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The “Stop Starmer” campaign needs better messaging than this – politicalbetting.com

SystemSystem Posts: 12,151
edited August 2023 in General
imageThe “Stop Starmer” campaign needs better messaging than this – politicalbetting.com

The campaign to stop the most untrustworthy politician this country has seen.https://t.co/0yrWI8GpKj pic.twitter.com/ACtdw2F0hW

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Comments

  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 28,322
    Corbynistas for Sunak might work as a campaign.
  • I assume "Stop Starmer" is a crank left campaign...?
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 95,994

    I assume "Stop Starmer" is a crank left campaign...?

    If it sounds really dumb that's often a good guess.

    Do you think they realise they help him with all this stuff?
  • El_CapitanoEl_Capitano Posts: 4,239
    It’s a Twitter account with 1374 followers. It’s really not worth talking about.
  • MiklosvarMiklosvar Posts: 1,855
    Who on earth is voicing the stop Starmer video?
  • Alphabet_SoupAlphabet_Soup Posts: 3,228
    Isn't "untrustworthy" an entry-level qualification for a politician?
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 29,386
    Miklosvar said:

    Who on earth is voicing the stop Starmer video?

    Indeed.
    Sounds really creepy. I wouldn't give him an Enhanced DBS.
  • kle4 said:

    I assume "Stop Starmer" is a crank left campaign...?

    If it sounds really dumb that's often a good guess.

    Do you think they realise they help him with all this stuff?
    Starmer has chosen his enemies brilliantly. They are fabulous enemies.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,039
    The future of Britain, the world, humanity, depends on who wins this race to AGI and how they exploit their victory



    Britain should be piling virtually all of its chips on AI. Bet the house. Bet everything. If we win we might solve nearly all of our problems at once - from productivity to the NHS to crime. If we lose we’re fucked but then if we are fucked so is everyone, probably, so it doesn’t matter
  • RogerRoger Posts: 19,854
    edited August 2023
    LOL!!

    Demon Eyes reborn!
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 29,386
    edited August 2023
    Leon said:

    The future of Britain, the world, humanity, depends on who wins this race to AGI and how they exploit their victory



    Britain should be piling virtually all of its chips on AI. Bet the house. Bet everything. If we win we might solve nearly all of our problems at once - from productivity to the NHS to crime. If we lose we’re fucked but then if we are fucked so is everyone, probably, so it doesn’t matter

    We've already bet the House on ever rising house prices.
    Ironically.
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 48,572
    Leon said:

    The future of Britain, the world, humanity, depends on who wins this race to AGI and how they exploit their victory



    Britain should be piling virtually all of its chips on AI. Bet the house. Bet everything. If we win we might solve nearly all of our problems at once - from productivity to the NHS to crime. If we lose we’re fucked but then if we are fucked so is everyone, probably, so it doesn’t matter

    But it isn't a race.

    Whether we invest in it or not won't influence who else does.
  • Pro_RataPro_Rata Posts: 5,280
    Brilliant video.

    It's time to STOP LAUGHING. Just give me another minute or two

    BJOFPE
  • Alphabet_SoupAlphabet_Soup Posts: 3,228
    Leon said:

    The future of Britain, the world, humanity, depends on who wins this race to AGI and how they exploit their victory



    Britain should be piling virtually all of its chips on AI. Bet the house. Bet everything. If we win we might solve nearly all of our problems at once - from productivity to the NHS to crime. If we lose we’re fucked but then if we are fucked so is everyone, probably, so it doesn’t matter

    I've always regarded Kurt Vonnegut Jr as the most prescient 20th century author. You might find this amuse bouche from 1950 ... err ... amusing:

    http://newmediaabington.pbworks.com/f/vonnegut_EPICAC.pdf
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,039
    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    The future of Britain, the world, humanity, depends on who wins this race to AGI and how they exploit their victory



    Britain should be piling virtually all of its chips on AI. Bet the house. Bet everything. If we win we might solve nearly all of our problems at once - from productivity to the NHS to crime. If we lose we’re fucked but then if we are fucked so is everyone, probably, so it doesn’t matter

    But it isn't a race.

    Whether we invest in it or not won't influence who else does.
    Idiotic. This is like becoming the First Nation to industrialise. The USA and China are marching ahead but there’s no reason we cannot nimbly follow. If we don’t we will get flattened by competitors - and some of them might be happy to use AI with absolute malignance

    It stupefies me how so many apparently smart people still don’t understand what is happening
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 51,498
    @OwenJones84
    Keir Starmer is one of the most dishonest politicians in Britain, and that's quite a bar to pass.

    He ran the most dishonest campaign for the leadership of a major political party in British history, however much his abusive cult-like followers pretend otherwise.


    https://twitter.com/OwenJones84/status/1551514583185121281
  • MightyAlexMightyAlex Posts: 1,651
    edited August 2023
    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    The future of Britain, the world, humanity, depends on who wins this race to AGI and how they exploit their victory



    Britain should be piling virtually all of its chips on AI. Bet the house. Bet everything. If we win we might solve nearly all of our problems at once - from productivity to the NHS to crime. If we lose we’re fucked but then if we are fucked so is everyone, probably, so it doesn’t matter

    But it isn't a race.

    Whether we invest in it or not won't influence who else does.
    Idiotic. This is like becoming the First Nation to industrialise. The USA and China are marching ahead but there’s no reason we cannot nimbly follow. If we don’t we will get flattened by competitors - and some of them might be happy to use AI with absolute malignance

    It stupefies me how so many apparently smart people still don’t understand what is happening
    Considering there aren't any major UK semiconductor companies we've already 'lost'. You can be as nimble as a flighty scarlet ibis but if you don't make the chips you're not competing in this race.

    And no ARM doesn't count.
    1. Not UK owned
    2. Not the right sort of chips
  • Northern_AlNorthern_Al Posts: 8,336
    Just watched the Stop Starmer video. Weird, but it's not from the Corbynite left/BJO wing. It's from the far right, as is clear from some of the references in it.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 57,038

    @OwenJones84
    Keir Starmer is one of the most dishonest politicians in Britain, and that's quite a bar to pass.

    He ran the most dishonest campaign for the leadership of a major political party in British history, however much his abusive cult-like followers pretend otherwise.


    https://twitter.com/OwenJones84/status/1551514583185121281

    The first cult on earth whose mantra is "well, he's a bit shit and he's a charisma-free zone, but at least he's not Jeremy Corbyn."

    I mean, come on Owen; accuse him of dishonesty, accuse him of whatever; but don't claim that he has anything that even vaguely resembles a cult like following.
  • Northern_AlNorthern_Al Posts: 8,336

    @OwenJones84
    Keir Starmer is one of the most dishonest politicians in Britain, and that's quite a bar to pass.

    He ran the most dishonest campaign for the leadership of a major political party in British history, however much his abusive cult-like followers pretend otherwise.


    https://twitter.com/OwenJones84/status/1551514583185121281

    Surprised that you are an Owen Jones fan.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 57,038
    edited August 2023
    I just watched that video.

    It was unintentionally hilarious.

    And is it just me, or does the voice remind anyone else of the baby-eating Bishop of Bath and Wells from Blackadder?
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 51,498

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    The future of Britain, the world, humanity, depends on who wins this race to AGI and how they exploit their victory



    Britain should be piling virtually all of its chips on AI. Bet the house. Bet everything. If we win we might solve nearly all of our problems at once - from productivity to the NHS to crime. If we lose we’re fucked but then if we are fucked so is everyone, probably, so it doesn’t matter

    But it isn't a race.

    Whether we invest in it or not won't influence who else does.
    Idiotic. This is like becoming the First Nation to industrialise. The USA and China are marching ahead but there’s no reason we cannot nimbly follow. If we don’t we will get flattened by competitors - and some of them might be happy to use AI with absolute malignance

    It stupefies me how so many apparently smart people still don’t understand what is happening
    Considering there aren't any major UK semiconductor companies we've already 'lost'. You can be as nimble as a flighty scarlet ibis but if you don't make the chips you're not competing in this race.

    And no ARM doesn't count.
    1. Not UK owned
    2. Not the right sort of chip
    Microsoft did alright out of the personal computing revolution despite not being a player in hardware...
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,039
    edited August 2023

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    The future of Britain, the world, humanity, depends on who wins this race to AGI and how they exploit their victory



    Britain should be piling virtually all of its chips on AI. Bet the house. Bet everything. If we win we might solve nearly all of our problems at once - from productivity to the NHS to crime. If we lose we’re fucked but then if we are fucked so is everyone, probably, so it doesn’t matter

    But it isn't a race.

    Whether we invest in it or not won't influence who else does.
    Idiotic. This is like becoming the First Nation to industrialise. The USA and China are marching ahead but there’s no reason we cannot nimbly follow. If we don’t we will get flattened by competitors - and some of them might be happy to use AI with absolute malignance

    It stupefies me how so many apparently smart people still don’t understand what is happening
    Considering there aren't any major UK semiconductor companies we've already 'lost'. You can be as nimble as a flighty scarlet ibis but if you don't make the chips you're not competing in this race.

    And no ARM doesn't count.
    1. Not UK owned
    2. Not the right sort of chips
    The Saudis and UAE don’t make chips either. But they’re buying them up - the particular kind of chip required for LLMs. And - as the article says - they’ve already made impressive strides in AI

    So chips are important, but they can be bought. It is, then, what you do with them

    The First Nation to reach self-improving AI will potentially dominate the world, unless several nations get there near-simultaneously
  • EabhalEabhal Posts: 8,569
    The only thing worse than that video is the website the profile links to.

    There is also an instagram page that was supposed to launch yesterday.

    And a paypal button. Hmmmm.

  • RogerRoger Posts: 19,854
    rcs1000 said:

    I just watched that video.

    It was unintentionally hilarious.

