The Off Topic Topic

[Josquius]

This is really cool

Similarity between old English and modern Frisian

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DOYPlQADXyC/?igsh=MTI5Mjdzd3BwM21wcw==

I was excited to click but I see it's just the old bit from mongrel nation. The whole doc is interesting.
A fascinating topic.

[crazy canuck]

Sorry for giving actual information

[Jacob]

I think Josq meant to say "that's cool, even though I've already seen the show it was part of"

[Jacob]

Unconfirmed. Just random stuff seen on social media by people I don't know. But they claim their kids have started to say "Thats AI" for something being untrue.

My boy was laughing at his class' teams chat where some of his classmates were being silly.

He showed me, and I saw "What in that AI is that?" and "that's AI" (in this case in response to a picture of a tardigrade, which another kid had claimed was his new pet).

[celedhring]

To be frank, I'm surprised how many well educated people in my circles blindly trust whatever ChatGPT or Deepseek spits out. Most of the time is that they really don't understand how it really works, and just believe it's this magic thing that will search the Internet and provide them with 100% factual responses no matter what they ask.

[DGuller]

To be frank, I'm surprised how many well educated people in my circles blindly trust whatever ChatGPT or Deepseek spits out. Most of the time is that they really don't understand how it really works, and just believe it's this magic thing that will search the Internet and provide them with 100% factual responses no matter what they ask.

The problem is ironically that ChatGPT works well enough most of the time for most common use cases.  That's the danger zone of automation levels:  when performance level gets high enough that monitoring feels tedious, but not high enough that monitoring is unnecessary.

[crazy canuck]

To be frank, I'm surprised how many well educated people in my circles blindly trust whatever ChatGPT or Deepseek spits out. Most of the time is that they really don't understand how it really works, and just believe it's this magic thing that will search the Internet and provide them with 100% factual responses no matter what they ask.

Yep, one of our associates thought he knew how Chat worked, because he asked Chat 

[crazy canuck]

To be frank, I'm surprised how many well educated people in my circles blindly trust whatever ChatGPT or Deepseek spits out. Most of the time is that they really don't understand how it really works, and just believe it's this magic thing that will search the Internet and provide them with 100% factual responses no matter what they ask.

The problem is ironically that ChatGPT works well enough most of the time for most common use cases.  That's the danger zone of automation levels:  when performance level gets high enough that monitoring feels tedious, but not high enough that monitoring is unnecessary.

Maybe, but it is nowhere near close enough to that and people are still relying on it. 

Human nature being what it is, the easy way will always be tempting, and often taken.

[Baron von Schtinkenbutt]

To be frank, I'm surprised how many well educated people in my circles blindly trust whatever ChatGPT or Deepseek spits out. Most of the time is that they really don't understand how it really works, and just believe it's this magic thing that will search the Internet and provide them with 100% factual responses no matter what they ask.

Everybody knows you can't lie on the Internet.

[Josquius]

I've noticed googles crappy AI search results are becoming increasingly aggressive.

[crazy canuck]

I've noticed googles crappy AI search results are becoming increasingly aggressive.

When it was first released, I was apprehensive about people relying upon it. But it is so crappy that it has become a punch line in jokes and so it is helping people understand how terrible generative AI is and hopefully more people will be convinced not to use it.

[Sheilbh]

I wouldn't be so sure. Referral to news publishers by Google are down by about 10% since it launched and 15% for non-news brands. Some news sites are seeing as much as an 80% drop in visibility on Google.

And Google's position is that if you want to be indexed for Google search then their crawlers must also be able to scrape your site for generative search.

This is the plan - the platforms become the internet and just remove publishers from the picture (one of the reasons the news agencies are so much happier with AI deals than many other publishers).

[crazy canuck]

I wouldn't be so sure. Referral to news publishers by Google are down by about 10% since it launched and 15% for non-news brands. Some news sites are seeing as much as an 80% drop in visibility on Google.

And Google's position is that if you want to be indexed for Google search then their crawlers must also be able to scrape your site for generative search.

This is the plan - the platforms become the internet and just remove publishers from the picture (one of the reasons the news agencies are so much happier with AI deals than many other publishers).

Ok, my one moment of hope for the future has been destroyed

[Sheilbh]

Soz

Separately RIP Sir Terry Farrell - probably my favourite architect of the last 50 years (possibly the post-war era) absolutely love a bit of pomo exuberance and high-tech fun (like I absolutely love, even if he didn't know it was going to be MI6, going for a government commission with an art deco ziggurat):

Sir Terry Farrell obituary: leading architect
Proponent of postmodernism whose famous designs included London's MI6 building and the headquarters for TV-am dies aged Monday September 29 2025, 5.00pm, The Times


Terry Farrell with a model of the new MI6 building in 1992
TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER TIM BISHOP

Terry Farrell designed some of London's most striking buildings of recent times with a style that evolved from restrained high-tech modernism to flamboyant post-modernism.

