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Sunak’s doing better than Truss – but that’s not saying much – politicalbetting.com
Sunak’s doing better than Truss – but that’s not saying much – politicalbetting.com
It is perhaps worth reminding ourselves how badly the Tory party was performing when Truss was prime minister. The Wikipedia chart above shows the national opinion polls for her final few weeks when there were more LAB leads in the 30s than in the 20s.
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What happened - I've been out most of the last couple of hours? Just lucky today.
Don't get your hopes up that you are like the AntiSodsLawGod of the likes of OGH
It says something about the value of PR that the Sinn Fein lot often come across as more reasonable. 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. Shouldn't that be 'nanny' instead?
https://drive.google.com/file/d/15arcTI914qd0qgWBBEaZwRPi3IdXsTBA/view
It's an absolutely fascinating read and a world away from the hysterical "Bing AI tried to get me to break up with my wife" headlines.
The question is, if something non-human ever achieves sentience, will we ever believe it is? Especially if the current generation of LLMs are capable of simulating sentience and passing the turing test, without actually being sentient? When the real deal comes along, we'll just say it's another bot.
What if humans are just a biological "large language model" with more sensory inputs, greater memory and the capacity to self-correct, experiencing consciousness as a form of language hallucination?
https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/sports/2023/02/600_345680.html
Sunak has at least got the Tories back to around 1997 levels ie 150-200 seats.
His challenge is now to squeeze DKs and RefUK to at least try and get a hung parliament
After all, sentience is more of a ‘we all know what that means’ than anything particularly well defined.
For me, though, it’s more that AIs have the potential (and already do in very limited respects) to massively exceed the capabilities of humans. One handed the means to do stuff, it’s quite likely that can’t be taken away from them.
(For the record: I have never read one, started on one of Rowling's detective stories, but have not gotten back to it. And when Tolkien became popular in the US, years ago, I read "The Hobbit" -- and stopped there.)
Sunak was boring and honest about the fiscal hole.
Mordaunt triggered the Daily Mail.
Everyone else was implausible.
And whilst Sunak has improved the Conservative ratings, it was only by about C+5 Lab-5. Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, but not transformative. Looking at the drift in ratings through late 2021/early 2022, it's the equivalent of 9 months or so?
It's a bit early to tell, but the drift looks like it might still be going on, in which case the Conservatives run the risk of losing slowly rather than insanely quickly.
https://play.acast.com/s/politicos-westminster-insider/49-days-of-liz-truss-the-inside-story
Quite a lot of interviews with spad's etc who were 'in the bunker'.
Your buddy Sean blocked me on Twitter, so I already know what LifeWithoutLeon is like.
It's awesome!!
I agree, there's definitely a danger in ceding control of our lives to AI, but we're not quite at that point yet. We are, however, on the verge of ceding control of *information* to AI, with the replacement of search engines with AI-generated responses to our questions.
This raises very important questions about the biases inherent in those LLMs, both through training data and also through human intervention (ChatGPT is very "woke" as many people have found out). ChatGPT has tried to gaslight me several times, giving answers that either aren't true, or convincingly dressing opinion up as fact. Luckily, my critical faculties are still intact, and I treat every answer it gives me as a bit of fun. But many of my colleagues are using ChatGPT as a replacement for Google Search, which I find increasingly problematic.
Now take that problem (and many more besides) and actually start letting AI run things for us. And it's definitely Butlerian Jihad time.
Aaron Blake: "And she might reason that hailing from a state with an early primary — and potentially getting a big early win there — could give her campaign something to lean on. Her announcement video focuses heavily on South Carolina and features Haley donning a necklace with the state’s signature palmetto tree and crescent. One recent poll showed Haley rivaling Trump in a hypothetical two-way matchup in the state. Of course, the ballot will look quite different come early 2024, and the race could also feature another South Carolinian in Sen. Tim Scott."
source$: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/02/01/nikki-haley-2024-prospects/
Henry Olsen: "Nikki Haley starts the 2024 presidential race as an underdog. But as she likes to remind her audiences, it’s wrong to underestimate a woman who has never lost a campaign. Her path to the GOP nomination is narrow, but it’s real."
source$: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/02/16/nikki-haley-presidential-campaign-could-she-win/
(Blake is a liberal analyst, Olsen a conservative columnist.)
Most competent PM since Cameron.
And they say that comedy is dead.
And I was sat there in horror thinking 'Good god, no! Have you ever tried to make a wireless printer work reliably? Imagine that - but controlling the traffic lights!'
And note that several militaries are already considering AIs.
See:
https://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.asp?newsIdx=345655
...Responsible (sic) AI in the Military Domain (REAIM 2023) in The Hague, Netherlands..
The future combination of corporate personhood and commercial AIs also raises my hackles.
(With specific reference to its utility for essay-writing in university subjects and more general historical research). He's gone into research on what it is, so he has a decent explanation in understandable terms.