    And is it just me, or does the voice remind anyone else of the baby-eating Bishop of Bath and Wells from Blackadder?

    I know a man who knows a man who knows a man who's a friend of Jeffrey Epstein.......
  • 538 politics podcast on Trump's possible VP picks (and abortion driving turnout)
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0H9CfT351U0
  • EabhalEabhal Posts: 8,569
    edited August 2023
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    The future of Britain, the world, humanity, depends on who wins this race to AGI and how they exploit their victory



    Britain should be piling virtually all of its chips on AI. Bet the house. Bet everything. If we win we might solve nearly all of our problems at once - from productivity to the NHS to crime. If we lose we’re fucked but then if we are fucked so is everyone, probably, so it doesn’t matter

    But it isn't a race.

    Whether we invest in it or not won't influence who else does.
    Idiotic. This is like becoming the First Nation to industrialise. The USA and China are marching ahead but there’s no reason we cannot nimbly follow. If we don’t we will get flattened by competitors - and some of them might be happy to use AI with absolute malignance

    It stupefies me how so many apparently smart people still don’t understand what is happening
    Considering there aren't any major UK semiconductor companies we've already 'lost'. You can be as nimble as a flighty scarlet ibis but if you don't make the chips you're not competing in this race.

    And no ARM doesn't count.
    1. Not UK owned
    2. Not the right sort of chips
    The Saudis and UAE don’t make chips either. But they’re buying them up - the particular kind of chip required for LLMs. And - as the article says - they’ve already made impressive strides in AI

    So chips are important, but they can be bought. It is, then, what you do with them

    The First Nation to reach self-improving AI will potentially dominate the world, unless several nations get there near-simultaneously
    Oppenheimer 2
  • ohnotnowohnotnow Posts: 3,757
    rcs1000 said:

    I just watched that video.

    It was unintentionally hilarious.

    And is it just me, or does the voice remind anyone else of the baby-eating Bishop of Bath and Wells from Blackadder?

    I strongly suspect it's one of the eleven labs 'stock' voices.
  • RandallFlaggRandallFlagg Posts: 1,285
    Produced by the same useful idiots whose counterparts 'support' RFK in America
  • ohnotnowohnotnow Posts: 3,757
    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    The future of Britain, the world, humanity, depends on who wins this race to AGI and how they exploit their victory



    Britain should be piling virtually all of its chips on AI. Bet the house. Bet everything. If we win we might solve nearly all of our problems at once - from productivity to the NHS to crime. If we lose we’re fucked but then if we are fucked so is everyone, probably, so it doesn’t matter

    But it isn't a race.

    Whether we invest in it or not won't influence who else does.
    Idiotic. This is like becoming the First Nation to industrialise. The USA and China are marching ahead but there’s no reason we cannot nimbly follow. If we don’t we will get flattened by competitors - and some of them might be happy to use AI with absolute malignance

    It stupefies me how so many apparently smart people still don’t understand what is happening
    If you haven't watched/listened to it - there's a quite deep and thoughtful interview with the head of Anthropic (Claude etc) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nlkk3glap_U

    Really worth a go.
  • MiklosvarMiklosvar Posts: 1,855
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    The future of Britain, the world, humanity, depends on who wins this race to AGI and how they exploit their victory



    Britain should be piling virtually all of its chips on AI. Bet the house. Bet everything. If we win we might solve nearly all of our problems at once - from productivity to the NHS to crime. If we lose we’re fucked but then if we are fucked so is everyone, probably, so it doesn’t matter

    But it isn't a race.

    Whether we invest in it or not won't influence who else does.
    Idiotic. This is like becoming the First Nation to industrialise. The USA and China are marching ahead but there’s no reason we cannot nimbly follow. If we don’t we will get flattened by competitors - and some of them might be happy to use AI with absolute malignance

    It stupefies me how so many apparently smart people still don’t understand what is happening
    Considering there aren't any major UK semiconductor companies we've already 'lost'. You can be as nimble as a flighty scarlet ibis but if you don't make the chips you're not competing in this race.

    And no ARM doesn't count.
    1. Not UK owned
    2. Not the right sort of chips
    The Saudis and UAE don’t make chips either. But they’re buying them up - the particular kind of chip required for LLMs. And - as the article says - they’ve already made impressive strides in AI

    So chips are important, but they can be bought. It is, then, what you do with them

    The First Nation to reach self-improving AI will potentially dominate the world, unless several nations get there near-simultaneously
    Or, the self-improving AI will dominate the world, and it'll start by gobbling up the nation which produced it, and the rest of us will all think Phew, dodged that one.
  • Alphabet_SoupAlphabet_Soup Posts: 3,228

    538 politics podcast on Trump's possible VP picks (and abortion driving turnout)
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0H9CfT351U0

    Trump's last VP pick was one solid oak door away from getting lynched so it isn't necessarily a desirable role.
  • MiklosvarMiklosvar Posts: 1,855
    And you don't have to capitalise First Nation, which is wokespeak for Red Indian.
  • MightyAlexMightyAlex Posts: 1,651
    edited August 2023
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    The future of Britain, the world, humanity, depends on who wins this race to AGI and how they exploit their victory



    Britain should be piling virtually all of its chips on AI. Bet the house. Bet everything. If we win we might solve nearly all of our problems at once - from productivity to the NHS to crime. If we lose we’re fucked but then if we are fucked so is everyone, probably, so it doesn’t matter

    But it isn't a race.

    Whether we invest in it or not won't influence who else does.
    Idiotic. This is like becoming the First Nation to industrialise. The USA and China are marching ahead but there’s no reason we cannot nimbly follow. If we don’t we will get flattened by competitors - and some of them might be happy to use AI with absolute malignance

    It stupefies me how so many apparently smart people still don’t understand what is happening
    Considering there aren't any major UK semiconductor companies we've already 'lost'. You can be as nimble as a flighty scarlet ibis but if you don't make the chips you're not competing in this race.

    And no ARM doesn't count.
    1. Not UK owned
    2. Not the right sort of chips
    The Saudis and UAE don’t make chips either. But they’re buying them up - the particular kind of chip required for LLMs. And - as the article says - they’ve already made impressive strides in AI

    So chips are important, but they can be bought. It is, then, what you do with them

    The First Nation to reach self-improving AI will potentially dominate the world, unless several nations get there near-simultaneously
    The US is willing to restrict supply for geopolitical aims, ask China what happens if you can't easily access the good stuff.

    LLMS can be run on any chip its just the NVIDIA ones are currently the quickest. So upon every iteration its who gets the chips first and is able to accelerate from the rest. As the first mover advantage is so important why would an increasingly isolationist America prioritise our companies when they've the biggest/richest/sharpest corporates & spy agencies in the West?

    QED if these models are the future we've already 'lost'.
  • RandallFlaggRandallFlagg Posts: 1,285
    The message of the video appears to be that we should want this shambles of a government to get another 5 years so Richard Burgon can lead a pure, uncorrupted socialist Labour party who will be happy to have such policies as withdrawing from NATO and handing over half of Ukraine to Putin...
    Nice.
  • Can I just remind the good folks of PB that Owen Jones literally called for Corbyn to resign in 2017.
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 95,994
    rcs1000 said:

    I just watched that video.

    It was unintentionally hilarious.

    And is it just me, or does the voice remind anyone else of the baby-eating Bishop of Bath and Wells from Blackadder?

    It hadn't, but perhaps it did subconsciously, since I genuinely put on that episode after watching the video (granted, I had watched the preceding episode 5 hours ago).
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 95,994

    538 politics podcast on Trump's possible VP picks (and abortion driving turnout)
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0H9CfT351U0

    Trump's last VP pick was one solid oak door away from getting lynched so it isn't necessarily a desirable role.
    Though that guy is still planning to vote for Trump so apparently that's forgivable!

    (He hasn't said that outright, but those who aren't planning to have said so by now and given what he has said there'd be no reason for him to hold back to gain Trumpist votes, since they hate him anyway).
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 122,682
    Leon said:

    The future of Britain, the world, humanity, depends on who wins this race to AGI and how they exploit their victory



    Britain should be piling virtually all of its chips on AI. Bet the house. Bet everything. If we win we might solve nearly all of our problems at once - from productivity to the NHS to crime. If we lose we’re fucked but then if we are fucked so is everyone, probably, so it doesn’t matter

    The world needs to focus on controlling AI and ensuring it does not eliminate jobs without replacement and does not fall into the wrong hands, especially criminal elements and rogue states. That needs international co operation not just us piling in on AI, although obviously London and Cambridge etc can play a key role in leading it here
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,039
    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    The future of Britain, the world, humanity, depends on who wins this race to AGI and how they exploit their victory



    Britain should be piling virtually all of its chips on AI. Bet the house. Bet everything. If we win we might solve nearly all of our problems at once - from productivity to the NHS to crime. If we lose we’re fucked but then if we are fucked so is everyone, probably, so it doesn’t matter

    But it isn't a race.

    Whether we invest in it or not won't influence who else does.
    Idiotic. This is like becoming the First Nation to industrialise. The USA and China are marching ahead but there’s no reason we cannot nimbly follow. If we don’t we will get flattened by competitors - and some of them might be happy to use AI with absolute malignance

    It stupefies me how so many apparently smart people still don’t understand what is happening
    Considering there aren't any major UK semiconductor companies we've already 'lost'. You can be as nimble as a flighty scarlet ibis but if you don't make the chips you're not competing in this race.

    And no ARM doesn't count.
    1. Not UK owned
    2. Not the right sort of chips
    The Saudis and UAE don’t make chips either. But they’re buying them up - the particular kind of chip required for LLMs. And - as the article says - they’ve already made impressive strides in AI

    So chips are important, but they can be bought. It is, then, what you do with them

    The First Nation to reach self-improving AI will potentially dominate the world, unless several nations get there near-simultaneously
    Let's just game this out for a second.

