exchemist

Haha. It’s just a possibility that I don’t rule out. As I say, there may be a perfectly innocent, banal explanation. But tell me, as I’m not an IT whizz like you, what would be the typical reasons for a 503 error?

Maybe I should try early morning GMT and see if it works.

But this p.m. (in Europe) it’s down again, now that the US is awake….. My suspicions of enemy action are reawakened.

Yes, that’s the thing about Stalin. He was not just a totalitarian dictator intent on securing absolute personal power. He actually seems to have believed this shit, fanatically.

Rationalwiki seems to be accessible once more.

Well, Stalin did train as an orthodox priest, so perhaps it was to be expected that his dictatorship might extend to philosophical doctrines.

You have just demonstrated you don't understand the difference between gravitation and the electromagnetic interaction. It's funny, but there is beginning to be a familiar smell about this tosh of yours.

I think one has to be careful about lumping all AI together. It is LLMs that feed you botshit. My somewhat limited understanding is that LLMs (at least the simpler ones) have cleverly learnt how to use language, but that's all. Importantly, they are not equipped to reason or draw conclusions from the text they have encountered - they are mere "stochastic parrots". Whereas the AI applications used in engineering and medicine are totally different, being purpose-built for the field in which they are applied. I'd have a lot more confidence in those.

As I understand it the problem is poor neighbourhoods where supermarkets, which forced most smaller food shops out of business decades ago, don’t find it profitable to put a store. This tends to leave the field for convenience stores and fast food outlets only, which in turn leads, over decades, to loss of a culture of cooking, and thence to obesity, Type 2 diabetes and other health conditions in the local population. Small greengrocers, butchers etc can only get enough footfall when they cluster together to create a “high street” type shopping destination, which is very hard to re-establish once it has gone, or which may not even have been thought about at all in the case of many poorer modern housing developments.

To make you feel more at home, you mean?

😆

Hoho, don't worry, I haven't. Just reported it. But indeed they are trying new methods to get round the anti-spam measures.

And now I've just been sent a private message, by some new shitbot calling itself @ArzuOzoguz123 , saying just "Hello".

By the way, right on cue, here is an example of the kind of semi-plausible, but borderline necro, pointlessly content-free and thus suspicious, post from a new joiner (last one in the thread):https://scienceforums.net/topic/126922-url-shorteners/ Pound to a penny this entity will post a link with spam in it within the next few days. I suppose one could argue that this type of probable spammer could in fact be weeded out by moderation asking, by email, for more information but it would be a lot of extra work, I should think.

Yes I’ve had it return a 503 error as well, though I don’t know what that signifies. But I did wonder if there was a DDOS attack in progress to shut them down. If they were kaput because of the lawsuit I’d expect their Wikipedia entry to mention it. I was however pleased to see Kennedy has an entry in the Encyclopedia of American Loons: https://americanloons.blogspot.com/search?q=Kennedy. So dissent is still alive and kicking in some corners of the internet. And, as I say, Snopes is still working.

Because that does not stop them spamming in their second post. How can a moderator tell, from an initial post, what the intentions of the new member are? You can already see that some of these spammers start off with plausible or semi-plausible "sciency" posts, wait a few days and then come back with the spam. It's tricky. But this is all being discussed on the other thread anyway. Best not to duplicate it here I suspect.

You are descending into woo, by the look of it, with this "invisible threads" stuff. Where is the evidence for this idea and what does it explain? In science, you cannot just make shit up. Your theories have to be testable by observation of nature. As to your question about creating life just by mixing molecules together, the answer is almost certainly not. Life requires a whole set of structures as well as biochemical reactions. There are a lot of sub-assemblies. The goal of research into the origin of life is to understand how it may have occurred, not to try to replicate it.

Yes, I reported one too - but then recalled that we were told not to do that as it made more stuff for the mods to wade through, the spam posts themselves being fairly obvious. Oops. 🫢 I see there has been more discussion about countermeasures.

For the last few days I have ben unable to reach Rationalwiki. There does not seem to be any commentary on the internet about this, and I suppose there may be an innocent explanation. However I have an uneasy feeling about this, in view of the attack on academic freedom by the Trump administration. I would expect Rationalwiki to be something of a target, as it focuses on debunking pseudoscience, conspiracy theories and misinformation. Snopes I see is still however functioning normally. Does anyone have any information about this?

Somebody seems to have shot @Dirtbikesports , just as he or she was starting to tell us what all this paves the way for.

Certainly could have been candida about it.

Actually it seems, from what I have quickly read, that Kahm yeast ("kamma yeast" seems to have been made up by the bot) is a description encompassing a variety of yeasty growths, including candida varieties. So the bot was not entirely off-target, though we are probably lucky it didn't start burbling about vaginal swabs etc.

Wy yu sudenly tork bullox at end?😁🤡🔫

What do you want to discuss?

It seems to me this is making rather a meal of something simple. Surely there is a natural progression in degree of certainty from "I think" to I believe" , and then to "I know", is there not? "I believe" to me implies sufficient certainty to base decisions on, while bearing in mind there is still some risk of being mistaken. This is a completely normal state of affairs, which probably applies to a large part of what we do as human beings. If we were to wait for complete certainty we would be paralysed with indecision. Given that we live, perforce, in a world of shades of grey, I do not see it is as irrational to base decisions on a high probability of being right rather than waiting for complete certainty.