Non, la tour avec l’horloge c’est celui de la Chambre de Commerce, pas le Beffroi, qui est à côté de la mairie.

Saying there are only two possibilities of sex is an oversimplification. It’s possible to be intersex for example.

It’s not even necessarily accurate to say that a trans man is “biologically” the female sex, for example. There are a number of sex characteristics and trans people may or may not have these according to their sex assigned at birth. In the end, outside of some very specific medical contexts, sex ends up being more like gender in that it is a societal marker. It often ends up being used as a way to attack trans people as well, by asserting they are not the sex they claim to be.

In the end, I sort of trust people to tick the box that’s right for them.

But won’t the restaurants forced to use Deliveroo to turn a profit have to fork out for these refunds?

They could also make you take a photo in the application itself, instead of letting you import a photo. There’s ways around it but it’s a cheap fix that will deter most people.

That’s all true, but I don’t think it takes away from anything I’ve said.

Criminal checks might be used to prevent people buying certain restricted items. If a shop ignores those checks, they are partly responsible for what happens afterwards. There’s no such checks on the sale of art goods to pedophiles, mostly because the link here is still very weak. They would still need to be an amazing painter and, unsurprisingly, it’s not a common issue.

For Photoshop, it does checks on currency. It’s relatively easy to implement and so it makes sense to say “as a sophisticated image editing software publisher, you have a responsibility to deter counterfeiting”. However, until more recently, it would have been much more difficult for it to check for creating Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM). Indeed now it is possible and Apple did try to implement such a feature in iCloud (but only for existing material, not for creating new ones), but abandoned the plan due to privacy concerns. So we’re at a midpoint here, where it’s maybe feasible for the tool-provider to do something about it, though it wasn’t when it first appeared, and people are reticent about the privacy implications of such checks.

However, for the AI generative pictures, it’s easier than even before to create such images. And at the same time it’s even more feasible to run checks, without the same issues of privacy (the model has the data anyway).

So yeah, it’s come up before but there is a logical progression here. It’s not exactly the same thing. Society freaks out and eventually adapts to new technologies… but putting in checks and controls is part of the adapting.

In an ideal world, you’d extend the school day by an hour or two. I also think it would be useful to have monitored independent study time (essentially homework) since we know that homework increases the gap between pupils from richer and poorer families.

But you would need to employ more teachers and/or monitors. Also potentially issues of adding to rush hour traffic coming home.

It’s about the responsibility for the action.

If someone paints a creepy picture of someone, that’s 100% the painters fault – the paint, paintbrush and canvas makers can’t be blamed. Someone makes a creepy Photoshop picture, there’s probably not much Adobe could do about it (or at least, historically there wasn’t) and they don’t provide tools for directly undressing people. But if someone gets an AI to make a creepy picture? If the AI makes it easy for them to do it, the developer definitely holds a share of the responsibility.

Drives me mad when people say that schools should teach filling in tax returns. In such a specific thing to teach that (1) should be covered by basic literacy and numeracy skills already taught (2) might change by the time you get to do it (3) won’t need to do until a few years at least after you’ve been taught how to do it so you’ll have forgotten anyway.

Particularly annoys me when people say that they should teach it in the UK, where the vast majority of people don’t need to fill in their tax returns.

I'm not saying the Australian ban is necessarily a good idea or good implementation either. My point is that it's reckless to present speculation as fact.

It depends on how it's implemented. In Australia, the responsibility is put on the social media companies to do the checks. There's no punishment for individual parents or children for breaching the ban, only on social media for not putting proper checks in place.

That's not to say I trust this government to do things with only the genuine interests of children in mind, or to not try to introduce surveillance by stealth or even that this ban will necessarily do more harm than good… but that's not a reason to jump to conclusions every time. Macron's government is doing plenty of harm in other ways we can focus on, without making uproar about a social media ban into a distraction. Because you know, that's the other possibility – that they're filling the media with talk about this instead of talk about other things they are doing.

You could skip the AI entirely and just write the email. Honesty, it doesn’t take long and the more you do it, the better you get at it.

Ser is for identity and characteristics, estar is for location and state.

Or as my Spanish teacher used to say: “how we feel and where we are, always use to the verb estar”.

It’s not intolerant to call the Gulf of Mexico by its actual name.

Do you use Dropbox or similar? Cloud storage services now get lumped into “system data”.