    The UK government buys GPU chips from NVidia so as to give the UK an edge. (Presumably these chips are available to British firms to acquire from the government, with very strict rules about not reselling them on.)

    This is great for NVidia. They will sell massive numbers of chips to the UK. They will also contract additional foundry capacity so they can also sell to other people.

    How exactly is this scheme supposed to benefit the British people?

    Right now, I'm currently running some simple (GPU based) ML modelling in Google Colab. This is an area where 99.99% of people are going to be renting capacity.

    Work is happening in the UK, in Israel, the US, etc. The Deep Mind guys (and I know Demis) will I'm sure be great - albeit Google will accrue most of the benefits.

    But this is also a space where people are mobile and secrets rare.

    Within weeks of seeing the initial AI generated images, there were a dozen models. There are now half a dozen decent LLM models, most of which are open source. There are content libraries online (The Pile) that will help you train them up.

    It's coming. It will change our lives. But it's highly unlikely the nation state is going to have anything to do with it.
    It is absolutely certain that the nation state will largely dominate what happens with AGI because AGI will have a revolutionary impact on warfare

    No major power is going to yield control of that to mere corporations
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,039
    Miklosvar said:

    And you don't have to capitalise First Nation, which is wokespeak for Red Indian.

    My woke-phone capitalises it automatically. It’s deeply annoying but I can’t be arsed to correct it
  • MiklosvarMiklosvar Posts: 1,855

    Can I just remind the good folks of PB that Owen Jones literally called for Corbyn to resign in 2017.

    It does seem a bit relevant, that SKS literally did not. GE24 really is tweedledum on tweedledee.
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 32,492
    O/T

    If you like early 90s music, just discovered this excellent track IMO "This Is Your Life" by Banderas.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56LVUjK7Sz8
  • BartholomewRobertsBartholomewRoberts Posts: 21,963
    edited August 2023

    FF43 said:

    Stark illustration of the absolute disaster of Cameron's and Osborne's austerity policy. None of our peers followed us down that route.

    The Conservatives have done nothing else right since then, either.


    Much of the Eurozone had real austerity, not the increasing annually (but at a slower rate) "austerity" that the UK had.

    Look at Ireland, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain, the Netherlands and more for the austerity other nations had.

    The only ones that didn't were those that didn't have a deficit like ours.

    I can't think of any European peer that was spending like a drunken sailor on shore leave when the GFC hit (like Brown's was) that then continued to without any form of austerity afterwards.
    Labour should use that graph in its election ads.

    Whatever, spin you and fellow rightists try to put on it, most people will see the the simple truth: Labour = growing wages; Tories = stagnant wages.
    Borrowing to boost wages isn't growing wages, its stealing from your grandchildren.

    But a lot of voters seem to like that as a policy.
    That's more bullshit.

    Here's the UK defict as %GDP for the period 1998 - 2023

    image

    https://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/spending_chart_1998_2023UKp_17c1li111lcn_H0t_Current_Budget_Deficit
    Precisely! Thanks for proving my point.

    See that point in 2002/03 when it goes into having a deficit, despite there not being a recession in 2002/03?

    Stupid, stupid, stupid mismanagement of the finances.

    So when the inevitable recession hit, instead of going from budget surplus to manageable budget deficit, we went from deficit to humongous out of control deficit instead. Because the deficit inevitably worsens when you hit the inevitable downturn, which is why you don't blow your budget wide open five years before the recession.

    For the rest of the century the deficit has improved annually, or gotten worse during downtimes (like GFC or Covid or Russia/Ukraine War) which is natural and appropriate economics. Spending like there's no tomorrow pre-crash just means you're royally fucked when the crash inevitably comes. And it was entirely unnecessary since there was a budget surplus in 2002 and that just had to be maintained as a balanced budget or small surplus in order to avoid austerity.
  • MiklosvarMiklosvar Posts: 1,855
    HYUFD said:

    Leon said:

    The future of Britain, the world, humanity, depends on who wins this race to AGI and how they exploit their victory



    Britain should be piling virtually all of its chips on AI. Bet the house. Bet everything. If we win we might solve nearly all of our problems at once - from productivity to the NHS to crime. If we lose we’re fucked but then if we are fucked so is everyone, probably, so it doesn’t matter

    The world needs to focus on controlling AI and ensuring it does not eliminate jobs without replacement and does not fall into the wrong hands, especially criminal elements and rogue states. That needs international co operation not just us piling in on AI, although obviously London and Cambridge etc can play a key role in leading it here
    "Fall into the wrong hands" is what happens with bombs and stuff. Physical, hard to reproduce, hardware stuff. If AI happens, it will be downloadable on bittorrent within the year.
  • EabhalEabhal Posts: 8,569
    edited August 2023
    HYUFD said:

    Leon said:

    The future of Britain, the world, humanity, depends on who wins this race to AGI and how they exploit their victory



    Britain should be piling virtually all of its chips on AI. Bet the house. Bet everything. If we win we might solve nearly all of our problems at once - from productivity to the NHS to crime. If we lose we’re fucked but then if we are fucked so is everyone, probably, so it doesn’t matter

    The world needs to focus on controlling AI and ensuring it does not eliminate jobs without replacement and does not fall into the wrong hands, especially criminal elements and rogue states. That needs international co operation not just us piling in on AI, although obviously London and Cambridge etc can play a key role in leading it here
    Part of the reason we have had sluggish productivity growth over the last 15 years may be a lack of disruption in our economy and labour market. We should welcome stuff like AI, but be aware that dramatic shifts in the economy can leave some people behind.

    A large proportion of productivity growth in the 20th century translated into weekends and the 8 hour day. AI for rich countries might just mean a huge increase in human welfare.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,039
    edited August 2023
    Eabhal said:

    HYUFD said:

    Leon said:

    The future of Britain, the world, humanity, depends on who wins this race to AGI and how they exploit their victory



    Britain should be piling virtually all of its chips on AI. Bet the house. Bet everything. If we win we might solve nearly all of our problems at once - from productivity to the NHS to crime. If we lose we’re fucked but then if we are fucked so is everyone, probably, so it doesn’t matter

    The world needs to focus on controlling AI and ensuring it does not eliminate jobs without replacement and does not fall into the wrong hands, especially criminal elements and rogue states. That needs international co operation not just us piling in on AI, although obviously London and Cambridge etc can play a key role in leading it here
    Part of the reason we have had sluggish productivity growth over the last 15 years may be a lack of disruption in our economy and labour market. We should welcome stuff like AI, but be aware that dramatic shifts in the economy can leave some people behind.

    Remember - a large proportion of productivity growth in the 20th century translated into weekends and the 8 hour day. AI for rich countries might just mean a huge increase in human welfare.
    The impending advent of AI probably means the “demographic crisis” will in the end mean nothing at all. Good news for China and some other East Asian countries but probably good news for all humanity

    So there are fewer babies and fewer people? It doesn’t matter. AI is gonna do 70-90% of jobs. You don’t need these people. And Fewer people means less pressure on planet earth

    This is me being optimistic
  • Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    The future of Britain, the world, humanity, depends on who wins this race to AGI and how they exploit their victory



    Britain should be piling virtually all of its chips on AI. Bet the house. Bet everything. If we win we might solve nearly all of our problems at once - from productivity to the NHS to crime. If we lose we’re fucked but then if we are fucked so is everyone, probably, so it doesn’t matter

    But it isn't a race.

    Whether we invest in it or not won't influence who else does.
    Idiotic. This is like becoming the First Nation to industrialise. The USA and China are marching ahead but there’s no reason we cannot nimbly follow. If we don’t we will get flattened by competitors - and some of them might be happy to use AI with absolute malignance

    It stupefies me how so many apparently smart people still don’t understand what is happening
    Considering there aren't any major UK semiconductor companies we've already 'lost'. You can be as nimble as a flighty scarlet ibis but if you don't make the chips you're not competing in this race.

    And no ARM doesn't count.
    1. Not UK owned
    2. Not the right sort of chips
    The Saudis and UAE don’t make chips either. But they’re buying them up - the particular kind of chip required for LLMs. And - as the article says - they’ve already made impressive strides in AI

    So chips are important, but they can be bought. It is, then, what you do with them

    The First Nation to reach self-improving AI will potentially dominate the world, unless several nations get there near-simultaneously
    Let's just game this out for a second.

    The UK government buys GPU chips from NVidia so as to give the UK an edge. (Presumably these chips are available to British firms to acquire from the government, with very strict rules about not reselling them on.)

    This is great for NVidia. They will sell massive numbers of chips to the UK. They will also contract additional foundry capacity so they can also sell to other people.

    How exactly is this scheme supposed to benefit the British people?

    Right now, I'm currently running some simple (GPU based) ML modelling in Google Colab. This is an area where 99.99% of people are going to be renting capacity.

    Work is happening in the UK, in Israel, the US, etc. The Deep Mind guys (and I know Demis) will I'm sure be great - albeit Google will accrue most of the benefits.

    But this is also a space where people are mobile and secrets rare.

    Within weeks of seeing the initial AI generated images, there were a dozen models. There are now half a dozen decent LLM models, most of which are open source. There are content libraries online (The Pile) that will help you train them up.

    It's coming. It will change our lives. But it's highly unlikely the nation state is going to have anything to do with it.
    It is absolutely certain that the nation state will largely dominate what happens with AGI because AGI will have a revolutionary impact on warfare

    No major power is going to yield control of that to mere corporations
    It is not remotely certain because you can't put the genie back into the bottle. Pandora's box will be open, the knowledge will be out there.

    The only certainty is in your mind. But the real probability is that corporations and pirates and therefore pretty much everyone will have access rapidly.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 50,051
    On topic - Can’t tell if these people are mad fascists or mad ultra-left cultists.

