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This look problematic for ministers – politicalbetting.com

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  • kamskikamski Posts: 5,190

    That's a nice armband you got there, be a shame if we found some reason to kick you out the tournament.....

    England and other teams planning to wear the 'OneLove' armbands to make a statement against discrimination during the World Cup in Qatar were faced with 'extreme blackmail' of 'massive sanctions', the German Football Association (DFB) claimed today.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11457769/England-BLACKMAILED-dropping-One-Love-armband-World-Cup-German-FA-reveals.html

    Today Rewe (German supermarket chain) ended its links with the German football association.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 50,269

    Roger said:

    WillG said:

    Roger said:

    A few more games like that and no one will be talking about the rights and wrongs of transvestite migrant workers

    What a disgusting dismissal of hundreds of people dying to build these stadiums.
    I did a job for three weeks in Dubai which at the time had a quarter of the worlds cranes working there. All the shiny new buildings were covered in tarpaulin to hide the blue uniformed workers from the tourists who might have found the sight off putting.

    They were nearly all Indians Bangladeshis and Pakistanis. Their conditions were known to be dreadful and deaths in the heat from falling off buildings were common. None of the workers were forced labour

    There wasn't a football stadium in sight. It was Just run of the mill capitalism

    Philppe Starck said 'if you buy a mictowave for under 50 euro's you know it's been made by a slave'.

    I'm glad Tories like you have started taking an interest

    WRONG.....there is plenty of evidence that in many (not all) workers were first told to pay a recruitment fee that they had to take out a loan for (so classic indebtment trap), then their passports were removed from them on arrival. The rules then stated you couldn't change job but if you tried to leave you couldn't get your passport and being could be arrested for being in the country without your documentation / job....then there were numerous incidents of wages not being paid....
    In decent countries, a single worker death on a project is considered a stop-and-find-out-what-went-wrong. That's run of the mill capitalism for you.

    But then the waiters were probably far more obsequious in Dubai than in, say, Norway.
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 42,957
    pillsbury said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    On Sunday, across the UK, local councils, politicians and media pundits all vied to be pallbearers at a phantom funeral, in order to mark Transgender Day of Remembrance – an annual event memorialising those who have been murdered as a result of transphobia. There were vigils, flags on public buildings and grim pronouncements on social media, all bemoaning an epidemic of murderous violence against trans people.

    In reality, these mourners were essentially traipsing behind empty coffins, wailing about deaths that never actually happened. Because, thankfully, despite what the performative shroud-waving would have you believe, there hasn’t been a single recorded murder of a transgender person in the UK for four years. More striking still, when Channel 4’s fact-checking team dug into the data in 2018, it found that in the UK ‘a trans person is less likely to be murdered than the average person’.


    https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/11/22/transgender-day-of-remembrance-is-a-ghoulish-spectacle/

    Another dig at the Scottish government?
    If you read the article it’s a range of virtue signallers:

    Nevertheless, on social media, the Welsh parliament chose to remember the ‘trans individuals who have lived, loved, fought and fallen’. Not to be outstripped in the grief stakes, mayor of London Sadiq Khan tweeted in honour of ‘the lives taken by anti-trans hate crimes’. On the BBC’s Thought for the Week on Friday, priest Sarah Jones asked listeners to take the opportunity to ‘remember the trans people whose lives have been cut short’.

    Spreading fear among a potentially isolated and marginalised community is far from helpful - especially when the overwhelming majority of the dead the TRAs cite were sex workers in South America. The problem is male violence and sex work, not “Transphobia”.
    I know you hate all that but the issue in the US was enough for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to opine on it. 46 transgender people killed in 2021 there. Only in America, eh?

    You'd have a much less stressful life I have no doubt if you stopped doing a @Leon and trawling through twitter to find things to be outraged about.

    No one is denying your right to be a woman.

    Stonewall and the more extreme trans activists I have no doubt will be marginalised in favour of sensible debate and policies.
    Handy hint for those proposing to visit South Africa: DO NOT tell any black African how you stood shoulder to shoulder to them in the great fight, by leafletting Barclays or refusing to drink Cape pinotage back in the 80s. Genuinely a good way to get beaten up, because they regard people who say that sort of thing as interfering, irrelevant, self-regarding wankers.

    A lesson here for "trans activists," extreme or otherwise. There is no Act to Prohibit Blokes From Chopping Their Bits Off And Wearing Dresses either on the statute book, or proposed by anyone. At all. So chill.
    Ah. The "bloke in a dress" approach.

    I had been trying to work out where you stood on it all with your cryptic posts but I get it now. Thanks.
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 48,661

    While you are arguing over comparative national economies, it strikes me that "per family", or even "per household", is, in many ways, a better measure of well being than "per capita".

    For example, suppose there are two workers in the US, each earning 15 dollars an hour, which is the minimum wage in some places in the US. Assuming 40 hour weeks and 50 weeks of work a year, each will earn a gross of 30,000 dollars a year. But their costs will be lower if they live together, than if they live separately.

    (I don't know how much lower, but I recall seeing a rule-of-thumb that a second person in a household added about 60 percent to the costs.)

    I don't know whether such statistics are available for all the G-20 nations, and if they are available how good they are. But that's what I would look for, were I doing these international comparisons.

    Yes, I think this matters a lot in family finances.

    The rise of single adult households as a percentage also puts a lot of pressure on housing stock, similar or more than immigration.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,339
    As promised, Stabie Diffusion is moving from AI generated images to videos

    Quite creepy

    https://twitter.com/infinite__vibes/status/1565045434229334019?s=21&t=s02vR9oi70tYnKm4_blMyA
  • DJ41 said:

    DJ41 said:

    Leon said:

    Oh no, what I have I done.....I have set Leon off on GPT-3000 taking over the world stories.

    Yep, and thanks

    Honestly tho there are some sober people on Twitter talking crazy talk about GPT4

    “I heard GPT4 is so good, it’s much better than me writing my own tweets and/or comments.

    Maybe we should just let Generative AI take over and go back and forth with itself, while we watch from a distance with our non-$8/month accounts. No developers needed at Twitter either.”

    https://twitter.com/bznotes/status/1588204059588108294?s=21&t=s02vR9oi70tYnKm4_blMyA
    Has anybody written any state-of-the-art computer programs that are useful to humanity recently?

    Thought not.
    Erhhh minor things like solving protein folding......

    The ability to accurately predict protein structures from their amino-acid sequence would be a huge boon to life sciences and medicine. It would vastly accelerate efforts to understand the building blocks of cells and enable quicker and more advanced drug discovery.

    https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03348-4


    or the AI that search the libraries of all known drugs to suggest a short list of ones that should be trialled for use against diseases...

    Or even finding speeds up in matrix multiplications given that huge amounts of technology relies on that...
    Ones that can develop pharmaceuticals faster and multiply matrices faster so that "technology" (meaning presumably other programs and machines) can run faster. But what about useful to humanity? Results that have actually occurred and which almost everyone agrees have been useful to humanity. Is there anything in that category?
    Pretty much all of modern science and our day-to-day existence relies on computer programs. Without software, computers would be useless heaps of metal and plastic, and life would grind to a halt.
  • https://www.advocate.com/transgender/2021/10/20/all-trans-people-killed-murdered-violence-2021-record-statistics#media-gallery-media-5

    Having now read the first 10 of these I have yet to come across one where transness had any obvious connection with the fact of murder.

    Also, I am confused by the claim that "He was misgendered in initial reports, something that was called out by activist Pedro Julio Serrano of Puerto Rico Para Tod@s. “One of the most serious problems we have with the Police and the Department of Justice is that they do not identify LGBTTIQ + people in their incident reports,” he said in a press release." I can't tell from the photo or narrative what the victim started out as or transitioned to, but surely from a trans POV if it's an M to F switcher, it is for all purposes a woman. So what are the police meant to do? "Deadname and misgender" so as to make it clear it's an allegedly transphobic crime, or simply record the death of a woman?
  • turbotubbsturbotubbs Posts: 17,405
    DJ41 said:

    DJ41 said:

    Leon said:

    Oh no, what I have I done.....I have set Leon off on GPT-3000 taking over the world stories.

    Yep, and thanks

    Honestly tho there are some sober people on Twitter talking crazy talk about GPT4

    “I heard GPT4 is so good, it’s much better than me writing my own tweets and/or comments.

    Maybe we should just let Generative AI take over and go back and forth with itself, while we watch from a distance with our non-$8/month accounts. No developers needed at Twitter either.”

    https://twitter.com/bznotes/status/1588204059588108294?s=21&t=s02vR9oi70tYnKm4_blMyA
    Has anybody written any state-of-the-art computer programs that are useful to humanity recently?

    Thought not.
    Erhhh minor things like solving protein folding......

    The ability to accurately predict protein structures from their amino-acid sequence would be a huge boon to life sciences and medicine. It would vastly accelerate efforts to understand the building blocks of cells and enable quicker and more advanced drug discovery.

    https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03348-4


    or the AI that search the libraries of all known drugs to suggest a short list of ones that should be trialled for use against diseases...

    Or even finding speeds up in matrix multiplications given that huge amounts of technology relies on that...
    Ones that can develop pharmaceuticals faster and multiply matrices faster so that "technology" (meaning presumably other programs and machines) can run faster. But what about useful to humanity? Results that have actually occurred and which almost everyone agrees have been useful to humanity. Is there anything in that category?
    Wow. Just wow. Those examples ARE useful to humanity. When I started in research in the 90’s a protein structure could take 6 months to solve, even assuming a crystal could be grown that would diffract X-rays. Now a computer can just take the sequence and get to the three dimensional folding. This is as revolutionary as resolving the structure of DNA. Most drug targets are proteins, most don’t ever crystallise so this tool alone will provide the opportunity for new treatments for existing diseases and novel ones. I fear for your education if you cannot appreciate that.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 50,269

    DJ41 said:

    DJ41 said:

    Leon said:

    Oh no, what I have I done.....I have set Leon off on GPT-3000 taking over the world stories.

    Yep, and thanks

    Honestly tho there are some sober people on Twitter talking crazy talk about GPT4

    “I heard GPT4 is so good, it’s much better than me writing my own tweets and/or comments.

    Maybe we should just let Generative AI take over and go back and forth with itself, while we watch from a distance with our non-$8/month accounts. No developers needed at Twitter either.”

    https://twitter.com/bznotes/status/1588204059588108294?s=21&t=s02vR9oi70tYnKm4_blMyA
    Has anybody written any state-of-the-art computer programs that are useful to humanity recently?

    Thought not.
    Erhhh minor things like solving protein folding......

    The ability to accurately predict protein structures from their amino-acid sequence would be a huge boon to life sciences and medicine. It would vastly accelerate efforts to understand the building blocks of cells and enable quicker and more advanced drug discovery.

    https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03348-4


    or the AI that search the libraries of all known drugs to suggest a short list of ones that should be trialled for use against diseases...

    Or even finding speeds up in matrix multiplications given that huge amounts of technology relies on that...
    Ones that can develop pharmaceuticals faster and multiply matrices faster so that "technology" (meaning presumably other programs and machines) can run faster. But what about useful to humanity? Results that have actually occurred and which almost everyone agrees have been useful to humanity. Is there anything in that category?
    Pretty much all of modern science and our day-to-day existence relies on computer programs. Without software, computers would be useless heaps of metal and plastic, and life would grind to a halt.
    For example, CNC machines (the funky robots that mill any shape you can think of out of solid blocks of metal) depend on tool paths. That is, a set of instructions of what to do and in what order. Sounds simple, but gets very complex with issues of machine access to difficult to reach bits, strength in the remaining material, work hardening etc.

