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@alex_prompter

This might be the most disturbing AI paper of 2025
Scientists just proved that large language models can literally rot their own brains the same way humans get brain rot from scrolling junk content online. They fed models months of viral Twitter data short, high-engagement posts and watched their cognition collapse: - Reasoning fell by 23% - Long-context memory dropped 30% - Personality tests showed spikes in narcissism & psychopathy And get this even after retraining on clean, high-quality data, the damage didn’t fully heal. The representational “rot” persisted. It’s not just bad data → bad output. It’s bad data → permanent cognitive drift. The AI equivalent of doomscrolling is real. And it’s already happening.
https://x.com/alex_prompter/status/1980224548550369376

It's the "dead Internet theory" come to fruition. Bots trolling other bots.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

Or Leon arguing with other Leons.

I hate to side with Johnson, but listening to St. Boris. I do believe he is being questioned by some idiot Labour MP with the benefit of hindsight.

School lockdowns were an imperative under the circumstances regardless of whether vulnerable children were at risk. School closures were the least worst national outcome even if some children were put in harms way.

"School lockdowns were an imperative" 🤔 Does anyone believe this ridiculous narrative anymore? 💩

They were imperative, you ignorant fool. In fact, to a great degree they had already happened because the rapid spread of the virus meant so many of pupils and staff were off ill it was impossible to function normally.

The big mistake was not locking down, it was refusing to put in place sensible measures to minimise it. We might have dodged the January full closure if we had had blended learning from October - two weeks on, one off. The government refused to allow it. We could have minimised missed learning by issuing data enabled tablets to every child. The government refused to pay for them. We could have dodged the issue with exams by running coursework units from September. The government refused to allow it because we were not going to lock down, or cancel exams, so it wasn't needed. They didn't even prepare or release extra sample papers for the innumerable additional exams we had to set (the class of 2021 had *more* exams than a normal year group, bizarrely, but we had to write the papers ourselves) as they were not going to be needed.

The fact is that anybody who worked in education knew as far back as October that there was going to be a train crash due to lack of planning and perverse and wilful denial of the seriousness of the situation by a government that was as clueless and dishonest as it was drunken and inept. I was yelling that from the rooftops on here. The unions were hammering it morning noon and night. Even local authorities were sounding the alarm. And not one person in Whitehall listened.

And I have no sympathy for Johnson or Williamson's persistent, self-serving and whiny refusal to note just how badly they messed up. That was not about hindsight, that was about having the courage and humility to admit they were not going to be able to carry out Plan A at a time an acceptable Plan B might have worked. Which because they are cowards as well as liars and scum they still refuse to do.

And there are still people out there pushing false narratives on the back of that. Frankly, I find that pretty disgusting and I suggest you look hard at a photo of RFK Jr before remembering every single thing you have said on the subject of Covid is wrong and not worth listening to.

Morning all! Whilst we are doing revisionist history its worth looking at what the Tories were saying in the run up to the GFC:

Revisionists: Brown was overspending, stupidly assuming the city would generate mega money forever
Tories07: We'll match ever pound of Labour's spending commitments AND inflate the bubble even harder to create cash for tax cuts. And we're sick of the city being tied up in all this red tape. Lets slash it and free the banks up to go even harder.

In hindsight what Brown/Darling did was stupid. But at the time the Tories offered the alternative of even harder stupid. Lets not stick one side on a pedestal and the other in the gutter - both were in the same gutter with the same policies. The only competition was who could let the city get furthest out of control fastest...

The problem with financial regulation pre-2007 wasn't that it was insufficient, it was that it was ineffectively applied. The mechanisms existed to control financial markets, but the ineffective regulators in the FSA and the top management at the banks simply didn't understand the risks they were running.

Not all Tories favoured ever higher public spending and debt - many hated Cameron's and Osborne's Heir to Blair crap and foresaw it would end it tears when the money stopped flowing, and that it wouldn't even be particularly popular electorally, as shown when supposedly slick PR man Cameron failed to get an overall majority against GORDON BROWN for Christ's sake.

James O'Brien critical of Kemi and Starmer for not calling to censure Katie Lam. Lib Dems have broken rank.

Why should she be censured?

Disagree with her, convince people she is wrong. But she’s not broken any rules or done more than state her opinion

What did she say?

Tory MP sparks backlash after calling for legal migrants to 'go home' to make Britain ‘culturally coherent’

Katie Lam said many migrants who came to Britain legally will 'need to go home'

https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/katie-lam-backlash-migrants-culturally-coherent-5HjdFgC_2/

Yikes!

It’s the language of the BNP.

FPT:

So the government is borrowing £20bn in a month, and £100bn in the first six months, that latter figure 13% higher year-on-year.

Err, I think it’s fair to say the public finances are totally Donald Ducked at this point.

Rachel needs to find £50bn of tax rises and £50bn of spending cuts this year, as an absolute minimum, and that’s still only half way to fixing the problem. At this stage in the economic cycle govt should be close to running a surplus.

Should it? Running a surplus is rare enough to be noteworthy.

Yes! Yes we should.

Half the problem the country faces is that it’s never recovered from Brown turning on the taps after the 2001 election, which made the 2008-9 recession much worse than it should have been, and it was just about back to level when the pandemic hit, and now appears to be getting worse rather than better.

Even if you are right that Brown overspent, it had sod all to do with the GFC; it neither caused nor aggravated it. And of course, Gordon Brown was the last Chancellor actually to run a surplus.

The issue is that we had a massive *structural* deficit post Brown. Simplifying massively he believes the tax levels from financial services would continue at that level for ever and so spent to the max rather than being prudent.

When they were proven to be a mirage we had something like a 10% of GDP structural deficit (ie excluding the impact of normal fiscal cycles). That’s just not sustainable

Indeed. There was even. Concern that the time taken to form the Coalition government would cause a borrowing crisis.

If Brown had been running a 4% surplus (say) then the GFC would have wiped that out, maybe put us into mild deficit. And we would have had less debt. There would have been scope for some borrowing to be counter cyclic - rather than cuts.

Note that the Labour plan was more cuts than Osborne.

How do you run a 4% surplus when half the country always demands lower taxes, half the country always demands more from the state, and 100% of the country demands both?

(Yes, I know those numbers don't add up. That's the point.)

By being disciplined and a leader

Edit: in practice you create a line in the budget “sinking fund for debt repayment” and claim a balanced budget while simultaneously retiring 4% of GDP worth of debt

There are a whole set of things that you should be doing before repairing debt - building infrastructure such as roads or HS2 to grow the economy would be a better use of some of the money.