I have an admittedly-odd hobby of reading old (1970s, 1980s) computer magazines. As I go along, I'll often see something that piques my curiosity, and so I'll do an Internet search for more tidbits about the item. Well, about a third of the time, the LLM box will confidently assert that the thing I just read about did not ever exist. Even when there's a directly-relevant search result a handful of items down.

Similarly, I tried, a few months ago, to have several LLMs perform a quite simple task -- take a list of the countries that are parties to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, take a list of countries by population, and give me the combined population of the countries that are members of the ICC. Every single time, the LLM crapped out. Even given explicit instructions on how to complete the task, a model would at most get a dozen countries in, and then quit in favor of some method of estimation. With results that were all over the map (as it were).

(Incidentally, Wolfram Alpha, which is not an LLM, will give you accurate-for-2023 stats for the member countries in the case of any number of  organizations, including the ICC. Manually adding Ukraine and subtracting the Philippines is easy enough, and indicates that every LLM estimate was off by at least 10%, and usually more.)

I accordingly am of the opinion that the thing LLMs are most suited for is enabling students to cheat on their homework. Facile regurgitation of shallow knowledge, an inability or unwillingness to work, and an obligation to answer instead of saying "I don't know" -- LLMs do a great job of emulating a sixteen-year-old just trying to skate through a required class.

Linguistically, I note the "Free Province" construction evokes the historical Irish Free State (1922-1937), a constitutional monarchy established as a compromise for a people who would have, in the main, have preferred to be a republic.

Quote from: Carteir Montagnhă on September 09, 2025, 09:30:55 AMhello! i just got my Talossan citizenship today! and i would like to get to know everyone here since i am now a Fiovan myself :)

Hello, from your provincial representative of the monarch!

Quote from: Marcel Eðo Pairescu Tafial, UrGP on August 09, 2025, 05:18:06 PMConsidering that one point on the agenda is the promotion of the Talossan language, I'd like to suggest Raßemblamaintsch dels Citaxhiéns Talossaes as a better translation for the name.

Well, if you are starting with the English translation of the party name (which most Talossans would be), sure, that's likely more how you'd go into Talossan. But since Mximo is a native speaker of French, I expect the "per el" instead of "dels" more correctly reflects his intent (historical French parties of the "Rally" name pattern include both a "Rassemblement du" and a "Rassemblement pour la").

Për.

The whole symbolism of the sash as part of the Royal Regalia is to honor modern Talossa's substantial inheritance from the Republic. It should be left as-is.

Talossa's provinces are . . . well. The provinces, by and large, have been nominal. There have been brief periods of actual local activity in some of them (Fiova for a while after Reunison comes to mind), but as a group, most of the time, they're just a potential hook that isn't being used. And while they don't get created/destroyed/re-symbol-ized at a blistering pace, they do change often enough that I expect that if incorporated into a bit of national regalia, said item of regalia would spend most of its time out-of-date.

Thanks, yes, visibility restored.

I think the Courthouse board got nuked. At least I can't see it or my past posts to it. That was kinda important.

Um, did someone delete the Courthouse sub-board on Witt? I can't find it, and looking at my past messages my posts to it are missing.

Contra.

Nothing huge -- but it bothers me that it is specified that sentence in the case of falsely claiming membership in the Order of Belacostă can only be pronounced by the Cort pü Inalt, not any lawful court hearing the case. Especially since the same unified statutes then specify how the provincial-level courts work.

So, the "Contra" is as much my fault as anybody's, because I didn't actually look at this back when a revision in accordance with my objection would have been easy. Sorry.

Anyway, assuming this passes, I'd appreciate if the Consuls would soon propose an amendment to eliminate that specificity.

One might, of course, debate if coloring hair or expressing a liking for Nickelback qualifies as "in the Judge's official and individual capacity".

I didn't have to parse exactly what the boundaries of that clause meant, or evaluate who has the power (the Ziu or a court) to decide if that clause applies, because the underlying complaint was so obviously about one individual's (in)actions in an official capacity as a judge.

On a purely speculative note, I wonder if relatively-disengaged voters pick among available parties at near-random, thus implicitly favoring small parties over broad coalitions.

In which case, the optimum tactic for a political alliance might be to register as several parties, but with the same electoral list. There is, at a first glance, no rule I see against people appearing on the electoral lists of more than one party. (Or, actually, even against for multiple parties having the same party leader.)

The natural checks on artificial use of this tactic are 1) having to pay a registration fee for each party; and 2) parties that look obviously "spammed" (particularly in having the same party leader) will probably turn off voters.

I'm waiting for the follow-up, where the badge of the new position has four fingers raised.

For the obvious reason, the holder of the new position would have to post in four-line rhymed stanzas.

As a Talossan cabinet position, of course the obligatory rhyme scheme for the stanzas would be ABBA, for a slightly more obscure reason.

Yeah, so, regarding the most recent case I saw?

It would be nice if, instead of relying on my interpretation (which isn't binding precedent since it's a General Cort-level decision, and couldn't become biding precedent under the Organic Law even if appealed to the Uppermost Cort because it couldn't get a three-judge panel after recusals), you guys could either revise the statute law to explicitly say the inactivity-retirement system is a Notice of Reprimand procedure requiring concurrence of 2/3rds the Cosa, or, alternatively, revise the OrgLaw to make the existing procedure unquestionably Organic.

What exactly you should do is, I think, too much a policy (and thus political) matter for it to be proper for me to make a specific recommendation.

But I do think the absolute worst place for there to be any obvious room for differing interpretations in Talossan law is over the question of who has the power and responsibility to definitively interpret Talossan law.

I realize that "the 49th parallel" is a common-enough metonymy for the US-Canada border, that parallel marking the longest section of that border.

But, in prosaic literal geographical fact, an absolute majority of the Canadian population lives in the parts of Canada south of the 46th parallel, never mind the 49th.