There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we have met aliens who can travel across space to visit us.
It's bizarre that more people aren't talking about this; if it is true* it is one of the biggest news stories in human history.
* It is not true
It really might be true
When I bang on about AI, @Benpointer always says “get back to me when a robot can stack my dishwasher”. And it’s a fair point
Well, now a robot can easily stack a dishwasher, and what’s more it can learn this simply by watching you do it first
“With enough strength and dexterity, Tesla's Bot could handle almost all physical tasks by simply looking at video clips of people doing said tasks.
Picking up a vacuum and running it through the house. Sorting and folding laundry. Tidying up the house. Moving material from point A to point B. Picking up trash and placing it in a bin. Pushing a lawnmower. Monitor an area for safety-related concerns. Laying bricks. Hammering nails. Using power tools. Clean dishes... etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”
(I'm fairly bullish on AI, but Optimus feels more like one of Elon's toy projects than something real - if it gets to the point where it can make Boston Dynamics-style videos in 5-10 years time, I think he'll be happy)
But we are clearly close to a “dishwasher stacking” AI robot, which is my original point. As that is the Turing Test proposed by @Benpointer
Sure - have a look at Ocado's Robotic Pick system, which does a better job of packing shopping into bags without crushing or damaging delicate items than any human. I bet it'd do a great job with stacking a dishwasher, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjczYsjO6fQ
I have to admire even for you how quickly we've gone from "It's here" to "I reckon from this video on YouTube that may this could do it, even though none ever has yet".
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we have met aliens who can travel across space to visit us.
It's bizarre that more people aren't talking about this; if it is true* it is one of the biggest news stories in human history.
* It is not true
It really might be true
When I bang on about AI, @Benpointer always says “get back to me when a robot can stack my dishwasher”. And it’s a fair point
Well, now a robot can easily stack a dishwasher, and what’s more it can learn this simply by watching you do it first
“With enough strength and dexterity, Tesla's Bot could handle almost all physical tasks by simply looking at video clips of people doing said tasks.
Picking up a vacuum and running it through the house. Sorting and folding laundry. Tidying up the house. Moving material from point A to point B. Picking up trash and placing it in a bin. Pushing a lawnmower. Monitor an area for safety-related concerns. Laying bricks. Hammering nails. Using power tools. Clean dishes... etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”
I can find you a parrot that can recite poetry - doesn't mean it can write you any.
Are learning machines cool? Yes. But at the end of the day they're automatons that can, at a basic level, do simple tasks in relatively stable environments. Complex tasks in other scenarios are out of reach. All the hype is just sales - of course people who own stocks in AI companies would claim it would end the world or be the gadget of the future, because they'll rake the money in.
It is not coincidental that the new "AI is going to be able to do everything" line came after the "Meta is going to be the new frontier" fell through and the "NFTs and the blockchain are going to revolutionise everything" idea was proven false. Capitalism always needs a new frontier, to exploit and sell and commodify, and tech bros think they can build the next one. So far they're failing.
In my view the free chat programmes available online have written reasoning capabilities that exceed that of most graduate level professionals with over 20 years of high level report writing experience. They can write better than people who have been doing decision making and report writing for their entire career. From a management point of view they surpass most humans in knowing how to respond to situations in difficult correspondence exercises.
It is an inevitable human reaction to deny this or not look at it, but it won't help.
Do you mean ChatGPT, or is there a specific programme you mean? I think the most convincing ones are good at creating the approximation of human writing, until you learn it is either just lying (making up references and quotes and just general facts) or spewing nonsense (this often happens with coding where the coding looks correct, but is really just nonsense).
The way this stuff currently works is by taking the input, analysing words that are associated with the words relevant to that topic, and picking each word based on the likelihood that it is the most common word to follow the previous word. That requires it to read (and arguably steal) the work of existing people. It cannot think - it is not creating. It is a parrot - a big parrot, a complex parrot, a parrot that can maybe do some simple things - but a parrot. And that's selling parrots short, because I believe parrots have the ability of cognition.
So, is the robot video real, or not?
You still haven't told us, and you still don't realise the significance of that
Do I personally believe in the reality of a video on Twitter? I don't. Do I personally know it isn't real? No - that's why I have said I will await for credible sources to do reporting rather than just trust people chatting on a notoriously untrustworthy social media platform about a topic where there is so much undue hype.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
My Spanish Father-in-Law doesn't understand why the UK doesn't build underground carparks as all the towns in Spain seem to have. Simples - because we are incompetent and corrupt. And they are not.
Hang on - I hear right wing voices say - the Spanish ARE corrupt. And that is true. And yet they can stick underground car parks into their towns and we can't afford to...
I haven't heard of this before - can we have examples of these underground car parks in all the towns in Spain?
Quite common in France - the classic in towns such as Fontainebleau is that they dug out the town square, and then put a nice tuned up version of the town square back on top.
I was pondering yesterday on the strange anomaly of airports. If ever there were a good place to have underground parking these are surely it:
- everyone hates going out miles on a shuttle bus to a huge car park on the perimeter, and it’s a mad waste of hectares of land - You can’t build very tall multi-storeys because of the planes, and it’s a waste to have one right by the terminal like in LHR when that could be taken by airport hotels - They dig up the land and create all sorts of ducting and subterranean units when they create airports anyway, why not bury a huge car park at the same time?
Obviously not directly under the runway but adjacent and below the terminals.
The other thing is solar plants. Why on earth isn’t every airport and airfield carpeted with solar arrays, given the land can’t be used for anything else and is already brownfield?
A fair point, but consider safety. At present running off the tarmac onto the grass isn't a huge disaster per se, as the plane has a fair chance to slow down in relative safety. But if one clutters it up with lots of steel girders and solar panels ...
I don't suppose the passengers would like it either. (I also wonder about the effect on airfield surveillance radar, too.)
Yes fair enough. I've looked it up to see if any airports do use them. Nice article from Wired a couple of years ago discussing the pros and cons
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
My Spanish Father-in-Law doesn't understand why the UK doesn't build underground carparks as all the towns in Spain seem to have. Simples - because we are incompetent and corrupt. And they are not.
Hang on - I hear right wing voices say - the Spanish ARE corrupt. And that is true. And yet they can stick underground car parks into their towns and we can't afford to...
I haven't heard of this before - can we have examples of these underground car parks in all the towns in Spain?
Quite common in France - the classic in towns such as Fontainebleau is that they dug out the town square, and then put a nice tuned up version of the town square back on top.
I was pondering yesterday on the strange anomaly of airports. If ever there were a good place to have underground parking these are surely it:
- everyone hates going out miles on a shuttle bus to a huge car park on the perimeter, and it’s a mad waste of hectares of land - You can’t build very tall multi-storeys because of the planes, and it’s a waste to have one right by the terminal like in LHR when that could be taken by airport hotels - They dig up the land and create all sorts of ducting and subterranean units when they create airports anyway, why not bury a huge car park at the same time?
Obviously not directly under the runway but adjacent and below the terminals.
The other thing is solar plants. Why on earth isn’t every airport and airfield carpeted with solar arrays, given the land can’t be used for anything else and is already brownfield?
I was speaking to a friend a while ago who does loads of planning for advertising at airports and was asking why they don’t do more on the land away from the runways and he said there are really strict rules about things that can distract pilots so I guess a solar field right by an airport would theoretically be a risk if the sun was glinting off it etc. I think airport dpsafety takes an understandably extreme position on safety so sight distractions or anything on any potential run-off area which could jeopardise an emergency landing is a no-no.
Yes, this has been going on for quite a while. Cross-reference neo-feudalism of the Noughties and Tens with techno-feudalism of the Tens and Twenties and it can be seen that they are actually the same phenomenon. Transnational entities are unaccountable to the nation state and so cannot be ameliorated. Recall my rant that the new building explosion in London is being underpinned by Qatari development funds, and that's just one example. Whether it's Musk moving factories to China because its nonunionized slave labour, or China investing in Africa and buying ports, or Tatar buying a steel mill in Wales and expecting perpetual subsidies, transnational entities exert power that is not mitigated by an increasingly enfeebled nation state. It is genuinely ironic that PB, so full of Brexiteers, wilfully declines to understand this. Benn's Five Questions applies.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
My Spanish Father-in-Law doesn't understand why the UK doesn't build underground carparks as all the towns in Spain seem to have. Simples - because we are incompetent and corrupt. And they are not.
Hang on - I hear right wing voices say - the Spanish ARE corrupt. And that is true. And yet they can stick underground car parks into their towns and we can't afford to...
I haven't heard of this before - can we have examples of these underground car parks in all the towns in Spain?
Quite common in France - the classic in towns such as Fontainebleau is that they dug out the town square, and then put a nice tuned up version of the town square back on top.
I was pondering yesterday on the strange anomaly of airports. If ever there were a good place to have underground parking these are surely it:
- everyone hates going out miles on a shuttle bus to a huge car park on the perimeter, and it’s a mad waste of hectares of land - You can’t build very tall multi-storeys because of the planes, and it’s a waste to have one right by the terminal like in LHR when that could be taken by airport hotels - They dig up the land and create all sorts of ducting and subterranean units when they create airports anyway, why not bury a huge car park at the same time?
Obviously not directly under the runway but adjacent and below the terminals.
The other thing is solar plants. Why on earth isn’t every airport and airfield carpeted with solar arrays, given the land can’t be used for anything else and is already brownfield?
I believe that low-rise buildings with flat roofs tend not to be strong enough to take the additional weight - I know this is an issue for warehouses and shopping centres.
Anything similar built from now on should be shrouded in solar panels, I agree.
Jordan Tyldesley @PippyBing · 5m “Here’s a list of names I’ve heard in recent weeks touted in Labour circles for peerages should the party win an election […] Iain Anderson, Margaret Beckett, Luciana Berger, Mark Drakeford, Michael Dugher, David Evans, Harriet Harman, Margaret Hodge…
===
This is all starting to look like some in Labour are starting to take the polling for granted.
This may well prove to be a massive mistake. The Tories will throw everything at Labour next year with migration at top of the list.
The Tories have had 13 years to deal with immigration and they haven't exactly done a good job....
True. But will it be a case of 'Labour will be even worse' message cutting through?
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
My Spanish Father-in-Law doesn't understand why the UK doesn't build underground carparks as all the towns in Spain seem to have. Simples - because we are incompetent and corrupt. And they are not.
Hang on - I hear right wing voices say - the Spanish ARE corrupt. And that is true. And yet they can stick underground car parks into their towns and we can't afford to...
Planners don’t approve them because more parking encourages driving. Or something.
There's a fabulous u/g car park in Bloomsbury Square, WC1, in the shape of a double helix. You drive round and round and down and down and slowly you realise you're climbing and, before you find a space, you're back out in the daylight again.
Not far from where Rosalind Frankllin worked at KCL ... though the two strands of her helix were of the same handedness, unlike, presumably, yours!
Fieldwork all post Rishi's announcement cancelling climate change. Three polls now so I think we can declare a bounce, of around 4-5%.
I think this shows the impact when you have one party opening up a contentious issue where the public is probably more evenly split than polling VI. It got a huge amount of press, and if even say 35% of people agreed with Rishi that might have been enough to push the polling up.
Long term it's a reversion to the polling numbers earlier in the summer, before quite a marked dip the week before the net zero anouncements.
A glimmer of good news for Sunak and maybe he has struck a cord with his recent announcements
At what point will people accept that SKS is more authoritarian than Corbyn, and that Corbyn was more tolerant of different ideologies in Labour that SKS is:
Jordan Tyldesley @PippyBing · 5m “Here’s a list of names I’ve heard in recent weeks touted in Labour circles for peerages should the party win an election […] Iain Anderson, Margaret Beckett, Luciana Berger, Mark Drakeford, Michael Dugher, David Evans, Harriet Harman, Margaret Hodge…
===
This is all starting to look like some in Labour are starting to take the polling for granted.
This may well prove to be a massive mistake. The Tories will throw everything at Labour next year with migration at top of the list.
The Tories have had 13 years to deal with immigration and they haven't exactly done a good job....
True. But will it be a case of 'Labour will be even worse' message cutting through?
Whichever party is in government in the future will have to secure the borders wrt economic migrants. The same is true of all other European governments.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
My Spanish Father-in-Law doesn't understand why the UK doesn't build underground carparks as all the towns in Spain seem to have. Simples - because we are incompetent and corrupt. And they are not.
Hang on - I hear right wing voices say - the Spanish ARE corrupt. And that is true. And yet they can stick underground car parks into their towns and we can't afford to...
I haven't heard of this before - can we have examples of these underground car parks in all the towns in Spain?
Quite common in France - the classic in towns such as Fontainebleau is that they dug out the town square, and then put a nice tuned up version of the town square back on top.
I was pondering yesterday on the strange anomaly of airports. If ever there were a good place to have underground parking these are surely it:
- everyone hates going out miles on a shuttle bus to a huge car park on the perimeter, and it’s a mad waste of hectares of land - You can’t build very tall multi-storeys because of the planes, and it’s a waste to have one right by the terminal like in LHR when that could be taken by airport hotels - They dig up the land and create all sorts of ducting and subterranean units when they create airports anyway, why not bury a huge car park at the same time?
Obviously not directly under the runway but adjacent and below the terminals.
The other thing is solar plants. Why on earth isn’t every airport and airfield carpeted with solar arrays, given the land can’t be used for anything else and is already brownfield?
A fair point, but consider safety. At present running off the tarmac onto the grass isn't a huge disaster per se, as the plane has a fair chance to slow down in relative safety. But if one clutters it up with lots of steel girders and solar panels ...
I don't suppose the passengers would like it either. (I also wonder about the effect on airfield surveillance radar, too.)
Yes fair enough. I've looked it up to see if any airports do use them. Nice article from Wired a couple of years ago discussing the pros and cons
Also - ISTR that LHR composts tdhe grass clippings.
Not sure if this is for methane for heating, but it would then be solar power collection, no?
You can still have grass growing under panels. And you can graze sheep, though that might be suboptimal next to an airport runway unless you want a regular supply of self-made lamb kofta.
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we have met aliens who can travel across space to visit us.
It's bizarre that more people aren't talking about this; if it is true* it is one of the biggest news stories in human history.
* It is not true
It really might be true
When I bang on about AI, @Benpointer always says “get back to me when a robot can stack my dishwasher”. And it’s a fair point
Well, now a robot can easily stack a dishwasher, and what’s more it can learn this simply by watching you do it first
“With enough strength and dexterity, Tesla's Bot could handle almost all physical tasks by simply looking at video clips of people doing said tasks.
Picking up a vacuum and running it through the house. Sorting and folding laundry. Tidying up the house. Moving material from point A to point B. Picking up trash and placing it in a bin. Pushing a lawnmower. Monitor an area for safety-related concerns. Laying bricks. Hammering nails. Using power tools. Clean dishes... etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”
I can find you a parrot that can recite poetry - doesn't mean it can write you any.
Are learning machines cool? Yes. But at the end of the day they're automatons that can, at a basic level, do simple tasks in relatively stable environments. Complex tasks in other scenarios are out of reach. All the hype is just sales - of course people who own stocks in AI companies would claim it would end the world or be the gadget of the future, because they'll rake the money in.
It is not coincidental that the new "AI is going to be able to do everything" line came after the "Meta is going to be the new frontier" fell through and the "NFTs and the blockchain are going to revolutionise everything" idea was proven false. Capitalism always needs a new frontier, to exploit and sell and commodify, and tech bros think they can build the next one. So far they're failing.
In my view the free chat programmes available online have written reasoning capabilities that exceed that of most graduate level professionals with over 20 years of high level report writing experience. They can write better than people who have been doing decision making and report writing for their entire career. From a management point of view they surpass most humans in knowing how to respond to situations in difficult correspondence exercises.
It is an inevitable human reaction to deny this or not look at it, but it won't help.
Do you mean ChatGPT, or is there a specific programme you mean? I think the most convincing ones are good at creating the approximation of human writing, until you learn it is either just lying (making up references and quotes and just general facts) or spewing nonsense (this often happens with coding where the coding looks correct, but is really just nonsense).
The way this stuff currently works is by taking the input, analysing words that are associated with the words relevant to that topic, and picking each word based on the likelihood that it is the most common word to follow the previous word. That requires it to read (and arguably steal) the work of existing people. It cannot think - it is not creating. It is a parrot - a big parrot, a complex parrot, a parrot that can maybe do some simple things - but a parrot. And that's selling parrots short, because I believe parrots have the ability of cognition.
So, is the robot video real, or not?
You still haven't told us, and you still don't realise the significance of that
Do I personally believe in the reality of a video on Twitter? I don't. Do I personally know it isn't real? No - that's why I have said I will await for credible sources to do reporting rather than just trust people chatting on a notoriously untrustworthy social media platform about a topic where there is so much undue hype.
That's nothing. They also developed a robot that can play ping-pong!
I expect them to scrap the link to Manchester and instead say they’ll improve west to east links . The public have never really got behind HS2 and the Tories want some cash to spend on other projects that are more voter friendly .
Not sure if anyone saw Newsnight but the comparison between cost per mile of building track in the UK compared to other major country’s was shocking.
Jaw dropping in fact .
Is it caused by the huge cost of compensation in this country compared to elsewhere? Maybe it's because we're more densely populated than nearly every other European country, so whereas in places like Spain and France it's relatively easy to route a new train line through mostly empty areas, it's much more difficult to do that here. I was using the Spanish high speed trains in February/March this year and I was surprised to see how utterly empty a lot of the countryside was.
Also, on the subject of cancelling the line to M'chester, what some people don't seem to realise is that they've already spent a huge amount of money on some of the infrastructure for the B'ham to M'chester route, so if they cancel it all of that will be wasted, and also all the disruption they've already caused in that area will have been for nothing. I hope Starmer decides to go ahead with it when he becomes PM (which seems very likely to happen now).
The Times have a very good article on it today, if you can get behind the paywall.
I have a theory that the more political a project is (like Palace of Westminster Restoration and Renewal, which is absolutely political and could fall or burn down at any time), or HS2, which simply crosses far too many constituencies for it not to be, the worse its governance will be because politicians simply can't help making kneejerk uninformed decisions and that's death to big infrastructure.
I think we really need a dedicated national infrastructure council that is at one remove from day to day political machinations that can make these kinds of long term decisions, ideally creating a pipeline of projects so that expertise in planning and contracting is not lost from one project to the next. On Westminster I think the building is too expensive to renovate as a working Parliament. They should simply pay to preserve it as an important national monument and move the parliament elsewhere. Maybe put them in tunnels under Euston until they complete HS2 to Manchester and Leeds. That might concentrate minds s bit.
Make Westminster a museum absolutely!
Move Parliament and the Civil Service out of London and into a new build city.
Looking at a map, North of York, East of Hull there seems to be quite a bit of land that's neither well developed nor in an AONB. Or between Grimsby and Scunthorpe could be another good location, though that's getting close to Lincolnshire Wolds AONB.
Build a new capital city for Parliament and the Civil Service there, in the form of Washington DC or Canberra, then see how quickly infrastructure gets developed.
Do you mean west of Hull? (Noth)East of Hull you'd have parliament on sea. Good luck taking on th NIMBYs in the Yorkshire Wolds (rolling countryside, less spectacular than moors or dales, but still popular). Proposed to my wife on a walk in the Wolds.
I'd tend to pop if somewhere Leeds/Bradford or further north to Darlington/Northallerton area to be more central for a UK parliament (Shetland can bugger off and join Norway if they don't consider that central-enough )
Sorry I wrote it backwards, I meant North of Hull, East of York.
Approximately where the small town of Driffield (never heard of it) is, or around that area, but its just one suggestion there's plenty of other valid suggestions.
I would suggest wherever it is, is not on an existing motorway network or high speed rail network.
Set a five year deadline maybe for construction then relocation of every single civil servant and Parliamentarian to be out of London by then. Get Parliament and the heads of the Civil Service all in that new build city and let them struggle with the infrastructure as it is, if they've not unlocked investment yet. See how quickly funding for investment becomes available.
Yeah, they'll have your balls on toasting fork in Driffield for suggesting flooding it with parliamentarians and roads and outsiders
It isn't the worst idea in the world. It would fix so many issues that are outstanding from when I first lived in Yorkshire. The Ouse Bridge would be fixed replaced as they'd upgrade the A63 to motorway all the way into Hull. Stamford Bridge would finally get a bypass. You'd have the restoration of the train line between Hull and York (Beverley is cut adrift at the moment thanks to Dr Beeching). Full fibre everywhere (not tied to KCOM). High-end retailers. Soaring property prices.
Great Driffield. The legislative capital of a post-Brexit United Kingdom. Those sunlit uplands (or Wolds) look marvellous.
I can just see Jacob Rees-Mogg in Boyes or Yorkshire Trading Company...
Heh, I know. Seriously considered a move to Driffield around three years back, for a specific house. Stayed (near Selby) and extended due to a load of family in the immediate area and better commute options.
Should indeed be motorway to Hull. Heading that way, you feel like you must somehow have missed the Hull turn-off when the road gets smaller!
Don't get me wrong. Properties are value for money. Access to good transport links (meaning you have to drive to the M62 or the A64/A1/M1 or catch the train to Hull first). Plenty of old money around. Access to the coast. Nice area.
But it takes ages to get anywhere. You feel like you've done a day's journey just to get to civilisation.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
My Spanish Father-in-Law doesn't understand why the UK doesn't build underground carparks as all the towns in Spain seem to have. Simples - because we are incompetent and corrupt. And they are not.
Hang on - I hear right wing voices say - the Spanish ARE corrupt. And that is true. And yet they can stick underground car parks into their towns and we can't afford to...
Planners don’t approve them because more parking encourages driving. Or something.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
My Spanish Father-in-Law doesn't understand why the UK doesn't build underground carparks as all the towns in Spain seem to have. Simples - because we are incompetent and corrupt. And they are not.
Hang on - I hear right wing voices say - the Spanish ARE corrupt. And that is true. And yet they can stick underground car parks into their towns and we can't afford to...
Planners don’t approve them because more parking encourages driving. Or something.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
My Spanish Father-in-Law doesn't understand why the UK doesn't build underground carparks as all the towns in Spain seem to have. Simples - because we are incompetent and corrupt. And they are not.
Hang on - I hear right wing voices say - the Spanish ARE corrupt. And that is true. And yet they can stick underground car parks into their towns and we can't afford to...
Planners don’t approve them because more parking encourages driving. Or something.
Its not entirely this. They are also expensive to build, complex land assembly issues etc.
They aren't expensive when you build them at the same time as building something else on top of them.
Yes, this has been going on for quite a while. Cross-reference neo-feudalism of the Noughties and Tens with techno-feudalism of the Tens and Twenties and it can be seen that they are actually the same phenomenon. Transnational entities are unaccountable to the nation state and so cannot be ameliorated. Recall my rant that the new building explosion in London is being underpinned by Qatari development funds, and that's just one example. Whether it's Musk moving factories to China because its nonunionized slave labour, or China investing in Africa and buying ports, or Tatar buying a steel mill in Wales and expecting perpetual subsidies, transnational entities exert power that is not mitigated by an increasingly enfeebled nation state. It is genuinely ironic that PB, so full of Brexiteers, wilfully declines to understand this. Benn's Five Questions applies.
Transnational entities absolutely can be ameliorated by the nation state so long as the state is willing to act.
Take your Qatari investments, they're only worthwhile because of our pathetically broken housing market that inflates the value of assets and cuts out competition.
If a Government gets a cojones to actually take on the NIMBYs and reform the housing market, then the Qatari investments would crash in value.
Some here would cry crocodile tears about how affordable housing equals negative equity. I won't. Let the Qatari investments become worthless, that's in our hands, they have no recourse to that.
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we have met aliens who can travel across space to visit us.
It's bizarre that more people aren't talking about this; if it is true* it is one of the biggest news stories in human history.
* It is not true
It really might be true
When I bang on about AI, @Benpointer always says “get back to me when a robot can stack my dishwasher”. And it’s a fair point
Well, now a robot can easily stack a dishwasher, and what’s more it can learn this simply by watching you do it first
“With enough strength and dexterity, Tesla's Bot could handle almost all physical tasks by simply looking at video clips of people doing said tasks.
Picking up a vacuum and running it through the house. Sorting and folding laundry. Tidying up the house. Moving material from point A to point B. Picking up trash and placing it in a bin. Pushing a lawnmower. Monitor an area for safety-related concerns. Laying bricks. Hammering nails. Using power tools. Clean dishes... etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”
I can find you a parrot that can recite poetry - doesn't mean it can write you any.
Are learning machines cool? Yes. But at the end of the day they're automatons that can, at a basic level, do simple tasks in relatively stable environments. Complex tasks in other scenarios are out of reach. All the hype is just sales - of course people who own stocks in AI companies would claim it would end the world or be the gadget of the future, because they'll rake the money in.
It is not coincidental that the new "AI is going to be able to do everything" line came after the "Meta is going to be the new frontier" fell through and the "NFTs and the blockchain are going to revolutionise everything" idea was proven false. Capitalism always needs a new frontier, to exploit and sell and commodify, and tech bros think they can build the next one. So far they're failing.
In my view the free chat programmes available online have written reasoning capabilities that exceed that of most graduate level professionals with over 20 years of high level report writing experience. They can write better than people who have been doing decision making and report writing for their entire career. From a management point of view they surpass most humans in knowing how to respond to situations in difficult correspondence exercises.
It is an inevitable human reaction to deny this or not look at it, but it won't help.
Do you mean ChatGPT, or is there a specific programme you mean? I think the most convincing ones are good at creating the approximation of human writing, until you learn it is either just lying (making up references and quotes and just general facts) or spewing nonsense (this often happens with coding where the coding looks correct, but is really just nonsense).
