Sure, but the gif doesn’t show 50 knots. The gif doesn’t show any speed actually, so I really don’t know where the 50 number comes from. But on the tracker the speed was 8.1 knots. Fast for a tanker, but totally believable.

The gif shows no data (dimmed icon) from 08:49 UTC to 11:10 UTC so I had my maths wrong and it’s 2 hours 21 minutes, apologies. Still a lot more than 30 minutes. The AIS data also generally comes in less frequently than every minute so there’s some unreliability there.

As I said, according to the current data the ship definitely kept going back up towards the Strait since I posted, so what’s more likely, it kept going on its current course and spoofed its AIS for nearly 12 hours, or that it turned around?

My source is marinetraffic.com. Other AIS trackers also corroborate it.

From the sounds of it the OP and most other articles are based on similar armchair research looking at trackers so I think it’s about as reliable as we’re going to get.

I don’t know where you’re getting any of that from. It was travelling at 8 knots before and after the turnaround. The bit in the animation where it slows and drifts almost due south is actually marinetraffic not having AIS data for that period so it just interpolates between the two known positions. Maybe I should have made that clearer.

That turnaround period is also close to 3.5 (edit: 2.5) hours, not 30 minutes.

According to the same data the ship is now close to the Strait of Hormuz that it passed through yesterday; it seems pretty clear it did not get where it wanted to go.

Everyone is reporting on these ships making it through the strait which is still under Iranian control. Few seem to mention the part in the Gulf of Oman where the US is actually implementing its blockade. The poster child, Rich Starry, mentioned in the article, did this a few hours after clearing the strait, still far from the Arabian Sea:

That sure doesn’t look like a ship breaching a blockade without incident.

It’s too early to say how this will play out on a larger scale but for these specific ships a lot of reporting is really fucking misleading at the moment.

My first answer is “WTF is RTK?”; my answer after consulting Wikipedia is “no, they’re separate things”.

RTK doesn’t sound like it broadcasts any data out but I barely understood what I just read. The Wikipedia coverage on this whole topic seems rather poor quality, I don’t think it’s just because I’m dumb.

It’s not as clear-cut as most people here are saying.

In short, GPS itself is just listening to satellites, and nothing is leaked that way, but most modern phones use “Assisted GPS” of some sort. The most common (I believe) AGPS is SUPL, which seems to be used by most phones. This involves sending your approximate location to an Internet server, which returns satellite data based on that approximate location.

To nobody’s surprise, in Android this is a Google server. I’m pretty sure most Android distros don’t give you any control over when it’s used, or which servers it uses. Anecdotally, my phone without Google Play services has a horrible time obtaining a GPS fix, so I suspect without GPlay it’s only using raw GPS, but I’ve not bothered to actually dig into it.

As I understand it, SUPL means even if you’re in aeroplane mode, if you have an Internet connection over WiFi you might still be leaking (approximate) location data when using GPS.

I learned about this from this excellent series of blog posts, which is a very thorough comparison of various Android ROMs’ privacy. It has a background section (search for “Assisted GPS”) in each of the ROM-specific posts which explains it better than I can.

This definition of social media is new to me as well, thanks for sharing it. This sort of clarifies a term I really dislike, and which you’ve used: “the algorithm”. It’s always seemed a little murky to me which algorithms it refers to. It’s like saying “don’t eat food with chemicals in it”.

Lemmy does have “an algorithm”, it’s just a relatively simple one based on communities one is subscribed to plus some vote/comment data for the various sort orderings.

Lemmy also absolutely implements a social graph – the data about who has interacted with whom is all stored by the system. It’s not explicitly stored as a graph structure, but then we’re arguing database schemas.

As I understand it, however, you’re saying “social media” arises when the “social graph” data structure is used as an input to “the algorithm”. That seems like a pretty robust definition to me.

One bit of pedantry: user blocks on Lemmy are, by a general definition, a form of social graph, and they do affect what content people see. So Lemmy could technically qualify as social media by the definition I’ve written here. I’m not sure what a more precise definition could be that avoids this technicality.

I’m surprised how many people seem offended by this comic. I found it pretty relatable. That doesn’t mean I “don’t understand context”, or think the writers were bad people, or that the shows aren’t worth watching. It just means I find it personally unpleasant to find these jokes in a work I’m otherwise enjoying.

When kids study older literature and media in school, generally when there’s a slur or racist reference or joke, the teacher will stop and explain the context and get the kids to reflect on it and why it’s probably not acceptable today. Even though I understand this and know it going in, I’m still kind of doing an abridged version of that in my head when something like this comes up in a show – I’ve been following along, laughing with the writers, and then suddenly I’m backing up and distancing myself from one joke or idea. It’s jarring, it pulls me out of the show, and it’s just not fun.

In some cases it also comes across as incredibly lazy and unoriginal. So many sitcoms from that era have “the trans episode”, “the gay episode”, “the lecherous character” – and they all make the same unfunny jokes, and it’s a reminder than a lot of these shows, even in their time, were just not that creative. Plenty of modern shows have the same problem, but they don’t draw attention to it by having large classes of “stock jokes” that simply do not land today.

It’s a screenshot of this report from a review of the UK’s security and terrorism legislation, published in December.

TechRadar article discussing the specific encryption issue here.

I was skeptical given the grammar issues others have pointed out but it seems legitimate.

Interesting, thanks for doing the research!

As an extreme non-expert, I would say “deliberate removal of a part of a model in order to study the structure of that model” is a somewhat different concept to “intrinsic and inexorable averaging of language by LLM tools as they currently exist”, but they may well involve similar mechanisms, and that may be what the OP is referencing, I don’t know enough of the technical side to say.

That paper looks pretty interesting in itself; other issues aside, LLMs are really fascinating in the way they build (statistical) representations of language.

This is a good name for one of the main reasons I’ve never really felt a desire to have an LLM rephrase/correct/review something I’ve already written. It’s the reason I’ve never used Grammarly, and turned off those infuriating “phrasing” suggestions in Microsoft Word that serve only to turn a perfectly legible sentence into the verbal equivalent of Corporate Memphis.

I’m not a writer, but lately I often deliberately edit myself less than usual, to stay as far as possible from the semantic “valley floor” along which LLM text tends to flow. It probably makes me sound a bit unhinged at times, but hey at least it’s slightly interesting to read.

I do wish the article made it clear if this is an existing term (or even phenomenon) among academics, something the author is coining as of this article, or somewhere in between.

GPT-4o mini, “Rephrase the below text in a neutral tone”:

This name is appropriate for one key reason: I have not felt the need to use an LLM for rephrasing, correcting, or reviewing my writing. This is also why I have not utilized Grammarly and have disabled the “phrasing” suggestions in Microsoft Word, which often transform a clear sentence into something overly corporate or generic.

Although I wouldn’t categorize myself as a writer, I have been intentionally editing myself less than usual lately to avoid the typical style associated with LLM-generated text. This approach might come across as unconventional at times, but it can also make for more engaging reading.

I also wish the article clarified whether this term is already established in academic circles, if the author is introducing it for the first time, or if it falls somewhere in between.

“avoid the typical style associated with LLM-generated text” – slop!

My assumption for the key icon was something to do with PINs/passkeys, which kind of reinforces OP’s point.

Ngl I really want to know what the tick icon actually does now.