    On second thoughts, why bother differentiating. How many more videos before they get to The Jews?
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,039

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    The future of Britain, the world, humanity, depends on who wins this race to AGI and how they exploit their victory



    Britain should be piling virtually all of its chips on AI. Bet the house. Bet everything. If we win we might solve nearly all of our problems at once - from productivity to the NHS to crime. If we lose we’re fucked but then if we are fucked so is everyone, probably, so it doesn’t matter

    But it isn't a race.

    Whether we invest in it or not won't influence who else does.
    Idiotic. This is like becoming the First Nation to industrialise. The USA and China are marching ahead but there’s no reason we cannot nimbly follow. If we don’t we will get flattened by competitors - and some of them might be happy to use AI with absolute malignance

    It stupefies me how so many apparently smart people still don’t understand what is happening
    Considering there aren't any major UK semiconductor companies we've already 'lost'. You can be as nimble as a flighty scarlet ibis but if you don't make the chips you're not competing in this race.

    And no ARM doesn't count.
    1. Not UK owned
    2. Not the right sort of chips
    The Saudis and UAE don’t make chips either. But they’re buying them up - the particular kind of chip required for LLMs. And - as the article says - they’ve already made impressive strides in AI

    So chips are important, but they can be bought. It is, then, what you do with them

    The First Nation to reach self-improving AI will potentially dominate the world, unless several nations get there near-simultaneously
    Let's just game this out for a second.

    The UK government buys GPU chips from NVidia so as to give the UK an edge. (Presumably these chips are available to British firms to acquire from the government, with very strict rules about not reselling them on.)

    This is great for NVidia. They will sell massive numbers of chips to the UK. They will also contract additional foundry capacity so they can also sell to other people.

    How exactly is this scheme supposed to benefit the British people?

    Right now, I'm currently running some simple (GPU based) ML modelling in Google Colab. This is an area where 99.99% of people are going to be renting capacity.

    Work is happening in the UK, in Israel, the US, etc. The Deep Mind guys (and I know Demis) will I'm sure be great - albeit Google will accrue most of the benefits.

    But this is also a space where people are mobile and secrets rare.

    Within weeks of seeing the initial AI generated images, there were a dozen models. There are now half a dozen decent LLM models, most of which are open source. There are content libraries online (The Pile) that will help you train them up.

    It's coming. It will change our lives. But it's highly unlikely the nation state is going to have anything to do with it.
    It is absolutely certain that the nation state will largely dominate what happens with AGI because AGI will have a revolutionary impact on warfare

    No major power is going to yield control of that to mere corporations
    It is not remotely certain because you can't put the genie back into the bottle. Pandora's box will be open, the knowledge will be out there.

    The only certainty is in your mind. But the real probability is that corporations and pirates and therefore pretty much everyone will have access rapidly.
    You think China is gonna let Baidu autonomously control technology that can wipe out humanity - or destroy enemy nation states?

    Ditto America with Facebook?

    This tech is potentially more menacing than nuclear weapons. It will likely be harder to control but powerful nations will do everything possible to control it
  • EabhalEabhal Posts: 8,569

    On topic - Can’t tell if these people are mad fascists or mad ultra-left cultists.

    On second thoughts, why bother differentiating. How many more videos before they get to The Jews?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory
  • .
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    The future of Britain, the world, humanity, depends on who wins this race to AGI and how they exploit their victory



    Britain should be piling virtually all of its chips on AI. Bet the house. Bet everything. If we win we might solve nearly all of our problems at once - from productivity to the NHS to crime. If we lose we’re fucked but then if we are fucked so is everyone, probably, so it doesn’t matter

    But it isn't a race.

    Whether we invest in it or not won't influence who else does.
    Idiotic. This is like becoming the First Nation to industrialise. The USA and China are marching ahead but there’s no reason we cannot nimbly follow. If we don’t we will get flattened by competitors - and some of them might be happy to use AI with absolute malignance

    It stupefies me how so many apparently smart people still don’t understand what is happening
    Considering there aren't any major UK semiconductor companies we've already 'lost'. You can be as nimble as a flighty scarlet ibis but if you don't make the chips you're not competing in this race.

    And no ARM doesn't count.
    1. Not UK owned
    2. Not the right sort of chips
    The Saudis and UAE don’t make chips either. But they’re buying them up - the particular kind of chip required for LLMs. And - as the article says - they’ve already made impressive strides in AI

    So chips are important, but they can be bought. It is, then, what you do with them

    The First Nation to reach self-improving AI will potentially dominate the world, unless several nations get there near-simultaneously
    Let's just game this out for a second.

    The UK government buys GPU chips from NVidia so as to give the UK an edge. (Presumably these chips are available to British firms to acquire from the government, with very strict rules about not reselling them on.)

    This is great for NVidia. They will sell massive numbers of chips to the UK. They will also contract additional foundry capacity so they can also sell to other people.

    How exactly is this scheme supposed to benefit the British people?

    Right now, I'm currently running some simple (GPU based) ML modelling in Google Colab. This is an area where 99.99% of people are going to be renting capacity.

    Work is happening in the UK, in Israel, the US, etc. The Deep Mind guys (and I know Demis) will I'm sure be great - albeit Google will accrue most of the benefits.

    But this is also a space where people are mobile and secrets rare.

    Within weeks of seeing the initial AI generated images, there were a dozen models. There are now half a dozen decent LLM models, most of which are open source. There are content libraries online (The Pile) that will help you train them up.

    It's coming. It will change our lives. But it's highly unlikely the nation state is going to have anything to do with it.
    It is absolutely certain that the nation state will largely dominate what happens with AGI because AGI will have a revolutionary impact on warfare

    No major power is going to yield control of that to mere corporations
    It is not remotely certain because you can't put the genie back into the bottle. Pandora's box will be open, the knowledge will be out there.

    The only certainty is in your mind. But the real probability is that corporations and pirates and therefore pretty much everyone will have access rapidly.
    You think China is gonna let Baidu autonomously control technology that can wipe out humanity - or destroy enemy nation states?

    Ditto America with Facebook?

    This tech is potentially more menacing than nuclear weapons. It will likely be harder to control but powerful nations will do everything possible to control it
    "everything possible"

    That is your problem.

    Its not going to be possible to control it.

    What China or the USA want to "let" happen is no more relevant than them making piracy illegal. Stopping the spread of knowledge on the internet is not within the set of possible outcomes.
  • FlatlanderFlatlander Posts: 4,635
    edited August 2023
    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    The future of Britain, the world, humanity, depends on who wins this race to AGI and how they exploit their victory



    Britain should be piling virtually all of its chips on AI. Bet the house. Bet everything. If we win we might solve nearly all of our problems at once - from productivity to the NHS to crime. If we lose we’re fucked but then if we are fucked so is everyone, probably, so it doesn’t matter

    But it isn't a race.

    Whether we invest in it or not won't influence who else does.
    Idiotic. This is like becoming the First Nation to industrialise. The USA and China are marching ahead but there’s no reason we cannot nimbly follow. If we don’t we will get flattened by competitors - and some of them might be happy to use AI with absolute malignance

    It stupefies me how so many apparently smart people still don’t understand what is happening
    Considering there aren't any major UK semiconductor companies we've already 'lost'. You can be as nimble as a flighty scarlet ibis but if you don't make the chips you're not competing in this race.

    And no ARM doesn't count.
    1. Not UK owned
    2. Not the right sort of chips
    The Saudis and UAE don’t make chips either. But they’re buying them up - the particular kind of chip required for LLMs. And - as the article says - they’ve already made impressive strides in AI

    So chips are important, but they can be bought. It is, then, what you do with them

    The First Nation to reach self-improving AI will potentially dominate the world, unless several nations get there near-simultaneously
    Let's just game this out for a second.

    The UK government buys GPU chips from NVidia so as to give the UK an edge. (Presumably these chips are available to British firms to acquire from the government, with very strict rules about not reselling them on.)

    This is great for NVidia. They will sell massive numbers of chips to the UK. They will also contract additional foundry capacity so they can also sell to other people.

    How exactly is this scheme supposed to benefit the British people?

    Right now, I'm currently running some simple (GPU based) ML modelling in Google Colab. This is an area where 99.99% of people are going to be renting capacity.

    Work is happening in the UK, in Israel, the US, etc. The Deep Mind guys (and I know Demis) will I'm sure be great - albeit Google will accrue most of the benefits.

    But this is also a space where people are mobile and secrets rare.

    Within weeks of seeing the initial AI generated images, there were a dozen models. There are now half a dozen decent LLM models, most of which are open source. There are content libraries online (The Pile) that will help you train them up.

    It's coming. It will change our lives. But it's highly unlikely the nation state is going to have anything to do with it.
    With the Atom Bomb, the secret was not really how to make one, it was that it worked at all.

    Once that rather hard to hide secret was out, all bets were off.

    Same applies here, except it won't be in the hands of governments.

    Uh oh.
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 32,492
    rcs1000 said:

    @OwenJones84
    Keir Starmer is one of the most dishonest politicians in Britain, and that's quite a bar to pass.

    He ran the most dishonest campaign for the leadership of a major political party in British history, however much his abusive cult-like followers pretend otherwise.


    https://twitter.com/OwenJones84/status/1551514583185121281

    The first cult on earth whose mantra is "well, he's a bit shit and he's a charisma-free zone, but at least he's not Jeremy Corbyn."

    I mean, come on Owen; accuse him of dishonesty, accuse him of whatever; but don't claim that he has anything that even vaguely resembles a cult like following.
    I still don't understand why Owen Jones so dislikes Keir Starmer.
  • Maybe the US should simply stop "letting" illegal drugs exist within America @Leon

    Perhaps they could declare a "war" on drugs since you want to compare AI to nuclear weapons?

    That'd surely work if they do "everything possible" to stop drugs?