The way this stuff currently works is by taking the input, analysing words that are associated with the words relevant to that topic, and picking each word based on the likelihood that it is the most common word to follow the previous word. That requires it to read (and arguably steal) the work of existing people. It cannot think - it is not creating. It is a parrot - a big parrot, a complex parrot, a parrot that can maybe do some simple things - but a parrot. And that's selling parrots short, because I believe parrots have the ability of cognition.
So, is the robot video real, or not?
You still haven't told us, and you still don't realise the significance of that
Do I personally believe in the reality of a video on Twitter? I don't. Do I personally know it isn't real? No - that's why I have said I will await for credible sources to do reporting rather than just trust people chatting on a notoriously untrustworthy social media platform about a topic where there is so much undue hype.
That's nothing. They also developed a robot that can play ping-pong!
I hear they have also devised an automaton that can do the work of a police officer - although it does need some organic matter. Apparently it is half man, half machine - all cop.
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we have met aliens who can travel across space to visit us.
It's bizarre that more people aren't talking about this; if it is true* it is one of the biggest news stories in human history.
* It is not true
It really might be true
When I bang on about AI, @Benpointer always says “get back to me when a robot can stack my dishwasher”. And it’s a fair point
Well, now a robot can easily stack a dishwasher, and what’s more it can learn this simply by watching you do it first
“With enough strength and dexterity, Tesla's Bot could handle almost all physical tasks by simply looking at video clips of people doing said tasks.
Picking up a vacuum and running it through the house. Sorting and folding laundry. Tidying up the house. Moving material from point A to point B. Picking up trash and placing it in a bin. Pushing a lawnmower. Monitor an area for safety-related concerns. Laying bricks. Hammering nails. Using power tools. Clean dishes... etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”
I can find you a parrot that can recite poetry - doesn't mean it can write you any.
Are learning machines cool? Yes. But at the end of the day they're automatons that can, at a basic level, do simple tasks in relatively stable environments. Complex tasks in other scenarios are out of reach. All the hype is just sales - of course people who own stocks in AI companies would claim it would end the world or be the gadget of the future, because they'll rake the money in.
It is not coincidental that the new "AI is going to be able to do everything" line came after the "Meta is going to be the new frontier" fell through and the "NFTs and the blockchain are going to revolutionise everything" idea was proven false. Capitalism always needs a new frontier, to exploit and sell and commodify, and tech bros think they can build the next one. So far they're failing.
In my view the free chat programmes available online have written reasoning capabilities that exceed that of most graduate level professionals with over 20 years of high level report writing experience. They can write better than people who have been doing decision making and report writing for their entire career. From a management point of view they surpass most humans in knowing how to respond to situations in difficult correspondence exercises.
It is an inevitable human reaction to deny this or not look at it, but it won't help.
Do you mean ChatGPT, or is there a specific programme you mean? I think the most convincing ones are good at creating the approximation of human writing, until you learn it is either just lying (making up references and quotes and just general facts) or spewing nonsense (this often happens with coding where the coding looks correct, but is really just nonsense).
The way this stuff currently works is by taking the input, analysing words that are associated with the words relevant to that topic, and picking each word based on the likelihood that it is the most common word to follow the previous word. That requires it to read (and arguably steal) the work of existing people. It cannot think - it is not creating. It is a parrot - a big parrot, a complex parrot, a parrot that can maybe do some simple things - but a parrot. And that's selling parrots short, because I believe parrots have the ability of cognition.
So, is the robot video real, or not?
You still haven't told us, and you still don't realise the significance of that
Do I personally believe in the reality of a video on Twitter? I don't. Do I personally know it isn't real? No - that's why I have said I will await for credible sources to do reporting rather than just trust people chatting on a notoriously untrustworthy social media platform about a topic where there is so much undue hype.
That's nothing. They also developed a robot that can play ping-pong!
Jordan Tyldesley @PippyBing · 5m “Here’s a list of names I’ve heard in recent weeks touted in Labour circles for peerages should the party win an election […] Iain Anderson, Margaret Beckett, Luciana Berger, Mark Drakeford, Michael Dugher, David Evans, Harriet Harman, Margaret Hodge…
===
This is all starting to look like some in Labour are starting to take the polling for granted.
This may well prove to be a massive mistake. The Tories will throw everything at Labour next year with migration at top of the list.
The Tories have had 13 years to deal with immigration and they haven't exactly done a good job....
True. But will it be a case of 'Labour will be even worse' message cutting through?
Whichever party is in government in the future will have to secure the borders wrt economic migrants. The same is true of all other European governments.
Which means it will have to secure the borders, which means it will have to deploy sufficient force to detect and prevent border crossings, which means it will have to buy/repurpose ships, helicopters and boats to do that and man it and pay for it
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we have met aliens who can travel across space to visit us.
It's bizarre that more people aren't talking about this; if it is true* it is one of the biggest news stories in human history.
* It is not true
It really might be true
When I bang on about AI, @Benpointer always says “get back to me when a robot can stack my dishwasher”. And it’s a fair point
Well, now a robot can easily stack a dishwasher, and what’s more it can learn this simply by watching you do it first
“With enough strength and dexterity, Tesla's Bot could handle almost all physical tasks by simply looking at video clips of people doing said tasks.
Picking up a vacuum and running it through the house. Sorting and folding laundry. Tidying up the house. Moving material from point A to point B. Picking up trash and placing it in a bin. Pushing a lawnmower. Monitor an area for safety-related concerns. Laying bricks. Hammering nails. Using power tools. Clean dishes... etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”
I can find you a parrot that can recite poetry - doesn't mean it can write you any.
Are learning machines cool? Yes. But at the end of the day they're automatons that can, at a basic level, do simple tasks in relatively stable environments. Complex tasks in other scenarios are out of reach. All the hype is just sales - of course people who own stocks in AI companies would claim it would end the world or be the gadget of the future, because they'll rake the money in.
It is not coincidental that the new "AI is going to be able to do everything" line came after the "Meta is going to be the new frontier" fell through and the "NFTs and the blockchain are going to revolutionise everything" idea was proven false. Capitalism always needs a new frontier, to exploit and sell and commodify, and tech bros think they can build the next one. So far they're failing.
In my view the free chat programmes available online have written reasoning capabilities that exceed that of most graduate level professionals with over 20 years of high level report writing experience. They can write better than people who have been doing decision making and report writing for their entire career. From a management point of view they surpass most humans in knowing how to respond to situations in difficult correspondence exercises.
It is an inevitable human reaction to deny this or not look at it, but it won't help.
Do you mean ChatGPT, or is there a specific programme you mean? I think the most convincing ones are good at creating the approximation of human writing, until you learn it is either just lying (making up references and quotes and just general facts) or spewing nonsense (this often happens with coding where the coding looks correct, but is really just nonsense).
The way this stuff currently works is by taking the input, analysing words that are associated with the words relevant to that topic, and picking each word based on the likelihood that it is the most common word to follow the previous word. That requires it to read (and arguably steal) the work of existing people. It cannot think - it is not creating. It is a parrot - a big parrot, a complex parrot, a parrot that can maybe do some simple things - but a parrot. And that's selling parrots short, because I believe parrots have the ability of cognition.
So, is the robot video real, or not?
You still haven't told us, and you still don't realise the significance of that
Do I personally believe in the reality of a video on Twitter? I don't. Do I personally know it isn't real? No - that's why I have said I will await for credible sources to do reporting rather than just trust people chatting on a notoriously untrustworthy social media platform about a topic where there is so much undue hype.
That's nothing. They also developed a robot that can play ping-pong!
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
My Spanish Father-in-Law doesn't understand why the UK doesn't build underground carparks as all the towns in Spain seem to have. Simples - because we are incompetent and corrupt. And they are not.
Hang on - I hear right wing voices say - the Spanish ARE corrupt. And that is true. And yet they can stick underground car parks into their towns and we can't afford to...
I haven't heard of this before - can we have examples of these underground car parks in all the towns in Spain?
Quite common in France - the classic in towns such as Fontainebleau is that they dug out the town square, and then put a nice tuned up version of the town square back on top.
I was pondering yesterday on the strange anomaly of airports. If ever there were a good place to have underground parking these are surely it:
- everyone hates going out miles on a shuttle bus to a huge car park on the perimeter, and it’s a mad waste of hectares of land - You can’t build very tall multi-storeys because of the planes, and it’s a waste to have one right by the terminal like in LHR when that could be taken by airport hotels - They dig up the land and create all sorts of ducting and subterranean units when they create airports anyway, why not bury a huge car park at the same time?
Obviously not directly under the runway but adjacent and below the terminals.
The other thing is solar plants. Why on earth isn’t every airport and airfield carpeted with solar arrays, given the land can’t be used for anything else and is already brownfield?
A fair point, but consider safety. At present running off the tarmac onto the grass isn't a huge disaster per se, as the plane has a fair chance to slow down in relative safety. But if one clutters it up with lots of steel girders and solar panels ...
I don't suppose the passengers would like it either. (I also wonder about the effect on airfield surveillance radar, too.)
Yes fair enough. I've looked it up to see if any airports do use them. Nice article from Wired a couple of years ago discussing the pros and cons
Also - ISTR that LHR composts tdhe grass clippings.
Not sure if this is for methane for heating, but it would then be solar power collection, no?
You can still have grass growing under panels. And you can graze sheep, though that might be suboptimal next to an airport runway unless you want a regular supply of self-made lamb kofta.
Definitely not next to the runway or taxiway. Sheep are bloody idiots (always go slow if there is a sheep looking stupid in your way on a country road). Some would be bound to run in front of the plane. And one doesn't want one's port engine cooking up a sheep just when one is committed to takeoff ...
Yes, this has been going on for quite a while. Cross-reference neo-feudalism of the Noughties and Tens with techno-feudalism of the Tens and Twenties and it can be seen that they are actually the same phenomenon. Transnational entities are unaccountable to the nation state and so cannot be ameliorated. Recall my rant that the new building explosion in London is being underpinned by Qatari development funds, and that's just one example. Whether it's Musk moving factories to China because its nonunionized slave labour, or China investing in Africa and buying ports, or Tatar buying a steel mill in Wales and expecting perpetual subsidies, transnational entities exert power that is not mitigated by an increasingly enfeebled nation state. It is genuinely ironic that PB, so full of Brexiteers, wilfully declines to understand this. Benn's Five Questions applies.
Jordan Tyldesley @PippyBing · 5m “Here’s a list of names I’ve heard in recent weeks touted in Labour circles for peerages should the party win an election […] Iain Anderson, Margaret Beckett, Luciana Berger, Mark Drakeford, Michael Dugher, David Evans, Harriet Harman, Margaret Hodge…
===
This is all starting to look like some in Labour are starting to take the polling for granted.
This may well prove to be a massive mistake. The Tories will throw everything at Labour next year with migration at top of the list.
The Tories have had 13 years to deal with immigration and they haven't exactly done a good job....
True. But will it be a case of 'Labour will be even worse' message cutting through?
Whichever party is in government in the future will have to secure the borders wrt economic migrants. The same is true of all other European governments.
Not just European governments but governments worldwide not least the US
I have no idea how this very serious and difficult issue is addressed but then neither does anybody with no apparent solution in sight
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
My Spanish Father-in-Law doesn't understand why the UK doesn't build underground carparks as all the towns in Spain seem to have. Simples - because we are incompetent and corrupt. And they are not.
Hang on - I hear right wing voices say - the Spanish ARE corrupt. And that is true. And yet they can stick underground car parks into their towns and we can't afford to...
Planners don’t approve them because more parking encourages driving. Or something.
There's a fabulous u/g car park in Bloomsbury Square, WC1, in the shape of a double helix. You drive round and round and down and down and slowly you realise you're climbing and, before you find a space, you're back out in the daylight again.
Not far from where Rosalind Frankllin worked at KCL ... though the two strands of her helix were of the same handedness, unlike, presumably, yours!
Um hold on for a minute. Doesn't the handedness of one helix in a double helix dictate the handedness of the other? Otherwise they'd collide?
Re Isam's very sad news about his friend earlier, I do think reluctance to visit hospital with serious symptoms is a problem, with men especially. Whether that's down to intrinsic cultural factors - not wanting to create a fuss, afraid of being patronised by the doctors for hypochondria, laziness - or more recent pressures on the health service and the prospect of waiting hours or getting bad treatment, or a mixture of both, I don't know.
My brother in law ended up in a near fatal situation earlier in the summer and was in hospital for months, but he ignored acute symptoms for days before the final admission and pretty worrying chronic symptoms for at least 5 years before finally going to A&E in crisis. With him it was definitely a case of not wanting to make a fuss mixed with denial - if you don't get checked out the illness isn't real.
I've certainly been reluctant to go down to A&E in the last couple of years and needed to be pushed to do so by my wife, once with an infected animal bite, once with broken bones and once with a deep wound. For me the prospect of waiting hours and then being fobbed off or made worse was the main obstacle.
Jordan Tyldesley @PippyBing · 5m “Here’s a list of names I’ve heard in recent weeks touted in Labour circles for peerages should the party win an election […] Iain Anderson, Margaret Beckett, Luciana Berger, Mark Drakeford, Michael Dugher, David Evans, Harriet Harman, Margaret Hodge…
===
This is all starting to look like some in Labour are starting to take the polling for granted.
This may well prove to be a massive mistake. The Tories will throw everything at Labour next year with migration at top of the list.
The Tories have had 13 years to deal with immigration and they haven't exactly done a good job....
True. But will it be a case of 'Labour will be even worse' message cutting through?
Whichever party is in government in the future will have to secure the borders wrt economic migrants. The same is true of all other European governments.
Not just European governments but governments worldwide not least the US
I have no idea how this very serious and difficult issue is addressed but then neither does anybody with no apparent solution in sight
Levelling up.
And in any even, half the world's economies will need economic migrants.
Russian is the most widely spoken native language in Europe.
More Ukranians have Russian as their mother tounge than Ukranian. Although the number of Ukrainians who only speak Russian when they have to has shot up in the last 18 months. Source: reliable hear say from Ukrainians that I know.
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we have met aliens who can travel across space to visit us.
It's bizarre that more people aren't talking about this; if it is true* it is one of the biggest news stories in human history.
* It is not true
It really might be true
When I bang on about AI, @Benpointer always says “get back to me when a robot can stack my dishwasher”. And it’s a fair point
Well, now a robot can easily stack a dishwasher, and what’s more it can learn this simply by watching you do it first
“With enough strength and dexterity, Tesla's Bot could handle almost all physical tasks by simply looking at video clips of people doing said tasks.
Picking up a vacuum and running it through the house. Sorting and folding laundry. Tidying up the house. Moving material from point A to point B. Picking up trash and placing it in a bin. Pushing a lawnmower. Monitor an area for safety-related concerns. Laying bricks. Hammering nails. Using power tools. Clean dishes... etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”
I can find you a parrot that can recite poetry - doesn't mean it can write you any.
Are learning machines cool? Yes. But at the end of the day they're automatons that can, at a basic level, do simple tasks in relatively stable environments. Complex tasks in other scenarios are out of reach. All the hype is just sales - of course people who own stocks in AI companies would claim it would end the world or be the gadget of the future, because they'll rake the money in.
It is not coincidental that the new "AI is going to be able to do everything" line came after the "Meta is going to be the new frontier" fell through and the "NFTs and the blockchain are going to revolutionise everything" idea was proven false. Capitalism always needs a new frontier, to exploit and sell and commodify, and tech bros think they can build the next one. So far they're failing.
In my view the free chat programmes available online have written reasoning capabilities that exceed that of most graduate level professionals with over 20 years of high level report writing experience. They can write better than people who have been doing decision making and report writing for their entire career. From a management point of view they surpass most humans in knowing how to respond to situations in difficult correspondence exercises.
It is an inevitable human reaction to deny this or not look at it, but it won't help.
Do you mean ChatGPT, or is there a specific programme you mean? I think the most convincing ones are good at creating the approximation of human writing, until you learn it is either just lying (making up references and quotes and just general facts) or spewing nonsense (this often happens with coding where the coding looks correct, but is really just nonsense).
The way this stuff currently works is by taking the input, analysing words that are associated with the words relevant to that topic, and picking each word based on the likelihood that it is the most common word to follow the previous word. That requires it to read (and arguably steal) the work of existing people. It cannot think - it is not creating. It is a parrot - a big parrot, a complex parrot, a parrot that can maybe do some simple things - but a parrot. And that's selling parrots short, because I believe parrots have the ability of cognition.
So, is the robot video real, or not?
You still haven't told us, and you still don't realise the significance of that
Do I personally believe in the reality of a video on Twitter? I don't. Do I personally know it isn't real? No - that's why I have said I will await for credible sources to do reporting rather than just trust people chatting on a notoriously untrustworthy social media platform about a topic where there is so much undue hype.
OK, I'll help you out of your painful confusion: it's real
Here's a Stanford AI professor discussing it in great depth
"Let's reverse engineer the phenomenal Tesla Optimus. No insider info, just my own analysis. Long read:
1. The smooth hand movements are almost certainly trained by imitation learning ("behavior cloning") from human operators. The alternative is reinforcement learning in simulation, but that typically leads to jittery motion and unnatural hand poses.
There're at least 4 ways to collect human demonstrations:
(1) A custom-built teleoperation system - I believe this is the most likely means used by Tesla team. Open-source example: ALOHA, a low-cost bimanual robot arm and teleoperation system by Stanford AI Labs (https://tonyzhaozh.github.io/aloha/). It enables very precise, dexterous motions, such as putting AAA batteries into a remote or manipulating contact lens.
(2) Motion Capture (MoCap): apply the MoCap systems used for Hollywood movies to capture the fine-grained motions of hand joints..."
Re Isam's very sad news about his friend earlier, I do think reluctance to visit hospital with serious symptoms is a problem, with men especially. Whether that's down to intrinsic cultural factors - not wanting to create a fuss, afraid of being patronised by the doctors for hypochondria, laziness - or more recent pressures on the health service and the prospect of waiting hours or getting bad treatment, or a mixture of both, I don't know.
My brother in law ended up in a near fatal situation earlier in the summer and was in hospital for months, but he ignored acute symptoms for days before the final admission and pretty worrying chronic symptoms for at least 5 years before finally going to A&E in crisis. With him it was definitely a case of not wanting to make a fuss mixed with denial - if you don't get checked out the illness isn't real.
I've certainly been reluctant to go down to A&E in the last couple of years and needed to be pushed to do so by my wife, once with an infected animal bite, once with broken bones and once with a deep wound. For me the prospect of waiting hours and then being fobbed off or made worse was the main obstacle.
My sympathies to isam, as well.
In terms of the worries about going to A&E - just use 111. Are they annoying when they read out the checklist of stuff to make sure it isn't a stroke or heart attack (when you know it isn't those things)? Yes. But if your symptoms tick enough boxes you will get a GP phone call within an hour or two (in my experience) and that GP will tell you if you should go to A&E or not. That way you can know whether it is worth going to A&E without worrying about adding pressure onto hospitals AND you're essentially kind of triaged so your wait in A&E (whilst still long) won't be the longest.
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we have met aliens who can travel across space to visit us.
It's bizarre that more people aren't talking about this; if it is true* it is one of the biggest news stories in human history.
* It is not true
It really might be true
When I bang on about AI, @Benpointer always says “get back to me when a robot can stack my dishwasher”. And it’s a fair point
Well, now a robot can easily stack a dishwasher, and what’s more it can learn this simply by watching you do it first
“With enough strength and dexterity, Tesla's Bot could handle almost all physical tasks by simply looking at video clips of people doing said tasks.
Picking up a vacuum and running it through the house. Sorting and folding laundry. Tidying up the house. Moving material from point A to point B. Picking up trash and placing it in a bin. Pushing a lawnmower. Monitor an area for safety-related concerns. Laying bricks. Hammering nails. Using power tools. Clean dishes... etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”
I can find you a parrot that can recite poetry - doesn't mean it can write you any.
Are learning machines cool? Yes. But at the end of the day they're automatons that can, at a basic level, do simple tasks in relatively stable environments. Complex tasks in other scenarios are out of reach. All the hype is just sales - of course people who own stocks in AI companies would claim it would end the world or be the gadget of the future, because they'll rake the money in.
It is not coincidental that the new "AI is going to be able to do everything" line came after the "Meta is going to be the new frontier" fell through and the "NFTs and the blockchain are going to revolutionise everything" idea was proven false. Capitalism always needs a new frontier, to exploit and sell and commodify, and tech bros think they can build the next one. So far they're failing.
In my view the free chat programmes available online have written reasoning capabilities that exceed that of most graduate level professionals with over 20 years of high level report writing experience. They can write better than people who have been doing decision making and report writing for their entire career. From a management point of view they surpass most humans in knowing how to respond to situations in difficult correspondence exercises.
It is an inevitable human reaction to deny this or not look at it, but it won't help.
Do you mean ChatGPT, or is there a specific programme you mean? I think the most convincing ones are good at creating the approximation of human writing, until you learn it is either just lying (making up references and quotes and just general facts) or spewing nonsense (this often happens with coding where the coding looks correct, but is really just nonsense).
The way this stuff currently works is by taking the input, analysing words that are associated with the words relevant to that topic, and picking each word based on the likelihood that it is the most common word to follow the previous word. That requires it to read (and arguably steal) the work of existing people. It cannot think - it is not creating. It is a parrot - a big parrot, a complex parrot, a parrot that can maybe do some simple things - but a parrot. And that's selling parrots short, because I believe parrots have the ability of cognition.
So, is the robot video real, or not?
You still haven't told us, and you still don't realise the significance of that
Do I personally believe in the reality of a video on Twitter? I don't. Do I personally know it isn't real? No - that's why I have said I will await for credible sources to do reporting rather than just trust people chatting on a notoriously untrustworthy social media platform about a topic where there is so much undue hype.
It looked artificial as fuck to me, but then have you seen any of Apple's recent product announcement videos?
Over-processed virtual sets, weird jerky body movements, speaking with unnatural cadences, and everyone standing in exactly the same 2015-style power pose. And those are definitely real people!
Jordan Tyldesley @PippyBing · 5m “Here’s a list of names I’ve heard in recent weeks touted in Labour circles for peerages should the party win an election […] Iain Anderson, Margaret Beckett, Luciana Berger, Mark Drakeford, Michael Dugher, David Evans, Harriet Harman, Margaret Hodge…
===
This is all starting to look like some in Labour are starting to take the polling for granted.
This may well prove to be a massive mistake. The Tories will throw everything at Labour next year with migration at top of the list.
The Tories have had 13 years to deal with immigration and they haven't exactly done a good job....
True. But will it be a case of 'Labour will be even worse' message cutting through?
Whichever party is in government in the future will have to secure the borders wrt economic migrants. The same is true of all other European governments.
Which means it will have to secure the borders, which means it will have to deploy sufficient force to detect and prevent border crossings, which means it will have to buy/repurpose ships, helicopters and boats to do that and man it and pay for it
Or they can make speeches and talk hard.
Which do you think they are going to do?
To secure the channel against small boats, you're basically looking at a 30km stretch from Boulougne/Gravelines to Dungeness/Ramsgate. Anything either side of the Dover Straits is a much more difficult crossing.
Even the tory ravaged RN has more than enough assets and people to completely lock down that stretch of water if the will were there. Stick Albion and Argus in the middle with two flights of Lynx (with fucking nutters on the door guns) and have Rivers as pickets. No subs or aviation threats to worry so you don't even need any T23/T45,
This government doesn't have the wit or the will to sail a fore-and-aft rigged dinghy across the Serpentine in Hyde Park.
Jordan Tyldesley @PippyBing · 5m “Here’s a list of names I’ve heard in recent weeks touted in Labour circles for peerages should the party win an election […] Iain Anderson, Margaret Beckett, Luciana Berger, Mark Drakeford, Michael Dugher, David Evans, Harriet Harman, Margaret Hodge…
===
This is all starting to look like some in Labour are starting to take the polling for granted.
This may well prove to be a massive mistake. The Tories will throw everything at Labour next year with migration at top of the list.
The Tories have had 13 years to deal with immigration and they haven't exactly done a good job....
True. But will it be a case of 'Labour will be even worse' message cutting through?
Whichever party is in government in the future will have to secure the borders wrt economic migrants. The same is true of all other European governments.
Not just European governments but governments worldwide not least the US
I have no idea how this very serious and difficult issue is addressed but then neither does anybody with no apparent solution in sight
Levelling up.
And in any even, half the world's economies will need economic migrants.
That is not remotely an answer. A more prosperous population means a more mobile population, so you get more. Unless you plan to 'level down' Western standards of living until they match those of the developing world - good luck getting support for that.
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we have met aliens who can travel across space to visit us.
It's bizarre that more people aren't talking about this; if it is true* it is one of the biggest news stories in human history.
* It is not true
It really might be true
When I bang on about AI, @Benpointer always says “get back to me when a robot can stack my dishwasher”. And it’s a fair point
Well, now a robot can easily stack a dishwasher, and what’s more it can learn this simply by watching you do it first
“With enough strength and dexterity, Tesla's Bot could handle almost all physical tasks by simply looking at video clips of people doing said tasks.
Picking up a vacuum and running it through the house. Sorting and folding laundry. Tidying up the house. Moving material from point A to point B. Picking up trash and placing it in a bin. Pushing a lawnmower. Monitor an area for safety-related concerns. Laying bricks. Hammering nails. Using power tools. Clean dishes... etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”
I can find you a parrot that can recite poetry - doesn't mean it can write you any.
