Latest news with #TheHitchhiker'sGuidetotheGalaxy
Local France
3 days ago
- Local France
French Phrase of the Day: Faire du stop
Why do I need to know faire du stop? Because this isn't an instruction. What does it mean? Faire du stop - roughly pronounced fair do stop - might sound like a command, but in reality, this combination of French and English means 'to hitchhike'. The official word for hitchhiking in French is l'autostop , which originated in the early 1940s, combining the prefix auto (for cars) with the English word 'stop'. A hitchhiker would thus be an autostoppeur (or autostoppeuse ), though the French translators of 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' opted instead for Le Guide du voyageur galactique (The traveller's guide to the galaxy ). Advertisement However, faire du stop is the colloquial phrase you are more likely to hear if you ever find yourself on the side of the road with your thumb up. There are several different ways to talk about hitchhiking in French. You can also say lever le pouce (to raise the thumb), and if you visit Quebec in Canada, you would say faire du pouce (to do the thumb). Hitchhiking emerged in France in the late 1930s, at a time when only one in every 20 people had a vehicle. The practice was a popular option for people who could not afford bus or train tickets. Like in other countries, the practice also became popular, particularly in the 1950s, amongst young people either looking to run off or travel. While hitchhiking has declined in France, it is still something you will see from time to time, especially if you visit a ski area where free navettes (buses) run from the town up to the station. There's also the more modern version - the French start-up Bla Bla Car is a way of arranging a ride share in advance from someone who is driving to your destination, although in this case you will be contributing petrol money. Use it like this Ce n'est pas grave si on rate le bus, on peut faire du stop. - It doesn't matter if we miss the bus. We can just hitchhike. J'ai fait du stop de Marseille à Paris. C'était un voyage formidable, mais parfois un peu angoissant. - I hitchhiked from Marseille to Paris. It was a great trip, but a bit anxiety-inducing at times.
Indian Express
17-05-2025
- Science
- Indian Express
An attempt at understanding dolphin language is being made — will people listen?
Since it was first published in 1979, Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has seen generations of the philosophically minded expand on some of its themes. The series of books is comical, of course, as it satirises ontology, metaphysics, the pomposity of politicians, the dreadful diatribes of bureaucrats. But in all the fun of puns, Adams often stumbled into, perhaps knowingly, profound questions. The most popular of these is the Babel Fish argument — based on a creature that, by eliminating all boundaries to interspecies communication across the galaxy, caused the most dreadful wars of all. And then there's the enigma of dolphins. As the Earth is about to be destroyed in the first book, they leave the planet, leaving behind a one-line message: 'So long, and thanks for all the fish.' Now, as AI models threaten and promise to make the fears and fortunes of sci-fi worlds a reality, Adams's questions might just be answered. This year, the Coller-Dolittle Prize — given for research into two-way inter-species communication — was awarded to the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program. It has used non-invasive methodologies to study the various vocalisations and body language of bottlenose dolphins for about 40 years. This data can be used to train AI models that can potentially uncover the layers of meaning in non-human language. The dolphins in Hitchhiker's were smarter than human beings. And perhaps, for a given definition of intelligence, life can imitate art. For a long time, human beings have ignored the personhood of intelligent animals. Elephants, higher primates, dolphins and whales — there are several species that have language and heritage, that laugh and cry and grieve, have a sense of family, self and community. Perhaps AI can translate their realities in a way humans can understand them, and learn from them. But then, given that people are so adept at treating people as things, what chance does a dolphin have?