    Newer generations of software for this are successively smarter. This means that the time taken to generate a good set of instructions is dropping and the quality of the auto-generated instructions are rising.

    This means that a number of things are better made and cheaper. And it is also quicker to create new products.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 42,159
    Driver said:

    kinabalu said:

    Driver said:

    kinabalu said:

    Driver said:

    kinabalu said:

    Driver said:

    Scott_xP said:

    It does appear that the primary criticism of the Remain campaign is that it was too honest.

    So putting forward a positive case for continued EU membership would have been dishonest? Thanks for clearing that up.
    "EU membership benefits our economy and increases our influence in the world."

    This was the main message.
    You lived through a different referendum campaign to me, apparently.
    Different world generally, I sense.
    In my world "that thing would be bad" is not the same thing as "this thing is good".
    In both our worlds I imagine when faced with a binary choice we pick the one preferable to us. Whether we express this as "better" or "less bad" is mainly semantics and depends on personality and mood as much as anything. Whatever - it's not important. "The Remain campaign was too negative" - this is yet more retrospective guilt-driven special pleading from Leavers straining to excuse themselves for voting for something most of the brighter ones now strongly suspect was stupid. Sorry, and let's please not "do" Brexit again, not with the WC on, and with Leon introducing lots of fascinating stuff about something or other, but this is my strong and settled opinion on the matter.
    No, it's not retrospective at all. My vote was driven in part by the utter negativity of the Remain campaign and its failure to actually sell the positives of the thing it wanted me to vote for.
    Nonsense. Don't believe you for a second. This is cakeism.

    Own that Leave vote or apologise for it.
  • moonshinemoonshine Posts: 5,748

    Are we expecting power cuts tonight?

    🚨BREAKING: Homes may suffer power issues this evening after the National Grid issued a warning on its capacity.

    Follow the latest on our live blog⬇️
    telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/…

    Seems.. worryingly early when it’s not massively cold

    I had one during the England match for around 10 mins. It also knocked out the internet in the area for about half an hour. And as it happens the thermostat on my boiler. So that was nice.
  • TOPPING said:

    pillsbury said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    On Sunday, across the UK, local councils, politicians and media pundits all vied to be pallbearers at a phantom funeral, in order to mark Transgender Day of Remembrance – an annual event memorialising those who have been murdered as a result of transphobia. There were vigils, flags on public buildings and grim pronouncements on social media, all bemoaning an epidemic of murderous violence against trans people.

    In reality, these mourners were essentially traipsing behind empty coffins, wailing about deaths that never actually happened. Because, thankfully, despite what the performative shroud-waving would have you believe, there hasn’t been a single recorded murder of a transgender person in the UK for four years. More striking still, when Channel 4’s fact-checking team dug into the data in 2018, it found that in the UK ‘a trans person is less likely to be murdered than the average person’.


    https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/11/22/transgender-day-of-remembrance-is-a-ghoulish-spectacle/

    Another dig at the Scottish government?
    If you read the article it’s a range of virtue signallers:

    Nevertheless, on social media, the Welsh parliament chose to remember the ‘trans individuals who have lived, loved, fought and fallen’. Not to be outstripped in the grief stakes, mayor of London Sadiq Khan tweeted in honour of ‘the lives taken by anti-trans hate crimes’. On the BBC’s Thought for the Week on Friday, priest Sarah Jones asked listeners to take the opportunity to ‘remember the trans people whose lives have been cut short’.

    Spreading fear among a potentially isolated and marginalised community is far from helpful - especially when the overwhelming majority of the dead the TRAs cite were sex workers in South America. The problem is male violence and sex work, not “Transphobia”.
    I know you hate all that but the issue in the US was enough for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to opine on it. 46 transgender people killed in 2021 there. Only in America, eh?

    You'd have a much less stressful life I have no doubt if you stopped doing a @Leon and trawling through twitter to find things to be outraged about.

    No one is denying your right to be a woman.

    Stonewall and the more extreme trans activists I have no doubt will be marginalised in favour of sensible debate and policies.
    Handy hint for those proposing to visit South Africa: DO NOT tell any black African how you stood shoulder to shoulder to them in the great fight, by leafletting Barclays or refusing to drink Cape pinotage back in the 80s. Genuinely a good way to get beaten up, because they regard people who say that sort of thing as interfering, irrelevant, self-regarding wankers.

    A lesson here for "trans activists," extreme or otherwise. There is no Act to Prohibit Blokes From Chopping Their Bits Off And Wearing Dresses either on the statute book, or proposed by anyone. At all. So chill.
    Ah. The "bloke in a dress" approach.

    I had been trying to work out where you stood on it all with your cryptic posts but I get it now. Thanks.
    No, that was a satirical hypothetical.

    Nothing cryptic here. You seem to have swallowed whole and unexamined the existence of gender-as-distinct-from-sex, just as your forebears probably believed in phlogiston, or the Universal Aether, or the Holy Spirit. Why? What's the philosophical justification for the claim? A surgically modified male wearing a dress is, quite literally, a bloke in a dress (though it would be unforgiveably rude to address or refer to him as that.)
  • CookieCookie Posts: 13,803
    Foxy said:

    While you are arguing over comparative national economies, it strikes me that "per family", or even "per household", is, in many ways, a better measure of well being than "per capita".

    For example, suppose there are two workers in the US, each earning 15 dollars an hour, which is the minimum wage in some places in the US. Assuming 40 hour weeks and 50 weeks of work a year, each will earn a gross of 30,000 dollars a year. But their costs will be lower if they live together, than if they live separately.

    (I don't know how much lower, but I recall seeing a rule-of-thumb that a second person in a household added about 60 percent to the costs.)

    I don't know whether such statistics are available for all the G-20 nations, and if they are available how good they are. But that's what I would look for, were I doing these international comparisons.

    Yes, I think this matters a lot in family finances.

    The rise of single adult households as a percentage also puts a lot of pressure on housing stock, similar or more than immigration.
    But consider two families of four - two adults, two young children. Both have a family income, after tax, of £60k. But in one family this is earned jointly by both parents; in the other, one parent earns all of it and the other parent stays at home and looks after the kids. The latter family will be far better off, because the latter family won't be paying out £12k a year in childcare.
    Time spent not working has a value.
  • malcolmgmalcolmg Posts: 43,329
    TOPPING said:

    malcolmg said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    On Sunday, across the UK, local councils, politicians and media pundits all vied to be pallbearers at a phantom funeral, in order to mark Transgender Day of Remembrance – an annual event memorialising those who have been murdered as a result of transphobia. There were vigils, flags on public buildings and grim pronouncements on social media, all bemoaning an epidemic of murderous violence against trans people.

    In reality, these mourners were essentially traipsing behind empty coffins, wailing about deaths that never actually happened. Because, thankfully, despite what the performative shroud-waving would have you believe, there hasn’t been a single recorded murder of a transgender person in the UK for four years. More striking still, when Channel 4’s fact-checking team dug into the data in 2018, it found that in the UK ‘a trans person is less likely to be murdered than the average person’.


    https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/11/22/transgender-day-of-remembrance-is-a-ghoulish-spectacle/

    Another dig at the Scottish government?
    If you read the article it’s a range of virtue signallers:

    Nevertheless, on social media, the Welsh parliament chose to remember the ‘trans individuals who have lived, loved, fought and fallen’. Not to be outstripped in the grief stakes, mayor of London Sadiq Khan tweeted in honour of ‘the lives taken by anti-trans hate crimes’. On the BBC’s Thought for the Week on Friday, priest Sarah Jones asked listeners to take the opportunity to ‘remember the trans people whose lives have been cut short’.

    Spreading fear among a potentially isolated and marginalised community is far from helpful - especially when the overwhelming majority of the dead the TRAs cite were sex workers in South America. The problem is male violence and sex work, not “Transphobia”.
    I know you hate all that but the issue in the US was enough for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to opine on it. 46 transgender people killed in 2021 there. Only in America, eh?

    You'd have a much less stressful life I have no doubt if you stopped doing a @Leon and trawling through twitter to find things to be outraged about.

    No one is denying your right to be a woman.

    Stonewall and the more extreme trans activists I have no doubt will be marginalised in favour of sensible debate and policies.
    Not happening in Scotland where government fund the extreme groups and are going to make it that anyone can just call themselves a woman at will. Troubles ahead.
    Malcolm you are a voter in Scotland. Vote the government out if it is doing the wrong thing.
    I shall do my best though the alternatives are even more shocking, I can see me not bothering to vote given the choices are so bad I could not justify any of them. If I have a local Alba option I will vote for them as one of teh few parties for independence. No chance I could vote for SNP given the people running it.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,339
    "Prediction: AGI will happen before 2024. Hold me to this."

    https://twitter.com/jeremymstamper/status/1591534202537017344?s=20&t=NpiWhiYzKLFHg9CysmKE4Q


    IF this comes true, you guys owe me a drink. I said on here - when GPT3 was unleashed - that we are much closer to AGI than most people realise, and I was roundly derided

    FWIW I don't think it will likely happen in 2023, but in the next 5-10 years, yes. And this blistering progress will become obvious soon
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 42,159



    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    On Sunday, across the UK, local councils, politicians and media pundits all vied to be pallbearers at a phantom funeral, in order to mark Transgender Day of Remembrance – an annual event memorialising those who have been murdered as a result of transphobia. There were vigils, flags on public buildings and grim pronouncements on social media, all bemoaning an epidemic of murderous violence against trans people.

    In reality, these mourners were essentially traipsing behind empty coffins, wailing about deaths that never actually happened. Because, thankfully, despite what the performative shroud-waving would have you believe, there hasn’t been a single recorded murder of a transgender person in the UK for four years. More striking still, when Channel 4’s fact-checking team dug into the data in 2018, it found that in the UK ‘a trans person is less likely to be murdered than the average person’.


    https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/11/22/transgender-day-of-remembrance-is-a-ghoulish-spectacle/

    Another dig at the Scottish government?
    If you read the article it’s a range of virtue signallers:

    Nevertheless, on social media, the Welsh parliament chose to remember the ‘trans individuals who have lived, loved, fought and fallen’. Not to be outstripped in the grief stakes, mayor of London Sadiq Khan tweeted in honour of ‘the lives taken by anti-trans hate crimes’. On the BBC’s Thought for the Week on Friday, priest Sarah Jones asked listeners to take the opportunity to ‘remember the trans people whose lives have been cut short’.

    Spreading fear among a potentially isolated and marginalised community is far from helpful - especially when the overwhelming majority of the dead the TRAs cite were sex workers in South America. The problem is male violence and sex work, not “Transphobia”.
    Stonewall and the more extreme trans activists I have no doubt will be marginalised in favour of sensible debate and policies.
    Not if there’s “no debate” as Stonewall want and concerns about proposed reforms are dismissed as “not valid” as Sturgeon has said and middle ranking natal male athletes continue to compete and win in women’s sports and children are subjected to hormone treatment, castration and mutilation in the name of “affirmative care”.
    Transgender issues are hardly short of debate. It's the nature of much of it that's the problem.
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 53,839

    DJ41 said:

    DJ41 said:

    Leon said:

    Oh no, what I have I done.....I have set Leon off on GPT-3000 taking over the world stories.

    Yep, and thanks

    Honestly tho there are some sober people on Twitter talking crazy talk about GPT4

    “I heard GPT4 is so good, it’s much better than me writing my own tweets and/or comments.

    Maybe we should just let Generative AI take over and go back and forth with itself, while we watch from a distance with our non-$8/month accounts. No developers needed at Twitter either.”

    https://twitter.com/bznotes/status/1588204059588108294?s=21&t=s02vR9oi70tYnKm4_blMyA
    Has anybody written any state-of-the-art computer programs that are useful to humanity recently?