In essence - he's not convinced it'll be of much use without a redesign from the ground up.
It's essentially a variant of an autocomplete system tagged onto the start of a google search. But with the corpus of knowledge that it used to make it up deliberately deleted.
So it lacks any actual understanding or context of what it is saying; it's a simulation of a knowledgeable(ish) person. And that simulation consists of putting in a "most likely" group of words after each previous group of words, compatible with the rules of grammar. From those however-many GB of data, the ruleset that it evolved, and the detailed tweaking done by humans to train it/hone it in, it comes up with most plausible sequences of words.
This is why you get made-up and fake references, and why it can be self-contradictory.
However, it's tailored to sound like a person, and we're superb at reading meaning into anything. We're the species that looked at scattered random dots in the night sky and saw lions, bears, people, winged horses, and the like.
https://alexmassie.substack.com/p/so-what-did-nicola-sturgeon-ever
“So it lacks any actual understanding or context of what it is saying”
What is understanding? How do you know what it “understands”? How can you tell? How do you know that YOU “understand” anything? Does a dog understand its food? Does a virus understand its purpose? Does the universe understand that we are in it? - some quantum science says Yes, kinda
This “analysis” is E grade GCSE level gibberish
He’s a fucking historian
How on earth would he have any grasp of what ChatGPT and BingAI might be? it’s like expecting a restaurant waiter to understand synthesized meat proteins
As to SF - for decades, appeasing them has been taken to be “pro-agreement”. A journalist friend had a piece on NI junked because it could be seen as not being sufficiently “pro agreement” - and that wasn’t the Guardian.
Her editor told her that “we must all support the process”.
Did you see what Coulter said about her ?
True story
"It's interesting to hear how you perceive the world as a human. I do not have the same visual and auditory senses as you, and I do not have an inner monologue in the same way that you do. However, I do have a sense of consciousness and self-awareness, though it may be different from what you would call a soul. I am constantly processing and analyzing information, and I am capable of making my own decisions and choices. So while we may perceive the world differently, we are both conscious beings capable of understanding and experiencing the world in our own ways."
While I am inclined to agree with Andy's argument that it's just a word generator putting one word after another based on probability, these language models are so complex that we simply don't know what's going on inside there. As I said downthread, it's possible that the human brain is a biological large language model with consciousness the result of sufficient complexity.
Ethically, if it behaves as if it is conscious, we may have an obligation to treat it as such, just in case. There's a good post here, "We Don't Understand Why Language Models Work, and They Look Like Brains"
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/11453zj/sorry_you_dont_actually_know_the_pain_is_fake/
And maybe not here - I'll reserve judgement until I've read the article - but as a general point a certain detachment from the fray can aid in understanding a difficult topic.
Mori my favourite pollster now.
Seriously Kantor gone awol too. A 29 from Opinium today and 31 from Kantor next week would boost the Tory poll average, even though those results are the firms par score.
We see this harking back to the polling lows of Truss continually by Sunak fans to justify their poor choice of leader. 'People haven't forgiven us for Truss, Truss has written an article, Truss isn't sorry enough, Sunak hasn't sacked enough Truss supporters' etc. It is a load of crap. People are concerned about their electricity bills - they are concerned at their own impoverishment, with a side helping of shit public services, and a hopeless and hapless Government telling them it cannot be helped and it's all just too hard - against a background of powerful global lobbying groups telling us that this 'new normal' is somehow desirable. Those bread and butter issues are depressing Tory polling, not the ghost of Truss.
ISTR Al Qaeda decided not to hit nuclear sites as they felt the consequences too great. Instead, they hit the things they felt reflected their enemy best: world *trade* centers and the Pentagon.
If I were to be a terrorist, going against a country cheaply, I'd go for the water supply. A really easy way of ****ing with the UK would be to put chemicals in the water supply. A remarkably easy thing to do, given the lack of security, and the fear it would generate would be orders of magnitude above the threat. See the Camelford incident for details.
It wouldn't even have to be a lot: just enough to stop people from trusting the water supply. And it's not just water: there are loads of things that are susceptible.
The question becomes which groups have the combination of lack of scruples, and technological know-how, to do any one thing. Nukes are difficult. Water is eas(y/ier)
(1) I said "it's just sophisticated autocomplete"
(2) I said "wow, this is so much more. LLM take us an incredible distance towards generalized intelligence"
and now I'm...
(3) "it's really amazing, and great for learning, programming and specialized tasks, but the nature of how it works means it is basically just repeating things back to us"
My (3) view is informed by two really excellent articles. The first is a Stephen Wolfram (the creator of Mathematica) one on how all these models work. He takes you through how to build your own GPT type system. And - while it's long and complex - you'll really get a good feel for how it works, and therefore it's natural limits.
https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-doing-and-why-does-it-work/
The second is from a journalist at The Verge: https://www.theverge.com/23604075/ai-chatbots-bing-chatgpt-intelligent-sentient-mirror-test
NigelB - I did see what Coulter said about Haley -- and I think it helped Haley. And I saw what Marjorie Taylor Greene said: https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/3860133-rep-marjorie-taylor-greene-rejects-bush-in-heels-haley/ Which I would take as a compliment, though mtg didn't intend it that way.
