I have an old voffee mug covered with 1970s computing aphorisms. One says, "If computers ever get too powerful, organize them into a committee. That will do them in.."

Yup, one stated reason for the RAT on documents I have seen is to extend the data collection by the FDRs by maintaining power to the sensors and canbuses.

That's how I read it. It should say it has no thrust.

A typical jet turbofan airframe has two engines that each have a generator shaft taking turbine energy and making electrical current. It then has a whole 'nother turbine engine used on the ground and in some other flight legs called the APU; this exhausts out the tail cone usually, and can start engines or provide extra hydraulic power if needed, but is slow to start just like the main engines.

For power loss emergencies, a small spring-loaded fan pops into action super fast, called a Ram Air Turbine or RAT. It can only make enough electrical power to reboot key systems like engine FADECs or avionics, often only on one electrical channel instead of all channels. It's only a turbine, not a thrust-producing fan. It's a pinwheel toy in comparison to the APU and even the APU cannot produce significant thrust.

Firing the entire board of vaccine science immunologists, and replacing them with pre-science miasma theory antivax stooges, for example.

AI scrapers use these residential proxies. It's not (just) VPNs and Tor routing. Several bottom-feeding companies openly advertise such scraping services, for pretty much any country you may want. I administer a wiki that's been on the receiving end of such scraping, and the majority of these scraping requests are in fact coming from residential IP-addresses rather than data centers.

I don't know whether these are hacked accounts, people getting tricked or paid to run these scraping apps on their devices, but it's impossible to block them all. Even if you let fail2ban block entire /24s for every detected hit (even disregarding the collateral damage and the fact that these blocks don't solve the issue, the fail2ban and iptables overhead starts to outweigh the apache load at some point).

Anubis seems to be taking care of it for now, but it's obviously only a matter of time before they can deal with that one too. Although its delay does enable fail2ban rules to block the IP-addresses before they get to stress the mediawiki php scripts, attempting to diff 2 revisions of a random page from 10 years ago.

For the Irish language course the recordings of native speakers were taken offline in 2023. The AI replacements are nonsensical.

This story is about AI generated courses, not voices, but my post was still (accidentally) on-topic: when they previously used AI to increase volume of content, they were ok with quality being thrown out the window.

The AI generated courses might be low quality, and the original (English) courses might also go downhill because the type of exercises they produce may now be restricted to the type of things that their AI is able to reorganise for other languages. E.g. it might go further in the direction of vocabulary memorisation.

Isn't it that they call it "español" in Latin America, and "castellano" in Spain?

Unfortunately, the voices are really bad.

It's a pity they don't also make available the old courses, with audio from native speakers.

Seems the Danes are less susceptible to Silly Valley's influences, or the study period ended too early, or both. Alternate explanation, companies have fallen over themselves to lay off staff but won't cop to AI as a cause, as they find other excuses to tell their investors.

Maybe from NOAA? (at least until they get defunded)

Dumb baldfaced lie. And so many gullible idiots will believe it.

FSF's Zoe Kooyman and Krzysztof Siewicz will give a presentation on Sunday 2nd of Feb:

"FSF's criteria for free machine learning applications"

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffosdem.org%2F2025%2Fschedu...

It'll be streamed. Well worth tuning in for. A recording should be online soon after.

ELIZA's evil twin.

Looks like their legal department is just as prone to unimaginative copy-paste output as their modeling team.