    Thought not.
    Erhhh minor things like solving protein folding......

    The ability to accurately predict protein structures from their amino-acid sequence would be a huge boon to life sciences and medicine. It would vastly accelerate efforts to understand the building blocks of cells and enable quicker and more advanced drug discovery.

    https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03348-4


    or the AI that search the libraries of all known drugs to suggest a short list of ones that should be trialled for use against diseases...

    Or even finding speeds up in matrix multiplications given that huge amounts of technology relies on that...
    Ones that can develop pharmaceuticals faster and multiply matrices faster so that "technology" (meaning presumably other programs and machines) can run faster. But what about useful to humanity? Results that have actually occurred and which almost everyone agrees have been useful to humanity. Is there anything in that category?
    Wow. Just wow. Those examples ARE useful to humanity. When I started in research in the 90’s a protein structure could take 6 months to solve, even assuming a crystal could be grown that would diffract X-rays. Now a computer can just take the sequence and get to the three dimensional folding. This is as revolutionary as resolving the structure of DNA. Most drug targets are proteins, most don’t ever crystallise so this tool alone will provide the opportunity for new treatments for existing diseases and novel ones. I fear for your education if you cannot appreciate that.
    I think you are being a little harsh as well as genuinely educational. Thanks for the demonstration of the utility of the technique.
  • turbotubbsturbotubbs Posts: 17,405
    Leon said:

    "Prediction: AGI will happen before 2024. Hold me to this."

    https://twitter.com/jeremymstamper/status/1591534202537017344?s=20&t=NpiWhiYzKLFHg9CysmKE4Q


    IF this comes true, you guys owe me a drink. I said on here - when GPT3 was unleashed - that we are much closer to AGI than most people realise, and I was roundly derided

    FWIW I don't think it will likely happen in 2023, but in the next 5-10 years, yes. And this blistering progress will become obvious soon

    AGI? Not on top of all the TLAs.
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 48,661
    pillsbury said:

    TOPPING said:

    pillsbury said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    On Sunday, across the UK, local councils, politicians and media pundits all vied to be pallbearers at a phantom funeral, in order to mark Transgender Day of Remembrance – an annual event memorialising those who have been murdered as a result of transphobia. There were vigils, flags on public buildings and grim pronouncements on social media, all bemoaning an epidemic of murderous violence against trans people.

    In reality, these mourners were essentially traipsing behind empty coffins, wailing about deaths that never actually happened. Because, thankfully, despite what the performative shroud-waving would have you believe, there hasn’t been a single recorded murder of a transgender person in the UK for four years. More striking still, when Channel 4’s fact-checking team dug into the data in 2018, it found that in the UK ‘a trans person is less likely to be murdered than the average person’.


    https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/11/22/transgender-day-of-remembrance-is-a-ghoulish-spectacle/

    Another dig at the Scottish government?
    If you read the article it’s a range of virtue signallers:

    Nevertheless, on social media, the Welsh parliament chose to remember the ‘trans individuals who have lived, loved, fought and fallen’. Not to be outstripped in the grief stakes, mayor of London Sadiq Khan tweeted in honour of ‘the lives taken by anti-trans hate crimes’. On the BBC’s Thought for the Week on Friday, priest Sarah Jones asked listeners to take the opportunity to ‘remember the trans people whose lives have been cut short’.

    Spreading fear among a potentially isolated and marginalised community is far from helpful - especially when the overwhelming majority of the dead the TRAs cite were sex workers in South America. The problem is male violence and sex work, not “Transphobia”.
    I know you hate all that but the issue in the US was enough for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to opine on it. 46 transgender people killed in 2021 there. Only in America, eh?

    You'd have a much less stressful life I have no doubt if you stopped doing a @Leon and trawling through twitter to find things to be outraged about.

    No one is denying your right to be a woman.

    Stonewall and the more extreme trans activists I have no doubt will be marginalised in favour of sensible debate and policies.
    Handy hint for those proposing to visit South Africa: DO NOT tell any black African how you stood shoulder to shoulder to them in the great fight, by leafletting Barclays or refusing to drink Cape pinotage back in the 80s. Genuinely a good way to get beaten up, because they regard people who say that sort of thing as interfering, irrelevant, self-regarding wankers.

    A lesson here for "trans activists," extreme or otherwise. There is no Act to Prohibit Blokes From Chopping Their Bits Off And Wearing Dresses either on the statute book, or proposed by anyone. At all. So chill.
    Ah. The "bloke in a dress" approach.

    I had been trying to work out where you stood on it all with your cryptic posts but I get it now. Thanks.
    No, that was a satirical hypothetical.

    Nothing cryptic here. You seem to have swallowed whole and unexamined the existence of gender-as-distinct-from-sex, just as your forebears probably believed in phlogiston, or the Universal Aether, or the Holy Spirit. Why? What's the philosophical justification for the claim? A surgically modified male wearing a dress is, quite literally, a bloke in a dress (though it would be unforgiveably rude to address or refer to him as that.)
    So, if it is unforgiveable rude, why do you do so?

    We do not know how many Trans people are PB readers.
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 42,592

    DJ41 said:

    DJ41 said:

    Leon said:

    Oh no, what I have I done.....I have set Leon off on GPT-3000 taking over the world stories.

    Yep, and thanks

    Honestly tho there are some sober people on Twitter talking crazy talk about GPT4

    “I heard GPT4 is so good, it’s much better than me writing my own tweets and/or comments.

    Maybe we should just let Generative AI take over and go back and forth with itself, while we watch from a distance with our non-$8/month accounts. No developers needed at Twitter either.”

    https://twitter.com/bznotes/status/1588204059588108294?s=21&t=s02vR9oi70tYnKm4_blMyA
    Has anybody written any state-of-the-art computer programs that are useful to humanity recently?

    Thought not.
    Erhhh minor things like solving protein folding......

    The ability to accurately predict protein structures from their amino-acid sequence would be a huge boon to life sciences and medicine. It would vastly accelerate efforts to understand the building blocks of cells and enable quicker and more advanced drug discovery.

    https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03348-4


    or the AI that search the libraries of all known drugs to suggest a short list of ones that should be trialled for use against diseases...

    Or even finding speeds up in matrix multiplications given that huge amounts of technology relies on that...
    Ones that can develop pharmaceuticals faster and multiply matrices faster so that "technology" (meaning presumably other programs and machines) can run faster. But what about useful to humanity? Results that have actually occurred and which almost everyone agrees have been useful to humanity. Is there anything in that category?
    Pretty much all of modern science and our day-to-day existence relies on computer programs. Without software, computers would be useless heaps of metal and plastic, and life would grind to a halt.
    For example, CNC machines (the funky robots that mill any shape you can think of out of solid blocks of metal) depend on tool paths. That is, a set of instructions of what to do and in what order. Sounds simple, but gets very complex with issues of machine access to difficult to reach bits, strength in the remaining material, work hardening etc.

    Newer generations of software for this are successively smarter. This means that the time taken to generate a good set of instructions is dropping and the quality of the auto-generated instructions are rising.

    This means that a number of things are better made and cheaper. And it is also quicker to create new products.
    Optimisation can be cool. Coincidentally, we were watching the following video over dinner:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c33AZBnRHks

    In a video, a mathematician tackled a problem: can you create five five-letter words, each using unique letters of the alphabet (so one letter is unused)?

    He created an unoptimised program in Python (*) that took about a month to run. Viewers quickly got that down to miliseconds using some fairly clever and interesting techniques.

    And it turned out the problem had been solved fifty years earlier.

    (*) Yes, I, and he, knows.
  • EPGEPG Posts: 6,652
    A lot of stats are produced at "equivalised" household level - typically used for disposable income. But income isn't everything, and for measuring the productive or taxable capacity of an economy it matters hardly at all, which is where GDP is most useful.
  • pigeonpigeon Posts: 4,839

    That's a nice armband you got there, be a shame if we found some reason to kick you out the tournament.....

    England and other teams planning to wear the 'OneLove' armbands to make a statement against discrimination during the World Cup in Qatar were faced with 'extreme blackmail' of 'massive sanctions', the German Football Association (DFB) claimed today.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11457769/England-BLACKMAILED-dropping-One-Love-armband-World-Cup-German-FA-reveals.html

    Bollocks to the excuses. They're just weak and pathetic.
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 42,592
    edited November 2022
    Leon said:

    "Prediction: AGI will happen before 2024. Hold me to this."

    https://twitter.com/jeremymstamper/status/1591534202537017344?s=20&t=NpiWhiYzKLFHg9CysmKE4Q


    IF this comes true, you guys owe me a drink. I said on here - when GPT3 was unleashed - that we are much closer to AGI than most people realise, and I was roundly derided

    FWIW I don't think it will likely happen in 2023, but in the next 5-10 years, yes. And this blistering progress will become obvious soon

    Do you think the owner of that Twitter handle is an expert in the relevant field?

    https://twitter.com/jeremymstamper
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 48,661
    Cookie said:

    Foxy said:

    While you are arguing over comparative national economies, it strikes me that "per family", or even "per household", is, in many ways, a better measure of well being than "per capita".

    For example, suppose there are two workers in the US, each earning 15 dollars an hour, which is the minimum wage in some places in the US. Assuming 40 hour weeks and 50 weeks of work a year, each will earn a gross of 30,000 dollars a year. But their costs will be lower if they live together, than if they live separately.

    (I don't know how much lower, but I recall seeing a rule-of-thumb that a second person in a household added about 60 percent to the costs.)

    I don't know whether such statistics are available for all the G-20 nations, and if they are available how good they are. But that's what I would look for, were I doing these international comparisons.

    Yes, I think this matters a lot in family finances.

    The rise of single adult households as a percentage also puts a lot of pressure on housing stock, similar or more than immigration.
    But consider two families of four - two adults, two young children. Both have a family income, after tax, of £60k. But in one family this is earned jointly by both parents; in the other, one parent earns all of it and the other parent stays at home and looks after the kids. The latter family will be far better off, because the latter family won't be paying out £12k a year in childcare.
    Time spent not working has a value.
    Indeed, but it is more complex. If one adult is earning £60k then they are paying higher band tax, and will be affected by the Child benefit charge.

    If the full time hours do not overlap (like Mrs Foxy and myself for some years) then it is possible to have more income with two earners of £30k.
  • Foxy said:

    pillsbury said:

    TOPPING said:

    pillsbury said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    On Sunday, across the UK, local councils, politicians and media pundits all vied to be pallbearers at a phantom funeral, in order to mark Transgender Day of Remembrance – an annual event memorialising those who have been murdered as a result of transphobia. There were vigils, flags on public buildings and grim pronouncements on social media, all bemoaning an epidemic of murderous violence against trans people.

    In reality, these mourners were essentially traipsing behind empty coffins, wailing about deaths that never actually happened. Because, thankfully, despite what the performative shroud-waving would have you believe, there hasn’t been a single recorded murder of a transgender person in the UK for four years. More striking still, when Channel 4’s fact-checking team dug into the data in 2018, it found that in the UK ‘a trans person is less likely to be murdered than the average person’.


    https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/11/22/transgender-day-of-remembrance-is-a-ghoulish-spectacle/

    Another dig at the Scottish government?
    If you read the article it’s a range of virtue signallers:

    Nevertheless, on social media, the Welsh parliament chose to remember the ‘trans individuals who have lived, loved, fought and fallen’. Not to be outstripped in the grief stakes, mayor of London Sadiq Khan tweeted in honour of ‘the lives taken by anti-trans hate crimes’. On the BBC’s Thought for the Week on Friday, priest Sarah Jones asked listeners to take the opportunity to ‘remember the trans people whose lives have been cut short’.