Are learning machines cool? Yes. But at the end of the day they're automatons that can, at a basic level, do simple tasks in relatively stable environments. Complex tasks in other scenarios are out of reach. All the hype is just sales - of course people who own stocks in AI companies would claim it would end the world or be the gadget of the future, because they'll rake the money in.
It is not coincidental that the new "AI is going to be able to do everything" line came after the "Meta is going to be the new frontier" fell through and the "NFTs and the blockchain are going to revolutionise everything" idea was proven false. Capitalism always needs a new frontier, to exploit and sell and commodify, and tech bros think they can build the next one. So far they're failing.
In my view the free chat programmes available online have written reasoning capabilities that exceed that of most graduate level professionals with over 20 years of high level report writing experience. They can write better than people who have been doing decision making and report writing for their entire career. From a management point of view they surpass most humans in knowing how to respond to situations in difficult correspondence exercises.
It is an inevitable human reaction to deny this or not look at it, but it won't help.
Do you mean ChatGPT, or is there a specific programme you mean? I think the most convincing ones are good at creating the approximation of human writing, until you learn it is either just lying (making up references and quotes and just general facts) or spewing nonsense (this often happens with coding where the coding looks correct, but is really just nonsense).
The way this stuff currently works is by taking the input, analysing words that are associated with the words relevant to that topic, and picking each word based on the likelihood that it is the most common word to follow the previous word. That requires it to read (and arguably steal) the work of existing people. It cannot think - it is not creating. It is a parrot - a big parrot, a complex parrot, a parrot that can maybe do some simple things - but a parrot. And that's selling parrots short, because I believe parrots have the ability of cognition.
So, is the robot video real, or not?
You still haven't told us, and you still don't realise the significance of that
Do I personally believe in the reality of a video on Twitter? I don't. Do I personally know it isn't real? No - that's why I have said I will await for credible sources to do reporting rather than just trust people chatting on a notoriously untrustworthy social media platform about a topic where there is so much undue hype.
OK, I'll help you out of your painful confusion: it's real
Here's a Stanford AI professor discussing it in great depth
"Let's reverse engineer the phenomenal Tesla Optimus. No insider info, just my own analysis. Long read:
1. The smooth hand movements are almost certainly trained by imitation learning ("behavior cloning") from human operators. The alternative is reinforcement learning in simulation, but that typically leads to jittery motion and unnatural hand poses.
There're at least 4 ways to collect human demonstrations:
(1) A custom-built teleoperation system - I believe this is the most likely means used by Tesla team. Open-source example: ALOHA, a low-cost bimanual robot arm and teleoperation system by Stanford AI Labs (https://tonyzhaozh.github.io/aloha/). It enables very precise, dexterous motions, such as putting AAA batteries into a remote or manipulating contact lens.
(2) Motion Capture (MoCap): apply the MoCap systems used for Hollywood movies to capture the fine-grained motions of hand joints..."
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
Thanks, mate. Keep us posted.
Sure. Here you go
"Wait, can we consider seriously the hypothesis that
1) the recent hyped tweets from OA's staff 2) "AGI has been achieved internally" 3) sama's comments on the qualification of slow or fast takeoff hinging on the date you count from 4) sama's comments on 10000x researchers are actually mapping to something true?
The implications are so crazy in terms of power shift. Or level of risks over the next few months.
Could some forecasters try to get a better estimate or share their own forecast on it?"
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we have met aliens who can travel across space to visit us.
It's bizarre that more people aren't talking about this; if it is true* it is one of the biggest news stories in human history.
* It is not true
It really might be true
When I bang on about AI, @Benpointer always says “get back to me when a robot can stack my dishwasher”. And it’s a fair point
Well, now a robot can easily stack a dishwasher, and what’s more it can learn this simply by watching you do it first
“With enough strength and dexterity, Tesla's Bot could handle almost all physical tasks by simply looking at video clips of people doing said tasks.
Picking up a vacuum and running it through the house. Sorting and folding laundry. Tidying up the house. Moving material from point A to point B. Picking up trash and placing it in a bin. Pushing a lawnmower. Monitor an area for safety-related concerns. Laying bricks. Hammering nails. Using power tools. Clean dishes... etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”
I can find you a parrot that can recite poetry - doesn't mean it can write you any.
Are learning machines cool? Yes. But at the end of the day they're automatons that can, at a basic level, do simple tasks in relatively stable environments. Complex tasks in other scenarios are out of reach. All the hype is just sales - of course people who own stocks in AI companies would claim it would end the world or be the gadget of the future, because they'll rake the money in.
It is not coincidental that the new "AI is going to be able to do everything" line came after the "Meta is going to be the new frontier" fell through and the "NFTs and the blockchain are going to revolutionise everything" idea was proven false. Capitalism always needs a new frontier, to exploit and sell and commodify, and tech bros think they can build the next one. So far they're failing.
In my view the free chat programmes available online have written reasoning capabilities that exceed that of most graduate level professionals with over 20 years of high level report writing experience. They can write better than people who have been doing decision making and report writing for their entire career. From a management point of view they surpass most humans in knowing how to respond to situations in difficult correspondence exercises.
It is an inevitable human reaction to deny this or not look at it, but it won't help.
Do you mean ChatGPT, or is there a specific programme you mean? I think the most convincing ones are good at creating the approximation of human writing, until you learn it is either just lying (making up references and quotes and just general facts) or spewing nonsense (this often happens with coding where the coding looks correct, but is really just nonsense).
The way this stuff currently works is by taking the input, analysing words that are associated with the words relevant to that topic, and picking each word based on the likelihood that it is the most common word to follow the previous word. That requires it to read (and arguably steal) the work of existing people. It cannot think - it is not creating. It is a parrot - a big parrot, a complex parrot, a parrot that can maybe do some simple things - but a parrot. And that's selling parrots short, because I believe parrots have the ability of cognition.
So, is the robot video real, or not?
You still haven't told us, and you still don't realise the significance of that
Do I personally believe in the reality of a video on Twitter? I don't. Do I personally know it isn't real? No - that's why I have said I will await for credible sources to do reporting rather than just trust people chatting on a notoriously untrustworthy social media platform about a topic where there is so much undue hype.
OK, I'll help you out of your painful confusion: it's real
Here's a Stanford AI professor discussing it in great depth
"Let's reverse engineer the phenomenal Tesla Optimus. No insider info, just my own analysis. Long read:
1. The smooth hand movements are almost certainly trained by imitation learning ("behavior cloning") from human operators. The alternative is reinforcement learning in simulation, but that typically leads to jittery motion and unnatural hand poses.
There're at least 4 ways to collect human demonstrations:
(1) A custom-built teleoperation system - I believe this is the most likely means used by Tesla team. Open-source example: ALOHA, a low-cost bimanual robot arm and teleoperation system by Stanford AI Labs (https://tonyzhaozh.github.io/aloha/). It enables very precise, dexterous motions, such as putting AAA batteries into a remote or manipulating contact lens.
(2) Motion Capture (MoCap): apply the MoCap systems used for Hollywood movies to capture the fine-grained motions of hand joints..."
So this is a robot which is so astonishing you presumed it was fake, yet at the same time you dismiss it as meaningless
Any sufficiently advanced technology...
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." is an argument for being more skeptical of a video like this. It may be that the magic is half a trick, and the technology isn't there yet.
Edit: not the veracity of the video, its importance.
I expect them to scrap the link to Manchester and instead say they’ll improve west to east links . The public have never really got behind HS2 and the Tories want some cash to spend on other projects that are more voter friendly .
Not sure if anyone saw Newsnight but the comparison between cost per mile of building track in the UK compared to other major country’s was shocking.
Jaw dropping in fact .
Is it caused by the huge cost of compensation in this country compared to elsewhere? Maybe it's because we're more densely populated than nearly every other European country, so whereas in places like Spain and France it's relatively easy to route a new train line through mostly empty areas, it's much more difficult to do that here. I was using the Spanish high speed trains in February/March this year and I was surprised to see how utterly empty a lot of the countryside was.
Also, on the subject of cancelling the line to M'chester, what some people don't seem to realise is that they've already spent a huge amount of money on some of the infrastructure for the B'ham to M'chester route, so if they cancel it all of that will be wasted, and also all the disruption they've already caused in that area will have been for nothing. I hope Starmer decides to go ahead with it when he becomes PM (which seems very likely to happen now).
The Times have a very good article on it today, if you can get behind the paywall.
I have a theory that the more political a project is (like Palace of Westminster Restoration and Renewal, which is absolutely political and could fall or burn down at any time), or HS2, which simply crosses far too many constituencies for it not to be, the worse its governance will be because politicians simply can't help making kneejerk uninformed decisions and that's death to big infrastructure.
I think we really need a dedicated national infrastructure council that is at one remove from day to day political machinations that can make these kinds of long term decisions, ideally creating a pipeline of projects so that expertise in planning and contracting is not lost from one project to the next. On Westminster I think the building is too expensive to renovate as a working Parliament. They should simply pay to preserve it as an important national monument and move the parliament elsewhere. Maybe put them in tunnels under Euston until they complete HS2 to Manchester and Leeds. That might concentrate minds s bit.
Make Westminster a museum absolutely!
Move Parliament and the Civil Service out of London and into a new build city.
Looking at a map, North of York, East of Hull there seems to be quite a bit of land that's neither well developed nor in an AONB. Or between Grimsby and Scunthorpe could be another good location, though that's getting close to Lincolnshire Wolds AONB.
Build a new capital city for Parliament and the Civil Service there, in the form of Washington DC or Canberra, then see how quickly infrastructure gets developed.
Do you mean west of Hull? (Noth)East of Hull you'd have parliament on sea. Good luck taking on th NIMBYs in the Yorkshire Wolds (rolling countryside, less spectacular than moors or dales, but still popular). Proposed to my wife on a walk in the Wolds.
I'd tend to pop if somewhere Leeds/Bradford or further north to Darlington/Northallerton area to be more central for a UK parliament (Shetland can bugger off and join Norway if they don't consider that central-enough )
Sorry I wrote it backwards, I meant North of Hull, East of York.
Approximately where the small town of Driffield (never heard of it) is, or around that area, but its just one suggestion there's plenty of other valid suggestions.
I would suggest wherever it is, is not on an existing motorway network or high speed rail network.
Set a five year deadline maybe for construction then relocation of every single civil servant and Parliamentarian to be out of London by then. Get Parliament and the heads of the Civil Service all in that new build city and let them struggle with the infrastructure as it is, if they've not unlocked investment yet. See how quickly funding for investment becomes available.
Yeah, they'll have your balls on toasting fork in Driffield for suggesting flooding it with parliamentarians and roads and outsiders
It isn't the worst idea in the world. It would fix so many issues that are outstanding from when I first lived in Yorkshire. The Ouse Bridge would be fixed replaced as they'd upgrade the A63 to motorway all the way into Hull. Stamford Bridge would finally get a bypass. You'd have the restoration of the train line between Hull and York (Beverley is cut adrift at the moment thanks to Dr Beeching). Full fibre everywhere (not tied to KCOM). High-end retailers. Soaring property prices.
Great Driffield. The legislative capital of a post-Brexit United Kingdom. Those sunlit uplands (or Wolds) look marvellous.
I can just see Jacob Rees-Mogg in Boyes or Yorkshire Trading Company...
Yeah, the M62 Ouse Bridge does need replacing.
I don't know what the exact problem is but having to re-pour the concrete deck in-situ does not inspire confidence in the longevity of the structure.
Still, I suppose all motorways will have a 30mph limit soon, so the current situation is good practice for that at least.
Due to mistyping a while ago, whenever I start to type maps.google.com, the browser tries to autocomplete maps.goole.com which, often, I click on without noticing the error, which of course makes it reinforced as a good suggestion to come up 🤦♂️
On the boring subject of 'AI'... (I don't know how that differs from normal software and I don't care to find out) I've noticed that if I give my students a translation exercise with a completely fictitious word (that is a word looks like a French or Russian word but I've just made it up) then the ones who cheat with ChatGPT (or whatever) submit a translation in which the 'AI' has tried to infer the meaning of my made up word. The ones who tried to do it for real leave it blank and ask what the word means.
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we have met aliens who can travel across space to visit us.
It's bizarre that more people aren't talking about this; if it is true* it is one of the biggest news stories in human history.
* It is not true
It really might be true
When I bang on about AI, @Benpointer always says “get back to me when a robot can stack my dishwasher”. And it’s a fair point
Well, now a robot can easily stack a dishwasher, and what’s more it can learn this simply by watching you do it first
“With enough strength and dexterity, Tesla's Bot could handle almost all physical tasks by simply looking at video clips of people doing said tasks.
Picking up a vacuum and running it through the house. Sorting and folding laundry. Tidying up the house. Moving material from point A to point B. Picking up trash and placing it in a bin. Pushing a lawnmower. Monitor an area for safety-related concerns. Laying bricks. Hammering nails. Using power tools. Clean dishes... etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”
I can find you a parrot that can recite poetry - doesn't mean it can write you any.
Are learning machines cool? Yes. But at the end of the day they're automatons that can, at a basic level, do simple tasks in relatively stable environments. Complex tasks in other scenarios are out of reach. All the hype is just sales - of course people who own stocks in AI companies would claim it would end the world or be the gadget of the future, because they'll rake the money in.
It is not coincidental that the new "AI is going to be able to do everything" line came after the "Meta is going to be the new frontier" fell through and the "NFTs and the blockchain are going to revolutionise everything" idea was proven false. Capitalism always needs a new frontier, to exploit and sell and commodify, and tech bros think they can build the next one. So far they're failing.
In my view the free chat programmes available online have written reasoning capabilities that exceed that of most graduate level professionals with over 20 years of high level report writing experience. They can write better than people who have been doing decision making and report writing for their entire career. From a management point of view they surpass most humans in knowing how to respond to situations in difficult correspondence exercises.
It is an inevitable human reaction to deny this or not look at it, but it won't help.
Do you mean ChatGPT, or is there a specific programme you mean? I think the most convincing ones are good at creating the approximation of human writing, until you learn it is either just lying (making up references and quotes and just general facts) or spewing nonsense (this often happens with coding where the coding looks correct, but is really just nonsense).
The way this stuff currently works is by taking the input, analysing words that are associated with the words relevant to that topic, and picking each word based on the likelihood that it is the most common word to follow the previous word. That requires it to read (and arguably steal) the work of existing people. It cannot think - it is not creating. It is a parrot - a big parrot, a complex parrot, a parrot that can maybe do some simple things - but a parrot. And that's selling parrots short, because I believe parrots have the ability of cognition.
I think it was the free version of Chat GPT a few months ago. I was getting it to write judgements absorbing written representations from two parties and getting it to make written rulings, justify them with reference to losing party arguments, and then defending its decisions against complaints. This was the work of a government agency I am very familiar with. In terms of the written reasoning skills, the reality is that it far outperforms most people that apply for the job (at the point of applying) and many of the people who are actually doing it now - these are quite high level operational roles, the people that write these judgements are at the level of a solicitor with significant post qualification experience. If you kept adding constraints to the process reflecting the real world and the existing legal framework then it could probably do your job for you.
I posted this on Linkedin in a comment thread discussing AI and the head of the organisation who I know professionally made clear to me he was aware of this (obviously they have done similar exercises).
I had a similar view on GPT to you prior to this. But a lawyer who runs an outsourcing firm explained they thought it was rapidly advancing and indicated they were starting to use it in work contracted out to them by local authorities, automatically generating correspondence relating to civil law breaches and also drafting legal notices, albeit corrected by humans. So what is clear is that it is already here and taking over work done by professionals.
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we have met aliens who can travel across space to visit us.
It's bizarre that more people aren't talking about this; if it is true* it is one of the biggest news stories in human history.
* It is not true
It really might be true
When I bang on about AI, @Benpointer always says “get back to me when a robot can stack my dishwasher”. And it’s a fair point
Well, now a robot can easily stack a dishwasher, and what’s more it can learn this simply by watching you do it first
“With enough strength and dexterity, Tesla's Bot could handle almost all physical tasks by simply looking at video clips of people doing said tasks.
Picking up a vacuum and running it through the house. Sorting and folding laundry. Tidying up the house. Moving material from point A to point B. Picking up trash and placing it in a bin. Pushing a lawnmower. Monitor an area for safety-related concerns. Laying bricks. Hammering nails. Using power tools. Clean dishes... etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”
I can find you a parrot that can recite poetry - doesn't mean it can write you any.
Are learning machines cool? Yes. But at the end of the day they're automatons that can, at a basic level, do simple tasks in relatively stable environments. Complex tasks in other scenarios are out of reach. All the hype is just sales - of course people who own stocks in AI companies would claim it would end the world or be the gadget of the future, because they'll rake the money in.
It is not coincidental that the new "AI is going to be able to do everything" line came after the "Meta is going to be the new frontier" fell through and the "NFTs and the blockchain are going to revolutionise everything" idea was proven false. Capitalism always needs a new frontier, to exploit and sell and commodify, and tech bros think they can build the next one. So far they're failing.
In my view the free chat programmes available online have written reasoning capabilities that exceed that of most graduate level professionals with over 20 years of high level report writing experience. They can write better than people who have been doing decision making and report writing for their entire career. From a management point of view they surpass most humans in knowing how to respond to situations in difficult correspondence exercises.
It is an inevitable human reaction to deny this or not look at it, but it won't help.
Do you mean ChatGPT, or is there a specific programme you mean? I think the most convincing ones are good at creating the approximation of human writing, until you learn it is either just lying (making up references and quotes and just general facts) or spewing nonsense (this often happens with coding where the coding looks correct, but is really just nonsense).
The way this stuff currently works is by taking the input, analysing words that are associated with the words relevant to that topic, and picking each word based on the likelihood that it is the most common word to follow the previous word. That requires it to read (and arguably steal) the work of existing people. It cannot think - it is not creating. It is a parrot - a big parrot, a complex parrot, a parrot that can maybe do some simple things - but a parrot. And that's selling parrots short, because I believe parrots have the ability of cognition.
So, is the robot video real, or not?
You still haven't told us, and you still don't realise the significance of that
Do I personally believe in the reality of a video on Twitter? I don't. Do I personally know it isn't real? No - that's why I have said I will await for credible sources to do reporting rather than just trust people chatting on a notoriously untrustworthy social media platform about a topic where there is so much undue hype.
OK, I'll help you out of your painful confusion: it's real
Here's a Stanford AI professor discussing it in great depth
"Let's reverse engineer the phenomenal Tesla Optimus. No insider info, just my own analysis. Long read:
1. The smooth hand movements are almost certainly trained by imitation learning ("behavior cloning") from human operators. The alternative is reinforcement learning in simulation, but that typically leads to jittery motion and unnatural hand poses.
There're at least 4 ways to collect human demonstrations:
(1) A custom-built teleoperation system - I believe this is the most likely means used by Tesla team. Open-source example: ALOHA, a low-cost bimanual robot arm and teleoperation system by Stanford AI Labs (https://tonyzhaozh.github.io/aloha/). It enables very precise, dexterous motions, such as putting AAA batteries into a remote or manipulating contact lens.
(2) Motion Capture (MoCap): apply the MoCap systems used for Hollywood movies to capture the fine-grained motions of hand joints..."
So this is a robot which is so astonishing you presumed it was fake, yet at the same time you dismiss it as meaningless
Any sufficiently advanced technology...
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." is an argument for being more skeptical of a video like this. It may be that the magic is half a trick, and the technology isn't there yet.
Edit: not the veracity of the video, its importance.
Confession: I ALSO thought it was fake when I first saw it. Even now it looks weird - it must be very deep in uncanny valley. However so many sane, highly-informed people on social media and elsewhere are saying Yes, this is real, I am guessing that this is real
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we have met aliens who can travel across space to visit us.
It's bizarre that more people aren't talking about this; if it is true* it is one of the biggest news stories in human history.
* It is not true
It really might be true
When I bang on about AI, @Benpointer always says “get back to me when a robot can stack my dishwasher”. And it’s a fair point
Well, now a robot can easily stack a dishwasher, and what’s more it can learn this simply by watching you do it first
“With enough strength and dexterity, Tesla's Bot could handle almost all physical tasks by simply looking at video clips of people doing said tasks.
Picking up a vacuum and running it through the house. Sorting and folding laundry. Tidying up the house. Moving material from point A to point B. Picking up trash and placing it in a bin. Pushing a lawnmower. Monitor an area for safety-related concerns. Laying bricks. Hammering nails. Using power tools. Clean dishes... etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”
I can find you a parrot that can recite poetry - doesn't mean it can write you any.
Are learning machines cool? Yes. But at the end of the day they're automatons that can, at a basic level, do simple tasks in relatively stable environments. Complex tasks in other scenarios are out of reach. All the hype is just sales - of course people who own stocks in AI companies would claim it would end the world or be the gadget of the future, because they'll rake the money in.
It is not coincidental that the new "AI is going to be able to do everything" line came after the "Meta is going to be the new frontier" fell through and the "NFTs and the blockchain are going to revolutionise everything" idea was proven false. Capitalism always needs a new frontier, to exploit and sell and commodify, and tech bros think they can build the next one. So far they're failing.
In my view the free chat programmes available online have written reasoning capabilities that exceed that of most graduate level professionals with over 20 years of high level report writing experience. They can write better than people who have been doing decision making and report writing for their entire career. From a management point of view they surpass most humans in knowing how to respond to situations in difficult correspondence exercises.
It is an inevitable human reaction to deny this or not look at it, but it won't help.
Do you mean ChatGPT, or is there a specific programme you mean? I think the most convincing ones are good at creating the approximation of human writing, until you learn it is either just lying (making up references and quotes and just general facts) or spewing nonsense (this often happens with coding where the coding looks correct, but is really just nonsense).
The way this stuff currently works is by taking the input, analysing words that are associated with the words relevant to that topic, and picking each word based on the likelihood that it is the most common word to follow the previous word. That requires it to read (and arguably steal) the work of existing people. It cannot think - it is not creating. It is a parrot - a big parrot, a complex parrot, a parrot that can maybe do some simple things - but a parrot. And that's selling parrots short, because I believe parrots have the ability of cognition.
So, is the robot video real, or not?
You still haven't told us, and you still don't realise the significance of that
Do I personally believe in the reality of a video on Twitter? I don't. Do I personally know it isn't real? No - that's why I have said I will await for credible sources to do reporting rather than just trust people chatting on a notoriously untrustworthy social media platform about a topic where there is so much undue hype.
OK, I'll help you out of your painful confusion: it's real
Here's a Stanford AI professor discussing it in great depth
"Let's reverse engineer the phenomenal Tesla Optimus. No insider info, just my own analysis. Long read:
1. The smooth hand movements are almost certainly trained by imitation learning ("behavior cloning") from human operators. The alternative is reinforcement learning in simulation, but that typically leads to jittery motion and unnatural hand poses.
There're at least 4 ways to collect human demonstrations:
(1) A custom-built teleoperation system - I believe this is the most likely means used by Tesla team. Open-source example: ALOHA, a low-cost bimanual robot arm and teleoperation system by Stanford AI Labs (https://tonyzhaozh.github.io/aloha/). It enables very precise, dexterous motions, such as putting AAA batteries into a remote or manipulating contact lens.
(2) Motion Capture (MoCap): apply the MoCap systems used for Hollywood movies to capture the fine-grained motions of hand joints..."
So this is a robot which is so astonishing you presumed it was fake, yet at the same time you dismiss it as meaningless
Any sufficiently advanced technology...
Me: I do not trust twitter as a source, I will wait for something more reputable to report on this. You: You idiot, you rube, you flounderer. Can't you see - that reputable report exists and I will show it to you. Me: Oh great, thanks You: provides twitter link HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA Me: -_-
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we have met aliens who can travel across space to visit us.
It's bizarre that more people aren't talking about this; if it is true* it is one of the biggest news stories in human history.
* It is not true
It really might be true
When I bang on about AI, @Benpointer always says “get back to me when a robot can stack my dishwasher”. And it’s a fair point
Well, now a robot can easily stack a dishwasher, and what’s more it can learn this simply by watching you do it first
“With enough strength and dexterity, Tesla's Bot could handle almost all physical tasks by simply looking at video clips of people doing said tasks.
Picking up a vacuum and running it through the house. Sorting and folding laundry. Tidying up the house. Moving material from point A to point B. Picking up trash and placing it in a bin. Pushing a lawnmower. Monitor an area for safety-related concerns. Laying bricks. Hammering nails. Using power tools. Clean dishes... etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”
I can find you a parrot that can recite poetry - doesn't mean it can write you any.
Are learning machines cool? Yes. But at the end of the day they're automatons that can, at a basic level, do simple tasks in relatively stable environments. Complex tasks in other scenarios are out of reach. All the hype is just sales - of course people who own stocks in AI companies would claim it would end the world or be the gadget of the future, because they'll rake the money in.
It is not coincidental that the new "AI is going to be able to do everything" line came after the "Meta is going to be the new frontier" fell through and the "NFTs and the blockchain are going to revolutionise everything" idea was proven false. Capitalism always needs a new frontier, to exploit and sell and commodify, and tech bros think they can build the next one. So far they're failing.
In my view the free chat programmes available online have written reasoning capabilities that exceed that of most graduate level professionals with over 20 years of high level report writing experience. They can write better than people who have been doing decision making and report writing for their entire career. From a management point of view they surpass most humans in knowing how to respond to situations in difficult correspondence exercises.
It is an inevitable human reaction to deny this or not look at it, but it won't help.
Do you mean ChatGPT, or is there a specific programme you mean? I think the most convincing ones are good at creating the approximation of human writing, until you learn it is either just lying (making up references and quotes and just general facts) or spewing nonsense (this often happens with coding where the coding looks correct, but is really just nonsense).