Irish Examiner
17-05-2025
- Business
- Irish Examiner
Books are my business: Owner and founder of EDB Studios Elize de Beer
Elize de Beer is the owner and founder of EDB Studios and is a bookbinder with a background in book and paper conservation. The bindery specialises in custom, small-run special editions, artist books, and enclosures. Originally from South Africa, she now lives in Crosshaven, Co Cork. What sparked your interest in bookbinding? I've always loved books in general, and I also love making and collecting them. I started to figure out that this was something I could just make and I was so curious to see their construction. I'm predominantly self-taught; over time, I just learned more and more of the processes. I also apprenticed at a conservation bindery, so a lot of my formal training was around conservation and repair. I think that's also why the books that I make now are still very traditional. They're made very much with conservation materials in mind. As I was making more books, more people were asking me for them. From there, I thought, why not actually just make this a business? It started off with making notebooks, and then I transitioned into making special edition books for authors that were self-publishing, special edition artist books, and things like that. Making collectible items is where I am now at the moment. I love making traditional books because I know that they'll last. I'm so rough with my books but I know if I've hand-sewn something, it's a centuries-old technique and it's going to hold up to me throwing it in my bag every day. I want these objects to be used. My favourite thing is seeing people purchase my notebooks or any of my books and that they're being used. What does your work involve? On a typical day, I start by making sure I have my orders for the week. I work in batches. So depending on the day, I'm either sewing, or making covers, or box-making. My favourite part is getting stuck into the big batch part of it, I play a podcast or listen to an audiobook, and get lost in the meditative process of it. At the end of the week, it's very satisfying having the final books done. What do you like most about it? I really love the process. When it comes to making books, I find that because I use such a traditional technique, there's no real way to speed it up. There are, of course, machines we can use, but there's something way more special about working with something that is handmade. It's about the satisfaction at the end when you have gone through this laborious process, and you are holding the physical thing in your hand. You know the work — the sewing, the glueing, the colour choice — that has gone into this simple, quiet, unassuming object. What do you like least about it? Often, if you're making 200 books, I think by number 100, you're a little mad. It's hard to see the end point sometimes, and you just have to push through. Also, the emails and communication part, as I wish I could just be making all day. Three desert island books The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams; it is still one of my favourite stories. Then I have this book in my collection called This Book is a Planetarium, it's a pop-up book by Kelli Anderson, and it has all these different elements, so I just get lost in it. My third pick would be one I read recently, Daughter of No Worlds by Carissa Broadbent. Fantasy is still my favourite genre to read, and it's such a beautiful story, I can read it again and again. Read More Books are my business: Frank Kelly of Lettertec
Yahoo
16-05-2025
- Yahoo
Grok Just Went Off the Rails. Its Meltdown Tells Us Something Pathetic About Elon Musk.
Of all the oddball companies that have come to define the current era of artificial intelligence hype, Elon Musk's xAI stands out as perhaps the oddest. That's not just because its core 'product' is a chatbot supposedly modeled after The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy yet named for a term, grok, that originates from Stranger in a Strange Land. Nor is it just because the startup is somehow valued at $80 billion despite reporting only $100 million in revenue last year, giving it the ability to 'acquire' the sharply devalued social network formerly known as Twitter. What really makes xAI so bizarre is that its Grok bot can't seem to quit talking about the 'white genocide' conspiracy theory lately—no matter what anyone asks it. And I mean no matter what: For a concerning period of time on Wednesday, the Grok bot's X account—which responds to users' prompts when tagged in a particular tweet—kept spouting responses that mentioned South Africa, white genocide, and the historic anti-apartheid protest song 'Dubul' ibhunu,' frequently translated from Xhosa as 'Kill the Boer.' It didn't matter if an X user was asking Grok about baseball, prompting it to fact-check a tweet, or instructing it to offer a simple reply. The xAI bot would maybe nod to the user query before launching into a screed about the 'debate' over whether Afrikaners have been subjected to racially targeted violence in South Africa. Grok has mostly stopped doing this as of Friday, and in some instances has acknowledged a 'glitch' that fueled its single-topic output. Some users were still able to get it back on this nonsensical subject by merely asking Grok to, um, 'jork it.' Let's just take a moment to call this out for what it is: completely batshit stuff. Elon Musk—a white South African immigrant and tech mogul who has spent the past few years wallowing in straight-up white nationalist conspiracy theories and transforming Twitter into a Nazi playground now known as X—has raised and spent unfathomable amounts of money to build a 'maximally truth-seeking' chatbot that spawns paragraphs about 'white genocide' unprompted, or when asked to 'jork it.' This is one of the most powerful and famous men in the country, an unelected stooge of President Donald Trump's, someone who has been spending all of 2025 firing essential government workers and trying to integrate more A.I. into federal functions. Yet this is what comes