Best Of

Evening from Spoons. I may be an AI luddite. I am utterly sick of having it rammed down my throat. A few examples:

1) Accounting platforms where it gives you suggestions for what the transaction may be which are almost always wrong. Takes longer to delete what Quickbooks / Sage / Revolut / Tide have autocompleted than to just do it directly
2) YouTube Studio. I am offered "comment reply suggestions" to most comments left on my channel. Can't switch this feature off, uses screen space, especially on mobile
3) Have just completed a trial of Monday.com for my business. Spent c. 8 hours on it, plus a few more doing planning etc. Trial about to expire so lets set our subscription. Not only do they force you to pay for users you don't have, you must buy AI tokens for those people you don't have. And in 2 weeks the number of AI tokens we have used on trial is zero. A cost increase of 50%. And of course you can't opt out. Other than binning the entire platform which we have now done
4) Microsoft won't let you remove Copilot. Endless intrusion on apps like Powerpoint, even down to the minor irritation of having to dock the logo thing so its not on the slides I am working on. WhatsApp won't even let you do that - the Meta AI symbol takes up screen space and you can't remove it

I'm being driven mad by AI. Please make it go away.

This is why I never want Portugal to win things with the theatrics and play acting. They are truly the worst team in the world for it.

That is up against some seriously stiff competition.

The ones that get me are the ones who scream and then pretend to be weeping in agony - it's not convincing, and they usually get a foul without it (even genuine fouls), so I really don't know why players add that level of theatricality which just harms their dignity to no benefit.

Saw one faking the other day (someone stepped on their foot after winning the ball, probably hurt a bit but that's football), everyone played on, and they faced the difficult choice of what to do. In the end they just laid down for around a minute, at which point the ref kind of had to stop play and make sure they really were ok, but that's real dedication to take out nearly 1% of your entire match because you're too embarrassed to get up when the faking didn't work.

I have seen a few broken legs etc at Leicester. When players are genuinely injured they lie still, apart from signalling with a hand for help. Anyone rolling or thrashing about is faking it. They confirm this when they sprint away immediately afterwards.

Let's see what happens with recent national opinion polls for these pollsters.

Survation - Both Labour (268->243) and Reform (111->103) 2024GE voters are downweighted, Labour by a little bit more.

More in Common - Both Labour (577->367) and Reform (224->156) 2024GE voters are downweighted, though Labour by a little bit more.

Opinium - Sample has very little weighting to correct sample for 2024GE past vote.

So my assumption would have been that Labour voters would have been easier to find, and overrepresented in the sample compared to Reform voters, but there isn't much of a difference in national opinion polls.

Obviously getting a sample for a constituency poll is a lot harder, so not directly comparable to a national poll, but I think this is some supporting evidence for the idea in the header.

One of the most humiliating episodes in American history frankly and one that will cause massive problems for years to come:

Andrew Neil
@afneil

The US has circulated its version of the Memo of Understanding with Iran to G7 leaders in France. It’s as bad if not worse than expected.

...

America will now become a partner with the tyrants of Tehran, who Trump only recently wanted to overthrow, in rebuilding their economy.


When Trump insisted the war would only end with ‘unconditional surrender’ it never crossed my mind he meant his own.

https://x.com/afneil/status/2067264423660556777

Trump did not want to overthrow the Iranian regime, or not until he was talked into it. That was the Neocons. No foreign wars, no forced regime changes was part of Trump's MAGA schtick.