The way this stuff currently works is by taking the input, analysing words that are associated with the words relevant to that topic, and picking each word based on the likelihood that it is the most common word to follow the previous word. That requires it to read (and arguably steal) the work of existing people. It cannot think - it is not creating. It is a parrot - a big parrot, a complex parrot, a parrot that can maybe do some simple things - but a parrot. And that's selling parrots short, because I believe parrots have the ability of cognition.
So, is the robot video real, or not?
You still haven't told us, and you still don't realise the significance of that
Do I personally believe in the reality of a video on Twitter? I don't. Do I personally know it isn't real? No - that's why I have said I will await for credible sources to do reporting rather than just trust people chatting on a notoriously untrustworthy social media platform about a topic where there is so much undue hype.
It looked artificial as fuck to me, but then have you seen any of Apple's recent product announcement videos?
Over-processed virtual sets, weird jerky body movements, speaking with unnatural cadences, and everyone standing in exactly the same 2015-style power pose. And those are definitely real people!
I expect them to scrap the link to Manchester and instead say they’ll improve west to east links . The public have never really got behind HS2 and the Tories want some cash to spend on other projects that are more voter friendly .
Not sure if anyone saw Newsnight but the comparison between cost per mile of building track in the UK compared to other major country’s was shocking.
Jaw dropping in fact .
Is it caused by the huge cost of compensation in this country compared to elsewhere? Maybe it's because we're more densely populated than nearly every other European country, so whereas in places like Spain and France it's relatively easy to route a new train line through mostly empty areas, it's much more difficult to do that here. I was using the Spanish high speed trains in February/March this year and I was surprised to see how utterly empty a lot of the countryside was.
Also, on the subject of cancelling the line to M'chester, what some people don't seem to realise is that they've already spent a huge amount of money on some of the infrastructure for the B'ham to M'chester route, so if they cancel it all of that will be wasted, and also all the disruption they've already caused in that area will have been for nothing. I hope Starmer decides to go ahead with it when he becomes PM (which seems very likely to happen now).
The Times have a very good article on it today, if you can get behind the paywall.
I have a theory that the more political a project is (like Palace of Westminster Restoration and Renewal, which is absolutely political and could fall or burn down at any time), or HS2, which simply crosses far too many constituencies for it not to be, the worse its governance will be because politicians simply can't help making kneejerk uninformed decisions and that's death to big infrastructure.
I think we really need a dedicated national infrastructure council that is at one remove from day to day political machinations that can make these kinds of long term decisions, ideally creating a pipeline of projects so that expertise in planning and contracting is not lost from one project to the next. On Westminster I think the building is too expensive to renovate as a working Parliament. They should simply pay to preserve it as an important national monument and move the parliament elsewhere. Maybe put them in tunnels under Euston until they complete HS2 to Manchester and Leeds. That might concentrate minds s bit.
Make Westminster a museum absolutely!
Move Parliament and the Civil Service out of London and into a new build city.
Looking at a map, North of York, East of Hull there seems to be quite a bit of land that's neither well developed nor in an AONB. Or between Grimsby and Scunthorpe could be another good location, though that's getting close to Lincolnshire Wolds AONB.
Build a new capital city for Parliament and the Civil Service there, in the form of Washington DC or Canberra, then see how quickly infrastructure gets developed.
Do you mean west of Hull? (Noth)East of Hull you'd have parliament on sea. Good luck taking on th NIMBYs in the Yorkshire Wolds (rolling countryside, less spectacular than moors or dales, but still popular). Proposed to my wife on a walk in the Wolds.
I'd tend to pop if somewhere Leeds/Bradford or further north to Darlington/Northallerton area to be more central for a UK parliament (Shetland can bugger off and join Norway if they don't consider that central-enough )
Sorry I wrote it backwards, I meant North of Hull, East of York.
Approximately where the small town of Driffield (never heard of it) is, or around that area, but its just one suggestion there's plenty of other valid suggestions.
I would suggest wherever it is, is not on an existing motorway network or high speed rail network.
Set a five year deadline maybe for construction then relocation of every single civil servant and Parliamentarian to be out of London by then. Get Parliament and the heads of the Civil Service all in that new build city and let them struggle with the infrastructure as it is, if they've not unlocked investment yet. See how quickly funding for investment becomes available.
Yeah, they'll have your balls on toasting fork in Driffield for suggesting flooding it with parliamentarians and roads and outsiders
It isn't the worst idea in the world. It would fix so many issues that are outstanding from when I first lived in Yorkshire. The Ouse Bridge would be fixed replaced as they'd upgrade the A63 to motorway all the way into Hull. Stamford Bridge would finally get a bypass. You'd have the restoration of the train line between Hull and York (Beverley is cut adrift at the moment thanks to Dr Beeching). Full fibre everywhere (not tied to KCOM). High-end retailers. Soaring property prices.
Great Driffield. The legislative capital of a post-Brexit United Kingdom. Those sunlit uplands (or Wolds) look marvellous.
I can just see Jacob Rees-Mogg in Boyes or Yorkshire Trading Company...
Yeah, the M62 Ouse Bridge does need replacing.
I don't know what the exact problem is but having to re-pour the concrete deck in-situ does not inspire confidence in the longevity of the structure.
Still, I suppose all motorways will have a 30mph limit soon, so the current situation is good practice for that at least.
Due to mistyping a while ago, whenever I start to type maps.google.com, the browser tries to autocomplete maps.goole.com which, often, I click on without noticing the error, which of course makes it reinforced as a good suggestion to come up 🤦♂️
Really need to clear the address history!
Happens more often than you realise. I type quickly yet carelessly (obviously). Goole is the centre of Analytics, Adwords and Merchant Centre universe...
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we have met aliens who can travel across space to visit us.
It's bizarre that more people aren't talking about this; if it is true* it is one of the biggest news stories in human history.
* It is not true
It really might be true
When I bang on about AI, @Benpointer always says “get back to me when a robot can stack my dishwasher”. And it’s a fair point
Well, now a robot can easily stack a dishwasher, and what’s more it can learn this simply by watching you do it first
“With enough strength and dexterity, Tesla's Bot could handle almost all physical tasks by simply looking at video clips of people doing said tasks.
Picking up a vacuum and running it through the house. Sorting and folding laundry. Tidying up the house. Moving material from point A to point B. Picking up trash and placing it in a bin. Pushing a lawnmower. Monitor an area for safety-related concerns. Laying bricks. Hammering nails. Using power tools. Clean dishes... etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”
I can find you a parrot that can recite poetry - doesn't mean it can write you any.
Are learning machines cool? Yes. But at the end of the day they're automatons that can, at a basic level, do simple tasks in relatively stable environments. Complex tasks in other scenarios are out of reach. All the hype is just sales - of course people who own stocks in AI companies would claim it would end the world or be the gadget of the future, because they'll rake the money in.
It is not coincidental that the new "AI is going to be able to do everything" line came after the "Meta is going to be the new frontier" fell through and the "NFTs and the blockchain are going to revolutionise everything" idea was proven false. Capitalism always needs a new frontier, to exploit and sell and commodify, and tech bros think they can build the next one. So far they're failing.
In my view the free chat programmes available online have written reasoning capabilities that exceed that of most graduate level professionals with over 20 years of high level report writing experience. They can write better than people who have been doing decision making and report writing for their entire career. From a management point of view they surpass most humans in knowing how to respond to situations in difficult correspondence exercises.
It is an inevitable human reaction to deny this or not look at it, but it won't help.
Do you mean ChatGPT, or is there a specific programme you mean? I think the most convincing ones are good at creating the approximation of human writing, until you learn it is either just lying (making up references and quotes and just general facts) or spewing nonsense (this often happens with coding where the coding looks correct, but is really just nonsense).
The way this stuff currently works is by taking the input, analysing words that are associated with the words relevant to that topic, and picking each word based on the likelihood that it is the most common word to follow the previous word. That requires it to read (and arguably steal) the work of existing people. It cannot think - it is not creating. It is a parrot - a big parrot, a complex parrot, a parrot that can maybe do some simple things - but a parrot. And that's selling parrots short, because I believe parrots have the ability of cognition.
So, is the robot video real, or not?
You still haven't told us, and you still don't realise the significance of that
Do I personally believe in the reality of a video on Twitter? I don't. Do I personally know it isn't real? No - that's why I have said I will await for credible sources to do reporting rather than just trust people chatting on a notoriously untrustworthy social media platform about a topic where there is so much undue hype.
OK, I'll help you out of your painful confusion: it's real
Here's a Stanford AI professor discussing it in great depth
"Let's reverse engineer the phenomenal Tesla Optimus. No insider info, just my own analysis. Long read:
1. The smooth hand movements are almost certainly trained by imitation learning ("behavior cloning") from human operators. The alternative is reinforcement learning in simulation, but that typically leads to jittery motion and unnatural hand poses.
There're at least 4 ways to collect human demonstrations:
(1) A custom-built teleoperation system - I believe this is the most likely means used by Tesla team. Open-source example: ALOHA, a low-cost bimanual robot arm and teleoperation system by Stanford AI Labs (https://tonyzhaozh.github.io/aloha/). It enables very precise, dexterous motions, such as putting AAA batteries into a remote or manipulating contact lens.
(2) Motion Capture (MoCap): apply the MoCap systems used for Hollywood movies to capture the fine-grained motions of hand joints..."
So this is a robot which is so astonishing you presumed it was fake, yet at the same time you dismiss it as meaningless
Any sufficiently advanced technology...
The technology is question has been around for quite a while. See discussions or raspberry picking machines - which are already available commercially. And warehouse picking bots.
Dishwasher filling and unloading is beyond these tasks, but probably not wildly beyond them.
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we have met aliens who can travel across space to visit us.
It's bizarre that more people aren't talking about this; if it is true* it is one of the biggest news stories in human history.
* It is not true
It really might be true
When I bang on about AI, @Benpointer always says “get back to me when a robot can stack my dishwasher”. And it’s a fair point
Well, now a robot can easily stack a dishwasher, and what’s more it can learn this simply by watching you do it first
“With enough strength and dexterity, Tesla's Bot could handle almost all physical tasks by simply looking at video clips of people doing said tasks.
Picking up a vacuum and running it through the house. Sorting and folding laundry. Tidying up the house. Moving material from point A to point B. Picking up trash and placing it in a bin. Pushing a lawnmower. Monitor an area for safety-related concerns. Laying bricks. Hammering nails. Using power tools. Clean dishes... etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”
I can find you a parrot that can recite poetry - doesn't mean it can write you any.
Are learning machines cool? Yes. But at the end of the day they're automatons that can, at a basic level, do simple tasks in relatively stable environments. Complex tasks in other scenarios are out of reach. All the hype is just sales - of course people who own stocks in AI companies would claim it would end the world or be the gadget of the future, because they'll rake the money in.
It is not coincidental that the new "AI is going to be able to do everything" line came after the "Meta is going to be the new frontier" fell through and the "NFTs and the blockchain are going to revolutionise everything" idea was proven false. Capitalism always needs a new frontier, to exploit and sell and commodify, and tech bros think they can build the next one. So far they're failing.
In my view the free chat programmes available online have written reasoning capabilities that exceed that of most graduate level professionals with over 20 years of high level report writing experience. They can write better than people who have been doing decision making and report writing for their entire career. From a management point of view they surpass most humans in knowing how to respond to situations in difficult correspondence exercises.
It is an inevitable human reaction to deny this or not look at it, but it won't help.
Do you mean ChatGPT, or is there a specific programme you mean? I think the most convincing ones are good at creating the approximation of human writing, until you learn it is either just lying (making up references and quotes and just general facts) or spewing nonsense (this often happens with coding where the coding looks correct, but is really just nonsense).
The way this stuff currently works is by taking the input, analysing words that are associated with the words relevant to that topic, and picking each word based on the likelihood that it is the most common word to follow the previous word. That requires it to read (and arguably steal) the work of existing people. It cannot think - it is not creating. It is a parrot - a big parrot, a complex parrot, a parrot that can maybe do some simple things - but a parrot. And that's selling parrots short, because I believe parrots have the ability of cognition.
I think it was the free version of Chat GPT a few months ago. I was getting it to write judgements absorbing written representations from two parties and getting it to make written rulings, justify them with reference to losing party arguments, and then defending its decisions against complaints. This was the work of a government agency I am very familiar with. In terms of the written reasoning skills, the reality is that it far outperforms most people that apply for the job (at the point of applying) and many of the people who are actually doing it now - these are quite high level operational roles, the people that write these judgements are at the level of a solicitor with significant post qualification experience. If you kept adding constraints to the process reflecting the real world and the existing legal framework then it could probably do your job for you.
I posted this on Linkedin in a comment thread discussing AI and the head of the organisation who I know professionally made clear to me he was aware of this (obviously they have done similar exercises).
I had a similar view on GPT to you prior to this. But a lawyer who runs an outsourcing firm explained they thought it was rapidly advancing and indicated they were starting to use it in work contracted out to them by local authorities, automatically generating correspondence relating to civil law breaches and also drafting legal notices, albeit corrected by humans. So what is clear is that it is already here and taking over work done by professionals.
Mrs J and her colleagues / minions like putting problems into ChatGPT, and see it come up with a whole load of stuff that might sound feasible to an outsider, but which is utterly and totally borken. The false references is just the start of it...
If people start using this sort of tech for medical advice, without proper stringent checking, people will die. Then there are data privacy issues - and the AI firms have already shown they don't care about data rights.
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we have met aliens who can travel across space to visit us.
It's bizarre that more people aren't talking about this; if it is true* it is one of the biggest news stories in human history.
* It is not true
It really might be true
When I bang on about AI, @Benpointer always says “get back to me when a robot can stack my dishwasher”. And it’s a fair point
Well, now a robot can easily stack a dishwasher, and what’s more it can learn this simply by watching you do it first
“With enough strength and dexterity, Tesla's Bot could handle almost all physical tasks by simply looking at video clips of people doing said tasks.
Picking up a vacuum and running it through the house. Sorting and folding laundry. Tidying up the house. Moving material from point A to point B. Picking up trash and placing it in a bin. Pushing a lawnmower. Monitor an area for safety-related concerns. Laying bricks. Hammering nails. Using power tools. Clean dishes... etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”
I can find you a parrot that can recite poetry - doesn't mean it can write you any.
Are learning machines cool? Yes. But at the end of the day they're automatons that can, at a basic level, do simple tasks in relatively stable environments. Complex tasks in other scenarios are out of reach. All the hype is just sales - of course people who own stocks in AI companies would claim it would end the world or be the gadget of the future, because they'll rake the money in.
It is not coincidental that the new "AI is going to be able to do everything" line came after the "Meta is going to be the new frontier" fell through and the "NFTs and the blockchain are going to revolutionise everything" idea was proven false. Capitalism always needs a new frontier, to exploit and sell and commodify, and tech bros think they can build the next one. So far they're failing.
In my view the free chat programmes available online have written reasoning capabilities that exceed that of most graduate level professionals with over 20 years of high level report writing experience. They can write better than people who have been doing decision making and report writing for their entire career. From a management point of view they surpass most humans in knowing how to respond to situations in difficult correspondence exercises.
It is an inevitable human reaction to deny this or not look at it, but it won't help.
Do you mean ChatGPT, or is there a specific programme you mean? I think the most convincing ones are good at creating the approximation of human writing, until you learn it is either just lying (making up references and quotes and just general facts) or spewing nonsense (this often happens with coding where the coding looks correct, but is really just nonsense).
The way this stuff currently works is by taking the input, analysing words that are associated with the words relevant to that topic, and picking each word based on the likelihood that it is the most common word to follow the previous word. That requires it to read (and arguably steal) the work of existing people. It cannot think - it is not creating. It is a parrot - a big parrot, a complex parrot, a parrot that can maybe do some simple things - but a parrot. And that's selling parrots short, because I believe parrots have the ability of cognition.
So, is the robot video real, or not?
You still haven't told us, and you still don't realise the significance of that
Do I personally believe in the reality of a video on Twitter? I don't. Do I personally know it isn't real? No - that's why I have said I will await for credible sources to do reporting rather than just trust people chatting on a notoriously untrustworthy social media platform about a topic where there is so much undue hype.
It looked artificial as fuck to me, but then have you seen any of Apple's recent product announcement videos?
Over-processed virtual sets, weird jerky body movements, speaking with unnatural cadences, and everyone standing in exactly the same 2015-style power pose. And those are definitely real people!
What is it with that wanky George Osborne pose? If it's some form of elite initiation they could at least do something that makes you look less of a prick.
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we have met aliens who can travel across space to visit us.
It's bizarre that more people aren't talking about this; if it is true* it is one of the biggest news stories in human history.
* It is not true
It really might be true
When I bang on about AI, @Benpointer always says “get back to me when a robot can stack my dishwasher”. And it’s a fair point
Well, now a robot can easily stack a dishwasher, and what’s more it can learn this simply by watching you do it first
“With enough strength and dexterity, Tesla's Bot could handle almost all physical tasks by simply looking at video clips of people doing said tasks.
Picking up a vacuum and running it through the house. Sorting and folding laundry. Tidying up the house. Moving material from point A to point B. Picking up trash and placing it in a bin. Pushing a lawnmower. Monitor an area for safety-related concerns. Laying bricks. Hammering nails. Using power tools. Clean dishes... etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”
I can find you a parrot that can recite poetry - doesn't mean it can write you any.
Are learning machines cool? Yes. But at the end of the day they're automatons that can, at a basic level, do simple tasks in relatively stable environments. Complex tasks in other scenarios are out of reach. All the hype is just sales - of course people who own stocks in AI companies would claim it would end the world or be the gadget of the future, because they'll rake the money in.
It is not coincidental that the new "AI is going to be able to do everything" line came after the "Meta is going to be the new frontier" fell through and the "NFTs and the blockchain are going to revolutionise everything" idea was proven false. Capitalism always needs a new frontier, to exploit and sell and commodify, and tech bros think they can build the next one. So far they're failing.
In my view the free chat programmes available online have written reasoning capabilities that exceed that of most graduate level professionals with over 20 years of high level report writing experience. They can write better than people who have been doing decision making and report writing for their entire career. From a management point of view they surpass most humans in knowing how to respond to situations in difficult correspondence exercises.
It is an inevitable human reaction to deny this or not look at it, but it won't help.
Do you mean ChatGPT, or is there a specific programme you mean? I think the most convincing ones are good at creating the approximation of human writing, until you learn it is either just lying (making up references and quotes and just general facts) or spewing nonsense (this often happens with coding where the coding looks correct, but is really just nonsense).
The way this stuff currently works is by taking the input, analysing words that are associated with the words relevant to that topic, and picking each word based on the likelihood that it is the most common word to follow the previous word. That requires it to read (and arguably steal) the work of existing people. It cannot think - it is not creating. It is a parrot - a big parrot, a complex parrot, a parrot that can maybe do some simple things - but a parrot. And that's selling parrots short, because I believe parrots have the ability of cognition.
I think it was the free version of Chat GPT a few months ago. I was getting it to write judgements absorbing written representations from two parties and getting it to make written rulings, justify them with reference to losing party arguments, and then defending its decisions against complaints. This was the work of a government agency I am very familiar with. In terms of the written reasoning skills, the reality is that it far outperforms most people that apply for the job (at the point of applying) and many of the people who are actually doing it now - these are quite high level operational roles, the people that write these judgements are at the level of a solicitor with significant post qualification experience. If you kept adding constraints to the process reflecting the real world and the existing legal framework then it could probably do your job for you.
I posted this on Linkedin in a comment thread discussing AI and the head of the organisation who I know professionally made clear to me he was aware of this (obviously they have done similar exercises).
I had a similar view on GPT to you prior to this. But a lawyer who runs an outsourcing firm explained they thought it was rapidly advancing and indicated they were starting to use it in work contracted out to them by local authorities, automatically generating correspondence relating to civil law breaches and also drafting legal notices, albeit corrected by humans. So what is clear is that it is already here and taking over work done by professionals.
Mrs J and her colleagues / minions like putting problems into ChatGPT, and see it come up with a whole load of stuff that might sound feasible to an outsider, but which is utterly and totally borken. The false references is just the start of it...
If people start using this sort of tech for medical advice, without proper stringent checking, people will die. Then there are data privacy issues - and the AI firms have already shown they don't care about data rights.
And not only that, but the more AI stuff we generate and put into the world, the more that it can be used as a reference for future AI outputs - meaning the internet is unfortunately going to degenerate into the echoes of AI that references itself.
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we have met aliens who can travel across space to visit us.
It's bizarre that more people aren't talking about this; if it is true* it is one of the biggest news stories in human history.
* It is not true
It really might be true
When I bang on about AI, @Benpointer always says “get back to me when a robot can stack my dishwasher”. And it’s a fair point
Well, now a robot can easily stack a dishwasher, and what’s more it can learn this simply by watching you do it first
“With enough strength and dexterity, Tesla's Bot could handle almost all physical tasks by simply looking at video clips of people doing said tasks.
Picking up a vacuum and running it through the house. Sorting and folding laundry. Tidying up the house. Moving material from point A to point B. Picking up trash and placing it in a bin. Pushing a lawnmower. Monitor an area for safety-related concerns. Laying bricks. Hammering nails. Using power tools. Clean dishes... etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”
I can find you a parrot that can recite poetry - doesn't mean it can write you any.
Are learning machines cool? Yes. But at the end of the day they're automatons that can, at a basic level, do simple tasks in relatively stable environments. Complex tasks in other scenarios are out of reach. All the hype is just sales - of course people who own stocks in AI companies would claim it would end the world or be the gadget of the future, because they'll rake the money in.
It is not coincidental that the new "AI is going to be able to do everything" line came after the "Meta is going to be the new frontier" fell through and the "NFTs and the blockchain are going to revolutionise everything" idea was proven false. Capitalism always needs a new frontier, to exploit and sell and commodify, and tech bros think they can build the next one. So far they're failing.
In my view the free chat programmes available online have written reasoning capabilities that exceed that of most graduate level professionals with over 20 years of high level report writing experience. They can write better than people who have been doing decision making and report writing for their entire career. From a management point of view they surpass most humans in knowing how to respond to situations in difficult correspondence exercises.
It is an inevitable human reaction to deny this or not look at it, but it won't help.
Do you mean ChatGPT, or is there a specific programme you mean? I think the most convincing ones are good at creating the approximation of human writing, until you learn it is either just lying (making up references and quotes and just general facts) or spewing nonsense (this often happens with coding where the coding looks correct, but is really just nonsense).
The way this stuff currently works is by taking the input, analysing words that are associated with the words relevant to that topic, and picking each word based on the likelihood that it is the most common word to follow the previous word. That requires it to read (and arguably steal) the work of existing people. It cannot think - it is not creating. It is a parrot - a big parrot, a complex parrot, a parrot that can maybe do some simple things - but a parrot. And that's selling parrots short, because I believe parrots have the ability of cognition.
So, is the robot video real, or not?
You still haven't told us, and you still don't realise the significance of that
Do I personally believe in the reality of a video on Twitter? I don't. Do I personally know it isn't real? No - that's why I have said I will await for credible sources to do reporting rather than just trust people chatting on a notoriously untrustworthy social media platform about a topic where there is so much undue hype.
It looked artificial as fuck to me, but then have you seen any of Apple's recent product announcement videos?
Over-processed virtual sets, weird jerky body movements, speaking with unnatural cadences, and everyone standing in exactly the same 2015-style power pose. And those are definitely real people!
I was once told that the article that supposedly demonstrated the efficacy of the power stance had been reexamined and fond to have a flaw. Right now I really wish I coud remember what it was...
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
My Spanish Father-in-Law doesn't understand why the UK doesn't build underground carparks as all the towns in Spain seem to have. Simples - because we are incompetent and corrupt. And they are not.
Hang on - I hear right wing voices say - the Spanish ARE corrupt. And that is true. And yet they can stick underground car parks into their towns and we can't afford to...
I haven't heard of this before - can we have examples of these underground car parks in all the towns in Spain?
Quite common in France - the classic in towns such as Fontainebleau is that they dug out the town square, and then put a nice tuned up version of the town square back on top.
I was pondering yesterday on the strange anomaly of airports. If ever there were a good place to have underground parking these are surely it:
- everyone hates going out miles on a shuttle bus to a huge car park on the perimeter, and it’s a mad waste of hectares of land - You can’t build very tall multi-storeys because of the planes, and it’s a waste to have one right by the terminal like in LHR when that could be taken by airport hotels - They dig up the land and create all sorts of ducting and subterranean units when they create airports anyway, why not bury a huge car park at the same time?
Obviously not directly under the runway but adjacent and below the terminals.
The other thing is solar plants. Why on earth isn’t every airport and airfield carpeted with solar arrays, given the land can’t be used for anything else and is already brownfield?
I was speaking to a friend a while ago who does loads of planning for advertising at airports and was asking why they don’t do more on the land away from the runways and he said there are really strict rules about things that can distract pilots so I guess a solar field right by an airport would theoretically be a risk if the sun was glinting off it etc. I think airport dpsafety takes an understandably extreme position on safety so sight distractions or anything on any potential run-off area which could jeopardise an emergency landing is a no-no.
Yes, glare could pontentially be an issue, so airport solar arrays would need a specific coating - which if it’s anything like anything else in aviation, will need the airport authorities to certify every specific type of panel, require specifically trained and certified technicians to install them, be able to have them covered at short notice if requested, be away from any areas designated as overrun for a landing or departing aircraft etc. It all gets very expensive very quickly.
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we have met aliens who can travel across space to visit us.
It's bizarre that more people aren't talking about this; if it is true* it is one of the biggest news stories in human history.
