exchemist

What the hell are you playing at? You are, by your admission a school student who is not yet 15 years old. This text you have posted is clearly not your own. You have no business pretending to be something you are not. -1.

Thanks!👍

Yes I read that, but my point is it does not seem clear what it means. My tentative interpretation of it is that this service is going to be offered by the Met Office to the BBC free of charge but it seems far from explicit. However as you say there is to be an update on the new "partnership", whatever TF that means (how I hate that word in business: it covers a multitude of sins), so maybe then all will be revealed.

The OP was about the high death rate in infancy and childhood. So your observation, apart from being wrong anyway, is irrelevant.

Well perhaps old men were not quite such a rarity as that, but certainly not at all representative.

Don't be a berk. Of course I don't reject science before the c.20th. You have made that up and it's absurd. A lot of modern science (e.g. thermodynamics, electromagnetic induction, periodic table of elements, gas laws etc.) dates from the c.19th and c.18th. Newton's laws date from the c.17th. My point to you was simply that a couple of instances tell you nothing about a whole population. It's like saying, "I've never been in a car crash so car crashes don't exist."

OK but that is not a chatbot. Nor are these clever AI applications that can diagnose medical conditions from X-ray or MRI images. They are purpose-built for a particular class of tasks. Enabling an AI agent to "reason" across a completely open-ended field of enquiry, such as a chatbot is faced with, would seem to be of a different order of difficulty. But OK, it appears from what you say they are trying to do it.

I am simply adopting the terminology @iNow is using. It seems these things are called "reasoning models". I take no view on whether this is an accurate representation of what the bloody things do. (Though in view of all the hype surrounding them, I would not be surprised if the proponents of AI are overstating their case.)

OK that's interesting. To get it clear, is a reasoning chatbot an LLM still, or is that term restricted only to those language emulators that operate by trawling a database and returning answers i.e. as stochastic parrots?

Yes a cast iron stove could be used from the late c.18th/c.19th. (There are pictures of them in the Beatrix Potter books, in Lake District cottages.) I gather there were brick ones for about a century before that. But I don't know how widespread these would have been in urban working class homes.

That two individuals lived to a great age tells us precisely zero about the life expectancy of the population.

Childhood diseases, mainly. Infant mortality actually remained high until the end of the c.19th. I suspect the hygiene issue may actually have been more important after the Industrial Revolution, when so may people moved to cities in crowded conditions without good sanitation, which promoted the transmission of disease (typhoid etc). In the Middle Ages it may have been more a mix of factors, including childhood diseases but also the harshness of the climate when housing was very basic, variations in nutrition due to reliance on subsistence farming, and so on. Infants have small body weight, so the cold of winter, shortages of food or the effects of illness would be more likely to kill them than a larger adult with more bodily reserves. In the early months breast feeding would have been essential as there was no possibility of bottle feeding. So if the mother could not breast feed (and illness or death of mothers from puerperal fever was common) the child might die unless a wet nurse could be found. Regarding your comment that "most people only lived to mid 40s", be careful. There can be confusion of average life expectancy with how long adults could be expected to live. Because so many infants died before they were 5, the effect of these early deaths on the statistics for the population is to bring down sharply the average life expectancy. If one was lucky enough to survive to one's twenties, there was a good chance of living some way past 40. (In your twenties the big risks would have been warfare for young men and death in or after childbirth for young women. If you made it to 30, you might live to 50 or 60.)

Hard to discern the motive, through all the lashings of corporate management-speak here. Do I gather, from the way they say this is not a "procurement" exercise, that the service is to be provided by the Met Office free of charge?

But is this weakness confined to maths and physics? Surely the issue is that while LLMs are very clever at learning how to mimic language, they can't reason and can't understand in any useful sense the content they present to the user? This would be true of other areas of knowledge. We had an example yesterday of an LLM (Gemini) coming up with a theory for @Prajna as to why Google's search engine seems to have got slower and returned fewer results, but then @Sensei blew this theory out of the water as it was apparently based on a misconception that the user had fed in and which Gemini had not challenged - all the while telling the user how clever he was.

No it's because people and institutions hold a lot of gold already, while total holdings of crapto are tiny by comparison. Don't confuse rate of growth with amount. The greater the amount, the more it takes to grow it at a rapid rate, obviously. Buying gold is not illegal anywhere, so far as I know.