of his $80 billion A.I. company. Musk, who's otherwise known to tweet a ridiculous amount, has not directly addressed this 'glitch' or how it happened. However, there is some relevant political context that helps clarify what may have happened here. For a few months now, Trump has been scuttling legal protections for various groups of nonwhite refugees settled in the United States (including Afghans and Cameroonians) while blocking new asylum-seekers from entering the country altogether—even those who'd already been approved for stateside resettlement. Nevertheless, Trump has consistently encouraged Afrikaners to come live in the U.S., and he made good on his promises this week when welcoming 59 white South Africans who'd been blessed with refugee status, put on the fast track for citizenship, and granted new homes in states like Idaho. All of this is premised on an absurd and racist claim, common within white supremacist circles since the end of apartheid, that South Africa's Black rulers and citizens have either abetted or planned out a 'genocide' against the descendants of the region's Dutch settlers—murdering them or seizing their farmland on the basis of their whiteness. There has never been any evidence for this ludicrous talking point; South Africa's small percentage of white farmers still control a disproportionate amount of farmland, and the number of Afrikaners who've been murdered on reverse-racial pretenses has always been extremely low. This is why, for the longest time, you'd only ever find such intense focus on this issue within fringe neo-Nazi forums. Even Afrikaners admit to feeling safe and at home in South Africa. But Trump is a racist person whose government is stacked with fellow bigots, including one Elon Musk, whose newfound fixation on 'white genocide' is just one of the many prejudiced beliefs he voices these days. Musk's far-right turn was, inevitably, a major influence on his approach to xAI. When ChatGPT became a sensation in late 2022—launched by OpenAI, the nonprofit Musk co-founded and from which he bitterly split—Musk joined the chorus of right-wingers who decried that the generative-A.I. tool had guardrails to prevent it from spewing racial slurs and hate speech against underprivileged groups. In direct opposition to such 'woke' A.I., he imagined xAI as something akin to his so-called free-speech-maximalist takeover of Twitter—basically, allowing bigoted sentiments to run rampant, with little to no moderation. When Grok launched in late 2023, Musk celebrated its 'vulgar' and unfiltered output; one xAI employee would later tell Business Insider that their mandate 'seems to be that we're training the MAGA version of ChatGPT,' with a focus on skewing the training data in favor of right-wing texts. In other words: to manifest Musk's vision and beliefs. You could even see this in Grok's image-generation capacity. Or in the fact that xAI runs off an energy-intensive supercomputer, based in Memphis, that runs on gas turbines whose exhaust is polluting the air in local Black neighborhoods. Still, as with any A.I. bot, Grok's output can be unpredictable, and it contradicts Musk himself a decent amount. Including, as we saw this week, on the topic of white South Africans. Grok, responding to users who prompted it about the Afrikaner situation, frequently debunked the 'white genocide' conspiracy theory. (One noteworthy response from Tuesday reads in part: 'Some figures, like Elon Musk, highlight specific incidents and rhetoric to argue white farmers are targeted, but these claims lack comprehensive evidence and are often politically charged.') Musk, who'd tweeted in anger back in March about a South African politician who sang 'Dubul' ibhunu' ('Kill the Boer') at a rally, was likely not happy about this; an unconfirmed theory going around at the moment posits that Musk himself demanded that xAI reengineer Grok to 'confirm' that 'white genocide' is indeed happening, leading to the repetitive, glitchy responses that took off Wednesday. Grok's insistence on talking about 'Kill the Boer' and referring to farmers would certainly appear to back this up—although, again, there is no confirmation of that theory just yet. On Thursday evening, the company published an official response on X, seemingly putting the blame on a rogue employee who made an 'unauthorized modification' to Grok so it would spit out the political response. But users are understandably skeptical. The explanation feels a little too tidy, particularly given Musk's own history of echoing similar rhetoric. The idea that one anonymous staffer could single-handedly steer an $80 billion chatbot into extremist territory, without oversight or detection, only raises more questions about how xAI operates. As of Friday morning, asking Grok to 'jork it' no longer seems to consistently prompt the bot into South African 'land debates,' but expressly talking to Grok about South Africa still pulls up responses Musk himself may not care for. But if you're worried this means that Grok is 'woke' now, fear not. On Thursday, the bot baselessly claimed that 'George Floyd's death in 2020 remains a debated topic,' another right-wing conspiracy that Musk has advocated recently. Anyway, regarding the South African context, the 'Kill the Boer' song is highly controversial, with some evidence suggesting …
Yahoo
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
'Murderbot' review: Alexander Skarsgård's killer robot comedy is slow to boot up