    Stopping the spread of knowledge online is infinitely harder than stopping the spread of drugs on the streets, since the latter is a physical product that needs to be moved/smuggled/produced. The former is just bits that can be effectively instantaneously replicated or transferred from anywhere on the planet to anywhere on the planet.

    America has more chance of winning the war on drugs, than it does preventing people from using or gaining access to AI. Ie none.
  • rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    The future of Britain, the world, humanity, depends on who wins this race to AGI and how they exploit their victory



    Britain should be piling virtually all of its chips on AI. Bet the house. Bet everything. If we win we might solve nearly all of our problems at once - from productivity to the NHS to crime. If we lose we’re fucked but then if we are fucked so is everyone, probably, so it doesn’t matter

    But it isn't a race.

    Whether we invest in it or not won't influence who else does.
    Idiotic. This is like becoming the First Nation to industrialise. The USA and China are marching ahead but there’s no reason we cannot nimbly follow. If we don’t we will get flattened by competitors - and some of them might be happy to use AI with absolute malignance

    It stupefies me how so many apparently smart people still don’t understand what is happening
    Considering there aren't any major UK semiconductor companies we've already 'lost'. You can be as nimble as a flighty scarlet ibis but if you don't make the chips you're not competing in this race.

    And no ARM doesn't count.
    1. Not UK owned
    2. Not the right sort of chips
    The Saudis and UAE don’t make chips either. But they’re buying them up - the particular kind of chip required for LLMs. And - as the article says - they’ve already made impressive strides in AI

    So chips are important, but they can be bought. It is, then, what you do with them

    The First Nation to reach self-improving AI will potentially dominate the world, unless several nations get there near-simultaneously
    Let's just game this out for a second.

    The UK government buys GPU chips from NVidia so as to give the UK an edge. (Presumably these chips are available to British firms to acquire from the government, with very strict rules about not reselling them on.)

    This is great for NVidia. They will sell massive numbers of chips to the UK. They will also contract additional foundry capacity so they can also sell to other people.

    How exactly is this scheme supposed to benefit the British people?

    Right now, I'm currently running some simple (GPU based) ML modelling in Google Colab. This is an area where 99.99% of people are going to be renting capacity.

    Work is happening in the UK, in Israel, the US, etc. The Deep Mind guys (and I know Demis) will I'm sure be great - albeit Google will accrue most of the benefits.

    But this is also a space where people are mobile and secrets rare.

    Within weeks of seeing the initial AI generated images, there were a dozen models. There are now half a dozen decent LLM models, most of which are open source. There are content libraries online (The Pile) that will help you train them up.

    It's coming. It will change our lives. But it's highly unlikely the nation state is going to have anything to do with it.
    With the Atom Bomb, the secret was not really how to make one, it was that it worked at all.

    Once that rather hard to hide secret was out, all bets were off.

    Same applies here, except it won't be in the hands of governments.

    Uh oh.
    Indeed and the reason very few nations own bombs is not because they don't know the science, its because they lack the skills, expertise and more importantly resources and infrastructure to do it. Which are all complex, with physical materials and volatile chemicals that need to be handled just right.

    Not bits that can be copied and pasted online.
  • Miklosvar said:

    And you don't have to capitalise First Nation, which is wokespeak for Red Indian.

    India actually has TWO main Communist Parties: the Communist Party of India, and the Communist Party of India (Marxist).
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 95,994

    On topic - Can’t tell if these people are mad fascists or mad ultra-left cultists.

    On second thoughts, why bother differentiating. How many more videos before they get to The Jews?

    I for one fully believe all those people who insist it is just so hard to criticise the Israeli government without accidentally voicing anti-semitic tropes or associating with openly racist speakers or groups, and certainly not that they believe those tropes or the people who are more direct about matters.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,039

    Maybe the US should simply stop "letting" illegal drugs exist within America @Leon

    Perhaps they could declare a "war" on drugs since you want to compare AI to nuclear weapons?

    That'd surely work if they do "everything possible" to stop drugs?

    Stopping the spread of knowledge online is infinitely harder than stopping the spread of drugs on the streets, since the latter is a physical product that needs to be moved/smuggled/produced. The former is just bits that can be effectively instantaneously replicated or transferred from anywhere on the planet to anywhere on the planet.

    America has more chance of winning the war on drugs, than it does preventing people from using or gaining access to AI. Ie none.

    I don’t think you really understand my argument, or what is happening in AI, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt for the purposes of debate

    If you’re right I reckon we’re doomed. It will be as if any damn fool can build a H bomb in his kitchen in 3 hours with gaffer tape, pastry dough and a screwdriver. If making devastating nukes ever got that easy criminal mafias, warring little nations, terror groups, religious nutters and mad people would kill us all within a decade

    I hope I’m right. I reckon this tech is so scary and powerful major nations will do the utmost to control it and they will probably succeed

    But perhaps I am being foolishly hopeful

    Of course there is a third option. We let AGI rule the world to make sure AGI doesn’t kill us. So we survive but become subjects
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 95,994

    Miklosvar said:

    And you don't have to capitalise First Nation, which is wokespeak for Red Indian.

    India actually has TWO main Communist Parties: the Communist Party of India, and the Communist Party of India (Marxist).
    At first I was astonished that a place as large and diverse would have a mere two communist parties, given the propensity of the far left to split, but then I noted you stated they were 'main' community parties. No doubt there are innumerable other offshoots.
  • kyf_100kyf_100 Posts: 4,914
    edited August 2023
    Leon said:

    Maybe the US should simply stop "letting" illegal drugs exist within America @Leon

    Perhaps they could declare a "war" on drugs since you want to compare AI to nuclear weapons?

    That'd surely work if they do "everything possible" to stop drugs?

    Stopping the spread of knowledge online is infinitely harder than stopping the spread of drugs on the streets, since the latter is a physical product that needs to be moved/smuggled/produced. The former is just bits that can be effectively instantaneously replicated or transferred from anywhere on the planet to anywhere on the planet.

    America has more chance of winning the war on drugs, than it does preventing people from using or gaining access to AI. Ie none.

    I don’t think you really understand my argument, or what is happening in AI, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt for the purposes of debate

    If you’re right I reckon we’re doomed. It will be as if any damn fool can build a H bomb in his kitchen in 3 hours with gaffer tape, pastry dough and a screwdriver. If making devastating nukes ever got that easy criminal mafias, warring little nations, terror groups, religious nutters and mad people would kill us all within a decade

    I hope I’m right. I reckon this tech is so scary and powerful major nations will do the utmost to control it and they will probably succeed

    But perhaps I am being foolishly hopeful

    Of course there is a third option. We let AGI rule the world to make sure AGI doesn’t kill us. So we survive but become subjects
    That which was only doable with a bank of a100s last year is now replicable with 2x 4090s, i.e. 2x consumer grade gaming pc graphics cards, to achieve gpt3 style results.

    Any fool can run an uncensored, open source LLM of the same power as the currently available models from OpenAI with comparable results, using commonly available consumer hardware.

    The cat, if it was ever in the bag, had its head, whiskers and nose pointing out from the start.
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 95,994
    Yes, that's about the shape of things - indicting has to happen for, you know, justice, but nothing can stop the juggernaut.

    Here’s the deal: Trump HAS TO be the GOP nominee. If he’s not their nominee, they can’t win in 2024 bcuz his followers will stay home, GOP turnout will be in the toilet, affecting lots of races.

    It’s too late for the GOP. They’re stuck with Trump. They did this to themselves.

    https://nitter.net/WalshFreedom/status/1691101776370368512#m
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 122,682
    Miklosvar said:

    HYUFD said:

    Leon said:

    The future of Britain, the world, humanity, depends on who wins this race to AGI and how they exploit their victory



    Britain should be piling virtually all of its chips on AI. Bet the house. Bet everything. If we win we might solve nearly all of our problems at once - from productivity to the NHS to crime. If we lose we’re fucked but then if we are fucked so is everyone, probably, so it doesn’t matter

    The world needs to focus on controlling AI and ensuring it does not eliminate jobs without replacement and does not fall into the wrong hands, especially criminal elements and rogue states. That needs international co operation not just us piling in on AI, although obviously London and Cambridge etc can play a key role in leading it here
    "Fall into the wrong hands" is what happens with bombs and stuff. Physical, hard to reproduce, hardware stuff. If AI happens, it will be downloadable on bittorrent within the year.
    Then governments can ban bittorrent unless for those with special licenses
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,039
    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    Maybe the US should simply stop "letting" illegal drugs exist within America @Leon

    Perhaps they could declare a "war" on drugs since you want to compare AI to nuclear weapons?

    That'd surely work if they do "everything possible" to stop drugs?

    Stopping the spread of knowledge online is infinitely harder than stopping the spread of drugs on the streets, since the latter is a physical product that needs to be moved/smuggled/produced. The former is just bits that can be effectively instantaneously replicated or transferred from anywhere on the planet to anywhere on the planet.

    America has more chance of winning the war on drugs, than it does preventing people from using or gaining access to AI. Ie none.

    I don’t think you really understand my argument, or what is happening in AI, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt for the purposes of debate

    If you’re right I reckon we’re doomed. It will be as if any damn fool can build a H bomb in his kitchen in 3 hours with gaffer tape, pastry dough and a screwdriver. If making devastating nukes ever got that easy criminal mafias, warring little nations, terror groups, religious nutters and mad people would kill us all within a decade

    I hope I’m right. I reckon this tech is so scary and powerful major nations will do the utmost to control it and they will probably succeed

    But perhaps I am being foolishly hopeful

    Of course there is a third option. We let AGI rule the world to make sure AGI doesn’t kill us. So we survive but become subjects
    That which was only doable with a bank of a100s last year is now replicable with 2x 4090s, i.e. 2x consumer grade gaming pc graphics cards, to achieve gpt3 style results.

    Any fool can run an uncensored, open source LLM of the same power as the currently available models from OpenAI with comparable results, using commonly available consumer hardware.