* It is not true
It really might be true
When I bang on about AI, @Benpointer always says “get back to me when a robot can stack my dishwasher”. And it’s a fair point
Well, now a robot can easily stack a dishwasher, and what’s more it can learn this simply by watching you do it first
“With enough strength and dexterity, Tesla's Bot could handle almost all physical tasks by simply looking at video clips of people doing said tasks.
Picking up a vacuum and running it through the house. Sorting and folding laundry. Tidying up the house. Moving material from point A to point B. Picking up trash and placing it in a bin. Pushing a lawnmower. Monitor an area for safety-related concerns. Laying bricks. Hammering nails. Using power tools. Clean dishes... etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”
I can find you a parrot that can recite poetry - doesn't mean it can write you any.
Are learning machines cool? Yes. But at the end of the day they're automatons that can, at a basic level, do simple tasks in relatively stable environments. Complex tasks in other scenarios are out of reach. All the hype is just sales - of course people who own stocks in AI companies would claim it would end the world or be the gadget of the future, because they'll rake the money in.
It is not coincidental that the new "AI is going to be able to do everything" line came after the "Meta is going to be the new frontier" fell through and the "NFTs and the blockchain are going to revolutionise everything" idea was proven false. Capitalism always needs a new frontier, to exploit and sell and commodify, and tech bros think they can build the next one. So far they're failing.
In my view the free chat programmes available online have written reasoning capabilities that exceed that of most graduate level professionals with over 20 years of high level report writing experience. They can write better than people who have been doing decision making and report writing for their entire career. From a management point of view they surpass most humans in knowing how to respond to situations in difficult correspondence exercises.
It is an inevitable human reaction to deny this or not look at it, but it won't help.
Do you mean ChatGPT, or is there a specific programme you mean? I think the most convincing ones are good at creating the approximation of human writing, until you learn it is either just lying (making up references and quotes and just general facts) or spewing nonsense (this often happens with coding where the coding looks correct, but is really just nonsense).
The way this stuff currently works is by taking the input, analysing words that are associated with the words relevant to that topic, and picking each word based on the likelihood that it is the most common word to follow the previous word. That requires it to read (and arguably steal) the work of existing people. It cannot think - it is not creating. It is a parrot - a big parrot, a complex parrot, a parrot that can maybe do some simple things - but a parrot. And that's selling parrots short, because I believe parrots have the ability of cognition.
So, is the robot video real, or not?
You still haven't told us, and you still don't realise the significance of that
Do I personally believe in the reality of a video on Twitter? I don't. Do I personally know it isn't real? No - that's why I have said I will await for credible sources to do reporting rather than just trust people chatting on a notoriously untrustworthy social media platform about a topic where there is so much undue hype.
OK, I'll help you out of your painful confusion: it's real
Here's a Stanford AI professor discussing it in great depth
"Let's reverse engineer the phenomenal Tesla Optimus. No insider info, just my own analysis. Long read:
1. The smooth hand movements are almost certainly trained by imitation learning ("behavior cloning") from human operators. The alternative is reinforcement learning in simulation, but that typically leads to jittery motion and unnatural hand poses.
There're at least 4 ways to collect human demonstrations:
(1) A custom-built teleoperation system - I believe this is the most likely means used by Tesla team. Open-source example: ALOHA, a low-cost bimanual robot arm and teleoperation system by Stanford AI Labs (https://tonyzhaozh.github.io/aloha/). It enables very precise, dexterous motions, such as putting AAA batteries into a remote or manipulating contact lens.
(2) Motion Capture (MoCap): apply the MoCap systems used for Hollywood movies to capture the fine-grained motions of hand joints..."
So this is a robot which is so astonishing you presumed it was fake, yet at the same time you dismiss it as meaningless
Any sufficiently advanced technology...
Me: I do not trust twitter as a source, I will wait for something more reputable to report on this. You: You idiot, you rube, you flounderer. Can't you see - that reputable report exists and I will show it to you. Me: Oh great, thanks You: provides twitter link HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA Me: -_-
NVIDIA: Senior AI Scientist. @Stanford PhD. Join me on the frontier of AI Agents, LLM & Robotics. MineDojo (NeurIPS Best Paper), Voyager. Ex: @OpenAI & @GoogleAI Get in touch →jimfan.meJoined December 2012 2,778 Following 138.9K Followers
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
My Spanish Father-in-Law doesn't understand why the UK doesn't build underground carparks as all the towns in Spain seem to have. Simples - because we are incompetent and corrupt. And they are not.
Hang on - I hear right wing voices say - the Spanish ARE corrupt. And that is true. And yet they can stick underground car parks into their towns and we can't afford to...
I haven't heard of this before - can we have examples of these underground car parks in all the towns in Spain?
Quite common in France - the classic in towns such as Fontainebleau is that they dug out the town square, and then put a nice tuned up version of the town square back on top.
I was pondering yesterday on the strange anomaly of airports. If ever there were a good place to have underground parking these are surely it:
- everyone hates going out miles on a shuttle bus to a huge car park on the perimeter, and it’s a mad waste of hectares of land - You can’t build very tall multi-storeys because of the planes, and it’s a waste to have one right by the terminal like in LHR when that could be taken by airport hotels - They dig up the land and create all sorts of ducting and subterranean units when they create airports anyway, why not bury a huge car park at the same time?
Obviously not directly under the runway but adjacent and below the terminals.
The other thing is solar plants. Why on earth isn’t every airport and airfield carpeted with solar arrays, given the land can’t be used for anything else and is already brownfield?
I was speaking to a friend a while ago who does loads of planning for advertising at airports and was asking why they don’t do more on the land away from the runways and he said there are really strict rules about things that can distract pilots so I guess a solar field right by an airport would theoretically be a risk if the sun was glinting off it etc. I think airport dpsafety takes an understandably extreme position on safety so sight distractions or anything on any potential run-off area which could jeopardise an emergency landing is a no-no.
Yes, glare could pontentially be an issue, so airport solar arrays would need a specific coating - which if it’s anything like anything else in aviation, will need the airport authorities to certify every specific type of panel, require specifically trained and certified technicians to install them, be able to have them covered at short notice if requested, be away from any areas designated as overrun for a landing or departing aircraft etc. It all gets very expensive very quickly.
Before it closed* Flatland airport made a fuss about every planning application within 10 miles
Make a pond somewhere near the flightline? Might attract birds, object. Dig a quarry somewhere near the flightline? Might attract birds, object. Put up a solar farm? Might distract the pilot, object. Put some wind turbines up 10 miles out? Might clutter our radar, object.
(I have seen all of these)
*Despite going on about Net Zero, apparently re-opening the airport is Doncaster council's "Number One Priority".
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we have met aliens who can travel across space to visit us.
It's bizarre that more people aren't talking about this; if it is true* it is one of the biggest news stories in human history.
* It is not true
It really might be true
When I bang on about AI, @Benpointer always says “get back to me when a robot can stack my dishwasher”. And it’s a fair point
Well, now a robot can easily stack a dishwasher, and what’s more it can learn this simply by watching you do it first
“With enough strength and dexterity, Tesla's Bot could handle almost all physical tasks by simply looking at video clips of people doing said tasks.
Picking up a vacuum and running it through the house. Sorting and folding laundry. Tidying up the house. Moving material from point A to point B. Picking up trash and placing it in a bin. Pushing a lawnmower. Monitor an area for safety-related concerns. Laying bricks. Hammering nails. Using power tools. Clean dishes... etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”
I can find you a parrot that can recite poetry - doesn't mean it can write you any.
Are learning machines cool? Yes. But at the end of the day they're automatons that can, at a basic level, do simple tasks in relatively stable environments. Complex tasks in other scenarios are out of reach. All the hype is just sales - of course people who own stocks in AI companies would claim it would end the world or be the gadget of the future, because they'll rake the money in.
It is not coincidental that the new "AI is going to be able to do everything" line came after the "Meta is going to be the new frontier" fell through and the "NFTs and the blockchain are going to revolutionise everything" idea was proven false. Capitalism always needs a new frontier, to exploit and sell and commodify, and tech bros think they can build the next one. So far they're failing.
In my view the free chat programmes available online have written reasoning capabilities that exceed that of most graduate level professionals with over 20 years of high level report writing experience. They can write better than people who have been doing decision making and report writing for their entire career. From a management point of view they surpass most humans in knowing how to respond to situations in difficult correspondence exercises.
It is an inevitable human reaction to deny this or not look at it, but it won't help.
Do you mean ChatGPT, or is there a specific programme you mean? I think the most convincing ones are good at creating the approximation of human writing, until you learn it is either just lying (making up references and quotes and just general facts) or spewing nonsense (this often happens with coding where the coding looks correct, but is really just nonsense).
The way this stuff currently works is by taking the input, analysing words that are associated with the words relevant to that topic, and picking each word based on the likelihood that it is the most common word to follow the previous word. That requires it to read (and arguably steal) the work of existing people. It cannot think - it is not creating. It is a parrot - a big parrot, a complex parrot, a parrot that can maybe do some simple things - but a parrot. And that's selling parrots short, because I believe parrots have the ability of cognition.
So, is the robot video real, or not?
You still haven't told us, and you still don't realise the significance of that
Do I personally believe in the reality of a video on Twitter? I don't. Do I personally know it isn't real? No - that's why I have said I will await for credible sources to do reporting rather than just trust people chatting on a notoriously untrustworthy social media platform about a topic where there is so much undue hype.
OK, I'll help you out of your painful confusion: it's real
Here's a Stanford AI professor discussing it in great depth
"Let's reverse engineer the phenomenal Tesla Optimus. No insider info, just my own analysis. Long read:
1. The smooth hand movements are almost certainly trained by imitation learning ("behavior cloning") from human operators. The alternative is reinforcement learning in simulation, but that typically leads to jittery motion and unnatural hand poses.
There're at least 4 ways to collect human demonstrations:
(1) A custom-built teleoperation system - I believe this is the most likely means used by Tesla team. Open-source example: ALOHA, a low-cost bimanual robot arm and teleoperation system by Stanford AI Labs (https://tonyzhaozh.github.io/aloha/). It enables very precise, dexterous motions, such as putting AAA batteries into a remote or manipulating contact lens.
(2) Motion Capture (MoCap): apply the MoCap systems used for Hollywood movies to capture the fine-grained motions of hand joints..."
So this is a robot which is so astonishing you presumed it was fake, yet at the same time you dismiss it as meaningless
Any sufficiently advanced technology...
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." is an argument for being more skeptical of a video like this. It may be that the magic is half a trick, and the technology isn't there yet.
Edit: not the veracity of the video, its importance.
Confession: I ALSO thought it was fake when I first saw it. Even now it looks weird - it must be very deep in uncanny valley. However so many sane, highly-informed people on social media and elsewhere are saying Yes, this is real, I am guessing that this is real
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we have met aliens who can travel across space to visit us.
It's bizarre that more people aren't talking about this; if it is true* it is one of the biggest news stories in human history.
* It is not true
It really might be true
When I bang on about AI, @Benpointer always says “get back to me when a robot can stack my dishwasher”. And it’s a fair point
Well, now a robot can easily stack a dishwasher, and what’s more it can learn this simply by watching you do it first
“With enough strength and dexterity, Tesla's Bot could handle almost all physical tasks by simply looking at video clips of people doing said tasks.
Picking up a vacuum and running it through the house. Sorting and folding laundry. Tidying up the house. Moving material from point A to point B. Picking up trash and placing it in a bin. Pushing a lawnmower. Monitor an area for safety-related concerns. Laying bricks. Hammering nails. Using power tools. Clean dishes... etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”
I can find you a parrot that can recite poetry - doesn't mean it can write you any.
Are learning machines cool? Yes. But at the end of the day they're automatons that can, at a basic level, do simple tasks in relatively stable environments. Complex tasks in other scenarios are out of reach. All the hype is just sales - of course people who own stocks in AI companies would claim it would end the world or be the gadget of the future, because they'll rake the money in.
It is not coincidental that the new "AI is going to be able to do everything" line came after the "Meta is going to be the new frontier" fell through and the "NFTs and the blockchain are going to revolutionise everything" idea was proven false. Capitalism always needs a new frontier, to exploit and sell and commodify, and tech bros think they can build the next one. So far they're failing.
In my view the free chat programmes available online have written reasoning capabilities that exceed that of most graduate level professionals with over 20 years of high level report writing experience. They can write better than people who have been doing decision making and report writing for their entire career. From a management point of view they surpass most humans in knowing how to respond to situations in difficult correspondence exercises.
It is an inevitable human reaction to deny this or not look at it, but it won't help.
Do you mean ChatGPT, or is there a specific programme you mean? I think the most convincing ones are good at creating the approximation of human writing, until you learn it is either just lying (making up references and quotes and just general facts) or spewing nonsense (this often happens with coding where the coding looks correct, but is really just nonsense).
The way this stuff currently works is by taking the input, analysing words that are associated with the words relevant to that topic, and picking each word based on the likelihood that it is the most common word to follow the previous word. That requires it to read (and arguably steal) the work of existing people. It cannot think - it is not creating. It is a parrot - a big parrot, a complex parrot, a parrot that can maybe do some simple things - but a parrot. And that's selling parrots short, because I believe parrots have the ability of cognition.
So, is the robot video real, or not?
You still haven't told us, and you still don't realise the significance of that
Do I personally believe in the reality of a video on Twitter? I don't. Do I personally know it isn't real? No - that's why I have said I will await for credible sources to do reporting rather than just trust people chatting on a notoriously untrustworthy social media platform about a topic where there is so much undue hype.
It looked artificial as fuck to me, but then have you seen any of Apple's recent product announcement videos?
Over-processed virtual sets, weird jerky body movements, speaking with unnatural cadences, and everyone standing in exactly the same 2015-style power pose. And those are definitely real people!
I'd need to see an incredibly boring video of him slowly placing coloured blocks onto trays like a slightly backward three year old in order to judge the matter.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
My Spanish Father-in-Law doesn't understand why the UK doesn't build underground carparks as all the towns in Spain seem to have. Simples - because we are incompetent and corrupt. And they are not.
Hang on - I hear right wing voices say - the Spanish ARE corrupt. And that is true. And yet they can stick underground car parks into their towns and we can't afford to...
I haven't heard of this before - can we have examples of these underground car parks in all the towns in Spain?
Quite common in France - the classic in towns such as Fontainebleau is that they dug out the town square, and then put a nice tuned up version of the town square back on top.
I was pondering yesterday on the strange anomaly of airports. If ever there were a good place to have underground parking these are surely it:
- everyone hates going out miles on a shuttle bus to a huge car park on the perimeter, and it’s a mad waste of hectares of land - You can’t build very tall multi-storeys because of the planes, and it’s a waste to have one right by the terminal like in LHR when that could be taken by airport hotels - They dig up the land and create all sorts of ducting and subterranean units when they create airports anyway, why not bury a huge car park at the same time?
Obviously not directly under the runway but adjacent and below the terminals.
The other thing is solar plants. Why on earth isn’t every airport and airfield carpeted with solar arrays, given the land can’t be used for anything else and is already brownfield?
I was speaking to a friend a while ago who does loads of planning for advertising at airports and was asking why they don’t do more on the land away from the runways and he said there are really strict rules about things that can distract pilots so I guess a solar field right by an airport would theoretically be a risk if the sun was glinting off it etc. I think airport dpsafety takes an understandably extreme position on safety so sight distractions or anything on any potential run-off area which could jeopardise an emergency landing is a no-no.
Yes, glare could pontentially be an issue, so airport solar arrays would need a specific coating - which if it’s anything like anything else in aviation, will need the airport authorities to certify every specific type of panel, require specifically trained and certified technicians to install them, be able to have them covered at short notice if requested, be away from any areas designated as overrun for a landing or departing aircraft etc. It all gets very expensive very quickly.
Before it closed* Flatland airport made a fuss about every planning application within 10 miles
Make a pond somewhere near the flightline? Might attract birds, object. Dig a quarry somewhere near the flightline? Might attract birds, object. Put up a solar farm? Might distract the pilot, object. Put some wind turbines up 10 miles out? Might clutter our radar, object.
(I have seen all of these)
*Despite going on about Net Zero, apparently re-opening the airport is Doncaster council's "Number One Priority".
Because an airport brings prestige to an area and (depending on the criteria the council uses) attracts jobs...
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we have met aliens who can travel across space to visit us.
It's bizarre that more people aren't talking about this; if it is true* it is one of the biggest news stories in human history.
* It is not true
It really might be true
When I bang on about AI, @Benpointer always says “get back to me when a robot can stack my dishwasher”. And it’s a fair point
Well, now a robot can easily stack a dishwasher, and what’s more it can learn this simply by watching you do it first
“With enough strength and dexterity, Tesla's Bot could handle almost all physical tasks by simply looking at video clips of people doing said tasks.
Picking up a vacuum and running it through the house. Sorting and folding laundry. Tidying up the house. Moving material from point A to point B. Picking up trash and placing it in a bin. Pushing a lawnmower. Monitor an area for safety-related concerns. Laying bricks. Hammering nails. Using power tools. Clean dishes... etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”
I can find you a parrot that can recite poetry - doesn't mean it can write you any.
Are learning machines cool? Yes. But at the end of the day they're automatons that can, at a basic level, do simple tasks in relatively stable environments. Complex tasks in other scenarios are out of reach. All the hype is just sales - of course people who own stocks in AI companies would claim it would end the world or be the gadget of the future, because they'll rake the money in.
It is not coincidental that the new "AI is going to be able to do everything" line came after the "Meta is going to be the new frontier" fell through and the "NFTs and the blockchain are going to revolutionise everything" idea was proven false. Capitalism always needs a new frontier, to exploit and sell and commodify, and tech bros think they can build the next one. So far they're failing.
In my view the free chat programmes available online have written reasoning capabilities that exceed that of most graduate level professionals with over 20 years of high level report writing experience. They can write better than people who have been doing decision making and report writing for their entire career. From a management point of view they surpass most humans in knowing how to respond to situations in difficult correspondence exercises.
It is an inevitable human reaction to deny this or not look at it, but it won't help.
Do you mean ChatGPT, or is there a specific programme you mean? I think the most convincing ones are good at creating the approximation of human writing, until you learn it is either just lying (making up references and quotes and just general facts) or spewing nonsense (this often happens with coding where the coding looks correct, but is really just nonsense).
The way this stuff currently works is by taking the input, analysing words that are associated with the words relevant to that topic, and picking each word based on the likelihood that it is the most common word to follow the previous word. That requires it to read (and arguably steal) the work of existing people. It cannot think - it is not creating. It is a parrot - a big parrot, a complex parrot, a parrot that can maybe do some simple things - but a parrot. And that's selling parrots short, because I believe parrots have the ability of cognition.
So, is the robot video real, or not?
You still haven't told us, and you still don't realise the significance of that
Do I personally believe in the reality of a video on Twitter? I don't. Do I personally know it isn't real? No - that's why I have said I will await for credible sources to do reporting rather than just trust people chatting on a notoriously untrustworthy social media platform about a topic where there is so much undue hype.
It looked artificial as fuck to me, but then have you seen any of Apple's recent product announcement videos?
Over-processed virtual sets, weird jerky body movements, speaking with unnatural cadences, and everyone standing in exactly the same 2015-style power pose. And those are definitely real people!
I was once told that the article that supposedly demonstrated the efficacy of the power stance had been reexamined and fond to have a flaw. Right now I really wish I coud remember what it was...
Possibly caught p-hacking, and has been disowned by one of the original paper's authors - but the other (the one would became the public face) still stands by it. Some meta-analyses later suggested that there might be something in it after all, but then those were criticized for lacking good controls.
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we have met aliens who can travel across space to visit us.
It's bizarre that more people aren't talking about this; if it is true* it is one of the biggest news stories in human history.
* It is not true
It really might be true
When I bang on about AI, @Benpointer always says “get back to me when a robot can stack my dishwasher”. And it’s a fair point
Well, now a robot can easily stack a dishwasher, and what’s more it can learn this simply by watching you do it first
“With enough strength and dexterity, Tesla's Bot could handle almost all physical tasks by simply looking at video clips of people doing said tasks.
Picking up a vacuum and running it through the house. Sorting and folding laundry. Tidying up the house. Moving material from point A to point B. Picking up trash and placing it in a bin. Pushing a lawnmower. Monitor an area for safety-related concerns. Laying bricks. Hammering nails. Using power tools. Clean dishes... etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”
I can find you a parrot that can recite poetry - doesn't mean it can write you any.
Are learning machines cool? Yes. But at the end of the day they're automatons that can, at a basic level, do simple tasks in relatively stable environments. Complex tasks in other scenarios are out of reach. All the hype is just sales - of course people who own stocks in AI companies would claim it would end the world or be the gadget of the future, because they'll rake the money in.
It is not coincidental that the new "AI is going to be able to do everything" line came after the "Meta is going to be the new frontier" fell through and the "NFTs and the blockchain are going to revolutionise everything" idea was proven false. Capitalism always needs a new frontier, to exploit and sell and commodify, and tech bros think they can build the next one. So far they're failing.
In my view the free chat programmes available online have written reasoning capabilities that exceed that of most graduate level professionals with over 20 years of high level report writing experience. They can write better than people who have been doing decision making and report writing for their entire career. From a management point of view they surpass most humans in knowing how to respond to situations in difficult correspondence exercises.
It is an inevitable human reaction to deny this or not look at it, but it won't help.
Do you mean ChatGPT, or is there a specific programme you mean? I think the most convincing ones are good at creating the approximation of human writing, until you learn it is either just lying (making up references and quotes and just general facts) or spewing nonsense (this often happens with coding where the coding looks correct, but is really just nonsense).
The way this stuff currently works is by taking the input, analysing words that are associated with the words relevant to that topic, and picking each word based on the likelihood that it is the most common word to follow the previous word. That requires it to read (and arguably steal) the work of existing people. It cannot think - it is not creating. It is a parrot - a big parrot, a complex parrot, a parrot that can maybe do some simple things - but a parrot. And that's selling parrots short, because I believe parrots have the ability of cognition.
So, is the robot video real, or not?
You still haven't told us, and you still don't realise the significance of that
Do I personally believe in the reality of a video on Twitter? I don't. Do I personally know it isn't real? No - that's why I have said I will await for credible sources to do reporting rather than just trust people chatting on a notoriously untrustworthy social media platform about a topic where there is so much undue hype.
OK, I'll help you out of your painful confusion: it's real
Here's a Stanford AI professor discussing it in great depth
"Let's reverse engineer the phenomenal Tesla Optimus. No insider info, just my own analysis. Long read:
1. The smooth hand movements are almost certainly trained by imitation learning ("behavior cloning") from human operators. The alternative is reinforcement learning in simulation, but that typically leads to jittery motion and unnatural hand poses.
There're at least 4 ways to collect human demonstrations:
(1) A custom-built teleoperation system - I believe this is the most likely means used by Tesla team. Open-source example: ALOHA, a low-cost bimanual robot arm and teleoperation system by Stanford AI Labs (https://tonyzhaozh.github.io/aloha/). It enables very precise, dexterous motions, such as putting AAA batteries into a remote or manipulating contact lens.
(2) Motion Capture (MoCap): apply the MoCap systems used for Hollywood movies to capture the fine-grained motions of hand joints..."
So this is a robot which is so astonishing you presumed it was fake, yet at the same time you dismiss it as meaningless
Any sufficiently advanced technology...
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." is an argument for being more skeptical of a video like this. It may be that the magic is half a trick, and the technology isn't there yet.
Edit: not the veracity of the video, its importance.
Confession: I ALSO thought it was fake when I first saw it. Even now it looks weird - it must be very deep in uncanny valley. However so many sane, highly-informed people on social media and elsewhere are saying Yes, this is real, I am guessing that this is real
No, see my edit which you quoted...
Others are also a touch befuddled:
"Tesla has released an update with progress on its Optimus humanoid robot with a video that almost looks like CGI."
On the boring subject of 'AI'... (I don't know how that differs from normal software and I don't care to find out) I've noticed that if I give my students a translation exercise with a completely fictitious word (that is a word looks like a French or Russian word but I've just made it up) then the ones who cheat with ChatGPT (or whatever) submit a translation in which the 'AI' has tried to infer the meaning of my made up word. The ones who tried to do it for real leave it blank and ask what the word means.
That's an interesting observation. Universities are shitting themselves (or should be) about AI and students using it to cheat in assessment. We have already had to ditch most online assessment due to cheating issues (students chatting on WhatsApp during exams etc) and now any essay based questions in an online exam are so easily answered with ChatGPT and the like.
So it will be back to exam halls, and handwritten papers. We use software such as Turnitin to detect plagiarism in work, but as far as I know Turnitin does not pick up ChatGPT, and will struggle to. Your test is an interesting example where cheating can be found.
However, I think humans can detect ChatGPT answers at the moment, at least in my limited field. We had some examples in a chemistry re-sit exam. The language used to answer some of the longer form questions is clearly not from the student (non- English extraction).
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we have met aliens who can travel across space to visit us.
It's bizarre that more people aren't talking about this; if it is true* it is one of the biggest news stories in human history.
* It is not true
It really might be true
When I bang on about AI, @Benpointer always says “get back to me when a robot can stack my dishwasher”. And it’s a fair point
Well, now a robot can easily stack a dishwasher, and what’s more it can learn this simply by watching you do it first
“With enough strength and dexterity, Tesla's Bot could handle almost all physical tasks by simply looking at video clips of people doing said tasks.
Picking up a vacuum and running it through the house. Sorting and folding laundry. Tidying up the house. Moving material from point A to point B. Picking up trash and placing it in a bin. Pushing a lawnmower. Monitor an area for safety-related concerns. Laying bricks. Hammering nails. Using power tools. Clean dishes... etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”
I can find you a parrot that can recite poetry - doesn't mean it can write you any.
