I thought it was supposed to be called the Department of War?

Supposedly only congress can actually change the name, DoW is a "secondary name", whatever that means. But there is a lot of "supposedly" so the de facto reality seems different.

Maybe the "secondary name" is the part that comes after a colon, as in a book title:

  Department of Defence: The Department of War

That was DoA.

But there's no reason to expect that work to be graded. It should be a learning exercise which trains skills later tested under exam conditions.

Many students will simply not do these assignments. They should but they won’t. Continuous assessment partly solves this.

Came here to say the same thing. The AI problem is functionally no different to the paid essay writers. Grade everything at face value, and then have people write essays under exam conditions for grading.

This is brilliant - thanks!

There are so many packs on that site to choose from, it would be great to get some pointers on which ones to install.

I will always politely ask people who are doing this to stop it, and 99% of the time they do. (This is in the UK).

I appreciate that is a temporary solution for you but that's just generally not our culture to do that. We expect people to follow rules and norms and aren't really prepared for when they don't

And 99% of them will not change their behaviour. The next trip or when you get off, they will do it again. It's not a solution

I believe that is happening on some public transport in the UK.

This seems to start with 2 agents, and then all of their offspring die immediately. Any hints?

should be starting with 30... if you're seeing 2 that might be an older default that I tried out (an adam and eve experiment). You can change it in the config too.

On the dying immediately thing - offspring get a fraction of the parent's energy when they fork. If the parent forks too early (low energy), the kid spawns with barely anything and can't cover its tick cost + brain metabolic cost.

That's working as intended — reproducing too early is a bad strategy and selection should punish it. But if everything dies instantly, something else might be off.

I take that back, I was falling asleep and then suddently had a population spike. Very good!

The UK used to have a cloud provider (UK Cloud) but it got aggressively outcompeted by the US Hyperscalers, despite primarily targeting government departments. It's interesting that at the time the UK didn't consider data sovereignty enough of an issue to support a local cloud company. Shocking really.

Is this science? Perhaps I should submit some of the random roleplay scenarios that I've run with LLMs to New Scientist.

Yes, if you do a bunch of simulations and write-up a technical report, that is science.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.14740v1

Tom Tugendhat had to stand up in the House of Commons and tell MPs not the use AI to write their speeches.

“I rise to speak. I rise to speak. I rise to speak. ChatGPT knows you’re there, but that is an Americanism that we don’t use, but still, keep using it, because it makes it clear that this place has become absurd.”