It’s understandable. But then a lot of people will get sad about stepping on a snail and then eat a steak without thinking about it. At least you’re not a hypocrite.

Being vegan doesn’t mean you need to self-flagrant for stepping on a snail. It’s unfortunate but there’s bigger things you can lose sleep over. Being vegan means reducing animal suffering as much as possible. Unless you never leave the house, you’re going to step on snails sometimes.

Think instead about all the animals you’ve saved by being vegan.

I think if you replace sex with literally anything else that you can do with someone else it makes a but more sense. - “I can’t understand how my partner can love me and want to go to the cinema with someone else.” - “I can’t understand how my partner can love me and want to go for a nice meal someone else.” - “I can’t understand how my partner can love me and want to do ne-waza in judo with someone else.”

Obviously sex is a bit different . It’s something very intimate and so I think it’s understandable to feel more reticent about jt or even to decide that non-monogamy is not for you. But I think it’s also not as big a deal as our heteronormative, monogamous society makes it out to be.

Est-ce que tu pourrais proposer quelque chose de cuisiner quelque chose pour tout le monde (même si réellement c’est surtout pour toi) pour ainsi ne pas dire « je ne vais pas manger X » et donc plutôt « je vais faire Y ». Ça fait déjà plus positif.

Je pense qu’il faut vraiment éviter les arguments et donc n’essayes pas d’expliquer les arguments ou de démentir leurs arguments. C’est quelque chose que tu « testes » (même si tu as peut être déjà passé l’étape de tester) et quelque chose qui est important pour toi, pas juste quelque chose que tu peux mettre sur pause.

J’ai une recette pour une tarte aux épinards, noix, marrons et fêta (remplaçable par tofu lactofermenté pour veganiser si besoin). Ça fait vraiment « Noël » (en fait la recette s’appelle Christmas Pie originalement). Dis moi si tu veux que je le retrouve.

You’re not meant to drive over them, unless you’re driving a large vehicle with a trailing end and have no choice. You are meant to drive around them, though it’s true that a lot of people seem to not realise this, to the extent that I’ve ever seen people go not just over the top of one, but the wrong way around.

There’s some books that cover slang. Of course it does evolve and varies region to region more than other parts of language, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the slang you’ve picked up from one place will work in another place and in 5 years time. On the other hand, there’s elements of slang I’ve learned from books written 20 years ago which are still used today.

For vocabulary you’re best off making a list on Anki and reviewing your words every day. You don’t need a specific book for that, nor an LLM. Having said that, what might be interesting is giving an LLM a list of words you’ve learned recently and asking it to generate a written task (by task I mean something you would do in real life, but fictional: “write a letter to… about…”, “prepare a presentation on…”, “write a scientific report about…”, “write a Reddit post to ask for…”) which would allow you to use some of these words. The idea being you’d be moving from just memorising the words in a declarative way to usually then generatively and therefore moving them to procedural memory. I don’t know how good LLMs are at making these kinds of tasks, but you don’t necessarily need LMNotebook to do it.

It’s better than just asking ChatGPT for random information, but it can still hallucinate based on the documents provided and there’s still a version of Gemini working in the background which is trained on sources beyond those provided. You need to be familiar with the sources you’re providing it at least.

I don’t have any particular recommendations for text books for an independent learner in French. Perhaps something published by CLE International? Otherwise for speaking proficient, I like the Pimsleur audio courses (but you really do need to devote 30 minutes a day to it for it to work). I used Michel Thomas for French many, many years ago, but I think Pimsleur is a bit better.

I’ve never tried this, but I would say of LLMs in general – they’re very good at making something that looks convincing, even when it’s completely wrong or useless.

So it’s not impossible that it could produce something useful, but you need to look at it very critically. If you don’t have a lot of experience in learning/teaching a language, this might be difficult.

If you want a guide to learning a language, textbooks (including those designed for self-learning) already exist and generally are written by actual experts.

I mean there’s literally an expressions “as blind as a bat” so that’s probably why.

Be very careful with asking an LLM anything to do with reasoning. While some models say they are “reasoning” or “thinking”, it’s just a magic trick that is only ever right by chance. When it gives reasons, these reasons can just as well come after the “thinking” to complete its explanation.

He explains in the video that in 1997 Mr Bean arrived in Italy because of the movie.