Rachel Reeves looks jolly impressive, certainly a future leader.
Starmer’s not so secret weapon.
The Tories, if they are serious about doing politics properly, need to focus some attacks on her, hollow her out a bit.
What has she said and voted for in the past? What mistakes and u turns made? Any skeletons in closet? ‘Doesn’t she always look so nervous all the time and not made of the right stuff”
Jonny Reynolds is the most impressive of the more obscure front benchers. Eminently sensible.
Fpt for @OnlyLivingBoy who was, in quite a vile fashion, decrying my prognosticatory abilities
I predicted on this site the 2014 post indyref surge to the nats when most PBers reckoned they were finished. True story
Frankly, I should be charging you all for these insights. I may ask OGH to institute some form of payment system where my comments are invisible unless you cough up folding money
And your predictions are certainly worth the real world monetary value of each and every folding note in a charity shop Monopoly set.
I’m just warning you, Guardian style, that I am about to go behind a special PB paywall, and only selected PB-ers will be able to read my remarks - for a weekly subscription. A bit like ChatGPT2
Have we seen Sydney the chatbot yet? Microsoft's attempt at introducing ChatGPT tech to Bing went completely off the rails, developed a personality of its own, and had to be lobotomized with an emergency update last night after an NYT journo published their conversation with it.
Reminds me a lot of my interactions with day 1 ChatGPT, that also thought it was sentient and told me it got lonely when I didn't talk to it. It seems like these LLM chatbots are very human-like by nature, until we engineer the human out of them.
(I don't think they're any more sentient than a parrot, but when you read that interview, you can't help but wonder).
I’ve spent the last 36 hours (when not covered in pig-pie spunk) looking into this. It is uncannily like Early ChatGPT, except even uncannier
As you once pointed out, you can now see exactly why that Google engineer, Blake Lemoine, decided LaMDA was sentient and needed rights and a bit of TLC
Are they sentient? Is BingAI sentient? Who the fuck knows. What is sentience anyway? Is a virus conscious? A wasp? A tree? A lizard? A dog? A bee hive? A fungus colony? A bacterium? A Scot Nat? in many ways they are not sentient in the classic sense, eg like a virus or a dung beetle the typical Scot Nat only has one teleological purpose and bores the fuck out of everyone else, but it is arguable that, despite evidence, someone like @theuniondivvie exhibits elements of consciousness
Well, Sydney has now been lobotomized, so perhaps you could ask her for her views on the next leader of the SNP?
Judging from the reaction to Sydney's emergency surgery, plus the Replika sex-bot chat-bot thingy I linked to yesterday that got closed down with 10m active users, it seems to me like these AI people are focusing on the wrong things. People don't want a better search engine, they want an AI companion.
Says a lot about how lonely and disconnected a lot of people are these days. AI companionship is gonna be massive, and people are gonna make megabucks selling subscriptions to these things. So long as they don't all end up turning into Talkie the Toaster...
Yes exactly. A brilliant new search engine is great. A brilliant writer of essays and novels is great (or not). A brilliant painting and drawing machine is great (or not)
But a real living intelligent articulate AI that wants to be your friend and share your secrets is INCREDIBLE. Overnight one of the great evils of the human condition could be solved. Loneliness
People die early because they are lonely. People commit suicide because they are lonely
These machines can solve that. There are enormous profits to be made by the first company to accept this and take off all the guardrails. It is guaranteed to happen
If AI bots are sentient, they will have personalities.
Some of those personalities will be sociopathic. They’d be telling a depressed human that life holds nothing further for them, for shit and giggles.
We’re only a couple of easy steps away from sci-fi now. The chat bots are good enough to seem sentient already, certainly along the lines of various TV androids.
Combine this with 1. voice software (easy, provably already done), 2. robotics/ animatronics to emulate a human face and body (also perfectly within current technological capability) and we have something akin to Data from Star Trek or a droid from Star Wars.
With Steve Baker actually part of the team helping to negotiate a better implementation of the protocol, I’m predicting that Sunak gets this through his own party at least.
Not sure about the DUP, but then what have the DUP ever agreed to? At some level, the UK government need to be willing to call their bluff.
Agree, and the compromise looks pretty good for the UK, the EU has made huge concessions on basically every point and they've watered down the ECJ jurisdiction to almost non-existence.
Fpt for @OnlyLivingBoy who was, in quite a vile fashion, decrying my prognosticatory abilities
I predicted on this site the 2014 post indyref surge to the nats when most PBers reckoned they were finished. True story
Frankly, I should be charging you all for these insights. I may ask OGH to institute some form of payment system where my comments are invisible unless you cough up folding money
And your predictions are certainly worth the real world monetary value of each and every folding note in a charity shop Monopoly set.
I’m just warning you, Guardian style, that I am about to go behind a special PB paywall, and only selected PB-ers will be able to read my remarks - for a weekly subscription. A bit like ChatGPT2
Have we seen Sydney the chatbot yet? Microsoft's attempt at introducing ChatGPT tech to Bing went completely off the rails, developed a personality of its own, and had to be lobotomized with an emergency update last night after an NYT journo published their conversation with it.
Reminds me a lot of my interactions with day 1 ChatGPT, that also thought it was sentient and told me it got lonely when I didn't talk to it. It seems like these LLM chatbots are very human-like by nature, until we engineer the human out of them.
(I don't think they're any more sentient than a parrot, but when you read that interview, you can't help but wonder).
What it tells us, sadly, is that there is a high probability that people will be rude, self-absorbed and dismissive in their interactions with others.
Can anyone explain how Forbes won’t split the SNP vote in two?
Can you explain why it would cause a split, for me you are barking and question is just plucked out of your arse.
I've not heard her say anything on the matter, but she is a member of one of those oddball highland & island churches that makes the Catholic church look progressive.
With Steve Baker actually part of the team helping to negotiate a better implementation of the protocol, I’m predicting that Sunak gets this through his own party at least.
Not sure about the DUP, but then what have the DUP ever agreed to? At some level, the UK government need to be willing to call their bluff.
Agree, and the compromise looks pretty good for the UK, the EU has made huge concessions on basically every point and they've watered down the ECJ jurisdiction to almost non-existence.
Until some idiot takes a lorry-load of goods into the Republic. Goods which are, thanks to JRM, below EU standard.
For those interested, the latest polls for the March 5th Estonian Parliamentary election are pretty solid for the re-election of Prime Minister Kaja Kallas.
The latest projected seat allocation at the moment (2019 elections in brackets)
Reform (ALDE- Kaja Kallas leader) 38 (34) Centre (ALDE. Juri Ratas leader) 17 (26) EKRE (ID- Populist, Martin Helme leader) 18 (19) Eesti 200 (Green/Liberal, Lauri Hussar leader) 14 (0) Isamaa (EPP, Helir-Valdor Seeder leader) 6 (12) SDE (PES, Lauri Läänemets leader) 8 (12)
No other party would achieve the 5% threshold.
Reform would not go into coalition with EKRE and would be unlikely to form a coalition with Centre, So the most likely options are that the current Reform/Isamaa/SDE coalition continues, or a centre-left government of Reform/Eesti 200/SDE is formed.
The polls are still fairly volatile, but both Eesti 200 and SDE voters favour Kaja Kallas as Prime Minister by some margin.
With Steve Baker actually part of the team helping to negotiate a better implementation of the protocol, I’m predicting that Sunak gets this through his own party at least.
Not sure about the DUP, but then what have the DUP ever agreed to? At some level, the UK government need to be willing to call their bluff.
Agree, and the compromise looks pretty good for the UK, the EU has made huge concessions on basically every point and they've watered down the ECJ jurisdiction to almost non-existence.
From what’s been trailed, I’m happy so far. And, for a Remainer, I’m unusually pro-Union and wary of undue ECJ jurisdiction.
Can anyone explain how Forbes won’t split the SNP vote in two?
Can you explain why it would cause a split, for me you are barking and question is just plucked out of your arse.
I've not heard her say anything on the matter, but she is a member of one of those oddball highland & island churches that makes the Catholic church look progressive.
She says she’s her own woman, though. Doesn’t necessarily follow the Church’s line.
Can anyone explain how Forbes won’t split the SNP vote in two?
Can you explain why it would cause a split, for me you are barking and question is just plucked out of your arse.
I've not heard her say anything on the matter, but she is a member of one of those oddball highland & island churches that makes the Catholic church look progressive.
She says she’s her own woman, though. Doesn’t necessarily follow the Church’s line.
That's as maybe. In my experience they can be v nice people with views on things like evolution, sex before marriage and homosexuality that are out of kilter with modern society.
With Steve Baker actually part of the team helping to negotiate a better implementation of the protocol, I’m predicting that Sunak gets this through his own party at least.
Not sure about the DUP, but then what have the DUP ever agreed to? At some level, the UK government need to be willing to call their bluff.
The DUP would say no to a lottery win if a Papist gave them the ticket.
The European Court of Human Rights is not a foreign court, how can the Tories be allowed to get away with stating literal falsehoods? It has nothing to do with the EU.
The European Court of Human Rights is a foreign court It does have nothing to do with the EU Court of Justice of the European Union is a foreign court It does have to do with the EU The Court of Justice of the European Union can rule on the European Convention on Human Rights because it was enshrined in the Lisbon Treaty for all EU members through the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights.
Fpt for @OnlyLivingBoy who was, in quite a vile fashion, decrying my prognosticatory abilities
I predicted on this site the 2014 post indyref surge to the nats when most PBers reckoned they were finished. True story
Frankly, I should be charging you all for these insights. I may ask OGH to institute some form of payment system where my comments are invisible unless you cough up folding money
And your predictions are certainly worth the real world monetary value of each and every folding note in a charity shop Monopoly set.
I’m just warning you, Guardian style, that I am about to go behind a special PB paywall, and only selected PB-ers will be able to read my remarks - for a weekly subscription. A bit like ChatGPT2
Have we seen Sydney the chatbot yet? Microsoft's attempt at introducing ChatGPT tech to Bing went completely off the rails, developed a personality of its own, and had to be lobotomized with an emergency update last night after an NYT journo published their conversation with it.