Security Unit 238776431 is the property of the Company, a powerful mega-conglomerate located in the galaxy's Corporation Rim. Programmed to serve, the heavily armed robot soldier does not love its job. 'I was built to obey humans,' explains SecUnit (Alexander Skarsgård) in the series premiere of Murderbot. 'But humans... well, they're assholes.' Unbeknownst to its owners, however, this SecUnit — a misanthropic robot in the vein of Marvin the Paranoid Android (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) and Bender (Futurama) — just hacked its 'governor module,' freeing itself from techno-slavery. Though it could kill its human captors and set off on its own, SecUnit does not want to risk discovery as a 'rogue' bot, which would result in being stripped for parts and melted in an acid bath. Choosing instead to bide its time, the SecUnit — which decides to rename itself Murderbot — reluctantly joins its next assignment: Working for a team of researchers from Preservation Alliance, a distant planet that rejects the Corporation Rim's harsh laws and embraces an egalitarian form of government. Murderbot resigns itself to protecting these 'hippie scientists,' though all it really wants to do is watch entertainment 'content' downloaded from the Company's satellite feed. Murderbot, adapted by Chris and Paul Weitz (About a Boy) from Martha Wells' popular book series, has a hilarious premise, an admirable cast, and a lavish, Apple TV+ budget. It also has a real pacing problem; the first half of the 10-episode season is puzzlingly light on plot momentum and laughs. While the action, characters, and comedy do ultimately gel by the end, viewers will likely have to wait for a season 2 to see Murderbot reach its killer potential. Preservation Alliance leader Dr. Ayda Mensah (Noma Dumezweni) and her team of scientists — Ratthi (Akshay Khanna), Bharadwaj (Tamara Podemski), Gurathin (David Dastmalchian), Arada (Tattiawna Jones), and her wife, Pin-Lee (Sabrina Wu) — embark on a research expedition to an uninhabited planet with Murderbot in tow. (Though Mensah says her team is 'not comfortable with the idea of a sentient construct being required to work for us,' the Company will not provide insurance for their research project unless the team takes security.) Murderbot has little interest in Mensah and her 'weird' crew. Still, it easily homes in on the team's subtle interpersonal dynamics, as when its pulse-rate monitor identifies a love triangle between Pin-Lee, Ratthi, and Arada. It also quickly realizes that Dr. Gurathin, an 'augmented human' whose brain can perform some computer functions, suspects that it might be rogue. The unit keeps one 'eye' on the scientists, and the other on its favorite soap opera, The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, which features a romance between a dashing captain (John Cho) and a beautiful Navigation Bot (DeWanda Wise). But when Mensah discovers that another research team on the planet has been killed by unknown assailants, Murderbot is forced to engage with its 'helpless and useless' clients. It may be a (literally) heartless machine, but Murderbot shares more in common with its clients than it's willing to admit. Like many humans, it is uncomfortable with sustained eye contact; it would rather take an acid bath than give a speech; and it prefers the company of TV characters to real people. Also, its coworkers drive it up a wall. Unfortunately, the Planetary Alliance gang insist on treating Murderbot like one of the team, inviting it to ride in their transport vehicle (instead of the cargo bay, where SecUnits usually travel) and giving it a crew uniform to wear when its armor is damaged. Murderbot's struggle to accept being embraced — figuratively and literally — by its human clients, who insist on valuing its input and individuality, is the show's comedic engine. When Murderbot gets really desperate, it searches Sanctuary Moon and other TV shows for examples of small talk ('Tell me, Dr. Arada, what planet are you from originally?'), which it mimics with comical discomfort. For nearly five episodes, though, the Weitz brothers stall their lead character's development by relegating its emotional turmoil to excessive voiceovers. Murderbot's inner monologue can be funny ('I don't have a stomach so I can't throw up, but if I did, I would'), but it also keeps the story in a holding pattern: Mensah and her team try to connect with Murderbot; it stonewalls them while stewing over how annoying they are; repeat. The debut season of Murderbot is based on the first book in Wells' series, All Systems Red, which clocks in at about 150 pages. I mention this because the Apple TV+ adaptation suffers from 'season-long pilot' syndrome — a common malady in which a new streaming series spends much of its initial 8 to 10 episodes restating its premise. The Weitz brothers, credited as the series' sole writers, hew close to Wells' source material for their adaptation, but there simply isn't enough story to fill 10 episodes, even at around 25 minutes each. As a result, the season is nearly half over before Murderbot's dynamic with its team, and the ongoing mystery about the slaughtered researchers, really start to develop. When Murderbot finally starts voicing its annoyance to Mensah and the team, the series gets a lot more entertaining. 'I wish I didn't have to, but of course I can hear you,' grouses SecUnit, after Pin-Lee complains about its eavesdropping. "I'm a highly advanced piece of technology.' Skarsgård, a stealth comedic presence in Succession, also puts his Nordic reserve to good use as Murderbot. The actor enhances his character's long inner monologues with his eloquent ice-blue eyes, which can convey emotions ranging from disdain and discomfiture to despair and devotion. Dumezweni makes Mensah believable as both a thoughtful leader and an overly anxious empath prone to panic attacks. And Pen15's Anna Konkle drops in for an amusing turn as Leebeebee, a survivor from the other research team who can't stop speculating about Murderbot's anatomy. Viewers who stick with Murderbot will be rewarded with a moving finale, one that solidifies the characters' relationship with SecUnit and seems to set up the story from Wells' second book, 2018's Artificial Condition. Apple TV+ has yet to announce a renewal, but the streamer isn't opposed to giving expensive sci-fi series multiple seasons, so it's not unreasonable to believe that Skarsgård's restless robot will be back. Now that Murderbot finally found its voice, it deserves a chance to use it. Grade: B- The first two episodes of Murderbot premiere Friday, May 16 on Apple TV+. Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