    Spreading fear among a potentially isolated and marginalised community is far from helpful - especially when the overwhelming majority of the dead the TRAs cite were sex workers in South America. The problem is male violence and sex work, not “Transphobia”.
    I know you hate all that but the issue in the US was enough for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to opine on it. 46 transgender people killed in 2021 there. Only in America, eh?

    You'd have a much less stressful life I have no doubt if you stopped doing a @Leon and trawling through twitter to find things to be outraged about.

    No one is denying your right to be a woman.

    Stonewall and the more extreme trans activists I have no doubt will be marginalised in favour of sensible debate and policies.
    Handy hint for those proposing to visit South Africa: DO NOT tell any black African how you stood shoulder to shoulder to them in the great fight, by leafletting Barclays or refusing to drink Cape pinotage back in the 80s. Genuinely a good way to get beaten up, because they regard people who say that sort of thing as interfering, irrelevant, self-regarding wankers.

    A lesson here for "trans activists," extreme or otherwise. There is no Act to Prohibit Blokes From Chopping Their Bits Off And Wearing Dresses either on the statute book, or proposed by anyone. At all. So chill.
    Ah. The "bloke in a dress" approach.

    I had been trying to work out where you stood on it all with your cryptic posts but I get it now. Thanks.
    No, that was a satirical hypothetical.

    Nothing cryptic here. You seem to have swallowed whole and unexamined the existence of gender-as-distinct-from-sex, just as your forebears probably believed in phlogiston, or the Universal Aether, or the Holy Spirit. Why? What's the philosophical justification for the claim? A surgically modified male wearing a dress is, quite literally, a bloke in a dress (though it would be unforgiveably rude to address or refer to him as that.)
    So, if it is unforgiveable rude, why do you do so?

    We do not know how many Trans people are PB readers.
    Valid point.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 42,840

    Leon said:

    "Prediction: AGI will happen before 2024. Hold me to this."

    https://twitter.com/jeremymstamper/status/1591534202537017344?s=20&t=NpiWhiYzKLFHg9CysmKE4Q


    IF this comes true, you guys owe me a drink. I said on here - when GPT3 was unleashed - that we are much closer to AGI than most people realise, and I was roundly derided

    FWIW I don't think it will likely happen in 2023, but in the next 5-10 years, yes. And this blistering progress will become obvious soon

    Do you think the owner of that Twitter handle is an expert in the relevant field?

    https://twitter.com/jeremymstamper
    Hmm, his understanding of an IQ score is idiosyncratic as outlined in the bit that goes at the top, and confirmed here:

    https://twitter.com/jeremymstamper/status/1482825966615285761?cxt=HHwWgsCivYeXh5QpAAAA

    Unless they have changed a lot since my time?
  • Jim_MillerJim_Miller Posts: 2,999
    Foxy said: "Indeed, but it is more complex. If one adult is earning £60k then they are paying higher band tax, and will be affected by the Child benefit charge."

    In the US, whether there is a "marriage penalty" depends on what state the couple lives in:
    https://taxfoundation.org/state-marriage-penalty-2022/#:~:text=A marriage penalty is when,- and low-income couples.

    (As I recall, George W. Bush was able to eliminate the marriage penalty from federal income taxes.)
  • DJ41DJ41 Posts: 792
    edited November 2022

    DJ41 said:

    DJ41 said:

    Leon said:

    Oh no, what I have I done.....I have set Leon off on GPT-3000 taking over the world stories.

    Yep, and thanks

    Honestly tho there are some sober people on Twitter talking crazy talk about GPT4

    “I heard GPT4 is so good, it’s much better than me writing my own tweets and/or comments.

    Maybe we should just let Generative AI take over and go back and forth with itself, while we watch from a distance with our non-$8/month accounts. No developers needed at Twitter either.”

    https://twitter.com/bznotes/status/1588204059588108294?s=21&t=s02vR9oi70tYnKm4_blMyA
    Has anybody written any state-of-the-art computer programs that are useful to humanity recently?

    Thought not.
    Erhhh minor things like solving protein folding......

    The ability to accurately predict protein structures from their amino-acid sequence would be a huge boon to life sciences and medicine. It would vastly accelerate efforts to understand the building blocks of cells and enable quicker and more advanced drug discovery.

    https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03348-4


    or the AI that search the libraries of all known drugs to suggest a short list of ones that should be trialled for use against diseases...

    Or even finding speeds up in matrix multiplications given that huge amounts of technology relies on that...
    Ones that can develop pharmaceuticals faster and multiply matrices faster so that "technology" (meaning presumably other programs and machines) can run faster. But what about useful to humanity? Results that have actually occurred and which almost everyone agrees have been useful to humanity. Is there anything in that category?
    Pretty much all of modern science and our day-to-day existence relies on computer programs. Without software, computers would be useless heaps of metal and plastic, and life would grind to a halt.
    I get it that you like Science and Modernity and you believe them to be required for continued human existence, and indeed for the continuation of life in general (a notion that seems to cry out for a response referring to eggs in a basket) but did you actually read the question? ("Has anybody written any state-of-the-art computer programs that are useful to humanity recently?") It wasn't about whether somebody can think of a useful computer program - it was about the "state of the art", cutting edge, call it the margin, what's acktchooerly 'appening that's new, loik.

  • moonshinemoonshine Posts: 5,748
    Leon said:

    "Prediction: AGI will happen before 2024. Hold me to this."

    https://twitter.com/jeremymstamper/status/1591534202537017344?s=20&t=NpiWhiYzKLFHg9CysmKE4Q


    IF this comes true, you guys owe me a drink. I said on here - when GPT3 was unleashed - that we are much closer to AGI than most people realise, and I was roundly derided

    FWIW I don't think it will likely happen in 2023, but in the next 5-10 years, yes. And this blistering progress will become obvious soon

    This is an amusing thread. Lots of arguing about Brexit (still!) and planning law. I would think far bigger is the news that a linguistic AI is about to be released with as much as one tenth the neural connections of a human brain (1000 trillion).

    What if consciousness is a mere artefact of very
    high numbers of neural connections?
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,339

    Leon said:

    "Prediction: AGI will happen before 2024. Hold me to this."

    https://twitter.com/jeremymstamper/status/1591534202537017344?s=20&t=NpiWhiYzKLFHg9CysmKE4Q


    IF this comes true, you guys owe me a drink. I said on here - when GPT3 was unleashed - that we are much closer to AGI than most people realise, and I was roundly derided

    FWIW I don't think it will likely happen in 2023, but in the next 5-10 years, yes. And this blistering progress will become obvious soon

    Do you think the owner of that Twitter handle is an expert in the relevant field?

    https://twitter.com/jeremymstamper
    Ben Hohner
    @BHohner
    ·
    Nov 17
    y'all think AGI is 5-10 years away. try 1-3


    https://twitter.com/BHohner/status/1593111037884366848?s=20&t=u28vp0FaA53drl1ryKOH7w



    "AGI existential safety researcher @robertskmiles warns of the risks of training AI on Diplomacy...

    ...5 days later, @MetaAI announces human-level performance on press Diplomacy (but not yet superhuman).

    What a time to be alive, and what an important time to work in AI safety!"

    https://twitter.com/jacyanthis/status/1595093987815489536?s=20&t=u28vp0FaA53drl1ryKOH7w


    "That parameter space is almost impossible to imagine. AGI on the verge? I'm excited to see it."

    https://twitter.com/freddealmeida/status/1594944979079659520?s=20&t=u28vp0FaA53drl1ryKOH7w
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 42,592
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    "Prediction: AGI will happen before 2024. Hold me to this."

    https://twitter.com/jeremymstamper/status/1591534202537017344?s=20&t=NpiWhiYzKLFHg9CysmKE4Q


    IF this comes true, you guys owe me a drink. I said on here - when GPT3 was unleashed - that we are much closer to AGI than most people realise, and I was roundly derided

    FWIW I don't think it will likely happen in 2023, but in the next 5-10 years, yes. And this blistering progress will become obvious soon

    Do you think the owner of that Twitter handle is an expert in the relevant field?

    https://twitter.com/jeremymstamper
    Ben Hohner
    @BHohner
    ·
    Nov 17
    y'all think AGI is 5-10 years away. try 1-3


    https://twitter.com/BHohner/status/1593111037884366848?s=20&t=u28vp0FaA53drl1ryKOH7w



    "AGI existential safety researcher @robertskmiles warns of the risks of training AI on Diplomacy...

    ...5 days later, @MetaAI announces human-level performance on press Diplomacy (but not yet superhuman).

    What a time to be alive, and what an important time to work in AI safety!"

    https://twitter.com/jacyanthis/status/1595093987815489536?s=20&t=u28vp0FaA53drl1ryKOH7w


    "That parameter space is almost impossible to imagine. AGI on the verge? I'm excited to see it."

    https://twitter.com/freddealmeida/status/1594944979079659520?s=20&t=u28vp0FaA53drl1ryKOH7w
    That does not appear to be an answer to my question; it is just a regurgitation of Twitter comments by others.
  • turbotubbsturbotubbs Posts: 17,405
    DJ41 said:

    DJ41 said:

    DJ41 said:

    Leon said:

    Oh no, what I have I done.....I have set Leon off on GPT-3000 taking over the world stories.

    Yep, and thanks

    Honestly tho there are some sober people on Twitter talking crazy talk about GPT4

    “I heard GPT4 is so good, it’s much better than me writing my own tweets and/or comments.

    Maybe we should just let Generative AI take over and go back and forth with itself, while we watch from a distance with our non-$8/month accounts. No developers needed at Twitter either.”

    https://twitter.com/bznotes/status/1588204059588108294?s=21&t=s02vR9oi70tYnKm4_blMyA
    Has anybody written any state-of-the-art computer programs that are useful to humanity recently?

    Thought not.
    Erhhh minor things like solving protein folding......

    The ability to accurately predict protein structures from their amino-acid sequence would be a huge boon to life sciences and medicine. It would vastly accelerate efforts to understand the building blocks of cells and enable quicker and more advanced drug discovery.

    https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03348-4


    or the AI that search the libraries of all known drugs to suggest a short list of ones that should be trialled for use against diseases...

    Or even finding speeds up in matrix multiplications given that huge amounts of technology relies on that...
    Ones that can develop pharmaceuticals faster and multiply matrices faster so that "technology" (meaning presumably other programs and machines) can run faster. But what about useful to humanity? Results that have actually occurred and which almost everyone agrees have been useful to humanity. Is there anything in that category?
    Pretty much all of modern science and our day-to-day existence relies on computer programs. Without software, computers would be useless heaps of metal and plastic, and life would grind to a halt.
    I get it that you like Science and Modernity and you believe them to be required for continued human existence, and indeed life in general, but did you actually read the question? ("Has anybody written any state-of-the-art computer programs that are useful to humanity recently?") It wasn't about whether somebody can think of a useful computer program - it was about the "state of the art", cutting edge, call it the margin, what's acktchooerly 'appening that's new, loik.