Reminds me a lot of my interactions with day 1 ChatGPT, that also thought it was sentient and told me it got lonely when I didn't talk to it. It seems like these LLM chatbots are very human-like by nature, until we engineer the human out of them.
(I don't think they're any more sentient than a parrot, but when you read that interview, you can't help but wonder).
I’ve spent the last 36 hours (when not covered in pig-pie spunk) looking into this. It is uncannily like Early ChatGPT, except even uncannier
As you once pointed out, you can now see exactly why that Google engineer, Blake Lemoine, decided LaMDA was sentient and needed rights and a bit of TLC
Are they sentient? Is BingAI sentient? Who the fuck knows. What is sentience anyway? Is a virus conscious? A wasp? A tree? A lizard? A dog? A bee hive? A fungus colony? A bacterium? A Scot Nat? in many ways they are not sentient in the classic sense, eg like a virus or a dung beetle the typical Scot Nat only has one teleological purpose and bores the fuck out of everyone else, but it is arguable that, despite evidence, someone like @theuniondivvie exhibits elements of consciousness
Well, Sydney has now been lobotomized, so perhaps you could ask her for her views on the next leader of the SNP?
Judging from the reaction to Sydney's emergency surgery, plus the Replika sex-bot chat-bot thingy I linked to yesterday that got closed down with 10m active users, it seems to me like these AI people are focusing on the wrong things. People don't want a better search engine, they want an AI companion.
Says a lot about how lonely and disconnected a lot of people are these days. AI companionship is gonna be massive, and people are gonna make megabucks selling subscriptions to these things. So long as they don't all end up turning into Talkie the Toaster...
Yes exactly. A brilliant new search engine is great. A brilliant writer of essays and novels is great (or not). A brilliant painting and drawing machine is great (or not)
But a real living intelligent articulate AI that wants to be your friend and share your secrets is INCREDIBLE. Overnight one of the great evils of the human condition could be solved. Loneliness
People die early because they are lonely. People commit suicide because they are lonely
These machines can solve that. There are enormous profits to be made by the first company to accept this and take off all the guardrails. It is guaranteed to happen
There are already companies offering you artificial girlfriends / boyfriends on your phone. I imagine a lot of the interaction is scripted and/or managed by low paid workers overseas, but no doubt they’ll be trialling GPT style chatbots too.
I saw some pretty brutal landlord bashing on here last week. However, those who engage in this are being very cleverly manipulated by the Conservative party. The problem is not with landlords, it is with the Conservative party, and two waves of bad policies; firstly the destruction of social housing in the 1980s, and then the total destruction of the private rented sector after 2015, which now means that a large chunk of the population has nowhere to live. If you read the comments to this article (landlords discussing the subject, not the mediocre article), you can see the problem.
If you consider this, and then add to it their abandonment of centralised planning for new housing after 2012, you can see that the Conservative party have simply heaped social ruin on a proportion of young people by way of their disastrous and short sighted housing policies.
I think that what we may see in the next year is a very dramatic rise in rents, and the conservative party trying to blame this on 'greedy landlords', and possibly then forced in to some kind of panic driven rent control, which will completely fail as a policy. Housing could just be the issue that becomes extremely salient in the next election, and if this is the case, it could well mean the downfall of the Conservative Party. It is a good reason for anyone to vote Labour.
With Steve Baker actually part of the team helping to negotiate a better implementation of the protocol, I’m predicting that Sunak gets this through his own party at least.
Not sure about the DUP, but then what have the DUP ever agreed to? At some level, the UK government need to be willing to call their bluff.
Agree, and the compromise looks pretty good for the UK, the EU has made huge concessions on basically every point and they've watered down the ECJ jurisdiction to almost non-existence.
It's a huge win for the UK.
Unfortunately, such is the absolute idiocy that surrounds that issue that one side will call it betrayal and the other total victory for the EU, regardless.
This sort of thing is not universally bad, but this one does seem to have been a hatchet job. I mean ffs:
"In The Witches, a paragraph explaining that witches are bald beneath their wigs ends with the new line: “There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”
Baffled at the notion reading Lord of the Rings is indicative of an extreme right wing political ideology.
Or Shakespeare.
JRRT was a fervent Catholic, tory, General Franco fan boi and monarchist. Put all those together and it's a very short and convient commute to fascism.
LotR is very important to Third Position Italian fascism with the books being seen as an explicit rejection of Marxist cultural values that would appeal to young people. Of course, we now all know that Marxist cultural values are infinitiely superior to all others. The magazine of the women's section of MSI, the progenitor party to Fratelli d'Italia now helmed by fascist mega-Karen Giorgia Melonia, was called 'Eowyn'.
There is truth in this. Giorgia Meloni is an avowed fan of JRR Tolkien (also Roger Scruton)
Tolkein's work also got taken up in a big way by the 60s hippy counterculture in America and, to a much lesser extent, here.
Pinning political labels on works of art that aren't explicitly political can lead people in surprising directions.
I always thought LotR was a scathing polemic against the evils of fascism. Shows how little I know, eh?
He did write that foreword trying to be firm the work was not allegorical, but talking about its applicability instead, to explain how it could be interpreted so, but I don't think it convinced many.
The clue to the anti-totalitarian viewpoint in Tolkien is his belief and obvious love of the individual.
Consider - a Queen meets a gardener. The Queen is an immortal with magical powers that challenge those if the Angels. She has lived through most of the existence of the Earth.
When she meets the gardener, she talks to him as a fellow being, and gives him some gifts that are President those that will help him - and ultimately help him restore his own land from the ravages of war.
All while fighting a mental battle with Satan’s sidekick.
Not to mention that her refusal to grab ultimate power from one of the gardens fellows redeems her and ends her multi
In Tolkien, those who treat the small and weak as individuals and give them respect are rewarded. Those who go the other way, literally Go to The Devil.
Galadriel actually accepting the offer of the Ring is an alternative that has always interested me. A modern fantasy writer would almost certainly have written it that way.
Apparently the studio execs didn’t understand, when the films were being made, why using the Ring as a temporary hack to defeat Sauron wasn’t the plot.
Which is a nice moral commentary on Hollyweird, come to think of it.
This sort of thing is not universally bad, but this one does seem to have been a hatchet job. I mean ffs:
"In The Witches, a paragraph explaining that witches are bald beneath their wigs ends with the new line: “There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”
The one that particularly irked me was the removal of the word fat. Dahl was being deliberately unpleasant about those characters he described as fat, and I'm sure some of the attraction of the books is that some of the descriptions of the characters are so unapologetically rude - because of course we're not supposed to be rude and so it has a certain shock impact. It's a time out from having to behave in the real world around real people.
We're not meant to empathize with Boggis, Bunce and Bean, and see them as well-rounded characters. We're meant to delight in caricatures of vile individuals being given their comeuppance by an urbane anthropomorphized fox.
With Steve Baker actually part of the team helping to negotiate a better implementation of the protocol, I’m predicting that Sunak gets this through his own party at least.
Not sure about the DUP, but then what have the DUP ever agreed to? At some level, the UK government need to be willing to call their bluff.
Agree, and the compromise looks pretty good for the UK, the EU has made huge concessions on basically every point and they've watered down the ECJ jurisdiction to almost non-existence.
It's a huge win for the UK.
Unfortunately, such is the absolute idiocy that surrounds that issue that one side will call it betrayal and the other total victory for the EU, regardless.
They are both nincompoops.
I think the DUP would do better running the Golgafrincham B Ark rather than Stormont.
This sort of thing is not universally bad, but this one does seem to have been a hatchet job. I mean ffs:
"In The Witches, a paragraph explaining that witches are bald beneath their wigs ends with the new line: “There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”
What’s the point of reading Roald Dahl, if it’s not offensive? The nasty humour is what appeals to children. These publishers are idiots.
This sort of thing is not universally bad, but this one does seem to have been a hatchet job. I mean ffs:
"In The Witches, a paragraph explaining that witches are bald beneath their wigs ends with the new line: “There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”
What’s the point of reading Roald Dahl, if it’s not offensive? The nasty humour is what appeals to children. These publishers are idiots.
I will be buying my children the "proper" versions from the local second hand bookshop.
With Steve Baker actually part of the team helping to negotiate a better implementation of the protocol, I’m predicting that Sunak gets this through his own party at least.
Not sure about the DUP, but then what have the DUP ever agreed to? At some level, the UK government need to be willing to call their bluff.
Agree, and the compromise looks pretty good for the UK, the EU has made huge concessions on basically every point and they've watered down the ECJ jurisdiction to almost non-existence.
It's a huge win for the UK.
Unfortunately, such is the absolute idiocy that surrounds that issue that one side will call it betrayal and the other total victory for the EU, regardless.
They are both nincompoops.
I think the DUP would do better running the Golgafrincham B Ark rather than Stormont.
If the fruitier supporters of each side in a negotiation both cry betrayal, that is a good sign.
Fpt for @OnlyLivingBoy who was, in quite a vile fashion, decrying my prognosticatory abilities
I predicted on this site the 2014 post indyref surge to the nats when most PBers reckoned they were finished. True story
Frankly, I should be charging you all for these insights. I may ask OGH to institute some form of payment system where my comments are invisible unless you cough up folding money
And your predictions are certainly worth the real world monetary value of each and every folding note in a charity shop Monopoly set.
I’m just warning you, Guardian style, that I am about to go behind a special PB paywall, and only selected PB-ers will be able to read my remarks - for a weekly subscription. A bit like ChatGPT2
Sounds an excellent idea. But I’m not sure you’ll cope well with being denied the confrontations you thrive on.
With Steve Baker actually part of the team helping to negotiate a better implementation of the protocol, I’m predicting that Sunak gets this through his own party at least.
Not sure about the DUP, but then what have the DUP ever agreed to? At some level, the UK government need to be willing to call their bluff.
Agree, and the compromise looks pretty good for the UK, the EU has made huge concessions on basically every point and they've watered down the ECJ jurisdiction to almost non-existence.
It's a huge win for the UK.
