnerable, which is an issue in networked software, especially. So what I have seen happening (and I can name some examples of companies here, both Chinese and Taiwanese) where vulnerabilities are simply not patched. Sometimes, they're plain obvious.
I have seen KRACK vulnerability not getting patched. I have seen old MiFi without proper firmware updates, like ever. I have seen motherboard update software still using HTTP instead of HTTPS. And in the world of IoT, it has been a huge mess from the get-go.
Furthermore, the core network of a major telco here was maintained by Chinese engineers who were flown from China. You can probably guess the company name here.
The tactic is obviously not limited to China or Taiwan only, but it can be tackled with reproducible builds and FOSS.
Yes, but it won't matter. The state energy firms of EU countries are going heavily into debt to survive this crisis, and it'll just turn from "paying high electricity prices because oil is expensive" to "paying high energy prices to repay state debt".
I mean it'll help in the sense that energy supply will switch to renewable sources, sure. Great for the climate, hopefully, But it won't help in lowering energy cost.
And before you say "but solar panels". A bunch of states have already started pretty heavily taxing them.
Which state energy firms? Most countries have mostly privatized generation with just the grid in public ownership. EDF is something of an exception, but they have very different economics (and the nuclear fleet).
> "paying high energy prices to repay state debt"
The whole range of general taxation is available for that.
> A bunch of states have already started pretty heavily taxing them.
* making everyone to use natural gas for heating by making it much cheaper than electricity
* slowing down the EV rollout by keeping to subsidize gas and diesel
could definitely be seen as a scheme to make the fossil fuel gravy train last as long as possible.
And that's not even talking about the absolutely out there schemes that didn't succeed like hydrogen powered vehicles (with most of hydrogen coming from fossil fuels and you can theoretically switch to zero emission one but you never would have because the fossil one is always going to be cheaper because making hydrogen is difficult).
Gas for heating used to be the standard but is on its way out now. My house hasn't had a gas connection for 8 years, and many people qre switching to heat pumps and other cleaner methods of heating.
I'm going to guess if net energy use goes up, due to a glut of renewable energy, the gaps on cloudy, windless days will result in greater fossil fuel use than before.
There need to be assurances renewables are replacing fossil fuels rather than just adding capacity.
> Alas, it is exactly the intermittent renewables that create a dependency on fossil fuels.
First of all, this is an insane statement.
> Unless you have nuclear
Second of all, with nuclear most countries will still be dependent on other countries for their fuel needs. So it doesn't solve the problem discussed here at all.
US sells a lot of other things to Europe that Europe doesn't have to buy. That includes tech. I'm not looking forward to the ensuing trade war but it's not a one way street by any means.
Cheers! Yeah, it's honestly mental how fragmented it is. Every council is its own little island. On the shutting-off worry: the data is statutorily public. Councils are legally required to publish it, and I'm respecting rate limits and not hammering anyone. So far no council has objected. Touch wood this remains the case. Tbh, I think the risk is more from the platform vendors than the councils themselves. It seems Idox etc have a commercial interest in this data being awkward to access.
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