    Did you see my answer?
  • DJ41DJ41 Posts: 792
    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    "Prediction: AGI will happen before 2024. Hold me to this."

    https://twitter.com/jeremymstamper/status/1591534202537017344?s=20&t=NpiWhiYzKLFHg9CysmKE4Q


    IF this comes true, you guys owe me a drink. I said on here - when GPT3 was unleashed - that we are much closer to AGI than most people realise, and I was roundly derided

    FWIW I don't think it will likely happen in 2023, but in the next 5-10 years, yes. And this blistering progress will become obvious soon

    Do you think the owner of that Twitter handle is an expert in the relevant field?

    https://twitter.com/jeremymstamper
    Hmm, his understanding of an IQ score is idiosyncratic as outlined in the bit that goes at the top, and confirmed here:

    https://twitter.com/jeremymstamper/status/1482825966615285761?cxt=HHwWgsCivYeXh5QpAAAA

    Unless they have changed a lot since my time?
    That tweet is seriously embarrassing. His wife or someone should tell him.
  • turbotubbsturbotubbs Posts: 17,405
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    "Prediction: AGI will happen before 2024. Hold me to this."

    https://twitter.com/jeremymstamper/status/1591534202537017344?s=20&t=NpiWhiYzKLFHg9CysmKE4Q


    IF this comes true, you guys owe me a drink. I said on here - when GPT3 was unleashed - that we are much closer to AGI than most people realise, and I was roundly derided

    FWIW I don't think it will likely happen in 2023, but in the next 5-10 years, yes. And this blistering progress will become obvious soon

    Do you think the owner of that Twitter handle is an expert in the relevant field?

    https://twitter.com/jeremymstamper
    Ben Hohner
    @BHohner
    ·
    Nov 17
    y'all think AGI is 5-10 years away. try 1-3


    https://twitter.com/BHohner/status/1593111037884366848?s=20&t=u28vp0FaA53drl1ryKOH7w



    "AGI existential safety researcher @robertskmiles warns of the risks of training AI on Diplomacy...

    ...5 days later, @MetaAI announces human-level performance on press Diplomacy (but not yet superhuman).

    What a time to be alive, and what an important time to work in AI safety!"

    https://twitter.com/jacyanthis/status/1595093987815489536?s=20&t=u28vp0FaA53drl1ryKOH7w


    "That parameter space is almost impossible to imagine. AGI on the verge? I'm excited to see it."

    https://twitter.com/freddealmeida/status/1594944979079659520?s=20&t=u28vp0FaA53drl1ryKOH7w
    Again - wtf is AGI?
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,339
    The fact everyone is talking about immigration without referencing the imminent arrival of AGI (or something close to it) points to the fatuity of our discourse. It's like arguing about the permissible speed of horses on London roads in 1890

    In a few years computers will be able to do almost any human task, and do it much better and much cheaper. So big workforces will not be needed, nor will immigrants, skilled or otherwise. The problem then will be what to do with all the idle, purposeless people
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 42,592
    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    "Prediction: AGI will happen before 2024. Hold me to this."

    https://twitter.com/jeremymstamper/status/1591534202537017344?s=20&t=NpiWhiYzKLFHg9CysmKE4Q


    IF this comes true, you guys owe me a drink. I said on here - when GPT3 was unleashed - that we are much closer to AGI than most people realise, and I was roundly derided

    FWIW I don't think it will likely happen in 2023, but in the next 5-10 years, yes. And this blistering progress will become obvious soon

    Do you think the owner of that Twitter handle is an expert in the relevant field?

    https://twitter.com/jeremymstamper
    Hmm, his understanding of an IQ score is idiosyncratic as outlined in the bit that goes at the top, and confirmed here:

    https://twitter.com/jeremymstamper/status/1482825966615285761?cxt=HHwWgsCivYeXh5QpAAAA

    Unless they have changed a lot since my time?
    That was so brain-dead that I discounted it as being a joke.

    But since Leon likes the account, perhaps Mr Stamper actually believes it... ;)
  • turbotubbsturbotubbs Posts: 17,405
    Leon said:

    The fact everyone is talking about immigration without referencing the imminent arrival of AGI (or something close to it) points to the fatuity of our discourse. It's like arguing about the permissible speed of horses on London roads in 1890

    In a few years computers will be able to do almost any human task, and do it much better and much cheaper. So big workforces will not be needed, nor will immigrants, skilled or otherwise. The problem then will be what to do with all the idle, purposeless people

    Please - what does AGI stand for? Genuine question.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 42,840
    edited November 2022

    DJ41 said:

    DJ41 said:

    Leon said:

    Oh no, what I have I done.....I have set Leon off on GPT-3000 taking over the world stories.

    Yep, and thanks

    Honestly tho there are some sober people on Twitter talking crazy talk about GPT4

    “I heard GPT4 is so good, it’s much better than me writing my own tweets and/or comments.

    Maybe we should just let Generative AI take over and go back and forth with itself, while we watch from a distance with our non-$8/month accounts. No developers needed at Twitter either.”

    https://twitter.com/bznotes/status/1588204059588108294?s=21&t=s02vR9oi70tYnKm4_blMyA
    Has anybody written any state-of-the-art computer programs that are useful to humanity recently?

    Thought not.
    Erhhh minor things like solving protein folding......

    The ability to accurately predict protein structures from their amino-acid sequence would be a huge boon to life sciences and medicine. It would vastly accelerate efforts to understand the building blocks of cells and enable quicker and more advanced drug discovery.

    https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03348-4


    or the AI that search the libraries of all known drugs to suggest a short list of ones that should be trialled for use against diseases...

    Or even finding speeds up in matrix multiplications given that huge amounts of technology relies on that...
    Ones that can develop pharmaceuticals faster and multiply matrices faster so that "technology" (meaning presumably other programs and machines) can run faster. But what about useful to humanity? Results that have actually occurred and which almost everyone agrees have been useful to humanity. Is there anything in that category?
    Wow. Just wow. Those examples ARE useful to humanity. When I started in research in the 90’s a protein structure could take 6 months to solve, even assuming a crystal could be grown that would diffract X-rays. Now a computer can just take the sequence and get to the three dimensional folding. This is as revolutionary as resolving the structure of DNA. Most drug targets are proteins, most don’t ever crystallise so this tool alone will provide the opportunity for new treatments for existing diseases and novel ones. I fear for your education if you cannot appreciate that.
    It is most impressive.

    I remember when I was a student in the mid-1970s, seeing the crude protein molecule models of an even earlier generation, made out of expanded plastic or stacked layers of perspex with tracings on them, after years of work. Like badly curled up Cumberland sausages.

    A freind was a research student and he said that the bearded males had a fairly noticeably higher success rate in persuading the protein to crystallise in the first place - put down to little bits of dinner, skin, etc. falling out of the beard and acting as nuclei for crystallisation.
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 42,592
    Leon said:

    The fact everyone is talking about immigration without referencing the imminent arrival of AGI (or something close to it) points to the fatuity of our discourse. It's like arguing about the permissible speed of horses on London roads in 1890

    In a few years computers will be able to do almost any human task, and do it much better and much cheaper. So big workforces will not be needed, nor will immigrants, skilled or otherwise. The problem then will be what to do with all the idle, purposeless people

    Look at the post I made below about speeding up a simple computer task. It would be interesting to see how/if an AI could optimise that really simple problem as well as the humans did. I have doubts, due to the radically different combinations of techniques that the meatsacks used.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 42,840

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    "Prediction: AGI will happen before 2024. Hold me to this."

    https://twitter.com/jeremymstamper/status/1591534202537017344?s=20&t=NpiWhiYzKLFHg9CysmKE4Q


    IF this comes true, you guys owe me a drink. I said on here - when GPT3 was unleashed - that we are much closer to AGI than most people realise, and I was roundly derided

    FWIW I don't think it will likely happen in 2023, but in the next 5-10 years, yes. And this blistering progress will become obvious soon

    Do you think the owner of that Twitter handle is an expert in the relevant field?

    https://twitter.com/jeremymstamper
    Hmm, his understanding of an IQ score is idiosyncratic as outlined in the bit that goes at the top, and confirmed here:

    https://twitter.com/jeremymstamper/status/1482825966615285761?cxt=HHwWgsCivYeXh5QpAAAA

    Unless they have changed a lot since my time?
    That was so brain-dead that I discounted it as being a joke.

    But since Leon likes the account, perhaps Mr Stamper actually believes it... ;)
    I wondered about it being a joke, but if you want to persuade people of your expertise, do you claim to be slightly below average in intelligence?
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 32,557
    France 1.25
    Australia 14.5
    Draw 7.2

    https://www.betfair.com/exchange/plus/en/football/fifa-world-cup/france-v-australia-betting-31526357

    Not sure if there are any value bets on this match.
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 42,592

    Leon said:

    The fact everyone is talking about immigration without referencing the imminent arrival of AGI (or something close to it) points to the fatuity of our discourse. It's like arguing about the permissible speed of horses on London roads in 1890

    In a few years computers will be able to do almost any human task, and do it much better and much cheaper. So big workforces will not be needed, nor will immigrants, skilled or otherwise. The problem then will be what to do with all the idle, purposeless people

    Please - what does AGI stand for? Genuine question.
    Artificial General Intelligence - a massive step-up from the dumb ML/AI programs we use atm.

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

    Basically Leon's been fapping himself off over Twitter feeds again.
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 42,592
    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    "Prediction: AGI will happen before 2024. Hold me to this."

    https://twitter.com/jeremymstamper/status/1591534202537017344?s=20&t=NpiWhiYzKLFHg9CysmKE4Q


    IF this comes true, you guys owe me a drink. I said on here - when GPT3 was unleashed - that we are much closer to AGI than most people realise, and I was roundly derided

    FWIW I don't think it will likely happen in 2023, but in the next 5-10 years, yes. And this blistering progress will become obvious soon

    Do you think the owner of that Twitter handle is an expert in the relevant field?

    https://twitter.com/jeremymstamper
    Hmm, his understanding of an IQ score is idiosyncratic as outlined in the bit that goes at the top, and confirmed here:

    https://twitter.com/jeremymstamper/status/1482825966615285761?cxt=HHwWgsCivYeXh5QpAAAA

    Unless they have changed a lot since my time?
    That was so brain-dead that I discounted it as being a joke.

    But since Leon likes the account, perhaps Mr Stamper actually believes it... ;)
    I wondered about it being a joke, but if you want to persuade people of your expertise, do you claim to be slightly below average in intelligence?
    He might be an expert in the field, but there's nothing in his twitter feed that shows that - and a worrying amount of Musk-love as well...
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,339
    DJ41 said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    "Prediction: AGI will happen before 2024. Hold me to this."

    https://twitter.com/jeremymstamper/status/1591534202537017344?s=20&t=NpiWhiYzKLFHg9CysmKE4Q


    IF this comes true, you guys owe me a drink. I said on here - when GPT3 was unleashed - that we are much closer to AGI than most people realise, and I was roundly derided

    FWIW I don't think it will likely happen in 2023, but in the next 5-10 years, yes. And this blistering progress will become obvious soon

    Do you think the owner of that Twitter handle is an expert in the relevant field?

    https://twitter.com/jeremymstamper
    Hmm, his understanding of an IQ score is idiosyncratic as outlined in the bit that goes at the top, and confirmed here:

    https://twitter.com/jeremymstamper/status/1482825966615285761?cxt=HHwWgsCivYeXh5QpAAAA

    Unless they have changed a lot since my time?
    That tweet is seriously embarrassing. His wife or someone should tell him.
    Er, it's obviously a joke. Quite a good joke

    You didn't get it, tho
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 32,557

    Are we expecting power cuts tonight?

    🚨BREAKING: Homes may suffer power issues this evening after the National Grid issued a warning on its capacity.

    Follow the latest on our live blog⬇️
    telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/…

    Seems.. worryingly early when it’s not massively cold

    The problem is probably that wind is only generating around 7% atm. And we've closed most of our coal-fired power stations.

    https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 42,159
    Leon said:

    The fact everyone is talking about immigration without referencing the imminent arrival of AGI (or something close to it) points to the fatuity of our discourse. It's like arguing about the permissible speed of horses on London roads in 1890

    In a few years computers will be able to do almost any human task, and do it much better and much cheaper. So big workforces will not be needed, nor will immigrants, skilled or otherwise. The problem then will be what to do with all the idle, purposeless people

    It is a challenge. Does Ron DeSantis have any sort of solution?
  • turbotubbsturbotubbs Posts: 17,405
    Carnyx said:

    DJ41 said:

    DJ41 said:

    Leon said:

    Oh no, what I have I done.....I have set Leon off on GPT-3000 taking over the world stories.