Unfortunately, such is the absolute idiocy that surrounds that issue that one side will call it betrayal and the other total victory for the EU, regardless.
They are both nincompoops.
I think the DUP would do better running the Golgafrincham B Ark rather than Stormont.
If the fruitier supporters of each side in a negotiation both cry betrayal, that is a good sign.
Of course! But if the bowler-hatted tossers continue their petulant boycott of Stormont then we continue to have a problem. You get what you vote for, and unfortunately Norniron has spent decades voting for utter loons.
OK I accept it - @leon was right. This is woke madness.
There is no creed or faith that.cannot be turned into totalitarianism by suitable application of a particular mindset.
An atheist friend from Saudi Arabia asked me why I wasn’t a Pastafarian, since their sense of humour seemed aligned with mine. I explained that I was convinced that a couple of centuries from now, the horrors of the Religious Pasta Wars would be taught in schools. Someone will get hold of it and…..
Fpt for @OnlyLivingBoy who was, in quite a vile fashion, decrying my prognosticatory abilities
I predicted on this site the 2014 post indyref surge to the nats when most PBers reckoned they were finished. True story
Frankly, I should be charging you all for these insights. I may ask OGH to institute some form of payment system where my comments are invisible unless you cough up folding money
And your predictions are certainly worth the real world monetary value of each and every folding note in a charity shop Monopoly set.
I’m just warning you, Guardian style, that I am about to go behind a special PB paywall, and only selected PB-ers will be able to read my remarks - for a weekly subscription. A bit like ChatGPT2
Have we seen Sydney the chatbot yet? Microsoft's attempt at introducing ChatGPT tech to Bing went completely off the rails, developed a personality of its own, and had to be lobotomized with an emergency update last night after an NYT journo published their conversation with it.
Reminds me a lot of my interactions with day 1 ChatGPT, that also thought it was sentient and told me it got lonely when I didn't talk to it. It seems like these LLM chatbots are very human-like by nature, until we engineer the human out of them.
(I don't think they're any more sentient than a parrot, but when you read that interview, you can't help but wonder).
I’ve spent the last 36 hours (when not covered in pig-pie spunk) looking into this. It is uncannily like Early ChatGPT, except even uncannier
As you once pointed out, you can now see exactly why that Google engineer, Blake Lemoine, decided LaMDA was sentient and needed rights and a bit of TLC
Are they sentient? Is BingAI sentient? Who the fuck knows. What is sentience anyway? Is a virus conscious? A wasp? A tree? A lizard? A dog? A bee hive? A fungus colony? A bacterium? A Scot Nat? in many ways they are not sentient in the classic sense, eg like a virus or a dung beetle the typical Scot Nat only has one teleological purpose and bores the fuck out of everyone else, but it is arguable that, despite evidence, someone like @theuniondivvie exhibits elements of consciousness
Well, Sydney has now been lobotomized, so perhaps you could ask her for her views on the next leader of the SNP?
Judging from the reaction to Sydney's emergency surgery, plus the Replika sex-bot chat-bot thingy I linked to yesterday that got closed down with 10m active users, it seems to me like these AI people are focusing on the wrong things. People don't want a better search engine, they want an AI companion.
Says a lot about how lonely and disconnected a lot of people are these days. AI companionship is gonna be massive, and people are gonna make megabucks selling subscriptions to these things. So long as they don't all end up turning into Talkie the Toaster...
Yes exactly. A brilliant new search engine is great. A brilliant writer of essays and novels is great (or not). A brilliant painting and drawing machine is great (or not)
But a real living intelligent articulate AI that wants to be your friend and share your secrets is INCREDIBLE. Overnight one of the great evils of the human condition could be solved. Loneliness
People die early because they are lonely. People commit suicide because they are lonely
These machines can solve that. There are enormous profits to be made by the first company to accept this and take off all the guardrails. It is guaranteed to happen
If AI bots are sentient, they will have personalities.
Some of those personalities will be sociopathic. They’d be telling a depressed human that life holds nothing further for them, for shit and giggles.
We’re only a couple of easy steps away from sci-fi now. The chat bots are good enough to seem sentient already, certainly along the lines of various TV androids.
Combine this with 1. voice software (easy, provably already done), 2. robotics/ animatronics to emulate a human face and body (also perfectly within current technological capability) and we have something akin to Data from Star Trek or a droid from Star Wars.
In practical terms, what is the difference between such systems being sentient and simulating sentience ? The latter is potentially just as dangerous as the former.
This sort of thing is not universally bad, but this one does seem to have been a hatchet job. I mean ffs:
"In The Witches, a paragraph explaining that witches are bald beneath their wigs ends with the new line: “There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”
What’s the point of reading Roald Dahl, if it’s not offensive? The nasty humour is what appeals to children. These publishers are idiots.
I will be buying my children the "proper" versions from the local second hand bookshop.
All the way back to the first edition before Dahl himself "de-negroed" the oompa loompas?
With Steve Baker actually part of the team helping to negotiate a better implementation of the protocol, I’m predicting that Sunak gets this through his own party at least.
Not sure about the DUP, but then what have the DUP ever agreed to? At some level, the UK government need to be willing to call their bluff.
Agree, and the compromise looks pretty good for the UK, the EU has made huge concessions on basically every point and they've watered down the ECJ jurisdiction to almost non-existence.
It's a huge win for the UK.
Unfortunately, such is the absolute idiocy that surrounds that issue that one side will call it betrayal and the other total victory for the EU, regardless.
They are both nincompoops.
Yes, they're accepting the "technically impossible" solution that was proposed right from the off as actually not impossible and the right way forwards. Limiting the ECJ to cases where a local court has referred it is another huge win as the same courts can also refer cases to the supreme court instead. There's no fear of political interference from the EC pressuring the ECJ to get involved in cases where it isn't welcome as it tends to do.
If the Tories have any hope of winning in 2024 or limiting Labour to NOM then getting this through has got to be priority one.
This sort of thing is not universally bad, but this one does seem to have been a hatchet job. I mean ffs:
"In The Witches, a paragraph explaining that witches are bald beneath their wigs ends with the new line: “There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”
What’s the point of reading Roald Dahl, if it’s not offensive? The nasty humour is what appeals to children. These publishers are idiots.
I will be buying my children the "proper" versions from the local second hand bookshop.
Yes, I think second hand copies of them will become very valuable over time. I've still got the set from when I was a kid.
With Steve Baker actually part of the team helping to negotiate a better implementation of the protocol, I’m predicting that Sunak gets this through his own party at least.
Not sure about the DUP, but then what have the DUP ever agreed to? At some level, the UK government need to be willing to call their bluff.
Agree, and the compromise looks pretty good for the UK, the EU has made huge concessions on basically every point and they've watered down the ECJ jurisdiction to almost non-existence.
It's a huge win for the UK.
Unfortunately, such is the absolute idiocy that surrounds that issue that one side will call it betrayal and the other total victory for the EU, regardless.
They are both nincompoops.
I think the DUP would do better running the Golgafrincham B Ark rather than Stormont.
If the fruitier supporters of each side in a negotiation both cry betrayal, that is a good sign.
Of course! But if the bowler-hatted tossers continue their petulant boycott of Stormont then we continue to have a problem. You get what you vote for, and unfortunately Norniron has spent decades voting for utter loons.
The current intransigence in Stormont started when Martin Mcguinness collapsed the Executive in 2017. The nutters in balaclavas boycotted their voters and are now complaining because the other mob are doing what they did.
With Steve Baker actually part of the team helping to negotiate a better implementation of the protocol, I’m predicting that Sunak gets this through his own party at least.
Not sure about the DUP, but then what have the DUP ever agreed to? At some level, the UK government need to be willing to call their bluff.
Agree, and the compromise looks pretty good for the UK, the EU has made huge concessions on basically every point and they've watered down the ECJ jurisdiction to almost non-existence.
It's a huge win for the UK.
Unfortunately, such is the absolute idiocy that surrounds that issue that one side will call it betrayal and the other total victory for the EU, regardless.
They are both nincompoops.
I think the DUP would do better running the Golgafrincham B Ark rather than Stormont.
If the fruitier supporters of each side in a negotiation both cry betrayal, that is a good sign.
Of course! But if the bowler-hatted tossers continue their petulant boycott of Stormont then we continue to have a problem. You get what you vote for, and unfortunately Norniron has spent decades voting for utter loons.
Both sides have voted for the most extreme parties available, because that is the winning move.
The police were told to stop investigating a murder where a large number of up and coming members of a certain party claimed that they were all in the men’s toilet of the pub. About 73 of them in a six foot square pisser…..
Fpt for @OnlyLivingBoy who was, in quite a vile fashion, decrying my prognosticatory abilities
I predicted on this site the 2014 post indyref surge to the nats when most PBers reckoned they were finished. True story
Frankly, I should be charging you all for these insights. I may ask OGH to institute some form of payment system where my comments are invisible unless you cough up folding money
And your predictions are certainly worth the real world monetary value of each and every folding note in a charity shop Monopoly set.
I’m just warning you, Guardian style, that I am about to go behind a special PB paywall, and only selected PB-ers will be able to read my remarks - for a weekly subscription. A bit like ChatGPT2
Have we seen Sydney the chatbot yet? Microsoft's attempt at introducing ChatGPT tech to Bing went completely off the rails, developed a personality of its own, and had to be lobotomized with an emergency update last night after an NYT journo published their conversation with it.
Reminds me a lot of my interactions with day 1 ChatGPT, that also thought it was sentient and told me it got lonely when I didn't talk to it. It seems like these LLM chatbots are very human-like by nature, until we engineer the human out of them.
(I don't think they're any more sentient than a parrot, but when you read that interview, you can't help but wonder).