    The cat, if it was ever in the bag, had its head, whiskers and nose pointing out from the start.
    Yes it is quite possible I am hopecasting. Because an anarchic AI free-for-all is profoundly frightening


    I can see why some experts put the chances of AI killing us off at >10%. A few are way more pessimistic than THAT
  • MiklosvarMiklosvar Posts: 1,855
    HYUFD said:

    Miklosvar said:

    HYUFD said:

    Leon said:

    The future of Britain, the world, humanity, depends on who wins this race to AGI and how they exploit their victory



    Britain should be piling virtually all of its chips on AI. Bet the house. Bet everything. If we win we might solve nearly all of our problems at once - from productivity to the NHS to crime. If we lose we’re fucked but then if we are fucked so is everyone, probably, so it doesn’t matter

    The world needs to focus on controlling AI and ensuring it does not eliminate jobs without replacement and does not fall into the wrong hands, especially criminal elements and rogue states. That needs international co operation not just us piling in on AI, although obviously London and Cambridge etc can play a key role in leading it here
    "Fall into the wrong hands" is what happens with bombs and stuff. Physical, hard to reproduce, hardware stuff. If AI happens, it will be downloadable on bittorrent within the year.
    Then governments can ban bittorrent unless for those with special licenses
    Yes of course, that's EXACTLY how the internet works. Silly me.
  • kle4 said:

    Miklosvar said:

    And you don't have to capitalise First Nation, which is wokespeak for Red Indian.

    India actually has TWO main Communist Parties: the Communist Party of India, and the Communist Party of India (Marxist).
    At first I was astonished that a place as large and diverse would have a mere two communist parties, given the propensity of the far left to split, but then I noted you stated they were 'main' community parties. No doubt there are innumerable other offshoots.
    Goes back to the 1960s Sino-Soviet split. The CPI supported Russia, the CPI(M) backed China.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 57,038
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    The future of Britain, the world, humanity, depends on who wins this race to AGI and how they exploit their victory



    Britain should be piling virtually all of its chips on AI. Bet the house. Bet everything. If we win we might solve nearly all of our problems at once - from productivity to the NHS to crime. If we lose we’re fucked but then if we are fucked so is everyone, probably, so it doesn’t matter

    But it isn't a race.

    Whether we invest in it or not won't influence who else does.
    Idiotic. This is like becoming the First Nation to industrialise. The USA and China are marching ahead but there’s no reason we cannot nimbly follow. If we don’t we will get flattened by competitors - and some of them might be happy to use AI with absolute malignance

    It stupefies me how so many apparently smart people still don’t understand what is happening
    Considering there aren't any major UK semiconductor companies we've already 'lost'. You can be as nimble as a flighty scarlet ibis but if you don't make the chips you're not competing in this race.

    And no ARM doesn't count.
    1. Not UK owned
    2. Not the right sort of chips
    The Saudis and UAE don’t make chips either. But they’re buying them up - the particular kind of chip required for LLMs. And - as the article says - they’ve already made impressive strides in AI

    So chips are important, but they can be bought. It is, then, what you do with them

    The First Nation to reach self-improving AI will potentially dominate the world, unless several nations get there near-simultaneously
    Let's just game this out for a second.

    The UK government buys GPU chips from NVidia so as to give the UK an edge. (Presumably these chips are available to British firms to acquire from the government, with very strict rules about not reselling them on.)

    This is great for NVidia. They will sell massive numbers of chips to the UK. They will also contract additional foundry capacity so they can also sell to other people.

    How exactly is this scheme supposed to benefit the British people?

    Right now, I'm currently running some simple (GPU based) ML modelling in Google Colab. This is an area where 99.99% of people are going to be renting capacity.

    Work is happening in the UK, in Israel, the US, etc. The Deep Mind guys (and I know Demis) will I'm sure be great - albeit Google will accrue most of the benefits.

    But this is also a space where people are mobile and secrets rare.

    Within weeks of seeing the initial AI generated images, there were a dozen models. There are now half a dozen decent LLM models, most of which are open source. There are content libraries online (The Pile) that will help you train them up.

    It's coming. It will change our lives. But it's highly unlikely the nation state is going to have anything to do with it.
    It is absolutely certain that the nation state will largely dominate what happens with AGI because AGI will have a revolutionary impact on warfare

    No major power is going to yield control of that to mere corporations
    It is not remotely certain because you can't put the genie back into the bottle. Pandora's box will be open, the knowledge will be out there.

    The only certainty is in your mind. But the real probability is that corporations and pirates and therefore pretty much everyone will have access rapidly.
    You think China is gonna let Baidu autonomously control technology that can wipe out humanity - or destroy enemy nation states?

    Ditto America with Facebook?

    This tech is potentially more menacing than nuclear weapons. It will likely be harder to control but powerful nations will do everything possible to control it
    @BartholomewRoberts is correct.

    Have you read the leaked Google internal email about LLMs and AI?

    There's a copy of it here: https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-neither

    The difference between this and the industrial revolution is massive. When the Brits started producing steel cheaply, no-one had any idea how they did it, or how to compete. The French offered fortunes to people who'd worked in British factories.

    Nowadays, everyone is online, anyone can work for anyone, and no-one has a monopoly on knowing shit.

    You seem to think there is this cliff edge, and it's either a 1 or a 0. It's not. It's one group at 0.555334 and another at 0.527881 etc. These groups aren't national. Some are corporates. Some are informal groups of people sharing source code on github.

    And not only that, but one LLM may be great at one set of things, while another has another set of specialties.

    Your vision of one country having some special bauble that no-one else has is absurd. That's not how this stuff works.
  • FlatlanderFlatlander Posts: 4,635
    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    Maybe the US should simply stop "letting" illegal drugs exist within America @Leon

    Perhaps they could declare a "war" on drugs since you want to compare AI to nuclear weapons?

    That'd surely work if they do "everything possible" to stop drugs?

    Stopping the spread of knowledge online is infinitely harder than stopping the spread of drugs on the streets, since the latter is a physical product that needs to be moved/smuggled/produced. The former is just bits that can be effectively instantaneously replicated or transferred from anywhere on the planet to anywhere on the planet.

    America has more chance of winning the war on drugs, than it does preventing people from using or gaining access to AI. Ie none.

    I don’t think you really understand my argument, or what is happening in AI, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt for the purposes of debate

    If you’re right I reckon we’re doomed. It will be as if any damn fool can build a H bomb in his kitchen in 3 hours with gaffer tape, pastry dough and a screwdriver. If making devastating nukes ever got that easy criminal mafias, warring little nations, terror groups, religious nutters and mad people would kill us all within a decade

    I hope I’m right. I reckon this tech is so scary and powerful major nations will do the utmost to control it and they will probably succeed

    But perhaps I am being foolishly hopeful

    Of course there is a third option. We let AGI rule the world to make sure AGI doesn’t kill us. So we survive but become subjects
    That which was only doable with a bank of a100s last year is now replicable with 2x 4090s, i.e. 2x consumer grade gaming pc graphics cards, to achieve gpt3 style results.

    Any fool can run an uncensored, open source LLM of the same power as the currently available models from OpenAI with comparable results, using commonly available consumer hardware.

    The cat, if it was ever in the bag, had its head, whiskers and nose pointing out from the start.
    Moore's Law will be the death of us all...
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 122,682
    edited August 2023
    Eabhal said:

    HYUFD said:

    Leon said:

    The future of Britain, the world, humanity, depends on who wins this race to AGI and how they exploit their victory



    Britain should be piling virtually all of its chips on AI. Bet the house. Bet everything. If we win we might solve nearly all of our problems at once - from productivity to the NHS to crime. If we lose we’re fucked but then if we are fucked so is everyone, probably, so it doesn’t matter

    The world needs to focus on controlling AI and ensuring it does not eliminate jobs without replacement and does not fall into the wrong hands, especially criminal elements and rogue states. That needs international co operation not just us piling in on AI, although obviously London and Cambridge etc can play a key role in leading it here
    Part of the reason we have had sluggish productivity growth over the last 15 years may be a lack of disruption in our economy and labour market. We should welcome stuff like AI, but be aware that dramatic shifts in the economy can leave some people behind.

    A large proportion of productivity growth in the 20th century translated into weekends and the 8 hour day. AI for rich countries might just mean a huge increase in human welfare.
    High IQ people may well be fine doing highly paid creative projects from time to time and spend their leisure time in the arts for the rest. The rest of society if AI takes most of the jobs (and certainly the full time and permanent jobs) are not going to sit around all day on a UBI (which would have to be funded by a robot tax on corporations anyway) without being more disruptive
  • tpfkartpfkar Posts: 1,564
    https://whois.domaintools.com/stopstarmer.co.uk

    Domain registered 02/05/23 - local election week.
    Looks like they have stopstarmer.org as well.
  • tpfkar said:

    https://whois.domaintools.com/stopstarmer.co.uk

    Domain registered 02/05/23 - local election week.
    Looks like they have stopstarmer.org as well.

    BJO fans please explain!
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 122,682
    kle4 said:

    Yes, that's about the shape of things - indicting has to happen for, you know, justice, but nothing can stop the juggernaut.

    Here’s the deal: Trump HAS TO be the GOP nominee. If he’s not their nominee, they can’t win in 2024 bcuz his followers will stay home, GOP turnout will be in the toilet, affecting lots of races.

    It’s too late for the GOP. They’re stuck with Trump. They did this to themselves.

    https://nitter.net/WalshFreedom/status/1691101776370368512#m

    And if Trump is convicted and jailed but remains GOP nominee the other more moderate half of Republicans will stay home, vote Democrat or for Independents anyway
  • EabhalEabhal Posts: 8,569
    I just looked up my first graduate job after uni. Nothing fancy - a big firm, but in a regional office. 70 hour weeks, mind-numbing work, rubbish pay. I quit after two years after a manager got divorced and had a breakdown.