    Yep, and thanks

    Honestly tho there are some sober people on Twitter talking crazy talk about GPT4

    “I heard GPT4 is so good, it’s much better than me writing my own tweets and/or comments.

    Maybe we should just let Generative AI take over and go back and forth with itself, while we watch from a distance with our non-$8/month accounts. No developers needed at Twitter either.”

    https://twitter.com/bznotes/status/1588204059588108294?s=21&t=s02vR9oi70tYnKm4_blMyA
    Has anybody written any state-of-the-art computer programs that are useful to humanity recently?

    Thought not.
    Erhhh minor things like solving protein folding......

    The ability to accurately predict protein structures from their amino-acid sequence would be a huge boon to life sciences and medicine. It would vastly accelerate efforts to understand the building blocks of cells and enable quicker and more advanced drug discovery.

    https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03348-4


    or the AI that search the libraries of all known drugs to suggest a short list of ones that should be trialled for use against diseases...

    Or even finding speeds up in matrix multiplications given that huge amounts of technology relies on that...
    Ones that can develop pharmaceuticals faster and multiply matrices faster so that "technology" (meaning presumably other programs and machines) can run faster. But what about useful to humanity? Results that have actually occurred and which almost everyone agrees have been useful to humanity. Is there anything in that category?
    Wow. Just wow. Those examples ARE useful to humanity. When I started in research in the 90’s a protein structure could take 6 months to solve, even assuming a crystal could be grown that would diffract X-rays. Now a computer can just take the sequence and get to the three dimensional folding. This is as revolutionary as resolving the structure of DNA. Most drug targets are proteins, most don’t ever crystallise so this tool alone will provide the opportunity for new treatments for existing diseases and novel ones. I fear for your education if you cannot appreciate that.
    It is most impressive.

    I remember when I was a student in the mid-1970s, seeing the crude protein molecule models of an even earlier generation, made out of expanded plastic or layers of perspex with tracings on them, after years of work. A freind was a research student and he said that the bearded males had a fairly noticeably higher success rate in persuading the protein to crystallise in the first place - put down to little bits of dinner, skin, etc. falling out of the beard and acting as nuclei for crystallisation.
    There are several bits of science folklore about crystallisation. One is the chemists beard, but the variant I know concerns why a new molecule, after being crystallised once somewhere in the world, is then easy to crystallise everywhere. It’s because of tiny traces of that sample get spread around the world in the afore mentioned chemists beard and act as nuclei. Almost certainly utter rubbish.
    One of the others is that crystallisation (e.g. single crystals for X-ray) needs to be slow and takes weeks or months. Not always so - Inhave one paper with three crystal structures, all from crystals grown by cooling a solution from around 80 deg C to room temp, over about 30 mins.
    It is also true that some people are better at getting crystals than others, but I often think it’s just doing the right things. Me, hugely excited by science, all the time keeps going back and checking for crystals, thus disturbing the system. Other, less excited people set them aside and go back a week later and hey presto…
    Crystals are great.
  • Andy_JS said:

    France 1.25
    Australia 14.5
    Draw 7.2

    https://www.betfair.com/exchange/plus/en/football/fifa-world-cup/france-v-australia-betting-31526357

    Not sure if there are any value bets on this match.

    Looking to repeat my coup of last night. Surely the disparity between the teams should reflect a squillion goals being scored, or at least over 2.5 goals at 1.69 should be value? 2.72 for over 3.5.
  • BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 34,664
    Leon said:

    The fact everyone is talking about immigration without referencing the imminent arrival of AGI (or something close to it) points to the fatuity of our discourse. It's like arguing about the permissible speed of horses on London roads in 1890

    In a few years computers will be able to do almost any human task, and do it much better and much cheaper. So big workforces will not be needed, nor will immigrants, skilled or otherwise. The problem then will be what to do with all the idle, purposeless people

    You're totally deluded pal.

    Computers are not going to be able to wipe someone's arse and put them to bed anytime soon, so that's all the care jobs still needing people. Computers are not going to be able to teach and keep a class of kids under control, so that's school jobs excluded. Computers are not going to be able to fix the roads, install broadband, build houses, conduct scientific research, make films, write travel reviews or knapp flint dildos for that matter.

    Not. In. Your. Lifetime.
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 52,568

    Monkeys said:

    Driver said:

    murali_s said:

    Nothing has changed.

    Brexit is a fucking calamity and Brexiteers are morons!

    I believe quite a few here voted for this madness!

    Well, one thing has changed: we're no longer in the EU, so eurozealots like you now have to win a Rejoin argument. Which, given that you were so shit you couldn't even win a Remain argument, has clearly driven you insanse.
    The Remain argument was somewhat hampered by Corbyn's Labour opposition providing so little leadership on the defining issue of the last decade that they were practically invisible. Any Rejoin argument would have some kind of actual leadership from the left. For this reason gravitating back towards closer EU status is inevitable surely?
    Brexit is dying on its arse.

    I put the pivot point as the resignation of Frost (December 21). At that point, mere ideological stagnation tipped into ideological entropy.

    Brexiters who care about Brexit need to put some energy into thinking about how it might work. The clear trajectory now is for it to be salami-sliced into meaninglessness and ultimately jettisoned, probably around 2030.


    Brexit can't "die on its arse".

    It has already been and gone. The UK has already left the European Union.

    Remain "died on its arse".

    Rejoin WILL "die on its arse".

    You are very old and are part of a dwindling cohort. The times they are a-changing.
    Very old? How dare you! I have months left in me yet.

    I plan to live long enough to see the end of rejoin at least.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 42,840

    Leon said:

    The fact everyone is talking about immigration without referencing the imminent arrival of AGI (or something close to it) points to the fatuity of our discourse. It's like arguing about the permissible speed of horses on London roads in 1890

    In a few years computers will be able to do almost any human task, and do it much better and much cheaper. So big workforces will not be needed, nor will immigrants, skilled or otherwise. The problem then will be what to do with all the idle, purposeless people

    You're totally deluded pal.

    Computers are not going to be able to wipe someone's arse and put them to bed anytime soon, so that's all the care jobs still needing people. Computers are not going to be able to teach and keep a class of kids under control, so that's school jobs excluded. Computers are not going to be able to fix the roads, install broadband, build houses, conduct scientific research, make films, write travel reviews or knapp flint dildos for that matter.

    Not. In. Your. Lifetime.
    But aliens can, depending on their tentacles, manipulators, etc. etc. (and respiratory needs, of course).
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 32,557
    pillsbury said:

    Andy_JS said:

    France 1.25
    Australia 14.5
    Draw 7.2

    https://www.betfair.com/exchange/plus/en/football/fifa-world-cup/france-v-australia-betting-31526357

    Not sure if there are any value bets on this match.

    Looking to repeat my coup of last night. Surely the disparity between the teams should reflect a squillion goals being scored, or at least over 2.5 goals at 1.69 should be value? 2.72 for over 3.5.
    Not sure. Incidentally, yesterday I turned £10 into £107 with 3 bets on the world cup matches, and lost it all today on the Argentina match.
  • Andy_JS said:

    Are we expecting power cuts tonight?

    🚨BREAKING: Homes may suffer power issues this evening after the National Grid issued a warning on its capacity.

    Follow the latest on our live blog⬇️
    telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/…

    Seems.. worryingly early when it’s not massively cold

    The problem is probably that wind is only generating around 7% atm. And we've closed most of our coal-fired power stations.

    https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk
    Octopus may pay me something for switching off lights and not making tea between 5:30pm and 6:30pm, we shall see if I've done enough to qualify.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 71,073
    edited November 2022
    This is magnificent.

    Martin Scorsese's Goncharov (1973) Is the Greatest Mafia Movie Never Made
    https://gizmodo.com/scorsese-goncharov-1973-tumblr-explained-mafia-movie-1849812229
    … With complete sincerity, Goncharov (1973) is (if you hadn’t guessed already) an entirely made-up movie. What has happened on Tumblr over the course of only a few days is nothing less than an exquisite corpse of collective unreality, all kicked off by a fake movie poster made by Tumblr user Beelzeebub, based on a photo of a knockoff merchandising boot. Beelzeebub, a full-time artist living in the Czech Republic, spoke to io9 on the phone last night, saying that the response was “wonderful, but very overwhelming.”…
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 42,159
    pillsbury said:

    Andy_JS said:

    France 1.25
    Australia 14.5
    Draw 7.2

    https://www.betfair.com/exchange/plus/en/football/fifa-world-cup/france-v-australia-betting-31526357

    Not sure if there are any value bets on this match.

    Looking to repeat my coup of last night. Surely the disparity between the teams should reflect a squillion goals being scored, or at least over 2.5 goals at 1.69 should be value? 2.72 for over 3.5.
    Also hardly any goals today so loads stored up and bubbling under.

    I'm so rational it hurts yet still a part of me thinks like this.

    I am not a robot!
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 29,406
    Foxy said:

    Cookie said:

    Foxy said:

    While you are arguing over comparative national economies, it strikes me that "per family", or even "per household", is, in many ways, a better measure of well being than "per capita".

    For example, suppose there are two workers in the US, each earning 15 dollars an hour, which is the minimum wage in some places in the US. Assuming 40 hour weeks and 50 weeks of work a year, each will earn a gross of 30,000 dollars a year. But their costs will be lower if they live together, than if they live separately.

    (I don't know how much lower, but I recall seeing a rule-of-thumb that a second person in a household added about 60 percent to the costs.)

    I don't know whether such statistics are available for all the G-20 nations, and if they are available how good they are. But that's what I would look for, were I doing these international comparisons.

    Yes, I think this matters a lot in family finances.

    The rise of single adult households as a percentage also puts a lot of pressure on housing stock, similar or more than immigration.
    But consider two families of four - two adults, two young children. Both have a family income, after tax, of £60k. But in one family this is earned jointly by both parents; in the other, one parent earns all of it and the other parent stays at home and looks after the kids. The latter family will be far better off, because the latter family won't be paying out £12k a year in childcare.
    Time spent not working has a value.
    Indeed, but it is more complex. If one adult is earning £60k then they are paying higher band tax, and will be affected by the Child benefit charge.

    If the full time hours do not overlap (like Mrs Foxy and myself for some years) then it is possible to have more income with two earners of £30k.

    Leon said:

    The fact everyone is talking about immigration without referencing the imminent arrival of AGI (or something close to it) points to the fatuity of our discourse. It's like arguing about the permissible speed of horses on London roads in 1890

    In a few years computers will be able to do almost any human task, and do it much better and much cheaper. So big workforces will not be needed, nor will immigrants, skilled or otherwise. The problem then will be what to do with all the idle, purposeless people

    You're totally deluded pal.

    Computers are not going to be able to wipe someone's arse and put them to bed anytime soon, so that's all the care jobs still needing people. Computers are not going to be able to teach and keep a class of kids under control, so that's school jobs excluded. Computers are not going to be able to fix the roads, install broadband, build houses, conduct scientific research, make films, write travel reviews or knapp flint dildos for that matter.

