The Hall of Fire

Wait. Are the runes wrong? The Sword of Elendil was forged anew by Elvish smiths, and on its blade was traced a device of seven stars set between the crescent Moon and the rayed Sun, and about them was written many runes; Does Tolkien refer to Elven script, which I assumed was used, as runes elsewhe...

Wordle 712 5/6

Or maybe it's this?

Its definitely a useful tool. When used correctly. Indeed but unfortunately it's a big when, shading into an if. I imagine searching legal databases for cases is a very good application for a machine learning model. But, it would have to be trained on those databases and instructed to stick to quot...

Wordle 711 4/6

There are also multiple continents full of countries that are not Russia to flee to, given that she is not fleeing the law, AFAIK. Why not go somewhere with a view of Mediterranean and good coffee?

Either Butina is an extremely effective agent, or Reade is not just a grifter but a spy as well.

Wordle 710 3/6

The runes are wrong, which I realized about an hour after I posted the link. I am very happy with Viggo as Aragorn, but if they ever need to cast Aragorn again, Idris Elba would be a good choice. He got that combination of quiet dignity and complete badassery. Related, someone said recently that Vig...

Thank you for that explanation. Still wtf bad, but not in the way it looked without context.

Magic: the Gathering is launching Universes Beyond's The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth™ This design is a great reminder that, as dramatic as PJ could get at times, he still was not dramatic enough . They got the runes on Anduril, and the shining cold in the light of the moon, and Aragorn ...

This, in the above quote, made my head go wooga-wooga. As the AP reported, one of those B-team legal experts was quietly fired after he intentionally showed child pornography at a meeting. Intentionally? And quietly fired? Isn't even possessing a felony? Also gotta love how the AG's job is to serve ...

I did not have this on my Bingo card, either.
In case you missed it, there are border clashes between Iran and the Taliban. Possibly Iran should keep its kamikaze drones for its own defense instead of giving them to Russia to shoot at Ukraine.

It's not lying. It's doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing - generating text based on the prompt that it was given and the body of information used to train it. If you ask it to generate text about something that doesn't exist, then you can't blame it for doing just that. Someone (I'll find t...

Wordle 707 3/6

The current Humble Bundle has 6 Murderbot audiobooks in the mp3 format. They are bundled with 14 other titles I've never heard about.

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/mart ... ooks-books

What does "let him show cause" mean?

Tech has finally delivered a language model that can predict the sequence of words that are most likely to go together in response to a natural language query and produce a coherent text. This is Quite Cool and has a number of genuinely helpful applications. Unfortunately, they called it an Artifici...

With 5 minutes to go in California, it's still World Dracula Day. The novel was published on May 26, 1897.

In honor of the Glorious 25th of May, here's the letter that a nineteen-year old Pratchett wrote to Tolkien. 22 November, 1967 Dear Professor Tolkien; This is simply a letter of appreciation. I have just read "Smith of Wootton Major". To tell the truth, when I ordered it I expected a light...

According to this , "The first phonograph was invented in 1877 at the Menlo Park lab." Lucy had quite a day, didn't she. I'm impressed - we've met four male characters, not counting Dracula, and all seem to be thoroughly decent guys, if a bit precipitous in proposing. No toxic masculinity ...