Are learning machines cool? Yes. But at the end of the day they're automatons that can, at a basic level, do simple tasks in relatively stable environments. Complex tasks in other scenarios are out of reach. All the hype is just sales - of course people who own stocks in AI companies would claim it would end the world or be the gadget of the future, because they'll rake the money in.
It is not coincidental that the new "AI is going to be able to do everything" line came after the "Meta is going to be the new frontier" fell through and the "NFTs and the blockchain are going to revolutionise everything" idea was proven false. Capitalism always needs a new frontier, to exploit and sell and commodify, and tech bros think they can build the next one. So far they're failing.
In my view the free chat programmes available online have written reasoning capabilities that exceed that of most graduate level professionals with over 20 years of high level report writing experience. They can write better than people who have been doing decision making and report writing for their entire career. From a management point of view they surpass most humans in knowing how to respond to situations in difficult correspondence exercises.
It is an inevitable human reaction to deny this or not look at it, but it won't help.
Do you mean ChatGPT, or is there a specific programme you mean? I think the most convincing ones are good at creating the approximation of human writing, until you learn it is either just lying (making up references and quotes and just general facts) or spewing nonsense (this often happens with coding where the coding looks correct, but is really just nonsense).
The way this stuff currently works is by taking the input, analysing words that are associated with the words relevant to that topic, and picking each word based on the likelihood that it is the most common word to follow the previous word. That requires it to read (and arguably steal) the work of existing people. It cannot think - it is not creating. It is a parrot - a big parrot, a complex parrot, a parrot that can maybe do some simple things - but a parrot. And that's selling parrots short, because I believe parrots have the ability of cognition.
So, is the robot video real, or not?
You still haven't told us, and you still don't realise the significance of that
Do I personally believe in the reality of a video on Twitter? I don't. Do I personally know it isn't real? No - that's why I have said I will await for credible sources to do reporting rather than just trust people chatting on a notoriously untrustworthy social media platform about a topic where there is so much undue hype.
It looked artificial as fuck to me, but then have you seen any of Apple's recent product announcement videos?
Over-processed virtual sets, weird jerky body movements, speaking with unnatural cadences, and everyone standing in exactly the same 2015-style power pose. And those are definitely real people!
I was once told that the article that supposedly demonstrated the efficacy of the power stance had been reexamined and fond to have a flaw. Right now I really wish I coud remember what it was...
Is it that anyone doing it looks like a complete and utter wanker?
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
My Spanish Father-in-Law doesn't understand why the UK doesn't build underground carparks as all the towns in Spain seem to have. Simples - because we are incompetent and corrupt. And they are not.
Hang on - I hear right wing voices say - the Spanish ARE corrupt. And that is true. And yet they can stick underground car parks into their towns and we can't afford to...
I haven't heard of this before - can we have examples of these underground car parks in all the towns in Spain?
Quite common in France - the classic in towns such as Fontainebleau is that they dug out the town square, and then put a nice tuned up version of the town square back on top.
I was pondering yesterday on the strange anomaly of airports. If ever there were a good place to have underground parking these are surely it:
- everyone hates going out miles on a shuttle bus to a huge car park on the perimeter, and it’s a mad waste of hectares of land - You can’t build very tall multi-storeys because of the planes, and it’s a waste to have one right by the terminal like in LHR when that could be taken by airport hotels - They dig up the land and create all sorts of ducting and subterranean units when they create airports anyway, why not bury a huge car park at the same time?
Obviously not directly under the runway but adjacent and below the terminals.
The other thing is solar plants. Why on earth isn’t every airport and airfield carpeted with solar arrays, given the land can’t be used for anything else and is already brownfield?
A fair point, but consider safety. At present running off the tarmac onto the grass isn't a huge disaster per se, as the plane has a fair chance to slow down in relative safety. But if one clutters it up with lots of steel girders and solar panels ...
I don't suppose the passengers would like it either. (I also wonder about the effect on airfield surveillance radar, too.)
Yes fair enough. I've looked it up to see if any airports do use them. Nice article from Wired a couple of years ago discussing the pros and cons
Also - ISTR that LHR composts tdhe grass clippings.
Not sure if this is for methane for heating, but it would then be solar power collection, no?
You can still have grass growing under panels. And you can graze sheep, though that might be suboptimal next to an airport runway unless you want a regular supply of self-made lamb kofta.
Definitely not next to the runway or taxiway. Sheep are bloody idiots (always go slow if there is a sheep looking stupid in your way on a country road). Some would be bound to run in front of the plane. And one doesn't want one's port engine cooking up a sheep just when one is committed to takeoff ...
They already spend a lot of time and money trying to keep birds away, it’s enough of an effort without introducing uncooked lamb chops into the sterile environment!
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we have met aliens who can travel across space to visit us.
It's bizarre that more people aren't talking about this; if it is true* it is one of the biggest news stories in human history.
* It is not true
It really might be true
When I bang on about AI, @Benpointer always says “get back to me when a robot can stack my dishwasher”. And it’s a fair point
Well, now a robot can easily stack a dishwasher, and what’s more it can learn this simply by watching you do it first
“With enough strength and dexterity, Tesla's Bot could handle almost all physical tasks by simply looking at video clips of people doing said tasks.
Picking up a vacuum and running it through the house. Sorting and folding laundry. Tidying up the house. Moving material from point A to point B. Picking up trash and placing it in a bin. Pushing a lawnmower. Monitor an area for safety-related concerns. Laying bricks. Hammering nails. Using power tools. Clean dishes... etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”
I can find you a parrot that can recite poetry - doesn't mean it can write you any.
Are learning machines cool? Yes. But at the end of the day they're automatons that can, at a basic level, do simple tasks in relatively stable environments. Complex tasks in other scenarios are out of reach. All the hype is just sales - of course people who own stocks in AI companies would claim it would end the world or be the gadget of the future, because they'll rake the money in.
It is not coincidental that the new "AI is going to be able to do everything" line came after the "Meta is going to be the new frontier" fell through and the "NFTs and the blockchain are going to revolutionise everything" idea was proven false. Capitalism always needs a new frontier, to exploit and sell and commodify, and tech bros think they can build the next one. So far they're failing.
In my view the free chat programmes available online have written reasoning capabilities that exceed that of most graduate level professionals with over 20 years of high level report writing experience. They can write better than people who have been doing decision making and report writing for their entire career. From a management point of view they surpass most humans in knowing how to respond to situations in difficult correspondence exercises.
It is an inevitable human reaction to deny this or not look at it, but it won't help.
Do you mean ChatGPT, or is there a specific programme you mean? I think the most convincing ones are good at creating the approximation of human writing, until you learn it is either just lying (making up references and quotes and just general facts) or spewing nonsense (this often happens with coding where the coding looks correct, but is really just nonsense).
The way this stuff currently works is by taking the input, analysing words that are associated with the words relevant to that topic, and picking each word based on the likelihood that it is the most common word to follow the previous word. That requires it to read (and arguably steal) the work of existing people. It cannot think - it is not creating. It is a parrot - a big parrot, a complex parrot, a parrot that can maybe do some simple things - but a parrot. And that's selling parrots short, because I believe parrots have the ability of cognition.
So, is the robot video real, or not?
You still haven't told us, and you still don't realise the significance of that
Do I personally believe in the reality of a video on Twitter? I don't. Do I personally know it isn't real? No - that's why I have said I will await for credible sources to do reporting rather than just trust people chatting on a notoriously untrustworthy social media platform about a topic where there is so much undue hype.
OK, I'll help you out of your painful confusion: it's real
Here's a Stanford AI professor discussing it in great depth
"Let's reverse engineer the phenomenal Tesla Optimus. No insider info, just my own analysis. Long read:
1. The smooth hand movements are almost certainly trained by imitation learning ("behavior cloning") from human operators. The alternative is reinforcement learning in simulation, but that typically leads to jittery motion and unnatural hand poses.
There're at least 4 ways to collect human demonstrations:
(1) A custom-built teleoperation system - I believe this is the most likely means used by Tesla team. Open-source example: ALOHA, a low-cost bimanual robot arm and teleoperation system by Stanford AI Labs (https://tonyzhaozh.github.io/aloha/). It enables very precise, dexterous motions, such as putting AAA batteries into a remote or manipulating contact lens.
(2) Motion Capture (MoCap): apply the MoCap systems used for Hollywood movies to capture the fine-grained motions of hand joints..."
So this is a robot which is so astonishing you presumed it was fake, yet at the same time you dismiss it as meaningless
Any sufficiently advanced technology...
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." is an argument for being more skeptical of a video like this. It may be that the magic is half a trick, and the technology isn't there yet.
Edit: not the veracity of the video, its importance.
Confession: I ALSO thought it was fake when I first saw it. Even now it looks weird - it must be very deep in uncanny valley. However so many sane, highly-informed people on social media and elsewhere are saying Yes, this is real, I am guessing that this is real
No, see my edit which you quoted...
Others are also a touch befuddled:
"Tesla has released an update with progress on its Optimus humanoid robot with a video that almost looks like CGI."
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
My Spanish Father-in-Law doesn't understand why the UK doesn't build underground carparks as all the towns in Spain seem to have. Simples - because we are incompetent and corrupt. And they are not.
Hang on - I hear right wing voices say - the Spanish ARE corrupt. And that is true. And yet they can stick underground car parks into their towns and we can't afford to...
I haven't heard of this before - can we have examples of these underground car parks in all the towns in Spain?
Quite common in France - the classic in towns such as Fontainebleau is that they dug out the town square, and then put a nice tuned up version of the town square back on top.
I was pondering yesterday on the strange anomaly of airports. If ever there were a good place to have underground parking these are surely it:
- everyone hates going out miles on a shuttle bus to a huge car park on the perimeter, and it’s a mad waste of hectares of land - You can’t build very tall multi-storeys because of the planes, and it’s a waste to have one right by the terminal like in LHR when that could be taken by airport hotels - They dig up the land and create all sorts of ducting and subterranean units when they create airports anyway, why not bury a huge car park at the same time?
Obviously not directly under the runway but adjacent and below the terminals.
The other thing is solar plants. Why on earth isn’t every airport and airfield carpeted with solar arrays, given the land can’t be used for anything else and is already brownfield?
I was speaking to a friend a while ago who does loads of planning for advertising at airports and was asking why they don’t do more on the land away from the runways and he said there are really strict rules about things that can distract pilots so I guess a solar field right by an airport would theoretically be a risk if the sun was glinting off it etc. I think airport dpsafety takes an understandably extreme position on safety so sight distractions or anything on any potential run-off area which could jeopardise an emergency landing is a no-no.
Yes, glare could pontentially be an issue, so airport solar arrays would need a specific coating - which if it’s anything like anything else in aviation, will need the airport authorities to certify every specific type of panel, require specifically trained and certified technicians to install them, be able to have them covered at short notice if requested, be away from any areas designated as overrun for a landing or departing aircraft etc. It all gets very expensive very quickly.
Before it closed* Flatland airport made a fuss about every planning application within 10 miles
Make a pond somewhere near the flightline? Might attract birds, object. Dig a quarry somewhere near the flightline? Might attract birds, object. Put up a solar farm? Might distract the pilot, object. Put some wind turbines up 10 miles out? Might clutter our radar, object.
(I have seen all of these)
*Despite going on about Net Zero, apparently re-opening the airport is Doncaster council's "Number One Priority".
Because an airport brings prestige to an area and (depending on the criteria the council uses) attracts jobs...
I don't disagree, but it does seem rather a conflict.
On the one hand the Tory government are terrible for delaying electric car mandates, but on the other hand we want more flights...
The council did look a bit stupid after they paid lots of money to build a link road (that would never be needed according to the original plan for the airport) and then watched the airport close a couple of years later.
Some conspiracists might suggest that Peel never really wanted an airport and just wanted an excuse to develop the site.
Admiral Viktor Sokolov, the commander of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, is apparently not dead, according to this photo released by the MOD today, despite Ukraine’s claims to have killed him last week. https://twitter.com/maxseddon/status/1706624970535669817
Admiral Viktor Sokolov, the commander of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, is apparently not dead, according to this photo released by the MOD today, despite Ukraine’s claims to have killed him last week. https://twitter.com/maxseddon/status/1706624970535669817
According to Russian TV yesterday, the reports of explosions near the Navy HQ building in Sevastopol were due to planned demolition works in the area.
Admiral Viktor Sokolov, the commander of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, is apparently not dead, according to this photo released by the MOD today, despite Ukraine’s claims to have killed him last week. https://twitter.com/maxseddon/status/1706624970535669817
According to Russian TV yesterday, the reports of explosions near the Navy HQ building in Sevastopol were due to planned demolition works in the area.
Definitely nothing to do with Storm Shadow.
It was definitely planned demolition works, though.
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we have met aliens who can travel across space to visit us.
It's bizarre that more people aren't talking about this; if it is true* it is one of the biggest news stories in human history.
* It is not true
It really might be true
When I bang on about AI, @Benpointer always says “get back to me when a robot can stack my dishwasher”. And it’s a fair point
Well, now a robot can easily stack a dishwasher, and what’s more it can learn this simply by watching you do it first
“With enough strength and dexterity, Tesla's Bot could handle almost all physical tasks by simply looking at video clips of people doing said tasks.
Picking up a vacuum and running it through the house. Sorting and folding laundry. Tidying up the house. Moving material from point A to point B. Picking up trash and placing it in a bin. Pushing a lawnmower. Monitor an area for safety-related concerns. Laying bricks. Hammering nails. Using power tools. Clean dishes... etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”
I can find you a parrot that can recite poetry - doesn't mean it can write you any.
Are learning machines cool? Yes. But at the end of the day they're automatons that can, at a basic level, do simple tasks in relatively stable environments. Complex tasks in other scenarios are out of reach. All the hype is just sales - of course people who own stocks in AI companies would claim it would end the world or be the gadget of the future, because they'll rake the money in.
It is not coincidental that the new "AI is going to be able to do everything" line came after the "Meta is going to be the new frontier" fell through and the "NFTs and the blockchain are going to revolutionise everything" idea was proven false. Capitalism always needs a new frontier, to exploit and sell and commodify, and tech bros think they can build the next one. So far they're failing.
In my view the free chat programmes available online have written reasoning capabilities that exceed that of most graduate level professionals with over 20 years of high level report writing experience. They can write better than people who have been doing decision making and report writing for their entire career. From a management point of view they surpass most humans in knowing how to respond to situations in difficult correspondence exercises.
It is an inevitable human reaction to deny this or not look at it, but it won't help.
Do you mean ChatGPT, or is there a specific programme you mean? I think the most convincing ones are good at creating the approximation of human writing, until you learn it is either just lying (making up references and quotes and just general facts) or spewing nonsense (this often happens with coding where the coding looks correct, but is really just nonsense).
The way this stuff currently works is by taking the input, analysing words that are associated with the words relevant to that topic, and picking each word based on the likelihood that it is the most common word to follow the previous word. That requires it to read (and arguably steal) the work of existing people. It cannot think - it is not creating. It is a parrot - a big parrot, a complex parrot, a parrot that can maybe do some simple things - but a parrot. And that's selling parrots short, because I believe parrots have the ability of cognition.
So, is the robot video real, or not?
You still haven't told us, and you still don't realise the significance of that
Do I personally believe in the reality of a video on Twitter? I don't. Do I personally know it isn't real? No - that's why I have said I will await for credible sources to do reporting rather than just trust people chatting on a notoriously untrustworthy social media platform about a topic where there is so much undue hype.
OK, I'll help you out of your painful confusion: it's real
Here's a Stanford AI professor discussing it in great depth
"Let's reverse engineer the phenomenal Tesla Optimus. No insider info, just my own analysis. Long read:
1. The smooth hand movements are almost certainly trained by imitation learning ("behavior cloning") from human operators. The alternative is reinforcement learning in simulation, but that typically leads to jittery motion and unnatural hand poses.
There're at least 4 ways to collect human demonstrations:
(1) A custom-built teleoperation system - I believe this is the most likely means used by Tesla team. Open-source example: ALOHA, a low-cost bimanual robot arm and teleoperation system by Stanford AI Labs (https://tonyzhaozh.github.io/aloha/). It enables very precise, dexterous motions, such as putting AAA batteries into a remote or manipulating contact lens.
(2) Motion Capture (MoCap): apply the MoCap systems used for Hollywood movies to capture the fine-grained motions of hand joints..."
So this is a robot which is so astonishing you presumed it was fake, yet at the same time you dismiss it as meaningless
Any sufficiently advanced technology...
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." is an argument for being more skeptical of a video like this. It may be that the magic is half a trick, and the technology isn't there yet.
Edit: not the veracity of the video, its importance.
Confession: I ALSO thought it was fake when I first saw it. Even now it looks weird - it must be very deep in uncanny valley. However so many sane, highly-informed people on social media and elsewhere are saying Yes, this is real, I am guessing that this is real
No, see my edit which you quoted...
Others are also a touch befuddled:
"Tesla has released an update with progress on its Optimus humanoid robot with a video that almost looks like CGI."
However, to me, that video is quite obviously fake, the very best robots - for big stuff like this - are Boston Dynamics, and they are not near that speed yet - but maybe only a few years away
The Tesla Optimus is disturbing and perplexing because it is right on the line where magic apparently meets advanced tech, and down in the uncanny valley where a robot is nearly-convincing as a human but not quite
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
My Spanish Father-in-Law doesn't understand why the UK doesn't build underground carparks as all the towns in Spain seem to have. Simples - because we are incompetent and corrupt. And they are not.
Hang on - I hear right wing voices say - the Spanish ARE corrupt. And that is true. And yet they can stick underground car parks into their towns and we can't afford to...
I haven't heard of this before - can we have examples of these underground car parks in all the towns in Spain?
Quite common in France - the classic in towns such as Fontainebleau is that they dug out the town square, and then put a nice tuned up version of the town square back on top.
I was pondering yesterday on the strange anomaly of airports. If ever there were a good place to have underground parking these are surely it:
- everyone hates going out miles on a shuttle bus to a huge car park on the perimeter, and it’s a mad waste of hectares of land - You can’t build very tall multi-storeys because of the planes, and it’s a waste to have one right by the terminal like in LHR when that could be taken by airport hotels - They dig up the land and create all sorts of ducting and subterranean units when they create airports anyway, why not bury a huge car park at the same time?
Obviously not directly under the runway but adjacent and below the terminals.
The other thing is solar plants. Why on earth isn’t every airport and airfield carpeted with solar arrays, given the land can’t be used for anything else and is already brownfield?
I was speaking to a friend a while ago who does loads of planning for advertising at airports and was asking why they don’t do more on the land away from the runways and he said there are really strict rules about things that can distract pilots so I guess a solar field right by an airport would theoretically be a risk if the sun was glinting off it etc. I think airport dpsafety takes an understandably extreme position on safety so sight distractions or anything on any potential run-off area which could jeopardise an emergency landing is a no-no.
Could also give a very inconvenient thermal right over one or more of the landing approaches. They heat up more readily than grassland and you always get bumpy air just over them.
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
Thanks, mate. Keep us posted.
I can keep you posted on this.
It’s not happening today or this year, and there are a lot of gullible people on Twitter.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
My Spanish Father-in-Law doesn't understand why the UK doesn't build underground carparks as all the towns in Spain seem to have. Simples - because we are incompetent and corrupt. And they are not.
Hang on - I hear right wing voices say - the Spanish ARE corrupt. And that is true. And yet they can stick underground car parks into their towns and we can't afford to...
I haven't heard of this before - can we have examples of these underground car parks in all the towns in Spain?
Quite common in France - the classic in towns such as Fontainebleau is that they dug out the town square, and then put a nice tuned up version of the town square back on top.
I was pondering yesterday on the strange anomaly of airports. If ever there were a good place to have underground parking these are surely it:
- everyone hates going out miles on a shuttle bus to a huge car park on the perimeter, and it’s a mad waste of hectares of land - You can’t build very tall multi-storeys because of the planes, and it’s a waste to have one right by the terminal like in LHR when that could be taken by airport hotels - They dig up the land and create all sorts of ducting and subterranean units when they create airports anyway, why not bury a huge car park at the same time?
Obviously not directly under the runway but adjacent and below the terminals.
The other thing is solar plants. Why on earth isn’t every airport and airfield carpeted with solar arrays, given the land can’t be used for anything else and is already brownfield?
I was speaking to a friend a while ago who does loads of planning for advertising at airports and was asking why they don’t do more on the land away from the runways and he said there are really strict rules about things that can distract pilots so I guess a solar field right by an airport would theoretically be a risk if the sun was glinting off it etc. I think airport dpsafety takes an understandably extreme position on safety so sight distractions or anything on any potential run-off area which could jeopardise an emergency landing is a no-no.
Yes, glare could pontentially be an issue, so airport solar arrays would need a specific coating - which if it’s anything like anything else in aviation, will need the airport authorities to certify every specific type of panel, require specifically trained and certified technicians to install them, be able to have them covered at short notice if requested, be away from any areas designated as overrun for a landing or departing aircraft etc. It all gets very expensive very quickly.
Before it closed* Flatland airport made a fuss about every planning application within 10 miles
Make a pond somewhere near the flightline? Might attract birds, object. Dig a quarry somewhere near the flightline? Might attract birds, object. Put up a solar farm? Might distract the pilot, object. Put some wind turbines up 10 miles out? Might clutter our radar, object.
(I have seen all of these)
*Despite going on about Net Zero, apparently re-opening the airport is Doncaster council's "Number One Priority".
Yes, airports are rather concerned about anything that could interfere with their operations, or degrade safety.
Looking at Heathrow NOTAMs (notices to airmen), there’s 11 temporary cranes close to the airport mentioned, as well as a number of firework displays, searchlight displays, filming locations etc, as well as various works actually going on at the airport itself.
On the boring subject of 'AI'... (I don't know how that differs from normal software and I don't care to find out) I've noticed that if I give my students a translation exercise with a completely fictitious word (that is a word looks like a French or Russian word but I've just made it up) then the ones who cheat with ChatGPT (or whatever) submit a translation in which the 'AI' has tried to infer the meaning of my made up word. The ones who tried to do it for real leave it blank and ask what the word means.
That's an interesting observation. Universities are shitting themselves (or should be) about AI and students using it to cheat in assessment. We have already had to ditch most online assessment due to cheating issues (students chatting on WhatsApp during exams etc) and now any essay based questions in an online exam are so easily answered with ChatGPT and the like.
So it will be back to exam halls, and handwritten papers. We use software such as Turnitin to detect plagiarism in work, but as far as I know Turnitin does not pick up ChatGPT, and will struggle to. Your test is an interesting example where cheating can be found.
However, I think humans can detect ChatGPT answers at the moment, at least in my limited field. We had some examples in a chemistry re-sit exam. The language used to answer some of the longer form questions is clearly not from the student (non- English extraction).
I think TurnItIn were looking at a ChatGPT detection tool, but nothing they’ve done is very accurate yet. We’ve decided not to trust any AI-detection software.
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we have met aliens who can travel across space to visit us.
It's bizarre that more people aren't talking about this; if it is true* it is one of the biggest news stories in human history.
* It is not true
It really might be true
When I bang on about AI, @Benpointer always says “get back to me when a robot can stack my dishwasher”. And it’s a fair point
Well, now a robot can easily stack a dishwasher, and what’s more it can learn this simply by watching you do it first
“With enough strength and dexterity, Tesla's Bot could handle almost all physical tasks by simply looking at video clips of people doing said tasks.
Picking up a vacuum and running it through the house. Sorting and folding laundry. Tidying up the house. Moving material from point A to point B. Picking up trash and placing it in a bin. Pushing a lawnmower. Monitor an area for safety-related concerns. Laying bricks. Hammering nails. Using power tools. Clean dishes... etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”
I can find you a parrot that can recite poetry - doesn't mean it can write you any.
Are learning machines cool? Yes. But at the end of the day they're automatons that can, at a basic level, do simple tasks in relatively stable environments. Complex tasks in other scenarios are out of reach. All the hype is just sales - of course people who own stocks in AI companies would claim it would end the world or be the gadget of the future, because they'll rake the money in.
It is not coincidental that the new "AI is going to be able to do everything" line came after the "Meta is going to be the new frontier" fell through and the "NFTs and the blockchain are going to revolutionise everything" idea was proven false. Capitalism always needs a new frontier, to exploit and sell and commodify, and tech bros think they can build the next one. So far they're failing.
In my view the free chat programmes available online have written reasoning capabilities that exceed that of most graduate level professionals with over 20 years of high level report writing experience. They can write better than people who have been doing decision making and report writing for their entire career. From a management point of view they surpass most humans in knowing how to respond to situations in difficult correspondence exercises.
It is an inevitable human reaction to deny this or not look at it, but it won't help.
Do you mean ChatGPT, or is there a specific programme you mean? I think the most convincing ones are good at creating the approximation of human writing, until you learn it is either just lying (making up references and quotes and just general facts) or spewing nonsense (this often happens with coding where the coding looks correct, but is really just nonsense).
The way this stuff currently works is by taking the input, analysing words that are associated with the words relevant to that topic, and picking each word based on the likelihood that it is the most common word to follow the previous word. That requires it to read (and arguably steal) the work of existing people. It cannot think - it is not creating. It is a parrot - a big parrot, a complex parrot, a parrot that can maybe do some simple things - but a parrot. And that's selling parrots short, because I believe parrots have the ability of cognition.
So, is the robot video real, or not?