    Not. In. Your. Lifetime.
    Increasingly, being able to teach or keep a class under control is a bit of a bonus for school jobs, mind.
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 29,406
    Andy_JS said:

    pillsbury said:

    Andy_JS said:

    France 1.25
    Australia 14.5
    Draw 7.2

    https://www.betfair.com/exchange/plus/en/football/fifa-world-cup/france-v-australia-betting-31526357

    Not sure if there are any value bets on this match.

    Looking to repeat my coup of last night. Surely the disparity between the teams should reflect a squillion goals being scored, or at least over 2.5 goals at 1.69 should be value? 2.72 for over 3.5.
    Not sure. Incidentally, yesterday I turned £10 into £107 with 3 bets on the world cup matches, and lost it all today on the Argentina match.
    It's a game of two halves.
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 32,557
    edited November 2022
    "Gareth Roberts
    How did contemporary culture become so dismal?" (£)

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-did-contemporary-culture-become-so-dismal/
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,339

    Leon said:

    The fact everyone is talking about immigration without referencing the imminent arrival of AGI (or something close to it) points to the fatuity of our discourse. It's like arguing about the permissible speed of horses on London roads in 1890

    In a few years computers will be able to do almost any human task, and do it much better and much cheaper. So big workforces will not be needed, nor will immigrants, skilled or otherwise. The problem then will be what to do with all the idle, purposeless people

    You're totally deluded pal.

    Computers are not going to be able to wipe someone's arse and put them to bed anytime soon, so that's all the care jobs still needing people. Computers are not going to be able to teach and keep a class of kids under control, so that's school jobs excluded. Computers are not going to be able to fix the roads, install broadband, build houses, conduct scientific research, make films, write travel reviews or knapp flint dildos for that matter.

    Not. In. Your. Lifetime.
    Think harder. You might be able to grasp this if you work at it

    Yes, the low level relatively unskilled tasks that require human physical interaction - social care, nurses, PE teaching, strippers. hookers, vicars, maybe even builders - they will be reprieved, for a while

    But all the others? Definitely threatened if not certainly doomed

    Robots can teach - put the AI's face on a screen, get a deepfake of the world's best teacher, with a mind like GPT4, wow

    They will obviously take over scientific research, see this very thread. They will take over because they will be much much better at it

    They will also take over the arts. They will make many of the films, write most of the books, and knap the dildos. Because the art will be better, cheaper, cleverer

  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 29,406
    Incidentally. I see 14.5 Australia as stonking value. A probable value loser, but the performances of all the European teams has been disappointing so far. Except one.
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 42,592

    Carnyx said:

    DJ41 said:

    DJ41 said:

    Leon said:

    Oh no, what I have I done.....I have set Leon off on GPT-3000 taking over the world stories.

    Yep, and thanks

    Honestly tho there are some sober people on Twitter talking crazy talk about GPT4

    “I heard GPT4 is so good, it’s much better than me writing my own tweets and/or comments.

    Maybe we should just let Generative AI take over and go back and forth with itself, while we watch from a distance with our non-$8/month accounts. No developers needed at Twitter either.”

    https://twitter.com/bznotes/status/1588204059588108294?s=21&t=s02vR9oi70tYnKm4_blMyA
    Has anybody written any state-of-the-art computer programs that are useful to humanity recently?

    Thought not.
    Erhhh minor things like solving protein folding......

    The ability to accurately predict protein structures from their amino-acid sequence would be a huge boon to life sciences and medicine. It would vastly accelerate efforts to understand the building blocks of cells and enable quicker and more advanced drug discovery.

    https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03348-4


    or the AI that search the libraries of all known drugs to suggest a short list of ones that should be trialled for use against diseases...

    Or even finding speeds up in matrix multiplications given that huge amounts of technology relies on that...
    Ones that can develop pharmaceuticals faster and multiply matrices faster so that "technology" (meaning presumably other programs and machines) can run faster. But what about useful to humanity? Results that have actually occurred and which almost everyone agrees have been useful to humanity. Is there anything in that category?
    Wow. Just wow. Those examples ARE useful to humanity. When I started in research in the 90’s a protein structure could take 6 months to solve, even assuming a crystal could be grown that would diffract X-rays. Now a computer can just take the sequence and get to the three dimensional folding. This is as revolutionary as resolving the structure of DNA. Most drug targets are proteins, most don’t ever crystallise so this tool alone will provide the opportunity for new treatments for existing diseases and novel ones. I fear for your education if you cannot appreciate that.
    It is most impressive.

    I remember when I was a student in the mid-1970s, seeing the crude protein molecule models of an even earlier generation, made out of expanded plastic or layers of perspex with tracings on them, after years of work. A freind was a research student and he said that the bearded males had a fairly noticeably higher success rate in persuading the protein to crystallise in the first place - put down to little bits of dinner, skin, etc. falling out of the beard and acting as nuclei for crystallisation.
    There are several bits of science folklore about crystallisation. One is the chemists beard, but the variant I know concerns why a new molecule, after being crystallised once somewhere in the world, is then easy to crystallise everywhere. It’s because of tiny traces of that sample get spread around the world in the afore mentioned chemists beard and act as nuclei. Almost certainly utter rubbish.
    One of the others is that crystallisation (e.g. single crystals for X-ray) needs to be slow and takes weeks or months. Not always so - Inhave one paper with three crystal structures, all from crystals grown by cooling a solution from around 80 deg C to room temp, over about 30 mins.
    It is also true that some people are better at getting crystals than others, but I often think it’s just doing the right things. Me, hugely excited by science, all the time keeps going back and checking for crystals, thus disturbing the system. Other, less excited people set them aside and go back a week later and hey presto…
    Crystals are great.
    Crystals are an area of science I know f-all about beyond GCSE level, but is fascinating. One commonly-known titbit is that the turbine blades in Rolls Royce jet engines are a single crystal. That's effing amazing.

    In fact, it's one of the many areas of science that I just throw into the "magic" category and try not to bother my little brain with.
  • Monkeys said:

    Driver said:

    murali_s said:

    Nothing has changed.

    Brexit is a fucking calamity and Brexiteers are morons!

    I believe quite a few here voted for this madness!

    Well, one thing has changed: we're no longer in the EU, so eurozealots like you now have to win a Rejoin argument. Which, given that you were so shit you couldn't even win a Remain argument, has clearly driven you insanse.
    The Remain argument was somewhat hampered by Corbyn's Labour opposition providing so little leadership on the defining issue of the last decade that they were practically invisible. Any Rejoin argument would have some kind of actual leadership from the left. For this reason gravitating back towards closer EU status is inevitable surely?
    Brexit is dying on its arse.

    I put the pivot point as the resignation of Frost (December 21). At that point, mere ideological stagnation tipped into ideological entropy.

    Brexiters who care about Brexit need to put some energy into thinking about how it might work. The clear trajectory now is for it to be salami-sliced into meaninglessness and ultimately jettisoned, probably around 2030.


    Brexit can't "die on its arse".

    It has already been and gone. The UK has already left the European Union.

    Remain "died on its arse".

    Rejoin WILL "die on its arse".

    You are very old and are part of a dwindling cohort. The times they are a-changing.
    Very old? How dare you! I have months left in me yet.

    I plan to live long enough to see the end of rejoin at least.
    That's unlikely. As long as there is an EU on our doorstep, there will always be a rejoin dream held by some. Maybe not many, but enough to keep a flame going.

    Besides, Brexit might really be an ugly ornament gifted by a relative. You can know it's going down the charity shop/landfill, but not yet. No reason to cause more upset than necessary.
  • dixiedean said:

    Incidentally. I see 14.5 Australia as stonking value. A probable value loser, but the performances of all the European teams has been disappointing so far. Except one.

    Cheering for Australia, feels dirty, but has to be done.
  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 38,829
    We really missed the opportunity to ditch the current national anthem for English sport.

    Jerusalem or I Vow To Thee My Country would be much more rousing than the current anthem which could be reserved for the Olympics and other national events where the four nations are present.
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 29,406
    As is 7.2 the draw tbh.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 71,073
    Andy_JS said:

    "Gareth Roberts
    How did contemporary culture become so dismal?" (£)

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-did-contemporary-culture-become-so-dismal/

    It didn’t.
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 28,437

    Are we expecting power cuts tonight?

    🚨BREAKING: Homes may suffer power issues this evening after the National Grid issued a warning on its capacity.

    Follow the latest on our live blog⬇️
    telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/…

    Seems.. worryingly early when it’s not massively cold

    But haven't we got all those solar farms to draw on?
    If only there were a limitless source of renewable energy that could deliver itself to turbines twice a day...

    With planning and construction times and costs a fraction of nuclear.

    Yet the first PMQs had Rishi banging about his support for nuclear. With Hunt's budget giving Sizewell C the go ahead.

    Somebody should be sandpapering the Govt's bollocks over how it has blocked tidal.

    And asking probing questions on just why they are SO keen on nuclear.
    Mark. Just bribe people. Or blackmail. It's the only language they understand. Something being 'a good idea so why don't we do it' went out with Disraeli.
  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 38,829
    Nigelb said:

    Andy_JS said:

    "Gareth Roberts
    How did contemporary culture become so dismal?" (£)

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-did-contemporary-culture-become-so-dismal/

    It didn’t.
    It has, contemporary culture is extremely dull with not enough risk taking by people or companies.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 71,073

    Monkeys said:

    Driver said:

    murali_s said:

    Nothing has changed.

    Brexit is a fucking calamity and Brexiteers are morons!

    I believe quite a few here voted for this madness!

    Well, one thing has changed: we're no longer in the EU, so eurozealots like you now have to win a Rejoin argument. Which, given that you were so shit you couldn't even win a Remain argument, has clearly driven you insanse.
    The Remain argument was somewhat hampered by Corbyn's Labour opposition providing so little leadership on the defining issue of the last decade that they were practically invisible. Any Rejoin argument would have some kind of actual leadership from the left. For this reason gravitating back towards closer EU status is inevitable surely?
    Brexit is dying on its arse.

    I put the pivot point as the resignation of Frost (December 21). At that point, mere ideological stagnation tipped into ideological entropy.

    Brexiters who care about Brexit need to put some energy into thinking about how it might work. The clear trajectory now is for it to be salami-sliced into meaninglessness and ultimately jettisoned, probably around 2030.


    Brexit can't "die on its arse".

    It has already been and gone. The UK has already left the European Union.

    Remain "died on its arse".

    Rejoin WILL "die on its arse".

    You are very old and are part of a dwindling cohort. The times they are a-changing.
    Very old? How dare you! I have months left in me yet.

    I plan to live long enough to see the end of rejoin at least.
    As it only ends with our rejoining, you might have to become very old indeed.
  • moonshinemoonshine Posts: 5,748
    MaxPB said:

    We really missed the opportunity to ditch the current national anthem for English sport.

    Jerusalem or I Vow To Thee My Country would be much more rousing than the current anthem which could be reserved for the Olympics and other national events where the four nations are present.

    Vindaloo
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,339
    England are now second favourites for the WC - 15/2

    Possibly a little value in somehow betting against this. It is driven by sentiment
  • EPGEPG Posts: 6,652
    MaxPB said:

    Nigelb said:

    Andy_JS said:

    "Gareth Roberts
    How did contemporary culture become so dismal?" (£)

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-did-contemporary-culture-become-so-dismal/

    It didn’t.
    It has, contemporary culture is extremely dull with not enough risk taking by people or companies.
    Are the people writing these articles avid TikTokkers because if not they are just writing about getting old. Like hanging out in the old man bar and wondering why everyone is old.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 42,159
    dixiedean said:

    Incidentally. I see 14.5 Australia as stonking value. A probable value loser, but the performances of all the European teams has been disappointing so far. Except one.

    We were terrific, weren't we? Just a nagging feeling about "too good too soon" but other than that, zero complaints.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 57,160

    The beautiful one has been given his P45 by Man Utd.