    New grads on that scheme have seen their salaries fall by 10% in real terms over the last few years. Crazy.
  • EabhalEabhal Posts: 8,569
    edited August 2023
    HYUFD said:

    Eabhal said:

    HYUFD said:

    Leon said:

    The future of Britain, the world, humanity, depends on who wins this race to AGI and how they exploit their victory



    Britain should be piling virtually all of its chips on AI. Bet the house. Bet everything. If we win we might solve nearly all of our problems at once - from productivity to the NHS to crime. If we lose we’re fucked but then if we are fucked so is everyone, probably, so it doesn’t matter

    The world needs to focus on controlling AI and ensuring it does not eliminate jobs without replacement and does not fall into the wrong hands, especially criminal elements and rogue states. That needs international co operation not just us piling in on AI, although obviously London and Cambridge etc can play a key role in leading it here
    Part of the reason we have had sluggish productivity growth over the last 15 years may be a lack of disruption in our economy and labour market. We should welcome stuff like AI, but be aware that dramatic shifts in the economy can leave some people behind.

    A large proportion of productivity growth in the 20th century translated into weekends and the 8 hour day. AI for rich countries might just mean a huge increase in human welfare.
    High IQ people may well be fine doing highly paid creative projects from time to time and spend their leisure time in the arts for the rest. The rest of society if AI takes most of the jobs (and certainly the full time and permanent jobs) are not going to sit around all day on a UBI (which would have to be funded by a robot tax on corporations anyway) without being more disruptive
    As in, rioting?

    If it happens very quickly it could be a disaster - see Thatcher closing the mines, or large military bases being closed. But the labour market will adjust over time.

    This is part of the reason why I think we could see 20%, even 30% of the workforce in health and social care over the next 50 years; it's a part of the economy that cannot be automated. It makes sense that more and more people will be in roles with human interaction, including the arts, sport, mountain guiding (back up career for me) etc etc
  • MJWMJW Posts: 1,728
    Andy_JS said:

    rcs1000 said:

    @OwenJones84
    Keir Starmer is one of the most dishonest politicians in Britain, and that's quite a bar to pass.

    He ran the most dishonest campaign for the leadership of a major political party in British history, however much his abusive cult-like followers pretend otherwise.


    https://twitter.com/OwenJones84/status/1551514583185121281

    The first cult on earth whose mantra is "well, he's a bit shit and he's a charisma-free zone, but at least he's not Jeremy Corbyn."

    I mean, come on Owen; accuse him of dishonesty, accuse him of whatever; but don't claim that he has anything that even vaguely resembles a cult like following.
    I still don't understand why Owen Jones so dislikes Keir Starmer.
    Because the existence and success (to date) of Keir Starmer shows the flaws in Owen's politics and worldview and made him entirely irrelevant. To most people Starmer is a pretty standard politician with strengths and weaknesses who is either preferable or not to the alternatives or not. To Owen he's the dingo who ate his baby.

    The 'cult' accusation is also pure 'get your own back' projection. Corbyn supporters used to absolutely loathe being called a 'cult' by people - despite the whole thing quite obviously relying on faith in the goodness of the leader and its odd quirks like 'Poems for Jeremy' that were a bit, y'know, culty. Others also pointed out that criticising the Dear Leader online often resulted in your phone pinging endlessly with Twitter abuse. So when Starmer became leader they immediately began chucking it back at anyone defending Starmer - even if their attitude was critical but wanting to succeed, don't write poetry or paint pictures of him, and the abuse amounts to pointing out when Owen is frequently wrong.
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 51,498
    rcs1000 said:

    And not only that, but one LLM may be great at one set of things, while another has another set of specialties.

    Your vision of one country having some special bauble that no-one else has is absurd. That's not how this stuff works.

    What if the LLM in question specialises in hybrid war?
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,039
    edited August 2023
    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    The future of Britain, the world, humanity, depends on who wins this race to AGI and how they exploit their victory



    Britain should be piling virtually all of its chips on AI. Bet the house. Bet everything. If we win we might solve nearly all of our problems at once - from productivity to the NHS to crime. If we lose we’re fucked but then if we are fucked so is everyone, probably, so it doesn’t matter

    But it isn't a race.

    Whether we invest in it or not won't influence who else does.
    Idiotic. This is like becoming the First Nation to industrialise. The USA and China are marching ahead but there’s no reason we cannot nimbly follow. If we don’t we will get flattened by competitors - and some of them might be happy to use AI with absolute malignance

    It stupefies me how so many apparently smart people still don’t understand what is happening
    Considering there aren't any major UK semiconductor companies we've already 'lost'. You can be as nimble as a flighty scarlet ibis but if you don't make the chips you're not competing in this race.

    And no ARM doesn't count.
    1. Not UK owned
    2. Not the right sort of chips
    The Saudis and UAE don’t make chips either. But they’re buying them up - the particular kind of chip required for LLMs. And - as the article says - they’ve already made impressive strides in AI

    So chips are important, but they can be bought. It is, then, what you do with them

    The First Nation to reach self-improving AI will potentially dominate the world, unless several nations get there near-simultaneously
    Let's just game this out for a second.

    The UK government buys GPU chips from NVidia so as to give the UK an edge. (Presumably these chips are available to British firms to acquire from the government, with very strict rules about not reselling them on.)

    This is great for NVidia. They will sell massive numbers of chips to the UK. They will also contract additional foundry capacity so they can also sell to other people.

    How exactly is this scheme supposed to benefit the British people?

    Right now, I'm currently running some simple (GPU based) ML modelling in Google Colab. This is an area where 99.99% of people are going to be renting capacity.

    Work is happening in the UK, in Israel, the US, etc. The Deep Mind guys (and I know Demis) will I'm sure be great - albeit Google will accrue most of the benefits.

    But this is also a space where people are mobile and secrets rare.

    Within weeks of seeing the initial AI generated images, there were a dozen models. There are now half a dozen decent LLM models, most of which are open source. There are content libraries online (The Pile) that will help you train them up.

    It's coming. It will change our lives. But it's highly unlikely the nation state is going to have anything to do with it.
    It is absolutely certain that the nation state will largely dominate what happens with AGI because AGI will have a revolutionary impact on warfare

    No major power is going to yield control of that to mere corporations
    It is not remotely certain because you can't put the genie back into the bottle. Pandora's box will be open, the knowledge will be out there.

    The only certainty is in your mind. But the real probability is that corporations and pirates and therefore pretty much everyone will have access rapidly.
    You think China is gonna let Baidu autonomously control technology that can wipe out humanity - or destroy enemy nation states?

    Ditto America with Facebook?

    This tech is potentially more menacing than nuclear weapons. It will likely be harder to control but powerful nations will do everything possible to control it
    @BartholomewRoberts is correct.

    Have you read the leaked Google internal email about LLMs and AI?

    There's a copy of it here: https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-neither

    The difference between this and the industrial revolution is massive. When the Brits started producing steel cheaply, no-one had any idea how they did it, or how to compete. The French offered fortunes to people who'd worked in British factories.

    Nowadays, everyone is online, anyone can work for anyone, and no-one has a monopoly on knowing shit.

    You seem to think there is this cliff edge, and it's either a 1 or a 0. It's not. It's one group at 0.555334 and another at 0.527881 etc. These groups aren't national. Some are corporates. Some are informal groups of people sharing source code on github.

    And not only that, but one LLM may be great at one set of things, while another has another set of specialties.

    Your vision of one country having some special bauble that no-one else has is absurd. That's not how this stuff works.
    But I don’t think that. This debate started with me pointing to Saudi and UAE buying Nvidia chips - and making serious advances in AI thereby. I don’t think there is one Precious which can be defended by one nation

    I do think Britain can be at the forefront of this, profitably, precisely because the tech will be everywhere, so then it becomes a matter of how cleverly you apply it. We are a clever country. We should have the confidence to go for it

    However I also think the military implications of AI are so profound nation states will seek some ultimate control. We should all probably pray they succeed, for reasons adduced
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 122,682
    In that video Starmer is attacked for trying to stop Brexit and being too close to the Davos global elite and Peter Mandelson and too restrictive of civil liberties. Reeves is attacked for being too close to the Bank of England and Streeting for being too close to private healthcare companies.

    Seems a video that could see some rare agreement between Corbynites, the ERG and Farage in supporting many of its key points
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,039
  • FlatlanderFlatlander Posts: 4,635
    edited August 2023
    Eabhal said:

    HYUFD said:

    Eabhal said:

    HYUFD said:

    Leon said:

    The future of Britain, the world, humanity, depends on who wins this race to AGI and how they exploit their victory



    Britain should be piling virtually all of its chips on AI. Bet the house. Bet everything. If we win we might solve nearly all of our problems at once - from productivity to the NHS to crime. If we lose we’re fucked but then if we are fucked so is everyone, probably, so it doesn’t matter

    The world needs to focus on controlling AI and ensuring it does not eliminate jobs without replacement and does not fall into the wrong hands, especially criminal elements and rogue states. That needs international co operation not just us piling in on AI, although obviously London and Cambridge etc can play a key role in leading it here
    Part of the reason we have had sluggish productivity growth over the last 15 years may be a lack of disruption in our economy and labour market. We should welcome stuff like AI, but be aware that dramatic shifts in the economy can leave some people behind.

    A large proportion of productivity growth in the 20th century translated into weekends and the 8 hour day. AI for rich countries might just mean a huge increase in human welfare.
    High IQ people may well be fine doing highly paid creative projects from time to time and spend their leisure time in the arts for the rest. The rest of society if AI takes most of the jobs (and certainly the full time and permanent jobs) are not going to sit around all day on a UBI (which would have to be funded by a robot tax on corporations anyway) without being more disruptive
    As in, rioting?

    If it happens very quickly it could be a disaster - see Thatcher closing the mines, or large military bases being closed. But the labour market will adjust over time.