You still haven't told us, and you still don't realise the significance of that
Do I personally believe in the reality of a video on Twitter? I don't. Do I personally know it isn't real? No - that's why I have said I will await for credible sources to do reporting rather than just trust people chatting on a notoriously untrustworthy social media platform about a topic where there is so much undue hype.
OK, I'll help you out of your painful confusion: it's real
Here's a Stanford AI professor discussing it in great depth
"Let's reverse engineer the phenomenal Tesla Optimus. No insider info, just my own analysis. Long read:
1. The smooth hand movements are almost certainly trained by imitation learning ("behavior cloning") from human operators. The alternative is reinforcement learning in simulation, but that typically leads to jittery motion and unnatural hand poses.
There're at least 4 ways to collect human demonstrations:
(1) A custom-built teleoperation system - I believe this is the most likely means used by Tesla team. Open-source example: ALOHA, a low-cost bimanual robot arm and teleoperation system by Stanford AI Labs (https://tonyzhaozh.github.io/aloha/). It enables very precise, dexterous motions, such as putting AAA batteries into a remote or manipulating contact lens.
(2) Motion Capture (MoCap): apply the MoCap systems used for Hollywood movies to capture the fine-grained motions of hand joints..."
So this is a robot which is so astonishing you presumed it was fake, yet at the same time you dismiss it as meaningless
Any sufficiently advanced technology...
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." is an argument for being more skeptical of a video like this. It may be that the magic is half a trick, and the technology isn't there yet.
Edit: not the veracity of the video, its importance.
Confession: I ALSO thought it was fake when I first saw it. Even now it looks weird - it must be very deep in uncanny valley. However so many sane, highly-informed people on social media and elsewhere are saying Yes, this is real, I am guessing that this is real
No, see my edit which you quoted...
Others are also a touch befuddled:
"Tesla has released an update with progress on its Optimus humanoid robot with a video that almost looks like CGI."
However, to me, that video is quite obviously fake, the very best robots - for big stuff like this - are Boston Dynamics, and they are not near that speed yet - but maybe only a few years away
The Tesla Optimus is disturbing and perplexing because it is right on the line where magic apparently meets advanced tech, and down in the uncanny valley where a robot is nearly-convincing as a human but not quite
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we have met aliens who can travel across space to visit us.
It's bizarre that more people aren't talking about this; if it is true* it is one of the biggest news stories in human history.
* It is not true
It really might be true
When I bang on about AI, @Benpointer always says “get back to me when a robot can stack my dishwasher”. And it’s a fair point
Well, now a robot can easily stack a dishwasher, and what’s more it can learn this simply by watching you do it first
“With enough strength and dexterity, Tesla's Bot could handle almost all physical tasks by simply looking at video clips of people doing said tasks.
Picking up a vacuum and running it through the house. Sorting and folding laundry. Tidying up the house. Moving material from point A to point B. Picking up trash and placing it in a bin. Pushing a lawnmower. Monitor an area for safety-related concerns. Laying bricks. Hammering nails. Using power tools. Clean dishes... etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”
I can find you a parrot that can recite poetry - doesn't mean it can write you any.
Are learning machines cool? Yes. But at the end of the day they're automatons that can, at a basic level, do simple tasks in relatively stable environments. Complex tasks in other scenarios are out of reach. All the hype is just sales - of course people who own stocks in AI companies would claim it would end the world or be the gadget of the future, because they'll rake the money in.
It is not coincidental that the new "AI is going to be able to do everything" line came after the "Meta is going to be the new frontier" fell through and the "NFTs and the blockchain are going to revolutionise everything" idea was proven false. Capitalism always needs a new frontier, to exploit and sell and commodify, and tech bros think they can build the next one. So far they're failing.
In my view the free chat programmes available online have written reasoning capabilities that exceed that of most graduate level professionals with over 20 years of high level report writing experience. They can write better than people who have been doing decision making and report writing for their entire career. From a management point of view they surpass most humans in knowing how to respond to situations in difficult correspondence exercises.
It is an inevitable human reaction to deny this or not look at it, but it won't help.
Do you mean ChatGPT, or is there a specific programme you mean? I think the most convincing ones are good at creating the approximation of human writing, until you learn it is either just lying (making up references and quotes and just general facts) or spewing nonsense (this often happens with coding where the coding looks correct, but is really just nonsense).
The way this stuff currently works is by taking the input, analysing words that are associated with the words relevant to that topic, and picking each word based on the likelihood that it is the most common word to follow the previous word. That requires it to read (and arguably steal) the work of existing people. It cannot think - it is not creating. It is a parrot - a big parrot, a complex parrot, a parrot that can maybe do some simple things - but a parrot. And that's selling parrots short, because I believe parrots have the ability of cognition.
So, is the robot video real, or not?
You still haven't told us, and you still don't realise the significance of that
Do I personally believe in the reality of a video on Twitter? I don't. Do I personally know it isn't real? No - that's why I have said I will await for credible sources to do reporting rather than just trust people chatting on a notoriously untrustworthy social media platform about a topic where there is so much undue hype.
OK, I'll help you out of your painful confusion: it's real
Here's a Stanford AI professor discussing it in great depth
"Let's reverse engineer the phenomenal Tesla Optimus. No insider info, just my own analysis. Long read:
1. The smooth hand movements are almost certainly trained by imitation learning ("behavior cloning") from human operators. The alternative is reinforcement learning in simulation, but that typically leads to jittery motion and unnatural hand poses.
There're at least 4 ways to collect human demonstrations:
(1) A custom-built teleoperation system - I believe this is the most likely means used by Tesla team. Open-source example: ALOHA, a low-cost bimanual robot arm and teleoperation system by Stanford AI Labs (https://tonyzhaozh.github.io/aloha/). It enables very precise, dexterous motions, such as putting AAA batteries into a remote or manipulating contact lens.
(2) Motion Capture (MoCap): apply the MoCap systems used for Hollywood movies to capture the fine-grained motions of hand joints..."
So this is a robot which is so astonishing you presumed it was fake, yet at the same time you dismiss it as meaningless
Any sufficiently advanced technology...
Me: I do not trust twitter as a source, I will wait for something more reputable to report on this. You: You idiot, you rube, you flounderer. Can't you see - that reputable report exists and I will show it to you. Me: Oh great, thanks You: provides twitter link HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA Me: -_-
NVIDIA: Senior AI Scientist. @Stanford PhD. Join me on the frontier of AI Agents, LLM & Robotics. MineDojo (NeurIPS Best Paper), Voyager. Ex: @OpenAI & @GoogleAI Get in touch →jimfan.meJoined December 2012 2,778 Following 138.9K Followers
The rather sad thing is that he asked you for a non-twitter link, you gave him a twitter link, he pointed this out, you gave him his twitter profile.
We are arguing in a virtual space about the veracity of a video depicting a robot that may or may not be a computer generated image about the truth or otherwise of an independent nonhuman intelligence by discussing a possibly fictional expert by pointing to his unverified credentials on a social media platform. Nobody has met these people or the robot. It's all pixels. PB has real problems in recognising reality
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we have met aliens who can travel across space to visit us.
It's bizarre that more people aren't talking about this; if it is true* it is one of the biggest news stories in human history.
* It is not true
It really might be true
When I bang on about AI, @Benpointer always says “get back to me when a robot can stack my dishwasher”. And it’s a fair point
Well, now a robot can easily stack a dishwasher, and what’s more it can learn this simply by watching you do it first
“With enough strength and dexterity, Tesla's Bot could handle almost all physical tasks by simply looking at video clips of people doing said tasks.
Picking up a vacuum and running it through the house. Sorting and folding laundry. Tidying up the house. Moving material from point A to point B. Picking up trash and placing it in a bin. Pushing a lawnmower. Monitor an area for safety-related concerns. Laying bricks. Hammering nails. Using power tools. Clean dishes... etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”
I can find you a parrot that can recite poetry - doesn't mean it can write you any.
Are learning machines cool? Yes. But at the end of the day they're automatons that can, at a basic level, do simple tasks in relatively stable environments. Complex tasks in other scenarios are out of reach. All the hype is just sales - of course people who own stocks in AI companies would claim it would end the world or be the gadget of the future, because they'll rake the money in.
It is not coincidental that the new "AI is going to be able to do everything" line came after the "Meta is going to be the new frontier" fell through and the "NFTs and the blockchain are going to revolutionise everything" idea was proven false. Capitalism always needs a new frontier, to exploit and sell and commodify, and tech bros think they can build the next one. So far they're failing.
In my view the free chat programmes available online have written reasoning capabilities that exceed that of most graduate level professionals with over 20 years of high level report writing experience. They can write better than people who have been doing decision making and report writing for their entire career. From a management point of view they surpass most humans in knowing how to respond to situations in difficult correspondence exercises.
It is an inevitable human reaction to deny this or not look at it, but it won't help.
Do you mean ChatGPT, or is there a specific programme you mean? I think the most convincing ones are good at creating the approximation of human writing, until you learn it is either just lying (making up references and quotes and just general facts) or spewing nonsense (this often happens with coding where the coding looks correct, but is really just nonsense).
The way this stuff currently works is by taking the input, analysing words that are associated with the words relevant to that topic, and picking each word based on the likelihood that it is the most common word to follow the previous word. That requires it to read (and arguably steal) the work of existing people. It cannot think - it is not creating. It is a parrot - a big parrot, a complex parrot, a parrot that can maybe do some simple things - but a parrot. And that's selling parrots short, because I believe parrots have the ability of cognition.
So, is the robot video real, or not?
You still haven't told us, and you still don't realise the significance of that
Do I personally believe in the reality of a video on Twitter? I don't. Do I personally know it isn't real? No - that's why I have said I will await for credible sources to do reporting rather than just trust people chatting on a notoriously untrustworthy social media platform about a topic where there is so much undue hype.
OK, I'll help you out of your painful confusion: it's real
Here's a Stanford AI professor discussing it in great depth
"Let's reverse engineer the phenomenal Tesla Optimus. No insider info, just my own analysis. Long read:
1. The smooth hand movements are almost certainly trained by imitation learning ("behavior cloning") from human operators. The alternative is reinforcement learning in simulation, but that typically leads to jittery motion and unnatural hand poses.
There're at least 4 ways to collect human demonstrations:
(1) A custom-built teleoperation system - I believe this is the most likely means used by Tesla team. Open-source example: ALOHA, a low-cost bimanual robot arm and teleoperation system by Stanford AI Labs (https://tonyzhaozh.github.io/aloha/). It enables very precise, dexterous motions, such as putting AAA batteries into a remote or manipulating contact lens.
(2) Motion Capture (MoCap): apply the MoCap systems used for Hollywood movies to capture the fine-grained motions of hand joints..."
So this is a robot which is so astonishing you presumed it was fake, yet at the same time you dismiss it as meaningless
Any sufficiently advanced technology...
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." is an argument for being more skeptical of a video like this. It may be that the magic is half a trick, and the technology isn't there yet.
Edit: not the veracity of the video, its importance.
Confession: I ALSO thought it was fake when I first saw it. Even now it looks weird - it must be very deep in uncanny valley. However so many sane, highly-informed people on social media and elsewhere are saying Yes, this is real, I am guessing that this is real
No, see my edit which you quoted...
Others are also a touch befuddled:
"Tesla has released an update with progress on its Optimus humanoid robot with a video that almost looks like CGI."
On the boring subject of 'AI'... (I don't know how that differs from normal software and I don't care to find out) I've noticed that if I give my students a translation exercise with a completely fictitious word (that is a word looks like a French or Russian word but I've just made it up) then the ones who cheat with ChatGPT (or whatever) submit a translation in which the 'AI' has tried to infer the meaning of my made up word. The ones who tried to do it for real leave it blank and ask what the word means.
Yes, I've noticed that with the draft machine translations that I get to edit. The AI will always have a go, and it will usually stand out in the target (translated) text like a sore thumb. Sometimes it just gives up and inserts the text from the original language (which will occasionally be right, if it's a "word" used in multiple languages like "UNICEF" or indeed "AI").
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we have met aliens who can travel across space to visit us.
It's bizarre that more people aren't talking about this; if it is true* it is one of the biggest news stories in human history.
* It is not true
It really might be true
When I bang on about AI, @Benpointer always says “get back to me when a robot can stack my dishwasher”. And it’s a fair point
Well, now a robot can easily stack a dishwasher, and what’s more it can learn this simply by watching you do it first
“With enough strength and dexterity, Tesla's Bot could handle almost all physical tasks by simply looking at video clips of people doing said tasks.
Picking up a vacuum and running it through the house. Sorting and folding laundry. Tidying up the house. Moving material from point A to point B. Picking up trash and placing it in a bin. Pushing a lawnmower. Monitor an area for safety-related concerns. Laying bricks. Hammering nails. Using power tools. Clean dishes... etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”
I can find you a parrot that can recite poetry - doesn't mean it can write you any.
Are learning machines cool? Yes. But at the end of the day they're automatons that can, at a basic level, do simple tasks in relatively stable environments. Complex tasks in other scenarios are out of reach. All the hype is just sales - of course people who own stocks in AI companies would claim it would end the world or be the gadget of the future, because they'll rake the money in.
It is not coincidental that the new "AI is going to be able to do everything" line came after the "Meta is going to be the new frontier" fell through and the "NFTs and the blockchain are going to revolutionise everything" idea was proven false. Capitalism always needs a new frontier, to exploit and sell and commodify, and tech bros think they can build the next one. So far they're failing.
In my view the free chat programmes available online have written reasoning capabilities that exceed that of most graduate level professionals with over 20 years of high level report writing experience. They can write better than people who have been doing decision making and report writing for their entire career. From a management point of view they surpass most humans in knowing how to respond to situations in difficult correspondence exercises.
It is an inevitable human reaction to deny this or not look at it, but it won't help.
Do you mean ChatGPT, or is there a specific programme you mean? I think the most convincing ones are good at creating the approximation of human writing, until you learn it is either just lying (making up references and quotes and just general facts) or spewing nonsense (this often happens with coding where the coding looks correct, but is really just nonsense).
The way this stuff currently works is by taking the input, analysing words that are associated with the words relevant to that topic, and picking each word based on the likelihood that it is the most common word to follow the previous word. That requires it to read (and arguably steal) the work of existing people. It cannot think - it is not creating. It is a parrot - a big parrot, a complex parrot, a parrot that can maybe do some simple things - but a parrot. And that's selling parrots short, because I believe parrots have the ability of cognition.
So, is the robot video real, or not?
You still haven't told us, and you still don't realise the significance of that
Do I personally believe in the reality of a video on Twitter? I don't. Do I personally know it isn't real? No - that's why I have said I will await for credible sources to do reporting rather than just trust people chatting on a notoriously untrustworthy social media platform about a topic where there is so much undue hype.
OK, I'll help you out of your painful confusion: it's real
Here's a Stanford AI professor discussing it in great depth
"Let's reverse engineer the phenomenal Tesla Optimus. No insider info, just my own analysis. Long read:
1. The smooth hand movements are almost certainly trained by imitation learning ("behavior cloning") from human operators. The alternative is reinforcement learning in simulation, but that typically leads to jittery motion and unnatural hand poses.
There're at least 4 ways to collect human demonstrations:
(1) A custom-built teleoperation system - I believe this is the most likely means used by Tesla team. Open-source example: ALOHA, a low-cost bimanual robot arm and teleoperation system by Stanford AI Labs (https://tonyzhaozh.github.io/aloha/). It enables very precise, dexterous motions, such as putting AAA batteries into a remote or manipulating contact lens.
(2) Motion Capture (MoCap): apply the MoCap systems used for Hollywood movies to capture the fine-grained motions of hand joints..."
So this is a robot which is so astonishing you presumed it was fake, yet at the same time you dismiss it as meaningless
Any sufficiently advanced technology...
Me: I do not trust twitter as a source, I will wait for something more reputable to report on this. You: You idiot, you rube, you flounderer. Can't you see - that reputable report exists and I will show it to you. Me: Oh great, thanks You: provides twitter link HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA Me: -_-
NVIDIA: Senior AI Scientist. @Stanford PhD. Join me on the frontier of AI Agents, LLM & Robotics. MineDojo (NeurIPS Best Paper), Voyager. Ex: @OpenAI & @GoogleAI Get in touch →jimfan.meJoined December 2012 2,778 Following 138.9K Followers
The rather sad thing is that he asked you for a non-twitter link, you gave him a twitter link, he pointed this out, you gave him his twitter profile.
We are arguing in a virtual space about the veracity of a video depicting a robot that may or may not be a computer generated image about the truth or otherwise of an independent nonhuman intelligence by discussing a possibly fictional expert by pointing to his unverified credentials on a social media platform. Nobody has met these people or the robot. It's all pixels. PB has real problems in recognising reality
I gave two non-Twitter links earlier - articles in the Mail and a tech journal
There are tantalising rumours on TwitterX that we are alarmingly close to AGI - true Artificial Intelligence - or, that OpenAI have actually achieved it already
It’s bizarre that more people aren’t talking about this; if it is true it is one of the biggest news stories in human history
Thanks, mate. Keep us posted.
I can keep you posted on this.
It’s not happening today or this year, and there are a lot of gullible people on Twitter.
Fieldwork all post Rishi's announcement cancelling climate change. Three polls now so I think we can declare a bounce, of around 4-5%.
I think this shows the impact when you have one party opening up a contentious issue where the public is probably more evenly split than polling VI. It got a huge amount of press, and if even say 35% of people agreed with Rishi that might have been enough to push the polling up.
Long term it's a reversion to the polling numbers earlier in the summer, before quite a marked dip the week before the net zero anouncements.
Conservatives back ahead in the South too, 35% to 34% for Labour and 14% for the LDs.
Conservatives lead amongst Leavers extends to 47% to 21% for Labour and 17% for RefUK.
Conservatives also lead 51% to 20% with over 65s and narrow Labour's lead with 50-64s to 37% to 32%
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
My Spanish Father-in-Law doesn't understand why the UK doesn't build underground carparks as all the towns in Spain seem to have. Simples - because we are incompetent and corrupt. And they are not.
Hang on - I hear right wing voices say - the Spanish ARE corrupt. And that is true. And yet they can stick underground car parks into their towns and we can't afford to...
Planners don’t approve them because more parking encourages driving. Or something.
There's a fabulous u/g car park in Bloomsbury Square, WC1, in the shape of a double helix. You drive round and round and down and down and slowly you realise you're climbing and, before you find a space, you're back out in the daylight again.
Not far from where Rosalind Frankllin worked at KCL ... though the two strands of her helix were of the same handedness, unlike, presumably, yours!
Um hold on for a minute. Doesn't the handedness of one helix in a double helix dictate the handedness of the other? Otherwise they'd collide?
Exactly what I was wondering, unless they're not on the same longitudinal axis, which makes sense in this case (car park not DNA).
Fieldwork all post Rishi's announcement cancelling climate change. Three polls now so I think we can declare a bounce, of around 4-5%.
I think this shows the impact when you have one party opening up a contentious issue where the public is probably more evenly split than polling VI. It got a huge amount of press, and if even say 35% of people agreed with Rishi that might have been enough to push the polling up.
Long term it's a reversion to the polling numbers earlier in the summer, before quite a marked dip the week before the net zero anouncements.
Conservatives back ahead in the South too, 35% to 34% for Labour and 14% for the LDs.
Conservatives lead amongst Leavers extends to 47% to 21% for Labour and 17% for RefUK.
Conservatives also lead 51% to 20% with over 65s and narrow Labour's lead with 50-64s to 37% to 32%
Con + Reform is relatively close to Labour in a lot of recent polls. And most of those voters (Reform) may go back to the Tories in certain circumstances.
On the boring subject of 'AI'... (I don't know how that differs from normal software and I don't care to find out) I've noticed that if I give my students a translation exercise with a completely fictitious word (that is a word looks like a French or Russian word but I've just made it up) then the ones who cheat with ChatGPT (or whatever) submit a translation in which the 'AI' has tried to infer the meaning of my made up word. The ones who tried to do it for real leave it blank and ask what the word means.
Maybe I'm very naive but I find it odd that some students who've presumably been told not to use ChatGPT decide to go ahead and use it anyway.
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
My Spanish Father-in-Law doesn't understand why the UK doesn't build underground carparks as all the towns in Spain seem to have. Simples - because we are incompetent and corrupt. And they are not.
Hang on - I hear right wing voices say - the Spanish ARE corrupt. And that is true. And yet they can stick underground car parks into their towns and we can't afford to...
I haven't heard of this before - can we have examples of these underground car parks in all the towns in Spain?
Quite common in France - the classic in towns such as Fontainebleau is that they dug out the town square, and then put a nice tuned up version of the town square back on top.
I was pondering yesterday on the strange anomaly of airports. If ever there were a good place to have underground parking these are surely it:
- everyone hates going out miles on a shuttle bus to a huge car park on the perimeter, and it’s a mad waste of hectares of land - You can’t build very tall multi-storeys because of the planes, and it’s a waste to have one right by the terminal like in LHR when that could be taken by airport hotels - They dig up the land and create all sorts of ducting and subterranean units when they create airports anyway, why not bury a huge car park at the same time?
Obviously not directly under the runway but adjacent and below the terminals.
The other thing is solar plants. Why on earth isn’t every airport and airfield carpeted with solar arrays, given the land can’t be used for anything else and is already brownfield?
A fair point, but consider safety. At present running off the tarmac onto the grass isn't a huge disaster per se, as the plane has a fair chance to slow down in relative safety. But if one clutters it up with lots of steel girders and solar panels ...
I don't suppose the passengers would like it either. (I also wonder about the effect on airfield surveillance radar, too.)
Yes fair enough. I've looked it up to see if any airports do use them. Nice article from Wired a couple of years ago discussing the pros and cons
Also - ISTR that LHR composts tdhe grass clippings.
Not sure if this is for methane for heating, but it would then be solar power collection, no?
You can still have grass growing under panels. And you can graze sheep, though that might be suboptimal next to an airport runway unless you want a regular supply of self-made lamb kofta.
Definitely not next to the runway or taxiway. Sheep are bloody idiots (always go slow if there is a sheep looking stupid in your way on a country road). Some would be bound to run in front of the plane. And one doesn't want one's port engine cooking up a sheep just when one is committed to takeoff ...
They already spend a lot of time and money trying to keep birds away, it’s enough of an effort without introducing uncooked lamb chops into the sterile environment!
I spent a couple of minutes trying to find out about grass and airports and came across a blog by the relevant chap (at Cardiff Rhoose?) - his operations are on the level of paying considerable attention also to the insect life and spraying if necessary (fewer insects = less food = fewer birds). He even had to phone up and talk to the farmer next door whose pea crop was attracting aphids = lots of swallows = unhappy pilots. Said farmer denied it till they met on the field - the pilots had seen the swallows which had spotted the aphids before the farmer had been round that very day.
Fieldwork all post Rishi's announcement cancelling climate change. Three polls now so I think we can declare a bounce, of around 4-5%.
I think this shows the impact when you have one party opening up a contentious issue where the public is probably more evenly split than polling VI. It got a huge amount of press, and if even say 35% of people agreed with Rishi that might have been enough to push the polling up.
Long term it's a reversion to the polling numbers earlier in the summer, before quite a marked dip the week before the net zero anouncements.
Yes, fair analysis. I wonder if that slightly changes the odds for the by-elections, where the PVs went out last weekend.
Note that the Labour lead is now significantly higher among ABC1 voters, who are presumably less worried about paying £s to reduce climate change (I know it was largely fake talk by Sunak, but that's the message he was pushing).
On the boring subject of 'AI'... (I don't know how that differs from normal software and I don't care to find out) I've noticed that if I give my students a translation exercise with a completely fictitious word (that is a word looks like a French or Russian word but I've just made it up) then the ones who cheat with ChatGPT (or whatever) submit a translation in which the 'AI' has tried to infer the meaning of my made up word. The ones who tried to do it for real leave it blank and ask what the word means.
Maybe I'm very naive but I find it odd that some students who've presumably been told not to use ChatGPT decide to go ahead and use it anyway.
Soon there will be chatbots that are entirely indistinguishable from humans, and undetectable as AI. Lord knows what educators (and others) do then
My older daughter has been composing her personal statement for Uni application. She did a REALLY good job and I was proud of her. And yet, as I read it, I got the sinking feeling that in about 6 months ChatGPT5 will be able to outdo her - it can already outdo a few of her friends (she showed me some other statements when I asked)
The market is deciding. The hysteria about the announcement last week was partly synthetic and partly misplaced. Just because people can sell something doesn’t mean they will.
Auto makers work on cycle times of years on products and platforms. They’d not be likely to chop and change at the govts whim.
But this can't be true. It was Keir Starmer forcing Nissan et al to ditch petrol. Sunak saved people from having to buy an electric car, it was in all the right newspapers and TV news shows. Thanks to Rishi making Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future, the dread threat of all EV by 2030 was removed.
Nissan must be mistaken .
Nissan don't make new cars at the £13k entry level range of the market like the Kia Picanto etc
By 2030 it seems entirely plausible that an electric juke will be as cheap as a petrol Juke, but it does not look likely that an electric Picanto would be available as cheap as a petrol Picanto.
So again, if in 6 years time if you could get a cheap petrol vehicle like the Picanto for £13k in real terms, but if the cheapest electric is in real terms £21k (currently £27k is cheapest) then should the Picanto be outlawed and people who want to buy it be forced to pay eight grand more?
We need to continue with what the market has been doing from Tesla onwards which is to start at the top of the market and work down with electrification, not the other way around. If in 2030 the only petrol vehicles the market still offers is 1.0 litre runarounds like the Picanto simply because electrification of them isn't affordably ready yet, then what's the harm in that?
