The Octonaut

I think there’s some useful context, if not a good defence of this story.

It’s one of the original stories told by Reverend Awdry told to his 2 year old, measles-ridden child in 1942 war-era England (Wait, is this making it worse?).

Awdry would sing/recite old poems to Christopher, who then pressed him for further details that turned into a story.

For example, the opening of that episode of Thomas features the Limerick that prompted the story, which was around at least since 1902:

In the original story by Awdry, there is only a single tunnel, and the train is completely blocking the line and essentially ruining a business. So stubborn is the engine, that they have to dig a new tunnel beside the old one. The rails are removed and “a wall” are placed in front of the tunnel, for safety - to prevent trains literally running into the wrong tunnel and crashing. The Fat Director/Controller is also pretty unsympathetic deliberately - he commands people to push and pull the train out without success, but doesn’t himself help - “My doctor has forbidden me to push”. However the original books follow the realities of steam engine and railway operation far more closely than the TV series did (and as a result, the original series, closer to the books, were far more realistic than the later ones).

As portrayed in the TV show it definitely comes off more villainous. But in the original telling we have to take away 70 years of Thomas trains having faces, personalities, relationships and familiarity. When originally told, the Henry story didn’t even take place in the same “universe” - there was just 3 abstract stories about trains, loosely based on old rhymes and news stories.

I think he deserved it, don’t you?

How is your wife doing by the way

All physical touch is essentially electromagnetism

In Irish we say “wuh”. And “punk” for dot.

Wuh wuh wuh punk lemmy punk world

The Speed Camera Ahead is everywhere where live. Why is it strange?

I just hate the pathetic effort they put into the quotes. Sean Bean was a weird choice anyway (“what do people universally and forever like? Game Of Thrones I suppose!”) but then they had him read quotes from literal blogs and often quotes that shat all over the technology you’d just researched. Oh! I completed a wonder! I definitely want to hear a quote about how it’s obsolete now and its abandonment caused immense poverty in the Ruhr valley.

That and the movement towards nations instead of, yknow, Civilizations. Sorry Australia, you are not a Civilisation. Nor is Canada. Nor Scotland. How do we have Scotland - an independent country for less than 300 years - and not the fucking Celts.

tourists

Must be really strange to have all those tourists come to your mountain top.

They don’t need to scrape Lemmy. They just need a federated instance and then they have literally everything you post delivered to them as part of the way Lemmy is designed.

Please understand literally nothing on Lemmy is private.

“Please sir, may I resist?”

The fuck does “won their union” mean?

Seasonality specifically refers to periodic signals over the course of a year. Any other interval means it’s not seasonality. You can read that yourself in the definition you quoted.

Sorry, yes. I’ll ammend

https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What-is-a-perpetual-fallback-license

You’re both half right.

You get the version at the time of your subscription (plus bugfixes). Then every time a version has been out for 12 months while you’ve been paying you get that version perpetually (plus bugfixes).

So it’s 1.0 when you subscribe, you get that perpetually.

It’s 1.0.1 in your third month, you get that perpetually.

It’s 1.1 in your fifth month. You get that perpetually after 17 months.

It’s 1.2 in your eighth month. You get that perpetually after 20 months.

You unsubscibe at 19 months but retain a perpetual version licence.

• You started with 1.0
• You ended with 1.2
• You have to roll back from 1.2 to 1.1

Previous version was incorrect. This is why I just distribute our licenses, not procure them!

Now I want them to do The Chain but with trumpets

People still somehow paying attention to Twitter

I build software that’s used in call centers and have therefore been in several of them, including 2 in India. My team builds things that help with voice and chat.

I can’t stress enough two things: the aim is and probably always will be to deflect away things that people could have Googled themselves. LLMs, if trained on the right stuff and not hallucinating, would genuinely be good on this.

Secondly, CCs and telecoms in general have not escaped the business cultural shift in the last 10 years to the frantic obsession with g r o w t h. So yes, they definitely are trying to sell you something on every call. However this really depends on the human personality involved, and any near-future LLMs would definitely struggle to sell you anything. Some of these people are magical at talking you into buying stuff. Do j mean scamming? No. The easiest thing to sell is the thing you’d probably benefit from, the hurdle being that you didn’t know about it or aren’t in the mood to buy because you called to complain about coverage. For European telecoms at least, there are severe penalties for misselling, too (that’s part of what our software tracks).

So in summary, LLMs might replace the link you’re sent to the FAQs page or the bit where you confirm who you are. But they are at least many years away from replacing the agents who can do what telecoms currently want them to do - turn the call into a sale.

That’s OK. The local radio is playing Knights of Cidonia and a recent gust short circuited the volume control.

British accents are non-rhotic

Except the ones that aren’t

https://www.rsa.ie/

It seems to have just been a really weird way to implement an “under maintenance” page, as the site was planned to be offline this morning.