    This is part of the reason why I think we could see 20%, even 30% of the workforce in health and social care over the next 50 years; it's a part of the economy that cannot be automated. It makes sense that more and more people will be in roles with human interaction, including the arts, sport, mountain guiding (back up career for me) etc etc
    Mountain guiding appears to be a little a bit riskier than I thought after last week's news. Oops. I wonder if we'll ever find out exactly what happened.

    But yes, you are right.

    We need a lot more people in health and social care, so perhaps that is just as well, although I wonder how many people are actually suited to it. Certainly from what I've seen a lot doing the job already aren't really that good at it.


    I shall retire to grow moss. Or something.

  • FF43 said:

    Stark illustration of the absolute disaster of Cameron's and Osborne's austerity policy. None of our peers followed us down that route.

    The Conservatives have done nothing else right since then, either.


    Much of the Eurozone had real austerity, not the increasing annually (but at a slower rate) "austerity" that the UK had.

    Look at Ireland, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain, the Netherlands and more for the austerity other nations had.

    The only ones that didn't were those that didn't have a deficit like ours.

    I can't think of any European peer that was spending like a drunken sailor on shore leave when the GFC hit (like Brown's was) that then continued to without any form of austerity afterwards.
    Labour should use that graph in its election ads.

    Whatever, spin you and fellow rightists try to put on it, most people will see the the simple truth: Labour = growing wages; Tories = stagnant wages.
    Borrowing to boost wages isn't growing wages, its stealing from your grandchildren.

    But a lot of voters seem to like that as a policy.
    That's more bullshit.

    Here's the UK defict as %GDP for the period 1998 - 2023

    image

    https://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/spending_chart_1998_2023UKp_17c1li111lcn_H0t_Current_Budget_Deficit
    Precisely! Thanks for proving my point.

    See that point in 2002/03 when it goes into having a deficit, despite there not being a recession in 2002/03?

    Stupid, stupid, stupid mismanagement of the finances.

    So when the inevitable recession hit, instead of going from budget surplus to manageable budget deficit, we went from deficit to humongous out of control deficit instead. Because the deficit inevitably worsens when you hit the inevitable downturn, which is why you don't blow your budget wide open five years before the recession.

    For the rest of the century the deficit has improved annually, or gotten worse during downtimes (like GFC or Covid or Russia/Ukraine War) which is natural and appropriate economics. Spending like there's no tomorrow pre-crash just means you're royally fucked when the crash inevitably comes. And it was entirely unnecessary since there was a budget surplus in 2002 and that just had to be maintained as a balanced budget or small surplus in order to avoid austerity.
    First of all there was a recession in the early 2000s, just not in Britain. Have you considered we avoided this recession because of Brown's counter-cyclical spending? Secondly, the scale of the GFC makes the small and within normal range deficits beforehand immaterial. You've been banging this drum for years, and you are wrong.
  • edmundintokyoedmundintokyo Posts: 17,708
    kle4 said:

    Yes, that's about the shape of things - indicting has to happen for, you know, justice, but nothing can stop the juggernaut.

    Here’s the deal: Trump HAS TO be the GOP nominee. If he’s not their nominee, they can’t win in 2024 bcuz his followers will stay home, GOP turnout will be in the toilet, affecting lots of races.

    It’s too late for the GOP. They’re stuck with Trump. They did this to themselves.

    https://nitter.net/WalshFreedom/status/1691101776370368512#m

    If Trump endorses another Republican then the MAGAs will vote for them.

    If Trump isn't the nominee then he needs to endorse whoever is, in the hope that they'll win the general and pardon him.

    Even if Trump wins the primary it may be in his interests to step aside and endorse with a better chance of beating Biden and pardoning him, although obviously it's not clear whether he would be able to mentally process the idea that he was going to lose and somebody else could win.
  • Jim_MillerJim_Miller Posts: 2,996
    edited August 2023
    Reminder: In most places, American voters can "write in" whoever they want on ballots. (Rules vary from state to state, but occasionally a write-in candidate wins. In 2004, Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski did just that.

    (Recently I learned one of the things her campaign did to make that happen. In general, you can't take open endorsements of candidates into a polling place. So the Murkowski campaign provided bracelets with her name on the insides of the bracelets, so her voters could look at the insides of the bracelets in the polling booth, and spell her name right.)

    Full disclosure: In 2016 and 2020, I cast write-in votes in the presidential races. (I knew the Democratic candidate would carry my home state of Washington, so my protest vote was, one could say, "free".)
  • StillWatersStillWaters Posts: 8,182

    @OwenJones84
    Keir Starmer is one of the most dishonest politicians in Britain, and that's quite a bar to pass.

    He ran the most dishonest campaign for the leadership of a major political party in British history, however much his abusive cult-like followers pretend otherwise.


    https://twitter.com/OwenJones84/status/1551514583185121281

    If I didn’t know better I’d have guessed he was bing ironic…
  • Jim_MillerJim_Miller Posts: 2,996
    Another reminder: I believe that, in 2016, Trump benefited from "negative" coat tails in key states. In the usual form of coat tails, the top of the ticket brings voters to the polling places -- who then vote for his or her party's candidates farther down.

    But Trump ran behind Republican candidates for governor and senator in key states, and may have won some of those states, only because their popularity brought Republican leaning voters to the polls. Who might not have come had Trump been the only candidate on the ballot.

    Will that happen again? My guess: Probably not to the same extent. Perhaps not at all. And some of those cadidates, who might have won without Trump at the top of the ticket will lose.

    (Incidentally, "negative" coat tails helps explain why so many state polls underestimated Trump's vote.)
  • Jim_MillerJim_Miller Posts: 2,996
    The heat here may be cooking my brain: I should have said "reverse" coat tails in my previous comment, since that is the more common way to describe the phenomena. Negative coat tails describes a different effect.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coattail_effect
  • bigjohnowlsbigjohnowls Posts: 22,652

    I assume "Stop Starmer" is a crank left campaign...?

    Only cults use the term crank
  • bigjohnowlsbigjohnowls Posts: 22,652

    tpfkar said:

    https://whois.domaintools.com/stopstarmer.co.uk

    Domain registered 02/05/23 - local election week.
    Looks like they have stopstarmer.org as well.

    BJO fans please explain!
    Cult supporter chooses red Tory in 2024 after going for blue Tory in last two
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 60,283

    kle4 said:

    Yes, that's about the shape of things - indicting has to happen for, you know, justice, but nothing can stop the juggernaut.

    Here’s the deal: Trump HAS TO be the GOP nominee. If he’s not their nominee, they can’t win in 2024 bcuz his followers will stay home, GOP turnout will be in the toilet, affecting lots of races.

    It’s too late for the GOP. They’re stuck with Trump. They did this to themselves.

    https://nitter.net/WalshFreedom/status/1691101776370368512#m

    If Trump endorses another Republican then the MAGAs will vote for them.

    If Trump isn't the nominee then he needs to endorse whoever is, in the hope that they'll win the general and pardon him.

    Even if Trump wins the primary it may be in his interests to step aside and endorse with a better chance of beating Biden and pardoning him, although obviously it's not clear whether he would be able to mentally process the idea that he was going to lose and somebody else could win.
    No, he couldn't.

    Trump's whole personality is based on the fact he must also win, whatever the cost, even he if he has to cheat and, if he doesn't, then that must mean that someone else cheated.
  • HeathenerHeathener Posts: 7,084

    I assume "Stop Starmer" is a crank left campaign...?

    Only cults use the term crank
    Tbh, Big J you are the one who comes across as pretty cranky in your detestation of Keir Starmer. I mean, I don't think he's any great shakes but he's not the devil incarnate of your rather obsessional mind. Maybe take a step back and try and get a little more balanced perspective?

    Meantime, how can Donald Trump continue his presidential re-bid with this weight of indictments on his shoulders. It's going beyond farcical.
  • HeathenerHeathener Posts: 7,084
    edited August 2023

    @OwenJones84
    Keir Starmer is one of the most dishonest politicians in Britain, and that's quite a bar to pass.

    He ran the most dishonest campaign for the leadership of a major political party in British history, however much his abusive cult-like followers pretend otherwise.


    https://twitter.com/OwenJones84/status/1551514583185121281

    If I didn’t know better I’d have guessed he was bing ironic…
    It's certainly a useful reminder that many on the Hard Left would prefer the Conservatives to win over Keir Starmer. Tony Blair had the same issue.

    Hard Left - Hard Right: each as bad, and dangerous, as the other.
  • Rishi Sunak the Swiftie ‘attends sold-out gig in US’
    The prime minister is thought to have seen Taylor Swift perform while on holiday

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/rishi-sunak-the-swiftie-attends-sold-out-gig-in-us-98qbr9pxv (£££)
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 70,933

    Reminder: In most places, American voters can "write in" whoever they want on ballots. (Rules vary from state to state, but occasionally a write-in candidate wins. In 2004, Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski did just that.

    (Recently I learned one of the things her campaign did to make that happen. In general, you can't take open endorsements of candidates into a polling place. So the Murkowski campaign provided bracelets with her name on the insides of the bracelets, so her voters could look at the insides of the bracelets in the polling booth, and spell her name right.)

    Full disclosure: In 2016 and 2020, I cast write-in votes in the presidential races. (I knew the Democratic candidate would carry my home state of Washington, so my protest vote was, one could say, "free".)

    You'd have voted Trump had it been a competitive state ?
    (I'd have called it unsatisfying, rather than 'free'.)
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 70,933
    The odd unindicted co-conspirator suggests someone is cooperating.
  • edmundintokyoedmundintokyo Posts: 17,708
    Nigelb said:

    The odd unindicted co-conspirator suggests someone is cooperating.

    Someone was saying one of them fund-raised for the DA's opponent, and they left them out to avoid the conflict of interest.
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