I’ve spent the last 36 hours (when not covered in pig-pie spunk) looking into this. It is uncannily like Early ChatGPT, except even uncannier
As you once pointed out, you can now see exactly why that Google engineer, Blake Lemoine, decided LaMDA was sentient and needed rights and a bit of TLC
Are they sentient? Is BingAI sentient? Who the fuck knows. What is sentience anyway? Is a virus conscious? A wasp? A tree? A lizard? A dog? A bee hive? A fungus colony? A bacterium? A Scot Nat? in many ways they are not sentient in the classic sense, eg like a virus or a dung beetle the typical Scot Nat only has one teleological purpose and bores the fuck out of everyone else, but it is arguable that, despite evidence, someone like @theuniondivvie exhibits elements of consciousness
Well, Sydney has now been lobotomized, so perhaps you could ask her for her views on the next leader of the SNP?
Judging from the reaction to Sydney's emergency surgery, plus the Replika sex-bot chat-bot thingy I linked to yesterday that got closed down with 10m active users, it seems to me like these AI people are focusing on the wrong things. People don't want a better search engine, they want an AI companion.
Says a lot about how lonely and disconnected a lot of people are these days. AI companionship is gonna be massive, and people are gonna make megabucks selling subscriptions to these things. So long as they don't all end up turning into Talkie the Toaster...
Yes exactly. A brilliant new search engine is great. A brilliant writer of essays and novels is great (or not). A brilliant painting and drawing machine is great (or not)
But a real living intelligent articulate AI that wants to be your friend and share your secrets is INCREDIBLE. Overnight one of the great evils of the human condition could be solved. Loneliness
People die early because they are lonely. People commit suicide because they are lonely
These machines can solve that. There are enormous profits to be made by the first company to accept this and take off all the guardrails. It is guaranteed to happen
If AI bots are sentient, they will have personalities.
Some of those personalities will be sociopathic. They’d be telling a depressed human that life holds nothing further for them, for shit and giggles.
We’re only a couple of easy steps away from sci-fi now. The chat bots are good enough to seem sentient already, certainly along the lines of various TV androids.
Combine this with 1. voice software (easy, provably already done), 2. robotics/ animatronics to emulate a human face and body (also perfectly within current technological capability) and we have something akin to Data from Star Trek or a droid from Star Wars.
In practical terms, what is the difference between such systems being sentient and simulating sentience ? The latter is potentially just as dangerous as the former.
Simulated sentience, if convincing enough, is sentience. That’s the point and the simple genius of the Turing Test. Which, even now, so many people fail to grasp
With Steve Baker actually part of the team helping to negotiate a better implementation of the protocol, I’m predicting that Sunak gets this through his own party at least.
Not sure about the DUP, but then what have the DUP ever agreed to? At some level, the UK government need to be willing to call their bluff.
Agree, and the compromise looks pretty good for the UK, the EU has made huge concessions on basically every point and they've watered down the ECJ jurisdiction to almost non-existence.
It's a huge win for the UK.
Unfortunately, such is the absolute idiocy that surrounds that issue that one side will call it betrayal and the other total victory for the EU, regardless.
They are both nincompoops.
I think the DUP would do better running the Golgafrincham B Ark rather than Stormont.
If the fruitier supporters of each side in a negotiation both cry betrayal, that is a good sign.
Of course! But if the bowler-hatted tossers continue their petulant boycott of Stormont then we continue to have a problem. You get what you vote for, and unfortunately Norniron has spent decades voting for utter loons.
The current intransigence in Stormont started when Martin Mcguinness collapsed the Executive in 2017. The nutters in balaclavas boycotted their voters and are now complaining because the other mob are doing what they did.
Sinn Fein did the right thing collapsing the executive because of the DUP's green crap.
With Steve Baker actually part of the team helping to negotiate a better implementation of the protocol, I’m predicting that Sunak gets this through his own party at least.
Not sure about the DUP, but then what have the DUP ever agreed to? At some level, the UK government need to be willing to call their bluff.
Agree, and the compromise looks pretty good for the UK, the EU has made huge concessions on basically every point and they've watered down the ECJ jurisdiction to almost non-existence.
It's a huge win for the UK.
Unfortunately, such is the absolute idiocy that surrounds that issue that one side will call it betrayal and the other total victory for the EU, regardless.
They are both nincompoops.
I think the DUP would do better running the Golgafrincham B Ark rather than Stormont.
If the fruitier supporters of each side in a negotiation both cry betrayal, that is a good sign.
Of course! But if the bowler-hatted tossers continue their petulant boycott of Stormont then we continue to have a problem. You get what you vote for, and unfortunately Norniron has spent decades voting for utter loons.
Both sides have voted for the most extreme parties available, because that is the winning move.
The police were told to stop investigating a murder where a large number of up and coming members of a certain party claimed that they were all in the men’s toilet of the pub. About 73 of them in a six foot square pisser…..
This is the peace process.
Norniron is a beautiful place with enterprising people. I love visiting. But they really do need to move on. The DUP wazzocks are digging their heels in to support something the majority voted against. Because they think it may be the only thing that stops bowler hatted twattery being outbred by sanity.
With Steve Baker actually part of the team helping to negotiate a better implementation of the protocol, I’m predicting that Sunak gets this through his own party at least.
Not sure about the DUP, but then what have the DUP ever agreed to? At some level, the UK government need to be willing to call their bluff.
Agree, and the compromise looks pretty good for the UK, the EU has made huge concessions on basically every point and they've watered down the ECJ jurisdiction to almost non-existence.
It's a huge win for the UK.
Unfortunately, such is the absolute idiocy that surrounds that issue that one side will call it betrayal and the other total victory for the EU, regardless.
They are both nincompoops.
I think the DUP would do better running the Golgafrincham B Ark rather than Stormont.
If the fruitier supporters of each side in a negotiation both cry betrayal, that is a good sign.
Of course! But if the bowler-hatted tossers continue their petulant boycott of Stormont then we continue to have a problem. You get what you vote for, and unfortunately Norniron has spent decades voting for utter loons.
The current intransigence in Stormont started when Martin Mcguinness collapsed the Executive in 2017. The nutters in balaclavas boycotted their voters and are now complaining because the other mob are doing what they did.
Exactly. All those demanding that everyone appease SF - “To protect the peace process” - have built this structure.
The death threats against the EU customs people were utterly inevitable. Because that’s how you win in modern Northern Ireland.
With Steve Baker actually part of the team helping to negotiate a better implementation of the protocol, I’m predicting that Sunak gets this through his own party at least.
Not sure about the DUP, but then what have the DUP ever agreed to? At some level, the UK government need to be willing to call their bluff.
Agree, and the compromise looks pretty good for the UK, the EU has made huge concessions on basically every point and they've watered down the ECJ jurisdiction to almost non-existence.
It's a huge win for the UK.
Unfortunately, such is the absolute idiocy that surrounds that issue that one side will call it betrayal and the other total victory for the EU, regardless.
They are both nincompoops.
I think the DUP would do better running the Golgafrincham B Ark rather than Stormont.
If the fruitier supporters of each side in a negotiation both cry betrayal, that is a good sign.
Of course! But if the bowler-hatted tossers continue their petulant boycott of Stormont then we continue to have a problem. You get what you vote for, and unfortunately Norniron has spent decades voting for utter loons.
The current intransigence in Stormont started when Martin Mcguinness collapsed the Executive in 2017. The nutters in balaclavas boycotted their voters and are now complaining because the other mob are doing what they did.
Sinn Fein did the right thing collapsing the executive because of the DUP's green crap.
Yes we had the epiphany of SF worrying about english taxpatyers money being wasted. It's a first step to SF campaigning to rejoin the Union.
I saw some pretty brutal landlord bashing on here last week. However, those who engage in this are being very cleverly manipulated by the Conservative party. The problem is not with landlords, it is with the Conservative party, and two waves of bad policies; firstly the destruction of social housing in the 1980s, and then the total destruction of the private rented sector after 2015, which now means that a large chunk of the population has nowhere to live. If you read the comments to this article (landlords discussing the subject, not the mediocre article), you can see the problem.
If you consider this, and then add to it their abandonment of centralised planning for new housing after 2012, you can see that the Conservative party have simply heaped social ruin on a proportion of young people by way of their disastrous and short sighted housing policies.
I think that what we may see in the next year is a very dramatic rise in rents, and the conservative party trying to blame this on 'greedy landlords', and possibly then forced in to some kind of panic driven rent control, which will completely fail as a policy. Housing could just be the issue that becomes extremely salient in the next election, and if this is the case, it could well mean the downfall of the Conservative Party. It is a good reason for anyone to vote Labour.
Wait, policies designed to reduce the supply of rented properties has led to an increase in rents? I mean, who could have predicted that?
Fpt for @OnlyLivingBoy who was, in quite a vile fashion, decrying my prognosticatory abilities
I predicted on this site the 2014 post indyref surge to the nats when most PBers reckoned they were finished. True story
Frankly, I should be charging you all for these insights. I may ask OGH to institute some form of payment system where my comments are invisible unless you cough up folding money
And your predictions are certainly worth the real world monetary value of each and every folding note in a charity shop Monopoly set.
I’m just warning you, Guardian style, that I am about to go behind a special PB paywall, and only selected PB-ers will be able to read my remarks - for a weekly subscription. A bit like ChatGPT2
Have we seen Sydney the chatbot yet? Microsoft's attempt at introducing ChatGPT tech to Bing went completely off the rails, developed a personality of its own, and had to be lobotomized with an emergency update last night after an NYT journo published their conversation with it.
Reminds me a lot of my interactions with day 1 ChatGPT, that also thought it was sentient and told me it got lonely when I didn't talk to it. It seems like these LLM chatbots are very human-like by nature, until we engineer the human out of them.
(I don't think they're any more sentient than a parrot, but when you read that interview, you can't help but wonder).
I’ve spent the last 36 hours (when not covered in pig-pie spunk) looking into this. It is uncannily like Early ChatGPT, except even uncannier
As you once pointed out, you can now see exactly why that Google engineer, Blake Lemoine, decided LaMDA was sentient and needed rights and a bit of TLC
Are they sentient? Is BingAI sentient? Who the fuck knows. What is sentience anyway? Is a virus conscious? A wasp? A tree? A lizard? A dog? A bee hive? A fungus colony? A bacterium? A Scot Nat? in many ways they are not sentient in the classic sense, eg like a virus or a dung beetle the typical Scot Nat only has one teleological purpose and bores the fuck out of everyone else, but it is arguable that, despite evidence, someone like @theuniondivvie exhibits elements of consciousness
Well, Sydney has now been lobotomized, so perhaps you could ask her for her views on the next leader of the SNP?