He was one of the first British architects to express the playful postmodernist style that had been flourishing on the other side of the Atlantic from the late Seventies. In doing so he added an intriguing layer to London's architectural landscape with such offerings as the TV-am building in Camden (1982), the Embankment Place Development in Charing Cross (1990) and the MI6 headquarters in Vauxhall (1994).

Unlike so many contemporary architects, Farrell was no fan of Le Corbusier and his approach to the building as a machine, which he dismissed as "a pseudo-scientific approach that denies the difference between architecture and the design of a product or a functional machine".

"I think Charles was 99 per cent right," he once said, referring to the future King's criticism of modernism.

Instead of Le Corbusier, Farrell liked to quote Edwin Lutyens, who said that "architecture begins where engineering ends", and was heavily influenced by the great American postmodernist Robert Venturi (under whom he studied in Philadelphia) — Venturi famously turned around Mies van der Rohe's saying "Less is More" into "Less is a Bore".

Such a licence for ornamentation led to some playful twists in Farrell's buildings. As a result he was accused at times of excess and vulgarity, but he insisted his ornamentation was underpinned by rigorous historical references and research.

Farrell's design track record moved through the ages, progressing from innovative use of materials on industrial buildings in the Seventies to conversions of warehouses in the Eighties to commercial premises, including a Sainsbury's store in Harlow, Essex, and government buildings in the Nineties. In more recent years he focused on vast international transportation projects such as Incheon airport in Seoul and the Beijing South railway station (one of the largest in Asia) and, closer to home, cultural and urban regeneration schemes in cities such as Edinburgh, Newcastle upon Tyne and Hull.


Incheon airport in Seoul
LAUREN SANDY


Beijing South Station
LAUREN SANDY

As one of the established stars of British architecture, he was renowned for making sage contributions in the political arena, such as the need to devise a "Ramblas style" boulevard to connect Regent's Park with Hyde Park and the creation of a Royal Park at Rainham Marshes along London's Thames estuary where the government planned a big regeneration project.

Terence Farrell was born in Sale, Cheshire, in 1938 to Irish Catholic parents, Thomas Farrell, a postman turned civil service executive officer, and Molly (née Maguire). Unusually for an architect his background was poor and working class — he did not have a bed of his own until he was 14.

The family moved to Newcastle upon Tyne and he attended St Cuthbert's High School in the city, where his drawing skills were encouraged by his art master. On a visit to London in 1951 he was inspired by the Festival of Britain and decided that he wanted to be an architect. He went on to gain a first-class degree in architecture from the University of Newcastle.

He did some early design work for London county council in 1961 before moving on to further study — for a master's in urban planning — as a Harkness Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, from 1962 to 1964. Among his teachers there were the cream of the city's modernist and postmodern architectural talent.

After returning to Britain, he founded his own practice in 1965 with Nicholas Grimshaw (later Sir Nicholas), who would also go on to become one of Britain's best-known architects and died only weeks before Farrell (obituary, September 15). The partnership was seen as an odd couple, a working-class Celt teaming up with a toff who qualified from the exclusive Architectural Association.

Together for 15 years, they made their way to the top of the profession by designing buildings in the "high-tech modernist style" that was already becoming the dominant design aesthetic of British architecture, thanks to the pioneering work of Norman Foster and Richard Rogers. Early projects included a freestanding structure of prefabricated plastic bathroom units for a student hostel in Paddington, completed in 1967. The following year a residential building at 125 Park Road in London showed an aptitude for innovation in low-cost construction and in the use of materials that would serve Farrell well in a later series of cheap but elegant industrial buildings more in keeping with the high-tech style. These included the Citroën warehouse in Runnymede, Berkshire (1973) and factory units at Winwick Quay, Warrington (1978). The best example was the Herman Miller Factory in Bath (1976), with its fibre-glass panelling that made the space easy to rearrange — the building was reconfigured five times in the next 15 years.

As successful as the Farrell-Grimshaw partnership was, a clear divergence in their aesthetic sensibilities was emerging by the end of the Seventies. Grimshaw was intent on developing his high-tech aesthetic whereas Farrell stuck to the post-modernism style that he had been influenced by in the US. "For 15 years I tagged along in Nick's wake," he once said. Realising they could no longer work together, both men set up their own practices. The split was bitter and public, and even their wives stopped speaking to each other. Yet for Farrell, who felt that architecture had become stuffy and rigid, he suddenly felt "artistically released".

After setting up Terry Farrell and Partners in 1980, his first commissions were two garden nurseries for Clifton Nurseries. The first, in Bayswater, west London, pioneered the use of double-skin polycarbonate sheeting as a cladding material. The second, in Covent Garden, was a classical-looking pavilion with Britain's first Teflon-coated glass-fibre roof; it showed the growing influence of American "Po-Mo" architects such as Michael Graves, though it was later demolished.

The growing whimsicality of Farrell's postmodernist style was most famously shown with the TV-am building for the ill-fated ITV breakfast show, fronting on to the Grand Union Canal in Camden Town, north London. Taking his cue from the colourful canal boats that nestled up against the building, he went for the gaudy, jokey look and on holiday in Venice, where ornamentation was rife, came up with the idea of placing giant eggcups (to symbolise breakfast) on the gables, which performed the same function as urns on a classical building. It was also a homage to the art deco movement of which he was particularly enamoured. The converted 1930 garage has since undergone several transformations that Farrell took in his stride. "I thought it was great while it lasted," he said, "I always knew it was temporary." In 2022 one of the eggcups turned up on the Antiques Roadshow.


