"The cost of processing a card payment has increased by 600 per cent in the past nine years, according to campaign group Axe the Card Tax."
Doubt.
Maybe costs per card transaction have gone down, but if most of a business's transactions used to be cash with only a few card transactions, they would only have paid the card transaction cost occasionally. If they have to pay it nearly all the time it would add up to more overall?
On the other hand, cash has a cost and you would have had to secure cash on the premises and pay insurance.
They are cognate. As I discovered in the Swabian castle of Siracusa last week. The word “grenade” comes from the French for “pomegranate” because the first, ceramic grenades looked like pomegranates
"The cost of processing a card payment has increased by 600 per cent in the past nine years, according to campaign group Axe the Card Tax."
Doubt.
Maybe costs per card transaction have gone down, but if most of a business's transactions used to be cash with only a few card transactions, they would only have paid the card transaction cost occasionally. If they have to pay it nearly all the time it would add up to more overall?
On the other hand, cash has a cost and you would have had to secure cash on the premises and pay insurance.
It's a much lower cost than card as long as you have a bank branch with a night safe nearby.
They are cognate. As I discovered in the Swabian castle of Siracusa last week. The word “grenade” comes from the French for “pomegranate” because the first, ceramic grenades looked like pomegranates
R&W have the Labour lead back at 20 points. It was 20 points in the first poll of the year in January so to say little has changed wouldn't be an understatement. The Conservatives bump around the mid to upper 20s. Labour bumps around the mid to upper 40s. The gap between Starmer and Sunak on the who would be the better PM question widens slightly but is now 12 points.
The England numbers are Labour 46%, Conservative 26%, Liberal Democrat 13% which is a 16.5% swing since 2019 and an 11% swing from Conservative to Liberal Democrat. The YouGov numbers last week were Labour 49%, Conservative 26% and Liberal Democrat 10%.
They are cognate. As I discovered in the Swabian castle of Siracusa last week. The word “grenade” comes from the French for “pomegranate” because the first, ceramic grenades looked like pomegranates
Language is fascinating. So much hidden history in words and phrases.
"The cost of processing a card payment has increased by 600 per cent in the past nine years, according to campaign group Axe the Card Tax."
Doubt.
They says costs are 2.5% now so back in 2014 costs were 0.004%?
I call fucking bullshit.
0.4%, Shirley? 600 percent is six times.
I still call fucking bullshit.
Card costs have come down.
Numerical calculation out by a factor of 100 but fronting it out and doubling down on your original claim, bold. Have you considered a career in politics, young man?
It was a lack of self confidence that stopped me going into politics.
I am way too modest for politics.
I can imagine.
I really did consider going into politics 20 years ago but there were a few insurmountable barriers
1) I would be considered gaffe prone for saying outrageous things with my colour metaphors. Apparently I have a tendency to say funny things which you really cannot say in polite society.
2) My mother wouldn't be able to cope with the constant attacks politicians come under. My private life is erm colourful. Her muslim ladies who lunch group would be ashamed by me.
3) MP pay is shit, I couldn't afford all my shoes and clothes on an MP's salary.
4) I have to keep my mind occupied, I really couldn't sit on the backbenches for a few years, I need to go straight into the cabinet.
When I was asked by the local party to consider it I went through a similar process and decided that:
1. I don't want the hassle of being backbench MP in opposition as would likely be the case by the time I won 2. It would be a gigantic pay cut and I'm not really up for it 3. I'm prone to speaking my mind and that means my ceiling is probably quite limited and the party machinery would see an end to any career beyond being a dreary constituency MP that asks the odd question on behalf of some old dear that can't use the NHS app to book an appointment. 4. And I can't stress this one enough, it would have made my wife extremely unhappy and ultimately that was the decision maker.
Speaking of achievements: This morning I leaned that Magic Johnson has become the fourth athete to become a billionaire (much of it from investments). (Fortune magazine)
The previous three? LeBron James, Michael Jordan, and Tiger Woods.
They are cognate. As I discovered in the Swabian castle of Siracusa last week. The word “grenade” comes from the French for “pomegranate” because the first, ceramic grenades looked like pomegranates
Language is fascinating. So much hidden history in words and phrases.
Pomegranate would be a good name for an English kitchen brand in Australia.
"Stats for Lefties @LeftieStats 🚨 BREAKING: Leftist MP Andy McDonald has been suspended from Labour for a pro-Palestine speech.
In his speech, McDonald said: "We won’t rest ... until all people ... between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty."
Labour says this speech was "deeply offensive"."
Israelis and Palestinians living in peaceful liberty is deeply offensive
FFS SKS FANS please explain
Had that been what he wanted to say, he should have said so. Including a catchphrase which is a (barely) plausibly deniable call for getting rid of Israel completely isn't really something Starmer can pretend not to notice.