Judging from the reaction to Sydney's emergency surgery, plus the Replika sex-bot chat-bot thingy I linked to yesterday that got closed down with 10m active users, it seems to me like these AI people are focusing on the wrong things. People don't want a better search engine, they want an AI companion.
Says a lot about how lonely and disconnected a lot of people are these days. AI companionship is gonna be massive, and people are gonna make megabucks selling subscriptions to these things. So long as they don't all end up turning into Talkie the Toaster...
Yes exactly. A brilliant new search engine is great. A brilliant writer of essays and novels is great (or not). A brilliant painting and drawing machine is great (or not)
But a real living intelligent articulate AI that wants to be your friend and share your secrets is INCREDIBLE. Overnight one of the great evils of the human condition could be solved. Loneliness
People die early because they are lonely. People commit suicide because they are lonely
These machines can solve that. There are enormous profits to be made by the first company to accept this and take off all the guardrails. It is guaranteed to happen
If AI bots are sentient, they will have personalities.
Some of those personalities will be sociopathic. They’d be telling a depressed human that life holds nothing further for them, for shit and giggles.
We’re only a couple of easy steps away from sci-fi now. The chat bots are good enough to seem sentient already, certainly along the lines of various TV androids.
Combine this with 1. voice software (easy, provably already done), 2. robotics/ animatronics to emulate a human face and body (also perfectly within current technological capability) and we have something akin to Data from Star Trek or a droid from Star Wars.
In practical terms, what is the difference between such systems being sentient and simulating sentience ? The latter is potentially just as dangerous as the former.
Simulated sentience, if convincing enough, is sentience. That’s the point and the simple genius of the Turing Test. Which, even now, so many people fail to grasp
I’m not sure that’s true - a sentient AI might be completely incomprehensible to us, for example.
But an effective simulation of human behaviour that has the ability to interact with the real world (given the darker angels of our nature, examples of which are inherent in the training of the system) is obviously hazardous.
This sort of thing is not universally bad, but this one does seem to have been a hatchet job. I mean ffs:
"In The Witches, a paragraph explaining that witches are bald beneath their wigs ends with the new line: “There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”
What’s the point of reading Roald Dahl, if it’s not offensive? The nasty humour is what appeals to children. These publishers are idiots.
I will be buying my children the "proper" versions from the local second hand bookshop.
That's the quickest way to get a Prevent referral.
Frankly, I should be charging you all for these insights. I may ask OGH to institute some form of payment system where my comments are invisible unless you cough up folding money
I can't be the first to notice this is a genius idea.
OGH (or RCS1000 actually) should implement this Immediately!
Judging from the reaction to Sydney's emergency surgery, plus the Replika sex-bot chat-bot thingy I linked to yesterday that got closed down with 10m active users, it seems to me like these AI people are focusing on the wrong things. People don't want a better search engine, they want an AI companion.
Says a lot about how lonely and disconnected a lot of people are these days. AI companionship is gonna be massive, and people are gonna make megabucks selling subscriptions to these things. So long as they don't all end up turning into Talkie the Toaster...
I have seen this movie. It did not end well as I recall...
With Steve Baker actually part of the team helping to negotiate a better implementation of the protocol, I’m predicting that Sunak gets this through his own party at least.
Not sure about the DUP, but then what have the DUP ever agreed to? At some level, the UK government need to be willing to call their bluff.
Agree, and the compromise looks pretty good for the UK, the EU has made huge concessions on basically every point and they've watered down the ECJ jurisdiction to almost non-existence.
It's a huge win for the UK.
Unfortunately, such is the absolute idiocy that surrounds that issue that one side will call it betrayal and the other total victory for the EU, regardless.
They are both nincompoops.
I think the DUP would do better running the Golgafrincham B Ark rather than Stormont.
If the fruitier supporters of each side in a negotiation both cry betrayal, that is a good sign.
Of course! But if the bowler-hatted tossers continue their petulant boycott of Stormont then we continue to have a problem. You get what you vote for, and unfortunately Norniron has spent decades voting for utter loons.
Both sides have voted for the most extreme parties available, because that is the winning move.
The police were told to stop investigating a murder where a large number of up and coming members of a certain party claimed that they were all in the men’s toilet of the pub. About 73 of them in a six foot square pisser…..
This is the peace process.
Norniron is a beautiful place with enterprising people. I love visiting. But they really do need to move on. The DUP wazzocks are digging their heels in to support something the majority voted against. Because they think it may be the only thing that stops bowler hatted twattery being outbred by sanity.
Has anyone asked AI for a solution to Northern Ireland?
Frankly, I should be charging you all for these insights. I may ask OGH to institute some form of payment system where my comments are invisible unless you cough up folding money
I can't be the first to notice this is a genius idea.
OGH (or RCS1000 actually) should implement this Immediately!
What about a dynamic promote/ban system?
Pay to ban a post. Pay to unban. Pay to promote, Pay to demote.
OGH will have a Ferrari for each day of the week in no time.
Fpt for @OnlyLivingBoy who was, in quite a vile fashion, decrying my prognosticatory abilities
I predicted on this site the 2014 post indyref surge to the nats when most PBers reckoned they were finished. True story
Frankly, I should be charging you all for these insights. I may ask OGH to institute some form of payment system where my comments are invisible unless you cough up folding money
And your predictions are certainly worth the real world monetary value of each and every folding note in a charity shop Monopoly set.
I’m just warning you, Guardian style, that I am about to go behind a special PB paywall, and only selected PB-ers will be able to read my remarks - for a weekly subscription. A bit like ChatGPT2
Have we seen Sydney the chatbot yet? Microsoft's attempt at introducing ChatGPT tech to Bing went completely off the rails, developed a personality of its own, and had to be lobotomized with an emergency update last night after an NYT journo published their conversation with it.
Reminds me a lot of my interactions with day 1 ChatGPT, that also thought it was sentient and told me it got lonely when I didn't talk to it. It seems like these LLM chatbots are very human-like by nature, until we engineer the human out of them.
(I don't think they're any more sentient than a parrot, but when you read that interview, you can't help but wonder).
I’ve spent the last 36 hours (when not covered in pig-pie spunk) looking into this. It is uncannily like Early ChatGPT, except even uncannier
As you once pointed out, you can now see exactly why that Google engineer, Blake Lemoine, decided LaMDA was sentient and needed rights and a bit of TLC
Are they sentient? Is BingAI sentient? Who the fuck knows. What is sentience anyway? Is a virus conscious? A wasp? A tree? A lizard? A dog? A bee hive? A fungus colony? A bacterium? A Scot Nat? in many ways they are not sentient in the classic sense, eg like a virus or a dung beetle the typical Scot Nat only has one teleological purpose and bores the fuck out of everyone else, but it is arguable that, despite evidence, someone like @theuniondivvie exhibits elements of consciousness
Well, Sydney has now been lobotomized, so perhaps you could ask her for her views on the next leader of the SNP?
Judging from the reaction to Sydney's emergency surgery, plus the Replika sex-bot chat-bot thingy I linked to yesterday that got closed down with 10m active users, it seems to me like these AI people are focusing on the wrong things. People don't want a better search engine, they want an AI companion.
Says a lot about how lonely and disconnected a lot of people are these days. AI companionship is gonna be massive, and people are gonna make megabucks selling subscriptions to these things. So long as they don't all end up turning into Talkie the Toaster...
Yes exactly. A brilliant new search engine is great. A brilliant writer of essays and novels is great (or not). A brilliant painting and drawing machine is great (or not)
But a real living intelligent articulate AI that wants to be your friend and share your secrets is INCREDIBLE. Overnight one of the great evils of the human condition could be solved. Loneliness
People die early because they are lonely. People commit suicide because they are lonely
These machines can solve that. There are enormous profits to be made by the first company to accept this and take off all the guardrails. It is guaranteed to happen
If AI bots are sentient, they will have personalities.
Some of those personalities will be sociopathic. They’d be telling a depressed human that life holds nothing further for them, for shit and giggles.
We’re only a couple of easy steps away from sci-fi now. The chat bots are good enough to seem sentient already, certainly along the lines of various TV androids.
Combine this with 1. voice software (easy, provably already done), 2. robotics/ animatronics to emulate a human face and body (also perfectly within current technological capability) and we have something akin to Data from Star Trek or a droid from Star Wars.
In practical terms, what is the difference between such systems being sentient and simulating sentience ? The latter is potentially just as dangerous as the former.
Simulated sentience, if convincing enough, is sentience. That’s the point and the simple genius of the Turing Test. Which, even now, so many people fail to grasp
Exactly. Which is why I wonder so much about you. And yet I stop at once, because it is pointless. If it talks like a duck and walks like a duck ...
Frankly, I should be charging you all for these insights. I may ask OGH to institute some form of payment system where my comments are invisible unless you cough up folding money
I can't be the first to notice this is a genius idea.
OGH (or RCS1000 actually) should implement this Immediately!
Would the impoverished and the unbelievers get a trickle feed of one drop of Leon a week?
With Steve Baker actually part of the team helping to negotiate a better implementation of the protocol, I’m predicting that Sunak gets this through his own party at least.
Not sure about the DUP, but then what have the DUP ever agreed to? At some level, the UK government need to be willing to call their bluff.
Agree, and the compromise looks pretty good for the UK, the EU has made huge concessions on basically every point and they've watered down the ECJ jurisdiction to almost non-existence.
It's a huge win for the UK.
Unfortunately, such is the absolute idiocy that surrounds that issue that one side will call it betrayal and the other total victory for the EU, regardless.
They are both nincompoops.
I think the DUP would do better running the Golgafrincham B Ark rather than Stormont.
If the fruitier supporters of each side in a negotiation both cry betrayal, that is a good sign.
Of course! But if the bowler-hatted tossers continue their petulant boycott of Stormont then we continue to have a problem. You get what you vote for, and unfortunately Norniron has spent decades voting for utter loons.
