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5 days before becoming PM Brown faced a tough BBC grilling – politicalbetting.com
5 days before becoming PM Brown faced a tough BBC grilling – politicalbetting.com
in June 2007, the last time there was a change at Number 10 halfway through a parliament, Gordon Brown was ready to go on Newnight and face tough interview. Yes the circumstances with Truss are slightly different because he became LAB leader without having to fight a leadership election.
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The lion’s share of blame actually lies with Boris Johnson, who after pleading for a month or so’s stay of execution, couldn’t even be bothered turning up to work.
The country has drifted, at a time of crisis.
cf the Opposition being ready at any and every moment in time to have an election.
She is heir assumptive and thinks she is above going on the national broadcaster.
I understand why she's not going on TV. Journalists now go for the gotcha rather than letting their interviewees develop an answer. I blame the journalists as much as the politicians.
The problem is that she hasn't got the job yet because the contest was made too long.
I honestly can't think of a worse use of the national credit card than a VAT cut right now. Borrowing to keep prices down, borrowing to invest, borrowing to keep the lights on all make sense. Borrowing to give people £100 off a £3500 TV doesn't
The only priority for the government in the next month is coming up with a way to keep energy bills down to £1200 for lower income people, £2000 for middle income and £4000 for higher income people and working out how to help businesses.
“It’s a view”.
Nothing demonstrates that the Tory Party are essentially uninterested in governing, than the current, disgraceful spectacle.
All she needs to do now is stick two fingers up at the Archbishop of Canterbury or the National Education Union, and it'll feel like 1979.
Had 2016 gone the other way, I'm sure that there would currently be headlines saying "We send £350 million a week to the EU. Let's use it to cut fuel bills instead."
I’m not outraged.
I just note the judgment that prizes questionable narrow strategy over the bigger picture of public accountability and indeed leadership during crisis.
It does not say great things about her character.
“Free version (slow, queue)
https://huggingface.co/spaces/stabilityai/stable-diffusion
Paid with credits (instant, and you get a few credits free)
https://beta.dreamstudio.ai/home
I've been playing with both all afternoon and have barely got anything coherent, let alone anything chuckleworthty.”
++++
I don’t wish to boast - you know what I’m like - but I was getting memorable results within 20 minutes and Holy Shit results within 2 hours
You just have to work out what Stable Diffusion is good at - and what it isn’t - and also what words trigger it into doing the good shit, without also triggering it’s no-porn no-violence censor modules
Perhaps I’m good at it because I’m good with flints and words? Which is slightly reassuring. Still a small role for the artist
Her government could be finished by the end of next week frankly.
Nothing they do afterwards will make the slightest difference.
That. Was. A. Disgrace.
https://www.joeodea.com/
In Washington state, Senate candidate Tiffany Smiley has said that she is pro-life -- but that, if elected, she would not vote to ban abortion nation wide. And, she is calling for more support for women in pregnancy, and after their babies are born.
https://www.smileyforwashington.com/
Both have attractive personal stories.
(This reminds me more than a little of Bill Clinton's compromise: He advocated making abortion safe, legal -- and rare. Earlier in his political career, he had claimed to be pro-life, by the way, as did Al Gore.)
So my takeaway is it's fairly good at producing stock-y expected images, but if you want to get granular about the details of the image, or throw something unexpected at it in terms of proportion size or "something that shouldn't be in the room is present" it can't cope.
Your promptcraft is poor, and you’re trying to get it to do things it’s not good at - at least via words (you can also use images as prompts if you’re not good with the words)
You’re like someone who’s been given the world’s first plane and you’re complaining it’s no good for collecting the shopping
But I haven’t even seen her recognise the potential scale or complexity of the problem, just crap about not penalising entrepreneurship.
On some of your specific examples, moral rights are an interesting one. If you can create a recognisable image of the sugababes then what restrictions do they have on how it is used? You'd probably be fine in certain contexts with some of the normal defences, but others could be tricky.
Small-to-medium crises are good for idealogical politicians, because they are opportunities to get public consent to move society the way you want it. Blair got consent for his expansion of the state becuase everyone knew, deep down, that the public realm was more than a bit shabby. Cameron didn't have to argue that hard for austerity, becasue it was accepted that there was no money left. And so on.
What's incoming is huge. For those of us who have been broadly comfortable, it will be unpleasant. For people already on the edge, it will be ruinous. Then, as with all-out War
or the early days of Covid, what a politician wants to do goes out the window.