Also, he has form. He defended Corbyn over that mural, was one of the MPs who refused to sign the IHRA's definition of anti-semitism and once said in the same breath that he'd been to Auschwitz and the West Bank, meaning he had to clarify he didn't think Israelis were comparable to Nazis (which he did rather unconvincingly).
Put it this way, if I had a record like that and didn't want to be accused of being a stupid racist, I would pick my words very, very carefully and certainly not choose a phrase used to call for genocide in any interview no matter what I meant.
But because he seems to think as a left-wing person he can't possibly be a racist he clearly didn't.
An attitude of blind arrogance mingled with some pretty unsavoury personal attitudes and a stunning lack of self-awareness we've been seeing far too often in the last month from two particular posters on here.
While he's suspended is he effectively disallowed from being a Labour candidate at a GE?
"Stats for Lefties @LeftieStats 🚨 BREAKING: Leftist MP Andy McDonald has been suspended from Labour for a pro-Palestine speech.
In his speech, McDonald said: "We won’t rest ... until all people ... between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty."
Labour says this speech was "deeply offensive"."
Israelis and Palestinians living in peaceful liberty is deeply offensive
FFS SKS FANS please explain
Had that been what he wanted to say, he should have said so. Including a catchphrase which is a (barely) plausibly deniable call for getting rid of Israel completely isn't really something Starmer can pretend not to notice.
This is what people like him mean by calling to "free Palestine":
Susan Abulhawa is a Palestinian diaspora activist:
i think it’s an even newer dumber form of Black with a capital B, I saw it a few times in the Aussie Voice campaign. The aboriginal people are apparently “Blaks”
Here’s a thing, some people are trying to revive “sambo” - I kid you not. But you have to use a capital S to give it dignity
What amazes me is that no one ever finds this patronizing. It is generally white, bourgeois and often female academics who determine the New Words We Must Use for The Blaks
And what do the native people to Australia want to be called?
There is a guy called Peter Santenello who makes some really interesting long form videos about different areas of US (and other countries). He did a number of videos where he spent weeks with American Indians, First Nation, what do we want to call them...well he asked and the responses were wide and varied. Some demanded to be called Indians, some hated it, some others thought First Nation terms was bollocks....but most seemed to hate more than anything the lumping together of all the different tribes of people as if they were really all the same 'block'.
Yes, a lot of variety there.
In Australia the Torres Strait Islanders are counted as a distinct group within what was previously 'indigenous Australians' (wiki says Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples is often preferred) apparently, but not other groups from the mainland.
Without looking into it I'd assume terms like First Nations peoples, which I first heard in relation to Canada, has gained traction because it emphasises the interrelation - the various peoples being there 'first' compared to European settlers - but also subtly emphasises not all are the same, hence 'First Nations', not 'First Nation'.
Speaking of achievements: This morning I leaned that Magic Johnson has become the fourth athete to become a billionaire (much of it from investments). (Fortune magazine)
The previous three? LeBron James, Michael Jordan, and Tiger Woods.
I just looked it up, I had no idea just how wide ranging and diverse his business interest have been and are.
They are cognate. As I discovered in the Swabian castle of Siracusa last week. The word “grenade” comes from the French for “pomegranate” because the first, ceramic grenades looked like pomegranates
Language is fascinating. So much hidden history in words and phrases.
And this is why travel broadens the mind. I walked into that Swabian castle and saw those ancient ceramic grenades with the accompanying explanation
"Stats for Lefties @LeftieStats 🚨 BREAKING: Leftist MP Andy McDonald has been suspended from Labour for a pro-Palestine speech.
In his speech, McDonald said: "We won’t rest ... until all people ... between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty."
Labour says this speech was "deeply offensive"."
Israelis and Palestinians living in peaceful liberty is deeply offensive
FFS SKS FANS please explain
Had that been what he wanted to say, he should have said so. Including a catchphrase which is a (barely) plausibly deniable call for getting rid of Israel completely isn't really something Starmer can pretend not to notice.
This is what people like him mean by calling to "free Palestine":
Susan Abulhawa is a Palestinian diaspora activist:
On nuclear waste: Years ago, I realized that someone who thought nuclear waste was a major problem was either misinformed, or dishonest. (Early on, some anti-nuclear activists were surprised by the public reaction to the issue, and then used it even though they knew better.)
(When the Sierra Club had more scientists, proportionately, they were pro-nuclear.)
"Stats for Lefties @LeftieStats 🚨 BREAKING: Leftist MP Andy McDonald has been suspended from Labour for a pro-Palestine speech.
In his speech, McDonald said: "We won’t rest ... until all people ... between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty."
Labour says this speech was "deeply offensive"."
