Notices by Ken Milmore (kbm0@mastodon.social)

@MediaActivist @Jeffrey Ooh thanks for responding!

@Jeffrey @MediaActivist @jaybaker Hmm. It says "based in England". I wonder if that is a deliberate attempt at exclusion or just carelessness? If they are doing anything which involves physically meeting up, England is too large a region to organise (usually they really mean the south east). If they are operating entirely online, then why exclude the other home nations?

@Infoseepage Yes you'd have to stash the drives with a trustworthy party. No good clambering around with them.

@Infoseepage You need a teeny tiny portable LTO tape drive! 😂
Could you buy a large spinning rust drive (or preferably two), back up your data to that and escrow it somewhere? I'm not sure I'd trust flash for longevity anyway.

@Infoseepage Forbidding Name of the Rose style appearance.

@thomasfuchs My point is that you can apply verbs to non-sentient objects, and sometimes that implies a degree of animus that they do not really have. I've seen it done for years with conventional software and appliances. It is sloppy. But it has only become dangerous in the case of "AI" because people are being asked to believe that the sentience is to some extent real, rather than nothing more than a figure of speech.

@thomasfuchs This seems like a failure of language as much as anything. So I guess a chatbot can evade safeguards in the same sense as water can escape from a burst pipe. The water doesn't need any agency to "escape".

Went for a walk through Watergate Forest Park today. The lake was almost completely frozen over. Ducks making heroic skid landings on the ice. 🦢🦆❄️ #gateshead

@Infoseepage @Geri Note in particular the text of the Balfour declaration.

@Infoseepage The FB post led me to look for the Arbeia Journal. There is an article on the fort in Journal 3 (see link for pdf) which mentions a previous excavation adjacent the site which unsurprisingly found old mine workings (no surprise, they are found pretty much everywhere around here). Apparently there is another article in Journal 10 which I have yet to obtain.
https://www.arbsoc.org.uk/arbeiajournal

@Infoseepage Yes I bet there is a lot going on below the surface there. Very odd that nobody has ever excavated it.

@Infoseepage We may be getting confused about the orientation. Found this snippet on a local FB group. I will have to look it up at Gateshead Library when I'm next in there.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/dunstongateshead/posts/10162520405865090/

@Infoseepage Had a look for it on the wonderful NLS georeferenced maps. There was still nothing there on the 1850s OS map, but their satellite overlay layer shows the circular pattern just as clearly.

@Infoseepage Hmm. Yes there does appear to be a circular palimpsest of some sort. When I was a very young lad I remember it being surveyed from the air. Walked over it countless times but it just looks like any other farm field really. There was a colliery nearby up until the 1960s so there may be other reasons for surface disturbance.

@Infoseepage There is a little one just up the road from me (Washing Wells), an early fort which is only about 150m square. Nothing left visible from the ground there now.

@Infoseepage I have a (rubbish) USB-C laptop and I was surprised to find that it really does charge off 5V, it just takes a very long time.

@Infoseepage We use something like this on all our pirtable USB devices. Leave the low-profile schrengle plugged into the device at all times and you can attach a charging cable with a magnetic plug on the end at any time. The ones we use though, only pass the 5V of a standard USB1 charger, so it takes a looong time to charge a laptop that way.

@Infoseepage Apparently many cheeses have much lower lactose content than the milk they are made from. And the ancient Romans looked down on the barbarians for drinking so much milk, instead of making it into cheese. Someone was musing on here recently about whether the Romans may have been lactose intolerant, although it's more likely they didn't drink much milk because it goes off so fast in Mediterranean climes. Also they had olive oil to replace butter.

@Infoseepage Two things we could see in 2026:
- Vendors offering desktop PCs with <4GB RAM with a straight face.
- M$ lifting the mandatory TPM2 requirement for Windoze.
They have tried to push everybody onto new PCs just in time for the PC market to collapse.

@Infoseepage Have you tried any Breton cider? I'm told it's pretty good.