The Bluestocking Women's Pub, where brains can exist in a single state

[Magpiecomplex]

Welcome all. The booze here is minimally intoxicating, the food is calorie free and the staff are warm and cuddly. And if the thread title sounds nonsensical, blame the guy Myrtle was listening to this evening!

I've read the reviews if I come across them. They're struggling to say anything nice.

I didn't know ovens did that. it looks scary. Had you done something rash like cleaning it? (I wouldn't have to worry in that case).

I've had that happen on two mini electric ovens, but I thought that was just because they were cheap! Yours looks like a proper oven! Surely that shouldn't happen on things that cost more than £30!

Gosh no, cleaning the oven is probably the last thing that would ever occur to me. It's also only about 2.5 years old.

Bloody hell, that isn't good.

About £350 if I remember correctly. I'm just glad I was on the kitchen when it happened.

I had a total confidence dip and began to think that maybe I was being hypercritical or oversensitive, so didn’t dare read them until now in case they all said how brilliant it was!! Feel a bit vindicated now 🤣

Genius, Android!😂😂😂

It's interesting that AI didn't pick up that Sionnach Rua[dh] [modernised spelling drops the dh which isn't pronounced] means 'red fox'.

Old steam-driven Google Translate didn't hesitate to provide 'red fox'.
So AI doesn't draw on on-line translation tools??

That's pretty appalling.
Not like old appliances that lived forever - back in the mid-80s DM was cooking in, on and under the grill of a New World gas cooker which must have been 30 years old - it was certainly older than I was.

To be fair the Irish I know is Ulster Irish, so I'm about as comfortable with the old fashioned spelling they still use in Scotland. I have been known to sign off for the night with "oidhche mhaith"...

The ChatGPT type of LLM was found to be able to do various translations despite not having been deliberately trained for it - I think because the source material was ‘everything it could find on the internet’, and that includes text in many languages. If I ask it for the meaning of sionnach ruadh it says ‘searching the web’ before providing a full answer. But then I asked of it can translate Irish inti English, and how it does it:

ChatGPT performs translations using a language model trained on a vast range of multilingual text from books, websites, and other sources. Here's a simplified explanation of how it works:

1. Training on Multilingual DataDuring training, the model sees many examples of Irish paired with English and other languages. It learns patterns, vocabulary, and grammar structures—not by memorizing rules, but by statistically modeling how words and phrases relate across languages.

2. Contextual UnderstandingWhen you input an Irish phrase, ChatGPT analyzes it in context. It doesn't translate word-for-word, but rather interprets the meaning of the sentence as a whole and generates a natural English equivalent.

3. Handling AmbiguityIrish words can have multiple meanings depending on context (e.g., ban can mean "woman" or "white"). ChatGPT uses surrounding words to infer the correct meaning and produce a coherent translation.

4. Not a Dictionary or Rules-Based ToolUnlike Google Translate, which uses both statistical and neural methods, ChatGPT doesn’t access a separate translation database or follow strict grammar rules. It generates each translation on the fly based on learned language patterns.

if I ask for a translation it gives a much simpler answer - it doesn’t tell you anything about what a fox is.

I will obviously have to investigate this "AI" sorcery, as a supplement to my battered old copy of Father Dinneen's dictionary!

My suitcase loofah babies have survived the night. I was worried they might pack up and leave.

You’ve reminded me to check my morning glory seedlings, I put about half of them out in the growhouse yesterday. They don’t look quite as happy as the rather rambunctious ones still indoors, but ok.
last year they were a bit cold/not enough light even inside, I think and then they got badly slugged outside. Last year was very sluggy, this year touch wood isn’t so far, presumably because of the dryness. On the downside, despite doing what I thought was a reasonable amount of watering, some of my patio pot plants look unwell or dead.

I've seen very few slugs, just two small ones yesterday despite moving loads of stuff. Very little damage on my daughter's hosta, Carl, too. I wonder if the massive population explosion last year caused an outbreak of disease and/or parasites that, possibly coupled with stresses from the current hot and dry weather, has caused a collapse in their numbers?

Oh, they are there. I picked a large snail off a small plant in a pot, (the plant in pot was sitting on my flowerbed waiting to be planted in the soil) and underneath the large snail was a medium sized slug. It was hidden by the snail. I hope they weren't doing some sort of gastropodic merging.

So I was wondering about slugs the other day. I loathe them btw having sat on a 10inch one as a teen and vomited copiously in response. and quite phobic now, quite aside from the lungworm risk to my spaniels.

So… are they seasonal? Or nocturnal? Have gone through the whole winter without seeing one, but I do remember months where the whole of my new patio was crawling with them last year - summer time, I presume as they’ve not appeared yet?

I can’t put salt down on the patio because it would corrode the Italian porcelain tiles that we used (they looked lovely in the shop, didn’t for a second consider the practical implications of them, esp wrt slugs 🤦🏽‍♀️)… am expecting a mass convention any day (we will get hundreds of the tiny little ones that I then have to chase the dogs to stop them from eating!)

You could try copper tape, Lurky, as a boundary around the edge of your patio. Or sharp sand, or crushed shells. Anything which makes them uncomfortable to slither over!

Checks calendar...

Ooh! It's the fourth day of May.

Yay!

And to you, Boily!

Thank you Errol for querying AI about how it translates things, that's fascinating, and I'll try not to go off on a complete derail, but I was struck by
3. Handling Ambiguity Irish words can have multiple meanings depending on context (e.g., ban can mean "woman" or "white"). ChatGPT uses surrounding words to infer the correct meaning and produce a coherent translation.

'Ban' does not mean either woman or white, it only means the genitive plural of the word 'bean' [pron more or less the same as 'ban'].

It does not mean white. White in Irish is 'bán', pron, bawn [As in the Colleen Bawn pub in Southwark].
This goes to show that AI has not twigged that those funny little signs over Irish words are not just decoration, they are actually part of the meaning of the word as they indicate a different sound -'fada' means long, so the vowel is lengthened - and therefore a different meaning.

Sometimes that's very very signficant, for example caca in Irish means ..well, caca, whereas cáca means cake!

I grudgingly accept that AI using context isn't a bad idea, but it's getting the right answer for the wrong reason. There's something very comforting in the fact that AI doesn't know it all....yet, anyway🙂

I've only seen one tiny slug so far this year, and one normal-sized snail.

We get hedgehogs in the garden, and lots of robins and so forth, which all probably assist in keeping numbers down. There is also a ditch at the back - I haven't heard any frogs, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are some around.

I'm about to start knitting a birthday present for a friend, after spending a large chunk of the morning doing tedious admin. I've only got a few days, so it will have to be small!

No, they're all in my garden and have scoffed my hostas and zinnia seedlings.

More slugs (3) on the pots of veg plants I bought from the organic market stall yesterday than I have seen otherwise. Robins now - I'm trying to clear a strip about two meters wide along the edge of the veg plot to give me more space for said plants, and a couple of harassed parents thought that the odd-looking pig arrived to grub up the soil just in time. I'm not sure how many speckledy starving babies there were, but quite a few. As I observed, quite capable of foraging for themselves when their adoring parents weren't watching.

Out of focus, but you get the idea.

Love the art but I'm no artist. I am related to various other Harts, but there are many more than seven. Today I can offer tomato sandwiches and seedcake as I've been out murdering surplus tomato seedlings. Had to be done but feels criminal so I'd like to book a space in the Bluestocking for a wake for the poor plant babies.