Truss has a fairly consistent vision through her political career of small state / low tax / maximum freedom. She, Kwarteng, Redwood, Rees-Mogg... they didn't go into politics to administer a massive rapid transfer of money to poor people. She can't use this crisis to change the country in the way she wants, because there's no public consent for small state / low tax / maximum freedom and it almost certainly would end in disaster.
Worse than that, she has boxed herself in over the leadership campaign. I sort of get why, though once she was up against Rishi the Boriskiller, she was home and dry. But she now has a massive explanation job on her hands, telling the UK why she is going to spend more than the dry right would like but less than the public desire. And she has shown no sign of beginning to do this.
*liability
A videographer, Soliman Hijjy, has a history of praising Hitler, who was responsible for the deaths of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust."
And they hired another, with a similar background: Hosam Salem. And earlier still another, Fady Hanona -- who had also worked fot the Guardian.
source: https://www.mediaite.com/news/new-york-times-under-fire-for-hiring-freelancers-who-praised-hitler-hamas/
It is simple, either she bails out most of the energy costs for low and middle income peeps and all small businesses or she is done before she begins. Any crap about reducing tax or changing thresholds will not cut it.
I thought that was what GB News was for.
Sheer brilliance.
Marc Molinaro was pro-choice republican and not endorsed by or connected with Trump. He still got beat in a recent NY special election he was tipped to win.
EXCLUSIVE: Poll reveals 51 per cent of adults support an election this year, with only 20 per cent taking the opposite view
https://twitter.com/EveningStandard/status/1564632971587600392
Could be prescient.
Still publishes some interesting stuff.
I’m a Ukrainian Soldier, and I’ve Accepted My Death
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/30/opinion/ukraine-soldier-war.html
“A bunch of PB-ers cowering in a cupboard, staring in bewilderment at Stable Diffusion”
This is one of the less disquieting ones
Arizona’s Blake Masters is among the Republicans changing abortion positions on their websites, while others are airing TV ads on their stances.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/08/30/republican-abortion-positions-midterm-elections-00054128
In terms of usefulness, I once did some work for a company whose big idea for a PR stunt was to get the lead singers of two notorious rival bands to sing together on stage (sponsored by the company of course). A photoshopper was duly appointed and spent a day creating a realistic looking image of the two rival singers loved up and crooning together in a duet (the company logo flying proudly behind them on stage). The image was borderline believable, though still photoshopped if you looked at it closely. Hence my interest in working with prompts like this. I've had situations where it would have actually been useful at work.
The type of images I've been generating today look absolutely nothing close to what the professional photoshopper was able to achieve in a few hours, and it really does feel like pot luck more than anything else. One of the images I generated gave me two sugababes, but one of them had three legs.
My overall impression of it is "meh, it's a bit of fun but it's wrong 9 times out of 10 and generates nothing close to what a skilled human can create, though using AI may well in the future cut down on a professional designer's workflow substantially (a lot of modern photoshopping is automated through ai tools, albeit guided by a human hand).
So I posted mine. I can’t help it if they frighten the fuck out of you, old man
I expect a slide as people subsequently realise that she is a nutter who has surrounded herself with plodders (Kwasi) and other nutters (Rees-Mogg, Redwood et al).
The actions of government, parliament and its select committees provide the media including the BBC with an abundance of events, facts, words, actions for them to analyse and comment on.
Instead of conducting 'gotcha' interviews (not very well) they could focus their gigantic resources on reporting, analysis, consideration of options and balanced comment.
I may be an old man about to have our 5th grandchild but I do not consider your images anything to do with my age but just plain disrespect for children
I'm using it. Is there a right way or a wrong way to use it? Why is generating endless images of horrific clown faced children the right way to use it?
1.05 Liz Truss 95%
17 Rishi Sunak 6%
Next Conservative leader
1.05 Liz Truss 95%
18 Rishi Sunak 6%
Within ten minutes of using SD, I realised it would be pretty crap at what you're trying, half-wittedly, to do. Tho i did produce a reasonable Boris Johnson-in-the-19th-century
So instead I approached it artistically, imaginatively - imagining what is it GOOD AT?
