Best Of

Priorities for these fuckwits.

US Homeland Security News
@defense_civil25
14h
🚨Update: The White House has informed the Ukrainian delegation that Zelensky MUST wear a suit or there will be no meeting! Bravo White House. It’s a formal meeting, and the presidency of the U.S. is an institution that demands the highest level of formality!

They are going to lose their shit once they find out Churchill turned up to the White House in a onesie.

And did the full flash to Roosevelt post bath.

I honestly haven't got a clue why they're so obsessed with Zelensky wearing a suit.

Putin’s bitches in the White House will look for any excuse to criticise Zelenskyy, I mean they were fine with Musk dressing like a tramp in The Oval Office.

StarmerBot has woken up again.

https://x.com/keir_starmer/status/1957005625096856019

I will do what it takes to uphold the law and ensure fairness for the British people.

If someone doesn’t have the right to be in this country, we won’t allow them to stay. I will do what it takes to uphold the law and ensure fairness for the British people.

It’s getting seriously embarrassing now, surely his opponents are going to be putting these Tweets on billboards soon?

He is making himself a hostage to fortune with this stuff that he knows he can't deliver unless he intends to exit all these international treaties, rewrite UK law and solve the NI / GFA issue that will arise, and all in the next year or two.

Other countries manage it even though they’re signatories to the ECHR etc. Parliament needs to remind the judiciary that it is the Sovereign entity in this country, one way or another.

@Sandpit before I wander off and teach AI to read some payslips have you seen Ed Zitron's article on how ChatGPT 5 seems to work

https://www.wheresyoured.at/how-does-gpt-5-work/

One of those areas where you see the process flow and see why it looks great but is really problematic in person.

Sam Altman is rapidly turning into Elon Musk, he is now claiming, it is really really good, honest, it just we don't have enough GPUs at the moment.

They have now also released a load of docs telling you how you have to be really careful with your prompts when asking for help with coding and it will do the wrong thing if you don't follow them. The whole points of these LLMs is supposed they are getting better and make it easier to write code, not that I have to carefully construct my point with a load of xml tags before it will do the right thing. That is just changing one form of coding into another.

As long as the money is still being thrown at people like Altman, keep buying NVidia stock.

They’re the ones selling shovels in the new gold rush.

They’re also the company that crashes hardest if the AI boom down turn out to be a bubble. Motorola was crushed by the Internet crash.

There are many echoes of the 1999 Internet bubble here. Especially the pattern of VC companies pouring money into companies who are selling services at huge discounts in order to gain market share, combined with the hardware manufacturers boosting income by loaning money / hardware to their own client.

That doesn’t mean that this boom isn’t real - but it does make it very, very hard to distinguish it from a bubble because at this point in the cycle they both look the same & the VC ecosystem is very, very good at turning investment $ into “income” $ on the books of the various companies involved to juice the stock valuations they rely on to draw in fresh investment. The whole thing could easily be an elaborate kayfabe that will inevitably fall apart in dramatic fashion. Or not! From the outside it’s very hard to tell - we can’t see inside the books of the entire ecosystem & you can’t trust the income claims by the various players to be a reliable indicator of real demand.

Of course, the Internet boom was ultimately shown to be correct, but early. AI is (obviously) going to be transformational in some way - but that doesn’t mean the current players are going to survive long enough to make it out the other end.

True AI isn’t going to happen via this tech.

What these systems do is guesstimate an answer.

And need supervision. It can’t work on its own - it’s an enthusiastic junior which makes lots of mistakes. Subtle or not, these mistakes will be fatal. So it needs to be used by domain expert humans.

The other issue, which hasn’t been resolved is cost. Is a junior human coder actually cheaper than an LLM?

I suspect the bubble will continue until one of the big guys in this put up their prices to move to the profit phase. That will trigger the avalanche.

I will put 5 Scottish Pounds on Reform.

I don't expect to win, but 12-1 seem very fair odds.

Would Reform winning in Scotland be an even bigger sell out than the Union of the Crowns?

Nah, when the Scots had the first opportunity to endorse the Union of the Crowns, they endorsed it, so it was no sell out.

Bribes paid to Scottish nobles to vote for it:

Montrose £200
Roxburgh £500
Atholl £1000
Marchmont £1104 15s 6d
Cromartie £300
Balcarres £500
Dunmore £200
Glencairn £100
Seafield (also Lord Chancellor) £490
Banff £11 2s (cheapskate)

They essentially bartered their votes for enough money to cover their losses over the Darien disaster. The common people were less enthusiastic, and the Treaty was burned in Dumfries.

I find Harley's comment as Secretary of State on the subject of an unpopular linen tax amusing: 'But Mr Speaker, having bought the Scots, did we not also acquire the right to tax them?'

I meant the first time the common folk of Scotland had the chance to endorse the Union of the Crowns, 55% endorsed it.

Them ungrateful Jocks are never done asking for neverendums, more than one vote in 318 years is sheer self indulgence.

That’s still one more plebiscite than the English have had on the Union of the Crowns.

You can have your second plebiscite once England has had her first plebiscite on this topic.

@Sandpit before I wander off and teach AI to read some payslips have you seen Ed Zitron's article on how ChatGPT 5 seems to work

https://www.wheresyoured.at/how-does-gpt-5-work/

One of those areas where you see the process flow and see why it looks great but is really problematic in person.

Sam Altman is rapidly turning into Elon Musk, he is now claiming, it is really really good, honest, it just we don't have enough GPUs at the moment.

They have now also released a load of docs telling you how you have to be really careful with your prompts when asking for help with coding and it will do the wrong thing if you don't follow them. The whole points of these LLMs is supposed they are getting better and make it easier to write code, not that I have to carefully construct my point with a load of xml tags before it will do the right thing. That is just changing one form of coding into another.

As long as the money is still being thrown at people like Altman, keep buying NVidia stock.

They’re the ones selling shovels in the new gold rush.

They’re also the company that crashes hardest if the AI boom down turn out to be a bubble. Motorola was crushed by the Internet crash.

There are many echoes of the 1999 Internet bubble here. Especially the pattern of VC companies pouring money into companies who are selling services at huge discounts in order to gain market share, combined with the hardware manufacturers boosting income by loaning money / hardware to their own client.

That doesn’t mean that this boom isn’t real - but it does make it very, very hard to distinguish it from a bubble because at this point in the cycle they both look the same & the VC ecosystem is very, very good at turning investment $ into “income” $ on the books of the various companies involved to juice the stock valuations they rely on to draw in fresh investment. The whole thing could easily be an elaborate kayfabe that will inevitably fall apart in dramatic fashion. Or not! From the outside it’s very hard to tell - we can’t see inside the books of the entire ecosystem & you can’t trust the income claims by the various players to be a reliable indicator of real demand.

Of course, the Internet boom was ultimately shown to be correct, but early. AI is (obviously) going to be transformational in some way - but that doesn’t mean the current players are going to survive long enough to make it out the other end.