The TV-am studios at Camden Lock, London
RICHARD BRYANT

The high profile TV-am building proved to him that he could survive without Grimshaw. It also led to other conversions of former industrial buildings into creative enterprises, a common theme of the Eighties. They included the transformation of a former rum and banana warehouse into the Limehouse Studios (1983) and an aero-tyre factory at Hatton Street in north London converted into his own offices (1988).

By the end of the Eighties, Farrell had graduated to large-scale commercial building projects and his style was more refined. His first big commercial scheme at Embankment Place above Charing Cross Station was bridged over the railway tracks to create a powerful curved skyline; the design echoed the former train shed but also evoked a giant spider hunched over the tracks. The scheme included the transformation of Villiers Street, running down the side of the station towards the Thames, and spaces underneath the vaulted railway arches beneath the station. Farrell made initial designs for a footbridge to connect the new urban quarter he had created with the South Bank, a proposal that was finally realised ten years later. At the end of his career he said it was the project of which he was most proud. It was one of several which won Riba awards.


Embankment Place above Charing Cross Station
ALAMY

At the height of his reputation Farrell became an architect of choice for the British government and buildings he realised for it included the MI6 headquarters, a bomb-proof green-glazed fortress with memorable fir tree-lined balconies that featured prominently in some of the James Bond films. Farrell had no idea at the time that he was building for MI6. "We were told it was a government headquarters," he said, "and we guessed wrongly that it was the department of the environment" — which explained the trees. The building "was finished and handed over", he said, "and I was watching TV and on the screen it was announced that it was the headquarters of MI6".


The Home Office building in Westminster
ALAMY

Other government buildings included the British Council headquarters in Hong Kong (1996) and the Home Office building in Westminster (2005), a clever but restrained design with a beguiling use of coloured glass and public art.

He was commissioned for a spate of urban regeneration schemes. They included the International Centre for Life in Newcastle in 1999 and The Deep aquarium in Hull, which opened in 2002. The latter was a £45 million endeavour and was one of the more popular millennium building projects, with 1.4 million visitors in its first 12 months.


The Deep aquarium overlooking the Humber in Hull
LEE BEEL/ALAMY LIVE NEWS

By this point Farrell's practice had diversified into large-scale transportation projects and masterplanning. After establishing an office in Hong Kong, he designed Kowloon station there (which opened in 1998). He later created the 442-metre KK100 tower in Shenzhen in 2011— the world's tallest building by a British architect.

He also established an office in Edinburgh and scored a number of high-profile project wins in the city, including the Edinburgh International Conference Centre, the Sheraton Hotel, the Dean Gallery and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.


Edinburgh International Conference Centre
ALAMY

He was appointed OBE in 1978, advanced to CBE in 1996 and knighted for services to architecture and urban design in 2001.

Farrell was thrice married, first, in 1960, to Angela Mallam, and secondly, in 1973, to Susan Aplin. Both marriages were dissolved. He is survived by his third wife, Mei Xin Wang, whom he married in 2007, together with five children —Bee and Jo from his first marriage, Max, Luke and Milly from his second — and one stepson, Zhe.

In 2023 the Farrell Centre, an exhibition and meeting centre for architecture and urban design, opened as part of Newcastle University, after he had invested £1 million of his own money. Still with his bushy eyebrows, burly frame and typical modesty, he allowed himself a moment of reflection on what he had achieved and then formally retired from the profession.

Arguably most remembered for the MI6 building, Farrell had to deal with varying degrees of criticism, including that it looked like a set from Aida. In 2012 he was with friends in the cinema watching Skyfall when the building was blown up. To his chagrin, he said, "Everyone inside the cinema cheered."

Sir Terry Farrell, architect and urban designer, was born May 12, 1938. He died on September 28, 2025, aged 87
2 Marsham Street, Home Office government building in Westminster, London.


Eagle House in City Road, Shoreditch, London
KATHY DEWITT/ALAMY

Also his London flat is fabulous and I covet everything:mmm:
https://www.dezeen.com/2019/07/04/terry-farrell-flat-for-sale-old-aeroworks/

[Josquius]

I've noticed something odd at the bairn's school.
The girls are a fair match for the top baby name list of that year.
The boys.... Some nationally popular names are there (3 with my lads name ) but generally most of the popular ones are nowhere to be found.

Sample of just one class at one school so could mean nothing. Though I do know there's regional disparity in name popularity- I wonder whether this is stronger with boys than girls.
My theory would be there's a vague agreement between everyone no matter the class on nice girl names. As girl names should be nice. Even the trashy ones.
With boys however there's more of a divide with some working and middle class people going for 'nice' boy names too, whilst there's also an opposite push from the more non-working class side of things for 'tough' boy names too, and for reasons these tend to be far more localised thus less popular nationally.