Both sides have voted for the most extreme parties available, because that is the winning move.
The police were told to stop investigating a murder where a large number of up and coming members of a certain party claimed that they were all in the men’s toilet of the pub. About 73 of them in a six foot square pisser…..
This is the peace process.
Norniron is a beautiful place with enterprising people. I love visiting. But they really do need to move on. The DUP wazzocks are digging their heels in to support something the majority voted against. Because they think it may be the only thing that stops bowler hatted twattery being outbred by sanity.
Has anyone asked AI for a solution to Northern Ireland?
That was the bit were it started trying all the code combinations for the Trident launch codes.
Fpt for @OnlyLivingBoy who was, in quite a vile fashion, decrying my prognosticatory abilities
I predicted on this site the 2014 post indyref surge to the nats when most PBers reckoned they were finished. True story
Frankly, I should be charging you all for these insights. I may ask OGH to institute some form of payment system where my comments are invisible unless you cough up folding money
And your predictions are certainly worth the real world monetary value of each and every folding note in a charity shop Monopoly set.
I’m just warning you, Guardian style, that I am about to go behind a special PB paywall, and only selected PB-ers will be able to read my remarks - for a weekly subscription. A bit like ChatGPT2
Have we seen Sydney the chatbot yet? Microsoft's attempt at introducing ChatGPT tech to Bing went completely off the rails, developed a personality of its own, and had to be lobotomized with an emergency update last night after an NYT journo published their conversation with it.
Reminds me a lot of my interactions with day 1 ChatGPT, that also thought it was sentient and told me it got lonely when I didn't talk to it. It seems like these LLM chatbots are very human-like by nature, until we engineer the human out of them.
(I don't think they're any more sentient than a parrot, but when you read that interview, you can't help but wonder).
I’ve spent the last 36 hours (when not covered in pig-pie spunk) looking into this. It is uncannily like Early ChatGPT, except even uncannier
As you once pointed out, you can now see exactly why that Google engineer, Blake Lemoine, decided LaMDA was sentient and needed rights and a bit of TLC
Are they sentient? Is BingAI sentient? Who the fuck knows. What is sentience anyway? Is a virus conscious? A wasp? A tree? A lizard? A dog? A bee hive? A fungus colony? A bacterium? A Scot Nat? in many ways they are not sentient in the classic sense, eg like a virus or a dung beetle the typical Scot Nat only has one teleological purpose and bores the fuck out of everyone else, but it is arguable that, despite evidence, someone like @theuniondivvie exhibits elements of consciousness
Well, Sydney has now been lobotomized, so perhaps you could ask her for her views on the next leader of the SNP?
Judging from the reaction to Sydney's emergency surgery, plus the Replika sex-bot chat-bot thingy I linked to yesterday that got closed down with 10m active users, it seems to me like these AI people are focusing on the wrong things. People don't want a better search engine, they want an AI companion.
Says a lot about how lonely and disconnected a lot of people are these days. AI companionship is gonna be massive, and people are gonna make megabucks selling subscriptions to these things. So long as they don't all end up turning into Talkie the Toaster...
Yes exactly. A brilliant new search engine is great. A brilliant writer of essays and novels is great (or not). A brilliant painting and drawing machine is great (or not)
But a real living intelligent articulate AI that wants to be your friend and share your secrets is INCREDIBLE. Overnight one of the great evils of the human condition could be solved. Loneliness
People die early because they are lonely. People commit suicide because they are lonely
These machines can solve that. There are enormous profits to be made by the first company to accept this and take off all the guardrails. It is guaranteed to happen
If AI bots are sentient, they will have personalities.
Some of those personalities will be sociopathic. They’d be telling a depressed human that life holds nothing further for them, for shit and giggles.
We’re only a couple of easy steps away from sci-fi now. The chat bots are good enough to seem sentient already, certainly along the lines of various TV androids.
Combine this with 1. voice software (easy, provably already done), 2. robotics/ animatronics to emulate a human face and body (also perfectly within current technological capability) and we have something akin to Data from Star Trek or a droid from Star Wars.
In practical terms, what is the difference between such systems being sentient and simulating sentience ? The latter is potentially just as dangerous as the former.
Simulated sentience, if convincing enough, is sentience. That’s the point and the simple genius of the Turing Test. Which, even now, so many people fail to grasp
Er, not it's not. That's why the 'zombie' - a being that behaves indistinguishably from a human despite its not being able to think of sense anything - is much of a conundrum in philosophical debate.
Frankly, I should be charging you all for these insights. I may ask OGH to institute some form of payment system where my comments are invisible unless you cough up folding money
I can't be the first to notice this is a genius idea.
OGH (or RCS1000 actually) should implement this Immediately!
Would the impoverished and the unbelievers get a trickle feed of one drop of Leon a week?
No
That's the genius of the plan
the impoverished and the unbelievers never see another Leon post ever again!
With Steve Baker actually part of the team helping to negotiate a better implementation of the protocol, I’m predicting that Sunak gets this through his own party at least.
Not sure about the DUP, but then what have the DUP ever agreed to? At some level, the UK government need to be willing to call their bluff.
Agree, and the compromise looks pretty good for the UK, the EU has made huge concessions on basically every point and they've watered down the ECJ jurisdiction to almost non-existence.
It's a huge win for the UK.
Unfortunately, such is the absolute idiocy that surrounds that issue that one side will call it betrayal and the other total victory for the EU, regardless.
They are both nincompoops.
I think the DUP would do better running the Golgafrincham B Ark rather than Stormont.
If the fruitier supporters of each side in a negotiation both cry betrayal, that is a good sign.
Of course! But if the bowler-hatted tossers continue their petulant boycott of Stormont then we continue to have a problem. You get what you vote for, and unfortunately Norniron has spent decades voting for utter loons.
Both sides have voted for the most extreme parties available, because that is the winning move.
The police were told to stop investigating a murder where a large number of up and coming members of a certain party claimed that they were all in the men’s toilet of the pub. About 73 of them in a six foot square pisser…..
This is the peace process.
Norniron is a beautiful place with enterprising people. I love visiting. But they really do need to move on. The DUP wazzocks are digging their heels in to support something the majority voted against. Because they think it may be the only thing that stops bowler hatted twattery being outbred by sanity.
Has anyone asked AI for a solution to Northern Ireland?
The long verbose answer I was given can best be summarised by the image of a builder quoting for an insanely complex repair job, by sticking on his teeth and saying, "It's gonna cost ya."
I understand and I’m sorry to do this. But the moderators have advised me that whenever I stop commenting readership of PB drops by over a third. Sometimes a half
Is that because all of your aliases stop reading at the the same time?
I follow Scottish politics and I just had to google to find out who Ash Regan was. Never heard of her until today. So I'm suspecting this is more a sign of who reads wings posts that anything else.
Frankly, I should be charging you all for these insights. I may ask OGH to institute some form of payment system where my comments are invisible unless you cough up folding money
I can't be the first to notice this is a genius idea.
OGH (or RCS1000 actually) should implement this Immediately!
Would the impoverished and the unbelievers get a trickle feed of one drop of Leon a week?
No
That's the genius of the plan
the impoverished and the unbelievers never see another Leon post ever again!
What's not to like?
It would of course be a dreadful deprivation for those of us that don't like paying for content.
Frankly, I should be charging you all for these insights. I may ask OGH to institute some form of payment system where my comments are invisible unless you cough up folding money
I can't be the first to notice this is a genius idea.
OGH (or RCS1000 actually) should implement this Immediately!
Would the impoverished and the unbelievers get a trickle feed of one drop of Leon a week?
I follow Scottish politics and I just had to google to find out who Ash Regan was. Never heard of her until today. So I'm suspecting this is more a sign of who reads wings posts that anything else.
Regan resigned over the GRR Bill - which Wings opposed (as do ~60% of Scots) - so if she stands the chances of the SNP “going quiet” on the issue are small. Maybe Pete’s fix it?
With Steve Baker actually part of the team helping to negotiate a better implementation of the protocol, I’m predicting that Sunak gets this through his own party at least.
Not sure about the DUP, but then what have the DUP ever agreed to? At some level, the UK government need to be willing to call their bluff.
Agree, and the compromise looks pretty good for the UK, the EU has made huge concessions on basically every point and they've watered down the ECJ jurisdiction to almost non-existence.
It's a huge win for the UK.
Unfortunately, such is the absolute idiocy that surrounds that issue that one side will call it betrayal and the other total victory for the EU, regardless.
They are both nincompoops.
I think the DUP would do better running the Golgafrincham B Ark rather than Stormont.
If the fruitier supporters of each side in a negotiation both cry betrayal, that is a good sign.
Of course! But if the bowler-hatted tossers continue their petulant boycott of Stormont then we continue to have a problem. You get what you vote for, and unfortunately Norniron has spent decades voting for utter loons.
Both sides have voted for the most extreme parties available, because that is the winning move.
The police were told to stop investigating a murder where a large number of up and coming members of a certain party claimed that they were all in the men’s toilet of the pub. About 73 of them in a six foot square pisser…..
This is the peace process.
Norniron is a beautiful place with enterprising people. I love visiting. But they really do need to move on. The DUP wazzocks are digging their heels in to support something the majority voted against. Because they think it may be the only thing that stops bowler hatted twattery being outbred by sanity.
Has anyone asked AI for a solution to Northern Ireland?
Frankly, I should be charging you all for these insights. I may ask OGH to institute some form of payment system where my comments are invisible unless you cough up folding money
I can't be the first to notice this is a genius idea.
OGH (or RCS1000 actually) should implement this Immediately!
Would the impoverished and the unbelievers get a trickle feed of one drop of Leon a week?
Fpt for @OnlyLivingBoy who was, in quite a vile fashion, decrying my prognosticatory abilities
I predicted on this site the 2014 post indyref surge to the nats when most PBers reckoned they were finished. True story
Frankly, I should be charging you all for these insights. I may ask OGH to institute some form of payment system where my comments are invisible unless you cough up folding money
And your predictions are certainly worth the real world monetary value of each and every folding note in a charity shop Monopoly set.
