Best Of

Non gamblers don't generally mind higher taxes on someone else. Most gamblers don't have any idea how gambling tax works, and anyway regard gambling as a form of entertainment for which a price is paid, with no question of overall making profits (which will remain untaxed!); any gamblers who make big money regularly will gamble offshore.

The real question for the CoE is how to keep a decent slice of the whole industry within UK tax system by ensuring it is overall competitive with Abroadland. There is an obvious logical problem about taxing gambling anyway - it automatically affects the odds setter who need a greater margin simply to break even, which if pushed far enough destroys the economic model of legal gambling, encouraging the illegal market. A bit like fags costing £150 for 20.

It is not that simple. There are an awful lot of anti-gamblers who see high street betting shops and online casinos as blights on their communities and a menace to society. For them, raising taxes is not about raising money, it is about ending gambling. Like fags.

I think Michael Gove was talking recently about the importance of the high street to voters, the feeling that empty shops and gambling shops show country is in decline even if broader economy has a different picture

It is amazing, you're quite right. But that's more about something we think of being rich in ourselves actually being a pretty formulaic thing. Just because it seems to be almost human (but far better informed) makes LLM a substantial dead end that everyone is piling in to. My view anyway.

LLMs have a variety of uses where they're very useful, they're an interesting technology that absolutely does have a future. But, yes, they are not human-type or human-level intelligences the AI industry portrays them as and they never will be.

They will continue to improve in the areas they are already useful in, but anyone expecting them to ever function like a human mind are going to be disappointed. All those CEOs rushing to replace their employees with LLMs are going to look pretty stupid.

I’m pleased to report that I seem to be making a remarkably swift recovery

At 6am, when I finally got my bed, I was really struggling. I couldn’t breathe in for more than a second without a horrible stabbing pain in my left side. I was having to take breaks just walking very slowly across the room

At about 10am the first of plenty of antibiotics had started to kick in and I was feeling a little more comfortable. I then saw the A&E consultant who actually listened to what I told him about my ailments, and reviewed my file and the scans. He noticed what appeared to be an abscess between my lung and my ribcage and said that infected spot was almost certainly causing the pain

Since then the rest of the antibiotics seem to have worked and my chest pain has almost entirely gone. Even though the hospital tried to stress me out by making me move beds twice in the next two hours, I’ve been laughing about it (which doesn’t hurt). I’ve ended up in a ward with three geriatrics; two of them use commodes, the third shits accidentally and swears about it. They’re all rude to the nurses. It shouldn’t be a happy place, but I’m so relieved I can’t stop smiling

I might be able to go home tomorrow. This morning I thought I’d be in here for at least a week. Thanks very much for the supportive messages