I had a sense it would be deft at producing frightening images, if fed the right precise prompts, honed over hours. I posted some of the best yesterday (I won't do it again in case I actually kill @Big_G_NorthWales)
They are genuinely horrifying. I know this because of the way people reacted on here and the way people have reacted today as I have shared them. Holy Shit is the usual response
So it is REALLY good at that. Terrifying imagery. There's quite a big market for that. My guess is it will be really good at lots of other things. It's only been in existence for a week and people like me have been using it for 2 days. 2 days!
I am sorry your Sugababe had three legs
The time to be outraged is when she and her chancellor have announced their help proposals in the HOC in the next couple of weeks
I may well join the outrage bus if she doesn’t provide a package not only for consumers but also businesses, especially small business
It may not be popular on this forum but I really do not care about Nick Robinson and the BBC cancelled interview tonight, but I really do care about what she says and does in the HOC shortly
She will either sink or swim very quickly
As I said yesterday I have lived nearly 80 years on this planet, and am not easily shocked, especially in view of images I saw when serving as a police officer in Edinburgh in the early 1960's but introduce children, and horrific images of haunted children, in today's context of war in Ukraine jars with my sense of decency and frankly they are unnecessary
Still publishes some interesting stuff."
Agreed on both. For example, their reporter Anemona Hartocollis, is consistently good, often on difficult subjects. For instance, years ago, she wrote a story showing that Obamacare had led to the demise of many rural hospitals. (Unintentionally, I believe.) And she ahs been good on college admissions.
And, on the other side, the Times is partly responsible for the 1619 project, which may be a good story, but isn't true.
- As in Scotland, many people have looked at the United Kingdom and decided that it’s simply not working for them
The idea of an independent Wales is no longer just a hobby-horse of bearded men in Carmarthenshire pubs on Six Nations rugby match days. Polls put support for independence at about 30%, (and skew more pro- the younger you go): not enough to signal anything imminent, but high enough for us to be certain something real is happening. After all, Scotland was polling similar numbers in 2007, and just seven years later David Cameron, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg were making “the vow” to the people of Scotland as they scrambled to keep the union together.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/aug/30/support-welsh-independence-growing-scotland-uk
Someone who can make truly terrifying images can make money, because people pay hard cash to be frightened out of their wits, in cinemas and elsewhere
FWIW I don't think this image today is that terrifying. I was going for something more like "unsettling but with a certain soulfulness". Saying "this cannot be seen because Ukraine is at war" is bonkers
I will decide on the evidence and debate that follows
You are right about scary images, it's come up with some truly terrifying things when I use the keyword "nazi" (works on the huggingface free version, the word is censored on the paid/credits version though).
Both versions are quite happy to churn out some hideously racist stuff that I will not go into detail here, circumventing the prompts with the right turn of phrase to generate some shocking, 4-chan level crap is laughably easy.
But I can't understand why it's still making basic mistakes like rendering a singer with three legs, or when I asked for "two men riding a lawnmower" it gives me two men standing side by side a flymo-style lawnmower (it's not even smart enough to spot that if people are riding a lawn mower, it should be a sit on)
And yet it has done phenomenally well at other things. Years ago when doing some work for (insert name of dying - possibly now dead) high street fashion chain, one of the things we came up with was creating a "selfie wall" of polaroid pictures inside the dressing rooms. And when I prompted diffusion to create a visual for that, it came up with something incredibly similar to what our professional photoshopper used to illustrate our presentation to the company in the end. But perhaps "a wall of polaroids in a changing room" is an easier prompt than "the sugababes at a death metal gig with the stage on fire".
All I can say is it seems to be very hit and miss, but the more weird and specific your request, the harder it is for the machine to process it.
I've warned before. I won't warn again. NO MORE AI GENERATED IMAGES.
My sense is that you have to treat it as a brilliantly talented, superbly imaginative, rather retarded and incredibly drunk collaborator, who is easily bored. So if you ask it do to mundane, prosaic jobs it sighs loftily and coughs up mediocrity, or it sulks and does nothing, and vomits in the waste paper basket
But if you let its imagination run, encouraging it along the way, and nudging it helpfully when that is needed, you can get some stunning visuals
Despite the rigid rules supposedly built in, it has produced for me some ponographic and probably illegal images ((I certainly did not request this!). Quite disturbing. I predict some bizarre court cases in years to come, when people are tried for possessing images of things that never happened and involved no actual people
However, you're the boss, so I will desist - until and unless the ban is lifted
I am now.
Enough.
https://order-order.com/2022/08/30/libdems-open-candidate-selection-in-goves-seat-two-months-after-selecting-a-candidate/