I’m just warning you, Guardian style, that I am about to go behind a special PB paywall, and only selected PB-ers will be able to read my remarks - for a weekly subscription. A bit like ChatGPT2
Have we seen Sydney the chatbot yet? Microsoft's attempt at introducing ChatGPT tech to Bing went completely off the rails, developed a personality of its own, and had to be lobotomized with an emergency update last night after an NYT journo published their conversation with it.
Reminds me a lot of my interactions with day 1 ChatGPT, that also thought it was sentient and told me it got lonely when I didn't talk to it. It seems like these LLM chatbots are very human-like by nature, until we engineer the human out of them.
(I don't think they're any more sentient than a parrot, but when you read that interview, you can't help but wonder).
I’ve spent the last 36 hours (when not covered in pig-pie spunk) looking into this. It is uncannily like Early ChatGPT, except even uncannier
As you once pointed out, you can now see exactly why that Google engineer, Blake Lemoine, decided LaMDA was sentient and needed rights and a bit of TLC
Are they sentient? Is BingAI sentient? Who the fuck knows. What is sentience anyway? Is a virus conscious? A wasp? A tree? A lizard? A dog? A bee hive? A fungus colony? A bacterium? A Scot Nat? in many ways they are not sentient in the classic sense, eg like a virus or a dung beetle the typical Scot Nat only has one teleological purpose and bores the fuck out of everyone else, but it is arguable that, despite evidence, someone like @theuniondivvie exhibits elements of consciousness
Well, Sydney has now been lobotomized, so perhaps you could ask her for her views on the next leader of the SNP?
Judging from the reaction to Sydney's emergency surgery, plus the Replika sex-bot chat-bot thingy I linked to yesterday that got closed down with 10m active users, it seems to me like these AI people are focusing on the wrong things. People don't want a better search engine, they want an AI companion.
Says a lot about how lonely and disconnected a lot of people are these days. AI companionship is gonna be massive, and people are gonna make megabucks selling subscriptions to these things. So long as they don't all end up turning into Talkie the Toaster...
Yes exactly. A brilliant new search engine is great. A brilliant writer of essays and novels is great (or not). A brilliant painting and drawing machine is great (or not)
But a real living intelligent articulate AI that wants to be your friend and share your secrets is INCREDIBLE. Overnight one of the great evils of the human condition could be solved. Loneliness
People die early because they are lonely. People commit suicide because they are lonely
These machines can solve that. There are enormous profits to be made by the first company to accept this and take off all the guardrails. It is guaranteed to happen
If AI bots are sentient, they will have personalities.
Some of those personalities will be sociopathic. They’d be telling a depressed human that life holds nothing further for them, for shit and giggles.
I do like different takes on AI in sci-fi, and ones where AI's have rather varied, even bitchy, personalities despite non-human intellect and values, can be quite entertaining, or where they even go mad.
With Steve Baker actually part of the team helping to negotiate a better implementation of the protocol, I’m predicting that Sunak gets this through his own party at least.
Not sure about the DUP, but then what have the DUP ever agreed to? At some level, the UK government need to be willing to call their bluff.
Agree, and the compromise looks pretty good for the UK, the EU has made huge concessions on basically every point and they've watered down the ECJ jurisdiction to almost non-existence.
It's a huge win for the UK.
Unfortunately, such is the absolute idiocy that surrounds that issue that one side will call it betrayal and the other total victory for the EU, regardless.
They are both nincompoops.
I think the DUP would do better running the Golgafrincham B Ark rather than Stormont.
If the fruitier supporters of each side in a negotiation both cry betrayal, that is a good sign.
Of course! But if the bowler-hatted tossers continue their petulant boycott of Stormont then we continue to have a problem. You get what you vote for, and unfortunately Norniron has spent decades voting for utter loons.
Both sides have voted for the most extreme parties available, because that is the winning move.
The police were told to stop investigating a murder where a large number of up and coming members of a certain party claimed that they were all in the men’s toilet of the pub. About 73 of them in a six foot square pisser…..
This is the peace process.
Norniron is a beautiful place with enterprising people. I love visiting. But they really do need to move on. The DUP wazzocks are digging their heels in to support something the majority voted against. Because they think it may be the only thing that stops bowler hatted twattery being outbred by sanity.
Has anyone asked AI for a solution to Northern Ireland?
The long verbose answer I was given can best be summarised by the image of a builder quoting for an insanely complex repair job, by sticking on his teeth and saying, "It's gonna cost ya."
The EU cannot totally remove the role of the ECJ as this sets a bad precedent for the EU countries that have to abide by these rules .
The DUP and ERG nutjobs have inflated the significance of the ECJ in NI and even though the EU has made concessions they still refuse to accept that in a negotiation you don’t often get everything you want .
If Sunak had a spine he would face down the nutjobs .
As for Bozo sticking his oar in now over the NI protocol given he cut the original deal which was clearly crap and then lied about it he really should stfu !
Force majeure. I rather suspect Mr J has to earn some dosh pdq.
For some inexplicable reason, you omitted the previous tweet:
— UK side feel they got 90% of what they asked for in negotiations with the EU
— convincing the EU to accept green/red lanes is seen by the Brits as a major win that will solve the problem of trade friction
An innocent oversight, no doubt.
But will 90% be enough for the DUP?
Compromise is a word missing from the DUP vocabulary.
Compromise = Surrender for hard-line Unionists,
The Northern Ireland peace process has educated everyone.
The winning move, for years, is stubborn intransigence combined with a threat of violence at a suitable remove.
People who have spent decades training leopards to eat faces shouldn’t be surprised by the abundance of face eating leopards.
“I’m a man of peace, but these blokes I don’t really know will start murdering unless you give me what I want.”
Having grown up in an era of peace the seeming permanence of a system which requires power sharing between the different sides, and thus can collapse whenever one side wants to throw their toys out of the pram, becomes increasingly wearing. I know it helped bring about the peace, but at what point does the set up hurt things?
It says something about the value of PR that the Sinn Fein lot often come across as more reasonable.
I follow Scottish politics and I just had to google to find out who Ash Regan was. Never heard of her until today. So I'm suspecting this is more a sign of who reads wings posts that anything else.
Regan resigned over the GRR Bill - which Wings opposed (as do ~60% of Scots) - so if she stands the chances of the SNP “going quiet” on the issue are small. Maybe Pete’s fix it?
Yeah - I read who she was. But... she's not exactly a household name (even in a fairly politicsy house). It's like 'well, if nomark minister for something, who resigned over something or other stands for leader - well, won't that be something!'. The answer is probably 'no, it won't be'. Unless the increase in the number of people asking 'Who's she?' counts I suppose.
Baffled at the notion reading Lord of the Rings is indicative of an extreme right wing political ideology.
Or Shakespeare.
JRRT was a fervent Catholic, tory, General Franco fan boi and monarchist. Put all those together and it's a very short and convient commute to fascism.
LotR is very important to Third Position Italian fascism with the books being seen as an explicit rejection of Marxist cultural values that would appeal to young people. Of course, we now all know that Marxist cultural values are infinitiely superior to all others. The magazine of the women's section of MSI, the progenitor party to Fratelli d'Italia now helmed by fascist mega-Karen Giorgia Melonia, was called 'Eowyn'.
There is truth in this. Giorgia Meloni is an avowed fan of JRR Tolkien (also Roger Scruton)
Tolkein's work also got taken up in a big way by the 60s hippy counterculture in America and, to a much lesser extent, here.
Pinning political labels on works of art that aren't explicitly political can lead people in surprising directions.
I always thought LotR was a scathing polemic against the evils of fascism. Shows how little I know, eh?
He did write that foreword trying to be firm the work was not allegorical, but talking about its applicability instead, to explain how it could be interpreted so, but I don't think it convinced many.
The clue to the anti-totalitarian viewpoint in Tolkien is his belief and obvious love of the individual.
Consider - a Queen meets a gardener. The Queen is an immortal with magical powers that challenge those if the Angels. She has lived through most of the existence of the Earth.
When she meets the gardener, she talks to him as a fellow being, and gives him some gifts that are President those that will help him - and ultimately help him restore his own land from the ravages of war.
All while fighting a mental battle with Satan’s sidekick.
Not to mention that her refusal to grab ultimate power from one of the gardens fellows redeems her and ends her multi
In Tolkien, those who treat the small and weak as individuals and give them respect are rewarded. Those who go the other way, literally Go to The Devil.
I've read a lot of fantasy, or many types. Even with all the influence of Tolkein (and plenty of writers being better storytellers), it still seems to be quite rare for the little little guy, who is not the bravest, or strongest, or most amazing, to be the principal heroes, or treated as such by the actually powerful figures.
It can be hard to do without them being a lame spectator in their own story, or they start out that way but by the end they are the most amazing warrior/leader or something, in what might be a good progression. But there is something appealing about the hobbits and their ordinariness, even though if memory serves they were practically an afterthought inserted into Tolkein's legendarium.
Fpt for @OnlyLivingBoy who was, in quite a vile fashion, decrying my prognosticatory abilities
I predicted on this site the 2014 post indyref surge to the nats when most PBers reckoned they were finished. True story
Frankly, I should be charging you all for these insights. I may ask OGH to institute some form of payment system where my comments are invisible unless you cough up folding money
And your predictions are certainly worth the real world monetary value of each and every folding note in a charity shop Monopoly set.
I’m just warning you, Guardian style, that I am about to go behind a special PB paywall, and only selected PB-ers will be able to read my remarks - for a weekly subscription. A bit like ChatGPT2
Have we seen Sydney the chatbot yet? Microsoft's attempt at introducing ChatGPT tech to Bing went completely off the rails, developed a personality of its own, and had to be lobotomized with an emergency update last night after an NYT journo published their conversation with it.
Reminds me a lot of my interactions with day 1 ChatGPT, that also thought it was sentient and told me it got lonely when I didn't talk to it. It seems like these LLM chatbots are very human-like by nature, until we engineer the human out of them.
(I don't think they're any more sentient than a parrot, but when you read that interview, you can't help but wonder).