Yes more of a challenge before refrigerators. The upper and middle classes relied on cooks, of course. And I think, from reading Dickens, that lower classes indeed bought pies and things a lot of the time. I should think you would need quite a big kitchen to cook on an open fire.

Yeah, like your sycophantic bearded Cornish mate down the pub, who’s famous for talking out of his arse. 😁

Of course not. It's obviously ballocks from the ridiculous claims you are making. And you don't even explain who has - supposedly - produced this "research collection". P.S. Is "BastiSchmidt" something developed from "Batshit", by any chance? 😁

We? Is this the chatbot talking now, or you? I note the response to @geordief starts, "These are excellent questions".....

It’s not cynicism (apart perhaps from my suspicion about the motives of these AI corporations). It’s just my observation of what AI output is like on these forums, plus what I read. The output is verbose and uses terms that seek to impress, like a bad undergraduate essay. The style is ingratiating, usually starting by saying something to make user think he is brilliant. And the content seems to be, as often as not, wrong in some respect. People will end up emotionally invested in the trust they put in a fundamentally unreliable source of information. People like my son are already aware of the pitfalls of the addictive nature of many social media channels. He has deleted a number, like Facebook and Snapchat as he was wasting time on them. My own experience at work even with email is that the immediacy of response attracts one’s attention, distorts one’s priorities and damages one’s attention span. AI chatbots are clever at simulating human conversation. But it is synthetic: there is no mind behind it. So that makes them even more dangerous than social media.

This is case is interesting as it illustrates fairly fully the risks. It looks as if we see in Gemini's replies to @Prajna a series of plausible-sounding theories, but without it being able to point out the issue that @Sensei has identified , viz. that a changed address on Google doesn't necessarily mean what was suggested. In other words Gemini has connived with @Prajna in barking up the wrong tree! Furthermore we see in @Prajna 's attitude to Gemini a worrying level of interaction, as if he thinks he's dealing with a person, who he refers to as "Gem" and with whom he thinks he is having some sort of relationship - and whom he has thereby come to trust. This is pretty dreadful. These chatbots are clearly quite psychologically addictive, just as social media are (by design), and yet they they are also purveyors of wrong information. What could possibly go wrong, eh?

Yes I thought it was a rather atmospheric photograph. The guy is clearly dirt-poor, dressed in ragged clothes, but he has a mean haircut and displays a certain coolness and independent resilience, in spite of his impoverished circumstances. I didn't take it, mind you. I found it in a skip when they closed the library at Shell Centre. I also picked up some books on diesel engines and marine propulsion, written between the wars. They had beautifully drawn diagrams in them, as technical books of that era often did. Amusingly, in one them the diesel engine was scrupulous referred to throughout as either the "oil engine" or the "Ackroyd-Stuart engine". It seems the writer, after the First World War, could not bring himself to acknowledge the engin e was invented by a German! (Side Note: Ackroyd-Stuart did invent an oil engine before Rudolf Diesel, but his was a "hot bulb" engine, in which a separate heated chamber was needed to pre-heat the fuel to make it burn before admission to the cylinder. It ran at far lower compression ratios than the diesel engine, in which compression alone generates a sufficiently high temperature for the fuel charge to burn. The diesel engine is far more efficient, although hot bulb, or Ackroyd-Stuart, engines were produced until the 1920s.) Speaking of stuff that the company threw out or donated, there used to be a gallery of the secondary uses people around the world made of Shell oil containers: drums, 5litre cans etc. A lot of water butts in East Africa were Shell drums at one time. Nowadays, such a gallery would be seen as pollution or the evil influence of a multinational [boo, hiss] but those were simpler times. There was also a magnificent collection of butterflies from around the world that someone had accumulated and donated to the company in the 1960s, and a display of all the seashells whose names were given to the ships in the Shell Tanker fleet - and also to the brands of lubricating oil, almost all of which to this day are named after shells: Spirax, Turbo etc. One of the odd things about ageing is to find the company one worked for, for so many years, transformed in public perception from something one could be rather proud of (keeping all the many different kinds of machines that society relies on running smoothly) into a diabolical, evil monster. I suppose it was ever thus.

What ballocks.

No the black-coloured states are the ones where Americans are fattest. 😁 But, more seriously, there does seem to be some clustering around the Mississippi and its tributaries. I know nothing about US demographics but could this correlate with poor, black ex-slave communities?

Does this mean that Gemini was talking crap to @Prajna then, about the possible reasons?