An unexploded shell from a WW2-era live firing range was found the other day in my area - far from any war zone.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-10-04/wwii-shell-detonated-...

But baseline BP is all about diet, exercise, good sleep routine and avoiding smoking.

Some foods like licorice can elevate BP; the glycyrrhizic acid inhibits an enzyme that deactivates cortisol.

I personally drink hibiscus tea a few times a week which is an ACE inhibitor and is shown to reduce systolic blood pressure by 5-7mmHg. Also the occasional beetroot juice (+ apple and carrot) or magnesium bisglycinate for a 2-5mmHh systolic reduction due to the nitric oxide.

I was looking at Google maps to locate some of the more obscure climbs outside the Yosemite valley proper. Little did I realise that Tommy Caldwell, Alex Honnold, Lynn Hill and others had done a project with Google to take a Street View camera up El Capitan (The Nose route but also parts of the Dawn Wall). Seriously the best in-person view to get an idea of what it's like pitch by pitch up the wall.

As an anecdote: Family member has a partial lateral meniscus tear in the knee. Surgery was considered as if successful then returning to running might have been possible. Specialist opinions varied as did their reading of the MRI scans.

After a lot of research there was emerging evidence that long-term, surgery was more likely to result in osteoarthritis. So had to weight up long-term mobility over short-term pain relief and not having a major lifestyle change.

You see professional athlete undergoing surgery the next day, but their income relies on regaining usage as quickly as possible. The alternative is physio exercises to strengthen the supporting muscles and avoiding anything that might cause a re-injury.

Co-founder Jodie Evans is married to Neville Roy Singham who lives in China, has extensive links to the CCP and is currently Code Pink's major funder.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/05/world/europe/neville-roy-...

"Knowing what you don't know is the beginning of wisdom", and a new take on AI reasoning, but didn't actually use the word wisdom in the text.

Anyway, I think we're increasingly finding the old adage "garbage-in, garbage-out" still applies.

The question I would ask is: Does anyone first ask the AI for a non-coding solution rather than jumping straight to code? Is Systems Analysis dead? Does no one read Hawryszkiewycz anymore?

The lecturer had a side business building FoxPro apps for local businesses, and really pushed us with real-world style SQL puzzles.

Built an app to track my MtG cards at the time. (this was pre-Web)

I recently needed an "avatar" for the wall at work. The actual one I went with was a Tatakovsky-inspired minimalist avatar that was settled by the 4th prompt.

But I kept exploring and in the process had developed a canonical identity model definition which could then be transformed according to various art movements and other ideas, by the end focusing more on the light and materials than specific artists.

Some of my favourites and surprising ones out of the hundreds of images were:

- Prairie School with my portrait expressed as faceted timber

- Czech Cubism where my face was merged with the architecture

- Japanese sumi-e and ukiyo-e prints

- Delaunay triangulation

- Turing morphogenesis

- Magnetic fields

- Gaudi-inspired organic sculpture

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242706930_The_Rovin...

The real danger was being able to listen in and the potential for identity theft and recording conversations. ASIO recently issued a warning that government officials should avoid having confidential conversations in any internet-linked vehicle, so not just BYD.

BYD though are having a bad day with a major recall due to the spare wheel falling off Shark 6s.

https://www.drive.com.au/news/2024-26-byd-shark-6-recalled-b...

Might have to avoid driving behind one, as I see them everywhere.

He was very influential in pushing me to favour Many Worlds over Copenhagen, and his interviews with people like David Deutsch were gold. Might have to check out what he's doing these days.

Our model of the world, and this includes "memories" is very highly compressed, and extremely lossy. We reconstruct everything from what neurons activate when we recall something, so it can also be like a corrupted zip, where we don't access everything required in the moment. This can be affected by sleep, stress, hormones, etc.

What is quite interesting is when we try and recall something and can't, but the subconscious processing continues and you recall it later.

https://www.iluka.com/products-markets/rare-earth-products/

Not sure about Lynas and whether they have access to those rare earths from an alternate source to feed into their plant. The Mt Weld mine is carbonatite and mostly LRE rather than the Yytrium and Erbium heavy xenotime/monazite Iluka have stockpiled.

- Conscious is the substrate or architecture of the system.

- Awareness is the active resolution of inputs (external and internal) against that system's model.

- Subjective Experience is the feeling "what it is like to be" from within the system.

I also disagree with the "observer" position. Seems he's imported some Carlo Rovelli into this essay as they do collaborate together. You don't need an observer - it's the same reason I find Copenhagen / Wave function collapse to just seem wrong.

The reason I think quala is hard to pin down comes down to how the conscious internal model compresses what it has previously resolved about the world (internal and external).

The feeling of blueness is that highly compressed concept (not raw data about ranges of wavelengths) which is then compared against the blueness of something our awareness is focused on.

It's when you recognise the humanity of the individual - for example IR footage of a soldier trying to sleep in a foxhole before a drone drops a grenade. The aftermath starkly reminders you that this was a living person a few moments earlier.

- An internal model that is actively revised (the Markov blanket/s) - A continuing active resolution of inputs (either sensory or the ability to simulate "dream" - basically aliveness) - A persistent state of completed resolutions that are recursively reentered and affect the future resolutions.

Everything we might say have these abilities are organic, but a digital system could possibly be defined as being conscious if it met all those.

LLMs have an internal state, they respond to external input, they have a form of memory.

What is missing is agency; a directionality of resolution, and the subjective experience (what the conscious process "feels' like from inside.

I would suggest that those developed purely via evolution as the drive to procreate and stay alive against entropic decay.

When you stop typing, the LLM is not there wondering when or what you will type next. It responds if you ask it something, it doesn't wait around wanting to continue the conversation. There's also no loss if you stop or delete it completely.

The next phase could be adding something equivalent to dreaming (except a LLM doesn't sleep), where the LLM continues "thinking" about the conversation, and generates something additional to say without explicit prompting.

And maybe a digital system needs to know/sense/feel its potential mortality, and cares about that?

McGichrist write about the Master and the Emissary to explain the conscious and subconscious human brain. The octopus takes this to a whole new level with eight separate sub-brains, each a Markov blanket to itself as demonstrated when one gets severed. Unlike the tail of a drop-tail skink, the severed arm shows continuing evaluation and adjustment to its environment.

Is there a "what it is to be an octopuses arm", does it exhibit agency like a human? Most likely not but it blurs the boundary between organic and non-organic consciousness.