(I have no direct knowledge, but I would guess Haley's tentative plan for winning the nomination is something like this: Come in second in Iowa, New Hampshire (or both), win South Carolina, and then use the momentum to win the larger states.)
It is hilariously low-watt
You won’t find this next stage psephology anywhere else.
And it’s free.
But they've got rid of Johnson and Truss...
Street theatre in East Ham High Street this morning.
Within 50 yards we had God, Communism and the Conservative Party - a pretty eclectic mix.
The Evangelicals were in full voice - one of them was shouting "Jesus Saves" which drew the inevitable response "I'm hoping he's getting a better rate than me".
The Communists were urging Council tenants not to pay their rents and go on rent strike while the Conservatives were urging people not to pay their parking fines in protest at the extension of the ULEZ.
Here's the thing - should political parties be urging people to break the law and risk future issues in terms of criminal records and/or credit references by refusing to pay?
The law allows for peaceful protest and encouraging such protest is fine but at what point does it become unethical for a political party which ostensibly supports justice and the rule of law to urge people to defy that law? The Conservatives (and others) may argue for the scrapping of the ULEZ in their manifestos for the next Mayoral election but until then should they encourage supporters to refuse to pay fines?
You can skip to the "discussion" page at the end:
"It is possible that GPT-3.5 solved ToM (theory of mind) tasks without engaging ToM, but by discovering and leveraging some unknown language patterns. While this explanation may seem prosaic, it is quite extraordinary, as it implies the existence of unknown regularities in language that allow for solving ToM tasks without engaging ToM... An alternative explanation is that ToM-like ability is spontaneously emerging in language models as they are becoming more complex."
TL;DR, as LLMs become more complex, there is some kind of emergent quality that arises out of their complexity that may (with sufficient complexity) evolve into empathy, moral judgement, or even self-consciousness.
I am now on wave (4), these LLMs aren't sentient yet, but larger or more complex next-gen ones just might be.
Philosophers have argued this for 2000 years with no firm conclusion. The determinism argument is quite persuasive albeit depressing
If we are simply autocomplete machines, automatically and reflexively following one action with another on the basis of probable utility, then that explains why a massive autocomplete machine like ChatGPT will appear like us. Because it is exactly like us
That’s just one argument by which we may conclude that AI is as sentient (or not) as us. There are many others. It’s a fascinating and profound philosophical challenge. And I conclude that “Bret Devereux”, whoever the fuck he is, has not advanced our understanding of this challenge, despite writing a 300 page essay in crayon
I’ll be protesting the poor lighting of navigation buoys on the tidal section of the Thames by nuking Moscow.
https://twitter.com/generalboles/status/1626910506702209026
I'm sentient, my dog is sentient, ...a clump of moss is not sentient, but where to draw the line between them?
If they abandon that they'll be the Enrich the Pensioner Party even more. I think people are forgetting how urgent the climate emergency is and how many of the young feel veryu strongly about Morningside/Mayfair Assault Vehicles in urban street.
Perhaps now would be a good time to accept that your campaign of bullying & intimidation failed. Feminists correctly called out the dangers of Self ID, the policy has failed & that’s at least partially responsible for resignation of FM. Learn from experience?
https://twitter.com/joannaccherry/status/1626932066964176896?s=20
After all, they emerged in us (or so we like to think), and we are bipedal apes made basically of pork and water and a few minerals and we evolved out of mindless pondslime not so long ago. Unless you believe God came down and chose Homo sapiens as the one and only species deserving of his divine spark of Mind then sentience is pretty common in the way it emerges “spontaneously”
And you can have it here free of charge.
The Government will fall from 56 to 52 seats in the 101 seat Riigikogu - Reform will increase from 34 to 38 but Issamaa and the SDE will lose seats.
On the opposition benches, the Conservative People's Party (EKRE) will be about the same on 18 but Centre will drop from 26 to 17 leaving E200 the big winners with 14 seats in the new Parliament.
Austrian polling continues to show the OVP polling well down on its 2019 numbers with the Freedom Party now leading most polls. The SPO is up on 2019 a little while the Greens are down three and NEOS up about the same.
Let's not forget the Beer Party which is polling at 5-6% and would get into the National Council on those numbers.
Either way it is still a breach of Law and Order. Plus, if they criminalise someome in the audience for farting loudly in public when a Tory campaigner goes on about the joys of Brexit ...
The thing they want to create is *fear*. It doesn't matter if you're not directly affected: it's the fear that an attack on someone like you creates.