We shouldn't really go by capital price but by the cost paid per month by the purchaser. Given that only a very small fraction of people buying new cars pay cash on the full price for them, and 80-80% get PCP (we can debate the wisdom of going the PCP route, but for this, we simply recognise that such is the default route to new car purchase at the moment and therefore what the market will be following), we need to look at the main monthly expenditure of the purchaser.
Which is PCP monthly payment plus petrol or electricity costs.
Petrol comes in at c. £1.50 per litre at the moment.
The majority of those buying electric cars will be recharging at home overnight (70%+: there's a need to address the needs of those who cannot do this, but, again, the overall market is driven by those who can do this. And the core need would be to fill in the gap for those who can't). At the moment, an EV tariff from Octopus gives £0.075 per kWh overnight.
The Picanto does c. 13 miles per litre. Assuming the default given by Kia on their finance calculator of 10,000 miles per year, that costs £1,155 per year in petrol, or £96.30 per month. The finance calculator for the Picanto gives (at 10% down payment of £1,350) a cost of £206.58 per month on PCP. This leads to a cost on PCP plus fuel of £302.88 per month to the purchaser.
The Ceed comes in at £21k, so the finance for a putative £21k Kia EV can be looked at on the same site (which helps) and comes out at £342.02 per month (using the same £1350 deposit, which is under 10% this time and probably incurs a slightly higher interest rate, but we need it to be comparable for the purchaser). If the EV has an efficiency similar to the MGZ4 (3.8 miles/kWh), it would cost £197.37 per year in electricity, or £16.45 per month). Cost is then £358.37 per month to the purchaser for PCP plus electricity.
The difference is therefore 18% more expensive to the purchaser for the 21k EV over the 13k ICE rather than the 61% of the sticker price. You only need the price to fall to about £18k to be the same affordability as a £13k ICE to the purchaser, to all intents and purposes.
A large portion of people buying cheap small cars are parking on the street not off road. I certainly was.
Even based on your average that 30% will not be recharging at home overnight that needs to be included in the maths, but I strongly suspect that 30% is disproportionately those buying smaller, cheaper vehicles.
Compare like-for-like by comparing recharging rates at commercial charging stations and redo your maths.
Want to fix electric for everyone? Addressing the charging issue is the biggest issue to tackle, not quibble over a year or two for the transition to electric.
Perhaps we should ban on-road parking, like the Japanese?
Would free up space equivalent to 16 motorways.
My Spanish Father-in-Law doesn't understand why the UK doesn't build underground carparks as all the towns in Spain seem to have. Simples - because we are incompetent and corrupt. And they are not.
Hang on - I hear right wing voices say - the Spanish ARE corrupt. And that is true. And yet they can stick underground car parks into their towns and we can't afford to...
I haven't heard of this before - can we have examples of these underground car parks in all the towns in Spain?
Quite common in France - the classic in towns such as Fontainebleau is that they dug out the town square, and then put a nice tuned up version of the town square back on top.
I was pondering yesterday on the strange anomaly of airports. If ever there were a good place to have underground parking these are surely it:
- everyone hates going out miles on a shuttle bus to a huge car park on the perimeter, and it’s a mad waste of hectares of land - You can’t build very tall multi-storeys because of the planes, and it’s a waste to have one right by the terminal like in LHR when that could be taken by airport hotels - They dig up the land and create all sorts of ducting and subterranean units when they create airports anyway, why not bury a huge car park at the same time?
Obviously not directly under the runway but adjacent and below the terminals.
The other thing is solar plants. Why on earth isn’t every airport and airfield carpeted with solar arrays, given the land can’t be used for anything else and is already brownfield?
I was speaking to a friend a while ago who does loads of planning for advertising at airports and was asking why they don’t do more on the land away from the runways and he said there are really strict rules about things that can distract pilots so I guess a solar field right by an airport would theoretically be a risk if the sun was glinting off it etc. I think airport dpsafety takes an understandably extreme position on safety so sight distractions or anything on any potential run-off area which could jeopardise an emergency landing is a no-no.
Yes, glare could pontentially be an issue, so airport solar arrays would need a specific coating - which if it’s anything like anything else in aviation, will need the airport authorities to certify every specific type of panel, require specifically trained and certified technicians to install them, be able to have them covered at short notice if requested, be away from any areas designated as overrun for a landing or departing aircraft etc. It all gets very expensive very quickly.
Before it closed* Flatland airport made a fuss about every planning application within 10 miles
Make a pond somewhere near the flightline? Might attract birds, object. Dig a quarry somewhere near the flightline? Might attract birds, object. Put up a solar farm? Might distract the pilot, object. Put some wind turbines up 10 miles out? Might clutter our radar, object.
(I have seen all of these)
*Despite going on about Net Zero, apparently re-opening the airport is Doncaster council's "Number One Priority".
Because an airport brings prestige to an area and (depending on the criteria the council uses) attracts jobs...
I don't disagree, but it does seem rather a conflict.
On the one hand the Tory government are terrible for delaying electric car mandates, but on the other hand we want more flights...
The council did look a bit stupid after they paid lots of money to build a link road (that would never be needed according to the original plan for the airport) and then watched the airport close a couple of years later.
Some conspiracists might suggest that Peel never really wanted an airport and just wanted an excuse to develop the site.
Manston too might be relevant. You know, the airport for which PB's second* favourite piece of modern architecture was built, Thanet Parkway railway station.
*Or possibly not, if it ties with the Turd Hotel for first.
Regarding the video, I don't think it's AI generated, but I do think it is sped-up compared to reality. If you look at the moments when a block is pushed by a human, or when one falls slightly, they happen far too rapidly. (Indeed, they look like the block is snapping into place.)
That's a tell tale sign that it has been sped up.
Edit to add: I think the speeding up is also the reason it looks fake. There are too many moments where it seems slightly off.
On the boring subject of 'AI'... (I don't know how that differs from normal software and I don't care to find out) I've noticed that if I give my students a translation exercise with a completely fictitious word (that is a word looks like a French or Russian word but I've just made it up) then the ones who cheat with ChatGPT (or whatever) submit a translation in which the 'AI' has tried to infer the meaning of my made up word. The ones who tried to do it for real leave it blank and ask what the word means.
Maybe I'm very naive but I find it odd that some students who've presumably been told not to use ChatGPT decide to go ahead and use it anyway.
Soon there will be chatbots that are entirely indistinguishable from humans, and undetectable as AI. Lord knows what educators (and others) do then
My older daughter has been composing her personal statement for Uni application. She did a REALLY good job and I was proud of her. And yet, as I read it, I got the sinking feeling that in about 6 months ChatGPT5 will be able to outdo her - it can already outdo a few of her friends (she showed me some other statements when I asked)
Skills change.
Now the key skill is coming up with the right prompts for ChatGPT, and being able to make sure what it produces doesn't look AI generated.
Fieldwork all post Rishi's announcement cancelling climate change. Three polls now so I think we can declare a bounce, of around 4-5%.
I think this shows the impact when you have one party opening up a contentious issue where the public is probably more evenly split than polling VI. It got a huge amount of press, and if even say 35% of people agreed with Rishi that might have been enough to push the polling up.
Long term it's a reversion to the polling numbers earlier in the summer, before quite a marked dip the week before the net zero anouncements.
Yes, fair analysis. I wonder if that slightly changes the odds for the by-elections, where the PVs went out last weekend.
Note that the Labour lead is now significantly higher among ABC1 voters, who are presumably less worried about paying £s to reduce climate change (I know it was largely fake talk by Sunak, but that's the message he was pushing).
They'll be a useful test of how powerful the "motorist's friend" schtick is. Sunak has clearly decided to take a punt on it.
...or not. Consensus seems to be the Tories took a dip the week before largely because of RAAC and the chaos around it. So this may largely be an unwind of that effect, and reversion to the status quo ante.
Fieldwork all post Rishi's announcement cancelling climate change. Three polls now so I think we can declare a bounce, of around 4-5%.
I think this shows the impact when you have one party opening up a contentious issue where the public is probably more evenly split than polling VI. It got a huge amount of press, and if even say 35% of people agreed with Rishi that might have been enough to push the polling up.
Long term it's a reversion to the polling numbers earlier in the summer, before quite a marked dip the week before the net zero anouncements.
A glimmer of good news for Sunak and maybe he has struck a cord with his recent announcements
On the boring subject of 'AI'... (I don't know how that differs from normal software and I don't care to find out) I've noticed that if I give my students a translation exercise with a completely fictitious word (that is a word looks like a French or Russian word but I've just made it up) then the ones who cheat with ChatGPT (or whatever) submit a translation in which the 'AI' has tried to infer the meaning of my made up word. The ones who tried to do it for real leave it blank and ask what the word means.
Maybe I'm very naive but I find it odd that some students who've presumably been told not to use ChatGPT decide to go ahead and use it anyway.
Soon there will be chatbots that are entirely indistinguishable from humans, and undetectable as AI. Lord knows what educators (and others) do then
My older daughter has been composing her personal statement for Uni application. She did a REALLY good job and I was proud of her. And yet, as I read it, I got the sinking feeling that in about 6 months ChatGPT5 will be able to outdo her - it can already outdo a few of her friends (she showed me some other statements when I asked)
Skills change.
Now the key skill is coming up with the right prompts for ChatGPT, and being able to make sure what it produces doesn't look AI generated.
As of now, AI is at the standard of a pretty average A Level student.
On the boring subject of 'AI'... (I don't know how that differs from normal software and I don't care to find out) I've noticed that if I give my students a translation exercise with a completely fictitious word (that is a word looks like a French or Russian word but I've just made it up) then the ones who cheat with ChatGPT (or whatever) submit a translation in which the 'AI' has tried to infer the meaning of my made up word. The ones who tried to do it for real leave it blank and ask what the word means.
Maybe I'm very naive but I find it odd that some students who've presumably been told not to use ChatGPT decide to go ahead and use it anyway.
Soon there will be chatbots that are entirely indistinguishable from humans, and undetectable as AI. Lord knows what educators (and others) do then
My older daughter has been composing her personal statement for Uni application. She did a REALLY good job and I was proud of her. And yet, as I read it, I got the sinking feeling that in about 6 months ChatGPT5 will be able to outdo her - it can already outdo a few of her friends (she showed me some other statements when I asked)
Hello again and a good sunny afternoon again, all.
My nephew teaches at one of the more liberal-intellectual of the top public schools ( St Paul's, Westminster , Winchester etc, without naming which ) . He says that ChatGPT is a "growing problem" " particularly among the more lazy but also more able students, which I found interesting. It seems a lot of cleverer students enjoy the challenge of succesfully integrating ChatGpT's work with their own, thus simultaneously saving a lot of time, and simlutaneously outwitting the staff. This is apparently the latest thing as a trendy new skill among the pupils, which the teachers are trying to train themselves to recognise, and know when they see them.
A fairly healthy 11% Green and LD vote to squeeze if those numbers are correct, with a 10% Ref vote who I suspect might not turn out unless they're suddenly drawn to Motorists' Friend and scourge of woke climatologists Sunak.
Fieldwork all post Rishi's announcement cancelling climate change. Three polls now so I think we can declare a bounce, of around 4-5%.
I think this shows the impact when you have one party opening up a contentious issue where the public is probably more evenly split than polling VI. It got a huge amount of press, and if even say 35% of people agreed with Rishi that might have been enough to push the polling up.
Long term it's a reversion to the polling numbers earlier in the summer, before quite a marked dip the week before the net zero anouncements.
Conservatives back ahead in the South too, 35% to 34% for Labour and 14% for the LDs.
Conservatives lead amongst Leavers extends to 47% to 21% for Labour and 17% for RefUK.
Conservatives also lead 51% to 20% with over 65s and narrow Labour's lead with 50-64s to 37% to 32%
Fieldwork all post Rishi's announcement cancelling climate change. Three polls now so I think we can declare a bounce, of around 4-5%.
I think this shows the impact when you have one party opening up a contentious issue where the public is probably more evenly split than polling VI. It got a huge amount of press, and if even say 35% of people agreed with Rishi that might have been enough to push the polling up.
Long term it's a reversion to the polling numbers earlier in the summer, before quite a marked dip the week before the net zero anouncements.
A glimmer of good news for Sunak and maybe he has struck a cord with his recent announcements
Only time will tell though
At any rate, it did him no harm.
Meanwhile the earth just had its warmest ever daily anomaly, yet again. Well over 1.5C above pre-industrial level.
Fieldwork all post Rishi's announcement cancelling climate change. Three polls now so I think we can declare a bounce, of around 4-5%.
I think this shows the impact when you have one party opening up a contentious issue where the public is probably more evenly split than polling VI. It got a huge amount of press, and if even say 35% of people agreed with Rishi that might have been enough to push the polling up.
Long term it's a reversion to the polling numbers earlier in the summer, before quite a marked dip the week before the net zero anouncements.
Conservatives back ahead in the South too, 35% to 34% for Labour and 14% for the LDs.
Conservatives lead amongst Leavers extends to 47% to 21% for Labour and 17% for RefUK.
Conservatives also lead 51% to 20% with over 65s and narrow Labour's lead with 50-64s to 37% to 32%
Con + Reform is relatively close to Labour in a lot of recent polls. And most of those voters (Reform) may go back to the Tories in certain circumstances.
Call me cynical, but I have my doubts that a decent proportion of Reform voters are enthusiastic about having a Prime Minister and Home Secretary whose families hail from the Indian subcontinent. Relying on those with racist tendencies to come "home" under such circumstances may be wishful thinking. Mind you, it is clearly a tactic that gives Suella some confidence.
Comments
Russian is the most widely spoken native language in Europe.
Translation: It's not here.
Not sure if this is for methane for heating, but it would then be solar power collection, no?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66923824
Yes, this has been going on for quite a while. Cross-reference neo-feudalism of the Noughties and Tens with techno-feudalism of the Tens and Twenties and it can be seen that they are actually the same phenomenon. Transnational entities are unaccountable to the nation state and so cannot be ameliorated. Recall my rant that the new building explosion in London is being underpinned by Qatari development funds, and that's just one example. Whether it's Musk moving factories to China because its nonunionized slave labour, or China investing in Africa and buying ports, or Tatar buying a steel mill in Wales and expecting perpetual subsidies, transnational entities exert power that is not mitigated by an increasingly enfeebled nation state. It is genuinely ironic that PB, so full of Brexiteers, wilfully declines to understand this. Benn's Five Questions applies.
https://twitter.com/EnglishRadical/status/1032949579904376833
https://www.mylondon.news/news/zone-1-news/london-buildings-owned-qatar-fully-25779266
Anything similar built from now on should be shrouded in solar panels, I agree.
Only time will tell though
https://twitter.com/drunpleasant/status/1706626845615984852
"Stay and Fight" latest - only Starmer approved topics allowed for debate:
https://twitter.com/i/status/1687690852456402944
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driff_Field
Did any of PB's book traders come across him ?
Take your Qatari investments, they're only worthwhile because of our pathetically broken housing market that inflates the value of assets and cuts out competition.
If a Government gets a cojones to actually take on the NIMBYs and reform the housing market, then the Qatari investments would crash in value.
Some here would cry crocodile tears about how affordable housing equals negative equity. I won't. Let the Qatari investments become worthless, that's in our hands, they have no recourse to that.
Or they can make speeches and talk hard.
Which do you think they are going to do?
https://www.tiktok.com/@espn/video/7214521766394514734?lang=en
Cold as ice.
I have no idea how this very serious and difficult issue is addressed but then neither does anybody with no apparent solution in sight
My brother in law ended up in a near fatal situation earlier in the summer and was in hospital for months, but he ignored acute symptoms for days before the final admission and pretty worrying chronic symptoms for at least 5 years before finally going to A&E in crisis. With him it was definitely a case of not wanting to make a fuss mixed with denial - if you don't get checked out the illness isn't real.
I've certainly been reluctant to go down to A&E in the last couple of years and needed to be pushed to do so by my wife, once with an infected animal bite, once with broken bones and once with a deep wound. For me the prospect of waiting hours and then being fobbed off or made worse was the main obstacle.
And in any even, half the world's economies will need economic migrants.
Here's a Stanford AI professor discussing it in great depth
"Let's reverse engineer the phenomenal Tesla Optimus. No insider info, just my own analysis. Long read:
1. The smooth hand movements are almost certainly trained by imitation learning ("behavior cloning") from human operators. The alternative is reinforcement learning in simulation, but that typically leads to jittery motion and unnatural hand poses.
There're at least 4 ways to collect human demonstrations:
(1) A custom-built teleoperation system - I believe this is the most likely means used by Tesla team. Open-source example: ALOHA, a low-cost bimanual robot arm and teleoperation system by Stanford AI Labs (https://tonyzhaozh.github.io/aloha/). It enables very precise, dexterous motions, such as putting AAA batteries into a remote or manipulating contact lens.
(2) Motion Capture (MoCap): apply the MoCap systems used for Hollywood movies to capture the fine-grained motions of hand joints..."
(there is much more)
https://x.com/DrJimFan/status/1705982525825503282?s=20
So this is a robot which is so astonishing you presumed it was fake, yet at the same time you dismiss it as meaningless
Any sufficiently advanced technology...
In terms of the worries about going to A&E - just use 111. Are they annoying when they read out the checklist of stuff to make sure it isn't a stroke or heart attack (when you know it isn't those things)? Yes. But if your symptoms tick enough boxes you will get a GP phone call within an hour or two (in my experience) and that GP will tell you if you should go to A&E or not. That way you can know whether it is worth going to A&E without worrying about adding pressure onto hospitals AND you're essentially kind of triaged so your wait in A&E (whilst still long) won't be the longest.
Over-processed virtual sets, weird jerky body movements, speaking with unnatural cadences, and everyone standing in exactly the same 2015-style power pose. And those are definitely real people!
https://www.youtube.com/live/ZiP1l7jlIIA?t=240
Even the tory ravaged RN has more than enough assets and people to completely lock down that stretch of water if the will were there. Stick Albion and Argus in the middle with two flights of Lynx (with fucking nutters on the door guns) and have Rivers as pickets. No subs or aviation threats to worry so you don't even need any T23/T45,
This government doesn't have the wit or the will to sail a fore-and-aft rigged dinghy across the Serpentine in Hyde Park.
AI girlfriends are ruining an entire generation of men
https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/4218666-ai-girlfriends-are-ruining-an-entire-generation-of-men/
"Wait, can we consider seriously the hypothesis that
1) the recent hyped tweets from OA's staff
2) "AGI has been achieved internally"
3) sama's comments on the qualification of slow or fast takeoff hinging on the date you count from
4) sama's comments on 10000x researchers
are actually mapping to something true?
The implications are so crazy in terms of power shift. Or level of risks over the next few months.
Could some forecasters try to get a better estimate or share their own forecast on it?"
https://x.com/Simeon_Cps/status/1706078819617063304?s=20
Edit: not the veracity of the video, its importance.
Really need to clear the address history!
I posted this on Linkedin in a comment thread discussing AI and the head of the organisation who I know professionally made clear to me he was aware of this (obviously they have done similar exercises).
I had a similar view on GPT to you prior to this. But a lawyer who runs an outsourcing firm explained they thought it was rapidly advancing and indicated they were starting to use it in work contracted out to them by local authorities, automatically generating correspondence relating to civil law breaches and also drafting legal notices, albeit corrected by humans. So what is clear is that it is already here and taking over work done by professionals.
Hmm
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-12557737/Downward-facing-BOT-Watch-Teslas-humanoid-robot-Optimus-performs-yoga.html
https://www.autoevolution.com/news/optimus-bot-shows-incredibly-human-like-motions-fluidity-as-tesla-ramps-hiring-efforts-221658.html
Confession: I ALSO thought it was fake when I first saw it. Even now it looks weird - it must be very deep in uncanny valley. However so many sane, highly-informed people on social media and elsewhere are saying Yes, this is real, I am guessing that this is real
You: You idiot, you rube, you flounderer. Can't you see - that reputable report exists and I will show it to you.
Me: Oh great, thanks
You: provides twitter link HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Me: -_-
Dishwasher filling and unloading is beyond these tasks, but probably not wildly beyond them.
If people start using this sort of tech for medical advice, without proper stringent checking, people will die. Then there are data privacy issues - and the AI firms have already shown they don't care about data rights.
@DrJimFan
NVIDIA: Senior AI Scientist. @Stanford PhD.
Join me on the frontier of AI Agents, LLM & Robotics. MineDojo (NeurIPS Best Paper), Voyager. Ex: @OpenAI & @GoogleAI
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Make a pond somewhere near the flightline? Might attract birds, object.
Dig a quarry somewhere near the flightline? Might attract birds, object.
Put up a solar farm? Might distract the pilot, object.
Put some wind turbines up 10 miles out? Might clutter our radar, object.
(I have seen all of these)
*Despite going on about Net Zero, apparently re-opening the airport is Doncaster council's "Number One Priority".
All caught up in culture war stuff now, so who knows what was really going on: https://slate.com/technology/2017/10/did-power-posing-guru-amy-cuddy-deserve-her-public-shaming.html
What's certain is that loads of late middle age politicos / CxOs still love it!
"Tesla has released an update with progress on its Optimus humanoid robot with a video that almost looks like CGI."
https://electrek.co/2023/09/24/tesla-update-optimus-robot-video-cgi/
So it will be back to exam halls, and handwritten papers. We use software such as Turnitin to detect plagiarism in work, but as far as I know Turnitin does not pick up ChatGPT, and will struggle to. Your test is an interesting example where cheating can be found.
However, I think humans can detect ChatGPT answers at the moment, at least in my limited field. We had some examples in a chemistry re-sit exam. The language used to answer some of the longer form questions is clearly not from the student (non- English extraction).
On the one hand the Tory government are terrible for delaying electric car mandates, but on the other hand we want more flights...
The council did look a bit stupid after they paid lots of money to build a link road (that would never be needed according to the original plan for the airport) and then watched the airport close a couple of years later.
Some conspiracists might suggest that Peel never really wanted an airport and just wanted an excuse to develop the site.
Admiral Viktor Sokolov, the commander of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, is apparently not dead, according to this photo released by the MOD today, despite Ukraine’s claims to have killed him last week.
https://twitter.com/maxseddon/status/1706624970535669817
Definitely nothing to do with Storm Shadow.
Planned in Kyiv.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/09/bob-smith-is-finally-gone-from-blue-origin-his-replacement-comes-from-amazon/
However, to me, that video is quite obviously fake, the very best robots - for big stuff like this - are Boston Dynamics, and they are not near that speed yet - but maybe only a few years away
The Tesla Optimus is disturbing and perplexing because it is right on the line where magic apparently meets advanced tech, and down in the uncanny valley where a robot is nearly-convincing as a human but not quite
They heat up more readily than grassland and you always get bumpy air just over them.
It’s not happening today or this year, and there are a lot of gullible people on Twitter.
Looking at Heathrow NOTAMs (notices to airmen), there’s 11 temporary cranes close to the airport mentioned, as well as a number of firework displays, searchlight displays, filming locations etc, as well as various works actually going on at the airport itself.
https://ourairports.com/airports/EGLL/notams.html
Having said that, if the robot ping pong video was done automatically, that's impressive in itself.
We are arguing in a virtual space about the veracity of a video depicting a robot that may or may not be a computer generated image about the truth or otherwise of an independent nonhuman intelligence by discussing a possibly fictional expert by pointing to his unverified credentials on a social media platform. Nobody has met these people or the robot. It's all pixels. PB has real problems in recognising reality
The jilting of Ukraine, a bonfire of treaties, but perhaps a surprise on China
Janan Ganesh"
https://www.ft.com/content/3b15d02c-9835-481d-8ee7-b1ebcebe23e6
Conservatives lead amongst Leavers extends to 47% to 21% for Labour and 17% for RefUK.
Conservatives also lead 51% to 20% with over 65s and narrow Labour's lead with 50-64s to 37% to 32%
https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/TheTimes_VI_230922_W.pdf
Note that the Labour lead is now significantly higher among ABC1 voters, who are presumably less worried about paying £s to reduce climate change (I know it was largely fake talk by Sunak, but that's the message he was pushing).
My older daughter has been composing her personal statement for Uni application. She did a REALLY good job and I was proud of her. And yet, as I read it, I got the sinking feeling that in about 6 months ChatGPT5 will be able to outdo her - it can already outdo a few of her friends (she showed me some other statements when I asked)
*Or possibly not, if it ties with the Turd Hotel for first.
That's a tell tale sign that it has been sped up.
Edit to add: I think the speeding up is also the reason it looks fake. There are too many moments where it seems slightly off.
Now the key skill is coming up with the right prompts for ChatGPT, and being able to make sure what it produces doesn't look AI generated.
...or not. Consensus seems to be the Tories took a dip the week before largely because of RAAC and the chaos around it. So this may largely be an unwind of that effect, and reversion to the status quo ante.
My nephew teaches at one of the more liberal-intellectual of the top public schools ( St Paul's, Westminster , Winchester etc, without naming which ) . He says that ChatGPT is a "growing problem" " particularly among the more lazy but also more able students, which I found interesting. It seems a lot of cleverer students enjoy the challenge of succesfully integrating ChatGpT's work with their own, thus simultaneously saving a lot of time, and simlutaneously outwitting the staff. This is apparently the latest thing as a trendy new skill among the pupils, which the teachers are trying to train themselves to recognise, and know when they see them.
Lab and Con neck and neck in Tamworth
https://x.com/BNHWalker/status/1706656062571483487?s=20
A fairly healthy 11% Green and LD vote to squeeze if those numbers are correct, with a 10% Ref vote who I suspect might not turn out unless they're suddenly drawn to Motorists' Friend and scourge of woke climatologists Sunak.