    He'll be off to LA Galaxy, then.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 57,160
    Holy shit.

    Great Oz goal.
  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 38,829
    Lol.
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 28,437

    Monkeys said:

    Driver said:

    murali_s said:

    Nothing has changed.

    Brexit is a fucking calamity and Brexiteers are morons!

    I believe quite a few here voted for this madness!

    Well, one thing has changed: we're no longer in the EU, so eurozealots like you now have to win a Rejoin argument. Which, given that you were so shit you couldn't even win a Remain argument, has clearly driven you insanse.
    The Remain argument was somewhat hampered by Corbyn's Labour opposition providing so little leadership on the defining issue of the last decade that they were practically invisible. Any Rejoin argument would have some kind of actual leadership from the left. For this reason gravitating back towards closer EU status is inevitable surely?
    Brexit is dying on its arse.

    I put the pivot point as the resignation of Frost (December 21). At that point, mere ideological stagnation tipped into ideological entropy.

    Brexiters who care about Brexit need to put some energy into thinking about how it might work. The clear trajectory now is for it to be salami-sliced into meaninglessness and ultimately jettisoned, probably around 2030.


    Brexit can't "die on its arse".

    It has already been and gone. The UK has already left the European Union.

    Remain "died on its arse".

    Rejoin WILL "die on its arse".

    You are very old and are part of a dwindling cohort. The times they are a-changing.
    Very old? How dare you! I have months left in me yet.

    I plan to live long enough to see the end of rejoin at least.
    That's unlikely. As long as there is an EU on our doorstep, there will always be a rejoin dream held by some. Maybe not many, but enough to keep a flame going.

    Besides, Brexit might really be an ugly ornament gifted by a relative. You can know it's going down the charity shop/landfill, but not yet. No reason to cause more upset than necessary.
    Time is against it. The longer we're out, the more trade friction gets sorted out, the more we diverge in laws and practises, the more we enter into agreements with other countries, the more we engage with new markets, the more practical issues there are with rejoining. The same goes for being inside the EU. When we left, the EU was (and still is) deeply and some would say intractably tangled with our governance. We probably left at the last moment that it would even have been possible. Huzzah!
  • pillsbury said:

    kle4 said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Rishi Sunak faces a rebellion on planning reform - but will the govt try to delay the vote? https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-22/sunak-faces-first-tory-rebellion-over-uk-housebuilding-targets

    Rebels expecting votes on the Villiers amendments on Monday but rumours around the vote may be pulled …?

    What is the Villiers amendment?

    Feels like they've not really acehived anything since ditching Boris's attempt at reforms which got Jenrick sacked.
    Best explanation of it - https://twitter.com/rcolvile/status/1594243295638482945?s=46&t=ulZnK8gXpBM2m2fmzXVNeg
    "On Wednesday the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill returns to the House of Commons. It contains a set of amendments proposed by Theresa Villiers, a former environment secretary, with the support of Iain Duncan Smith, Chris Grayling, Damian Green, John Redwood, Tracey Crouch, Alicia Kearns and others. The effect will be to eviscerate the planning system as we know it by making all housing targets set by Whitehall purely advisory and removing the existing presumption in favour of development — in other words, scrapping the two core policies that tell councils they have to build, and punish them for not doing so."
    Contemptible. If that goes through, the Tories deserve a landslide defeat.
  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 38,829
    rcs1000 said:

    The beautiful one has been given his P45 by Man Utd.

    He'll be off to LA Galaxy, then.
    PSG.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 42,159
    rcs1000 said:

    Holy shit.

    Great Oz goal.

    Kit like Brazil, playing like Brazil!
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 57,160
    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    The beautiful one has been given his P45 by Man Utd.

    He'll be off to LA Galaxy, then.
    PSG.
    The rumour here in the US is that he's going to be yet another ageing star going to Carson to play out his final years at ever diminishing levels of fitness for a big paycheck.
  • Leon said:

    Leon said:

    The fact everyone is talking about immigration without referencing the imminent arrival of AGI (or something close to it) points to the fatuity of our discourse. It's like arguing about the permissible speed of horses on London roads in 1890

    In a few years computers will be able to do almost any human task, and do it much better and much cheaper. So big workforces will not be needed, nor will immigrants, skilled or otherwise. The problem then will be what to do with all the idle, purposeless people

    You're totally deluded pal.

    Computers are not going to be able to wipe someone's arse and put them to bed anytime soon, so that's all the care jobs still needing people. Computers are not going to be able to teach and keep a class of kids under control, so that's school jobs excluded. Computers are not going to be able to fix the roads, install broadband, build houses, conduct scientific research, make films, write travel reviews or knapp flint dildos for that matter.

    Not. In. Your. Lifetime.
    Think harder. You might be able to grasp this if you work at it

    Yes, the low level relatively unskilled tasks that require human physical interaction - social care, nurses, PE teaching, strippers. hookers, vicars, maybe even builders - they will be reprieved, for a while

    But all the others? Definitely threatened if not certainly doomed

    Robots can teach - put the AI's face on a screen, get a deepfake of the world's best teacher, with a mind like GPT4, wow

    They will obviously take over scientific research, see this very thread. They will take over because they will be much much better at it

    They will also take over the arts. They will make many of the films, write most of the books, and knap the dildos. Because the art will be better, cheaper, cleverer

    Yes and no.

    Humans selling the fruit of their minds to make a living is going to be totally undercut by increasing computer power. And we could well be near a tipping point there.

    But humans don't just do stuff for that reason; there's also a human urge to create, even if it's wobbly, inefficient, effortful and not very good. Otherwise, nobody would bake a cake at home.

    Or consider this site. People don't comment for money, so much as to draw a straight line through the mess because it satisfies the human psyche. That won't change.
  • BartholomewRobertsBartholomewRoberts Posts: 21,994
    edited November 2022

    Monkeys said:

    Driver said:

    murali_s said:

    Nothing has changed.

    Brexit is a fucking calamity and Brexiteers are morons!

    I believe quite a few here voted for this madness!

    Well, one thing has changed: we're no longer in the EU, so eurozealots like you now have to win a Rejoin argument. Which, given that you were so shit you couldn't even win a Remain argument, has clearly driven you insanse.
    The Remain argument was somewhat hampered by Corbyn's Labour opposition providing so little leadership on the defining issue of the last decade that they were practically invisible. Any Rejoin argument would have some kind of actual leadership from the left. For this reason gravitating back towards closer EU status is inevitable surely?
    Brexit is dying on its arse.

    I put the pivot point as the resignation of Frost (December 21). At that point, mere ideological stagnation tipped into ideological entropy.

    Brexiters who care about Brexit need to put some energy into thinking about how it might work. The clear trajectory now is for it to be salami-sliced into meaninglessness and ultimately jettisoned, probably around 2030.


    Brexit can't "die on its arse".

    It has already been and gone. The UK has already left the European Union.

    Remain "died on its arse".

    Rejoin WILL "die on its arse".

    You are very old and are part of a dwindling cohort. The times they are a-changing.
    Very old? How dare you! I have months left in me yet.

    I plan to live long enough to see the end of rejoin at least.
    That's unlikely. As long as there is an EU on our doorstep, there will always be a rejoin dream held by some. Maybe not many, but enough to keep a flame going.

    Besides, Brexit might really be an ugly ornament gifted by a relative. You can know it's going down the charity shop/landfill, but not yet. No reason to cause more upset than necessary.
    Overtime the notion of rejoin would be eccentric and odd. Like the idea of NZ joining Aus, or Canada the USA.

    Once upon a time people thought Canada joining the US on its doorstep was inevitable. Inertia is a powerful force.
  • I think I'm coming round to @Sean_F question on the YouGov sub-samples.

    Those numbers declaring Britain is a racist country are astonishingly high, even for pensioners.

    I'd expect more like 10-15% agreeing as opposed to 30%.

    The young numbers I take with more of a pinch of salt as they have a very wide definition of it in that generation.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 42,159

    Monkeys said:

    Driver said:

    murali_s said:

    Nothing has changed.

    Brexit is a fucking calamity and Brexiteers are morons!

    I believe quite a few here voted for this madness!

    Well, one thing has changed: we're no longer in the EU, so eurozealots like you now have to win a Rejoin argument. Which, given that you were so shit you couldn't even win a Remain argument, has clearly driven you insanse.
    The Remain argument was somewhat hampered by Corbyn's Labour opposition providing so little leadership on the defining issue of the last decade that they were practically invisible. Any Rejoin argument would have some kind of actual leadership from the left. For this reason gravitating back towards closer EU status is inevitable surely?
    Brexit is dying on its arse.

    I put the pivot point as the resignation of Frost (December 21). At that point, mere ideological stagnation tipped into ideological entropy.

    Brexiters who care about Brexit need to put some energy into thinking about how it might work. The clear trajectory now is for it to be salami-sliced into meaninglessness and ultimately jettisoned, probably around 2030.


    Brexit can't "die on its arse".

    It has already been and gone. The UK has already left the European Union.

    Remain "died on its arse".

    Rejoin WILL "die on its arse".

    You are very old and are part of a dwindling cohort. The times they are a-changing.
    Very old? How dare you! I have months left in me yet.

    I plan to live long enough to see the end of rejoin at least.
    That's unlikely. As long as there is an EU on our doorstep, there will always be a rejoin dream held by some. Maybe not many, but enough to keep a flame going.

    Besides, Brexit might really be an ugly ornament gifted by a relative. You can know it's going down the charity shop/landfill, but not yet. No reason to cause more upset than necessary.
    A half decent Brexit analogy! - rarer than a PB Leaver acknowledging Nigel Farage as a driving force of the project.
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 28,437

    pillsbury said:

    kle4 said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Rishi Sunak faces a rebellion on planning reform - but will the govt try to delay the vote? https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-22/sunak-faces-first-tory-rebellion-over-uk-housebuilding-targets

    Rebels expecting votes on the Villiers amendments on Monday but rumours around the vote may be pulled …?

    What is the Villiers amendment?

    Feels like they've not really acehived anything since ditching Boris's attempt at reforms which got Jenrick sacked.
    Best explanation of it - https://twitter.com/rcolvile/status/1594243295638482945?s=46&t=ulZnK8gXpBM2m2fmzXVNeg
    "On Wednesday the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill returns to the House of Commons. It contains a set of amendments proposed by Theresa Villiers, a former environment secretary, with the support of Iain Duncan Smith, Chris Grayling, Damian Green, John Redwood, Tracey Crouch, Alicia Kearns and others. The effect will be to eviscerate the planning system as we know it by making all housing targets set by Whitehall purely advisory and removing the existing presumption in favour of development — in other words, scrapping the two core policies that tell councils they have to build, and punish them for not doing so."
    Contemptible. If that goes through, the Tories deserve a landslide defeat.
    Apart from council housing, it isn't in the gift of councils to build more. As we know, developers are sitting on land (and their money) to keep prices high. Allowing councils to levy charges on plots with planning permission would be a good way to generate income for cash-strapoed councils, and encourage developers to build.
  • RobDRobD Posts: 59,930
    MaxPB said:

    Lol.

    Never mind GSTK, I’m singing God Save Your King.
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 28,437

    I think I'm coming round to @Sean_F question on the YouGov sub-samples.

    Those numbers declaring Britain is a racist country are astonishingly high, even for pensioners.

    I'd expect more like 10-15% agreeing as opposed to 30%.

    The young numbers I take with more of a pinch of salt as they have a very wide definition of it in that generation.

    Younger people are generally stupider. I think it's dietary.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 57,160

    New, Improved Thread

This discussion has been closed.