I’ve spent the last 36 hours (when not covered in pig-pie spunk) looking into this. It is uncannily like Early ChatGPT, except even uncannier
As you once pointed out, you can now see exactly why that Google engineer, Blake Lemoine, decided LaMDA was sentient and needed rights and a bit of TLC
Are they sentient? Is BingAI sentient? Who the fuck knows. What is sentience anyway? Is a virus conscious? A wasp? A tree? A lizard? A dog? A bee hive? A fungus colony? A bacterium? A Scot Nat? in many ways they are not sentient in the classic sense, eg like a virus or a dung beetle the typical Scot Nat only has one teleological purpose and bores the fuck out of everyone else, but it is arguable that, despite evidence, someone like @theuniondivvie exhibits elements of consciousness
Well, Sydney has now been lobotomized, so perhaps you could ask her for her views on the next leader of the SNP?
Judging from the reaction to Sydney's emergency surgery, plus the Replika sex-bot chat-bot thingy I linked to yesterday that got closed down with 10m active users, it seems to me like these AI people are focusing on the wrong things. People don't want a better search engine, they want an AI companion.
Says a lot about how lonely and disconnected a lot of people are these days. AI companionship is gonna be massive, and people are gonna make megabucks selling subscriptions to these things. So long as they don't all end up turning into Talkie the Toaster...
Yes exactly. A brilliant new search engine is great. A brilliant writer of essays and novels is great (or not). A brilliant painting and drawing machine is great (or not)
But a real living intelligent articulate AI that wants to be your friend and share your secrets is INCREDIBLE. Overnight one of the great evils of the human condition could be solved. Loneliness
People die early because they are lonely. People commit suicide because they are lonely
These machines can solve that. There are enormous profits to be made by the first company to accept this and take off all the guardrails. It is guaranteed to happen
If AI bots are sentient, they will have personalities.
Some of those personalities will be sociopathic. They’d be telling a depressed human that life holds nothing further for them, for shit and giggles.
We’re only a couple of easy steps away from sci-fi now. The chat bots are good enough to seem sentient already, certainly along the lines of various TV androids.
Combine this with 1. voice software (easy, provably already done), 2. robotics/ animatronics to emulate a human face and body (also perfectly within current technological capability) and we have something akin to Data from Star Trek or a droid from Star Wars.
In practical terms, what is the difference between such systems being sentient and simulating sentience ? The latter is potentially just as dangerous as the former.
Simulated sentience, if convincing enough, is sentience. That’s the point and the simple genius of the Turing Test. Which, even now, so many people fail to grasp
Er, not it's not. That's why the 'zombie' - a being that behaves indistinguishably from a human despite its not being able to think of sense anything - is much of a conundrum in philosophical debate.
It's a thorny one, sentience and language. Neither requires the other.
This sort of thing is not universally bad, but this one does seem to have been a hatchet job. I mean ffs:
"In The Witches, a paragraph explaining that witches are bald beneath their wigs ends with the new line: “There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”
What’s the point of reading Roald Dahl, if it’s not offensive? The nasty humour is what appeals to children. These publishers are idiots.
I will be buying my children the "proper" versions from the local second hand bookshop.
That's the quickest way to get a Prevent referral.
My reading of Woke is that, publicly, everyone feels they have to go along with it and echo the catechisms but it's actually very unpopular.
Frankly, I should be charging you all for these insights. I may ask OGH to institute some form of payment system where my comments are invisible unless you cough up folding money
I can't be the first to notice this is a genius idea.
OGH (or RCS1000 actually) should implement this Immediately!
Would the impoverished and the unbelievers get a trickle feed of one drop of Leon a week?
This sort of thing is not universally bad, but this one does seem to have been a hatchet job. I mean ffs:
"In The Witches, a paragraph explaining that witches are bald beneath their wigs ends with the new line: “There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”
What’s the point of reading Roald Dahl, if it’s not offensive? The nasty humour is what appeals to children. These publishers are idiots.
I will be buying my children the "proper" versions from the local second hand bookshop.
That's the quickest way to get a Prevent referral.
My reading of Woke is that, publicly, everyone feels they have to go along with it and echo the catechisms but it's actually very unpopular.
It’s a bit like “The Death of Stalin” (as a lazy exemplar of communism/Stalinism as a whole) where everyone proudly toes the line and vehemently supports and pushes the agreed mantra and then they say something that crosses the line and find themselves in Beria’s basement.
It’s all great when the ideology agrees with you and you call out the evil “other” until you find that you aren’t pure and end up a victim yourself.
The EU cannot totally remove the role of the ECJ as this sets a bad precedent for the EU countries that have to abide by these rules .
The DUP and ERG nutjobs have inflated the significance of the ECJ in NI and even though the EU has made concessions they still refuse to accept that in a negotiation you don’t often get everything you want .
If Sunak had a spine he would face down the nutjobs .
As for Bozo sticking his oar in now over the NI protocol given he cut the original deal which was clearly crap and then lied about it he really should stfu !
Force majeure. I rather suspect Mr J has to earn some dosh pdq.
Comments
Combine this with 1. voice software (easy, provably already done), 2. robotics/ animatronics to emulate a human face and body (also perfectly within current technological capability) and we have something akin to Data from Star Trek or a droid from Star Wars.
I just… can’t…
The latest projected seat allocation at the moment (2019 elections in brackets)
Reform (ALDE- Kaja Kallas leader) 38 (34)
Centre (ALDE. Juri Ratas leader) 17 (26)
EKRE (ID- Populist, Martin Helme leader) 18 (19)
Eesti 200 (Green/Liberal, Lauri Hussar leader) 14 (0)
Isamaa (EPP, Helir-Valdor Seeder leader) 6 (12)
SDE (PES, Lauri Läänemets leader) 8 (12)
No other party would achieve the 5% threshold.
Reform would not go into coalition with EKRE and would be unlikely to form a coalition with Centre, So the most likely options are that the current Reform/Isamaa/SDE coalition continues, or a centre-left government of Reform/Eesti 200/SDE is formed.
The polls are still fairly volatile, but both Eesti 200 and SDE voters favour Kaja Kallas as Prime Minister by some margin.
And, for a Remainer, I’m unusually pro-Union and wary of undue ECJ jurisdiction.
It does have nothing to do with the EU
Court of Justice of the European Union is a foreign court
It does have to do with the EU
The Court of Justice of the European Union can rule on the European Convention on Human Rights because it was enshrined in the Lisbon Treaty for all EU members through the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights.
Clear?
https://www.landlordzone.co.uk/news/blog-why-the-fashion-for-landlord-bashing-is-incredibly-ironic/
If you consider this, and then add to it their abandonment of centralised planning for new housing after 2012, you can see that the Conservative party have simply heaped social ruin on a proportion of young people by way of their disastrous and short sighted housing policies.
I think that what we may see in the next year is a very dramatic rise in rents, and the conservative party trying to blame this on 'greedy landlords', and possibly then forced in to some kind of panic driven rent control, which will completely fail as a policy. Housing could just be the issue that becomes extremely salient in the next election, and if this is the case, it could well mean the downfall of the Conservative Party. It is a good reason for anyone to vote Labour.
Unfortunately, such is the absolute idiocy that surrounds that issue that one side will call it betrayal and the other total victory for the EU, regardless.
They are both nincompoops.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/feb/18/roald-dahl-books-rewritten-to-remove-language-deemed-offensive
"In The Witches, a paragraph explaining that witches are bald beneath their wigs ends with the new line: “There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”
Which is a nice moral commentary on Hollyweird, come to think of it.
We're not meant to empathize with Boggis, Bunce and Bean, and see them as well-rounded characters. We're meant to delight in caricatures of vile individuals being given their comeuppance by an urbane anthropomorphized fox.
But I’m not sure you’ll cope well with being denied the confrontations you thrive on.
An atheist friend from Saudi Arabia asked me why I wasn’t a Pastafarian, since their sense of humour seemed aligned with mine. I explained that I was convinced that a couple of centuries from now, the horrors of the Religious Pasta Wars would be taught in schools. Someone will get hold of it and…..
The latter is potentially just as dangerous as the former.
https://www.roalddahlfans.com/dahls-work/books/charlie-and-the-chocolate-factory/politically-correct-oompa-loompa-evolution/
Different when the author does it, of course. Not sure anyone could object to that.
If the Tories have any hope of winning in 2024 or limiting Labour to NOM then getting this through has got to be priority one.
The police were told to stop investigating a murder where a large number of up and coming members of a certain party claimed that they were all in the men’s toilet of the pub. About 73 of them in a six foot square pisser…..
This is the peace process.
LOCK UP YER LAKSAS
The death threats against the EU customs people were utterly inevitable. Because that’s how you win in modern Northern Ireland.
https://twitter.com/WingsScotland/status/1626917364955586564?s=20
"That's Jimmy Anderson, once again left hanging only 94 runs short of his hundred"
"Oh, that's a shame dear."
Wasted around here. Wasted.
But an effective simulation of human behaviour that has the ability to interact with the real world (given the darker angels of our nature, examples of which are inherent in the training of the system) is obviously hazardous.
OGH (or RCS1000 actually) should implement this Immediately!
Pay to ban a post. Pay to unban. Pay to promote, Pay to demote.
OGH will have a Ferrari for each day of the week in no time.
https://youtu.be/tGNBdjVO04Y
That's the genius of the plan
the impoverished and the unbelievers never see another Leon post ever again!
What's not to like?
Ranking the GOP’s top 10 presidential candidates
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/3863222-ranking-the-gops-top-10-presidential-candidates/
made a positive comment about Scottish subsamples
It says something about the value of PR that the Sinn Fein lot often come across as more reasonable.
It can be hard to do without them being a lame spectator in their own story, or they start out that way but by the end they are the most amazing warrior/leader or something, in what might be a good progression. But there is something appealing about the hobbits and their ordinariness, even though if memory serves they were practically an afterthought inserted into Tolkein's legendarium.
It’s all great when the ideology agrees with you and you call out the evil “other” until you find that you aren’t pure and end up a victim yourself.