Israelis and Palestinians living in peaceful liberty is deeply offensive
FFS SKS FANS please explain
Had that been what he wanted to say, he should have said so. Including a catchphrase which is a (barely) plausibly deniable call for getting rid of Israel completely isn't really something Starmer can pretend not to notice.
This is what people like him mean by calling to "free Palestine":
Susan Abulhawa is a Palestinian diaspora activist:
We were discussing the impact of AI on the global south yesterday. I’ve just read a cogent article saying 5m coding jobs in India will disappear immediately - ie in the next two years. Not in a decade. From now on
I use ChatGPT and CoPilot every day to assist with coding. Now I am not doing run of mill boilerplate stuff, but it still makes absolutely loads of mistakes. I would say at the moment, it is more like an a combination of decent auto-complete (like you do with text messages) and an advanced search for stack overflow (which all coders have used for donkeys years to get an idealised solution to common problems). Once you get too far from tasks that are easily found there, it starts to break down.
In summary, will it cause lots of job losses a few years down the line, yes. I wouldn't want to be a random coder starting out their career now. Would I trust it to go from 10 coders to 1-3 coders doing the same job, not yet, not unless you want massively buggy code.
Indeed. I use ChatGPT and AWS's CodeWhisperer, and they're great tools, but that's all they are - tools. You have to be really careful how you use them though, and you still have to understand what you are doing. I've already been caught out once or twice by suggested code that initially looked perfectly good but turned out to contain some stupid bug that I missed on checking through it.
Lots of these prognoses are predicated on another leap by AI in the next year. GPT5 etc
And if the rumours are right, and GPT5 is to GPT4 what GPT4 was to 3, then they are right to be “alarmist”
And that’s just OpenAI
GPT3 -> GPT4 for coding wasn't that big of advance. It was evolution, rather than revolution. You could say well now you can show it a picture of some maths and it will code that function, thats new, but again, its very very hit and miss. I have been trying this to speed up implementing academic papers and its really not that great. I find I have to convert image to latex (a kinda of programming language to create scientific texts) then to say python and still so so.
It just takes one of these machines to have the ability to self improve - then KABOOM
It doesn't even "understand" basic maths yet, let alone know how to improve upon that. I had it the other day arguing black is white over the incorrect details of a tensor, which is trivial maths.
This is the fundamental issue with the idea of LLM being predicted on probabilistic selection of next token.
Arguably it doesn't "understand" anything because it's a goldfish in a bowl with a 5 second memory that happens to be born with an encyclopedia inside its head.
Give it long term memory, and it starts to look shockingly like how human minds work.
An LLM with long term memory accessible the way humans can remember something from 20 years ago at a pinch, starts to look shockingly like us. Give it the ability to improve on its own code and it starts to look very much like us. The human mind is nothing special.
We may be 5-10 years away from this, or some have speculated, Google or OpenAI may be there already but holding back on releasing it for fear of what it will do. But it is coming.
... or the LLM approach is fundamentally flawed, and whilst good at imitating intelligence, will not be able to approach true intelligence or AGI.
Yes, but...
To borrow from Westworld, "if you can't tell, does it matter?"
Either we are 95% of the way to AGI, or the current route (LLM + extended memory and processing power) is a route to nothing. But what seems increasingly likely (Based on some of the uncensored local LLMs I've tried) is we're pretty much there on something that can simulate intelligence already. So if you put one of those models into a humanlike body and for all intents and purposes it behaves like one of us, what's the difference?
Some philosophical types posit that humans don't really think in a free way either, we just imagine we do after subconscious and chemical processes already determine what we will do.
“There is no absolute, or free, will,” observed Spinoza, “the mind is determined to will this or that by a cause which is also determined by another, and this again by another, and so to infinity.”
I'm fascinated by Julian Jaynes, because I think that even though he argues most of what we see as consciousness is actually just a autonomic function, and most of the time we are on autopilot, the idea that our mind itself might be dialoguing with itself (due to bicameralism) at key moments, and that is where free will comes from, is an interesting one that deserves further exploration.
Of course, it's possible to take the deterministic view that Spinoza does down to the cellular level, that every thought we have is caused by a chemical reaction, which was caused by an earlier one, which was caused by [etc and so forth]
Complex processes like cognition probably aren't deterministic, though. Chaos theory has demonstrated that even fairly simple starting conditions diverge non-deterministically, and the brain is about as far away as you can get from simple.
The mind 'dialoguing with itself' complicates the matter further.
I think it highly implausible that human cognition is deterministic.
Some interesting thoughts as always from @Alanbrooke for which many thanks.
One or two comments - Councils have asked on occasion to reduce street lighting and even to turn off traffic lights at certain quieter junctions overnight but that has always been refused or resisted. I can't help but notice the office lights burning long into the night at Canary Wharf and elsewhere, the shop fronts illuminated etc. With the pandemic, the 24 hour society has just stepped back a notch and perhaps we need to consider how wasteful organisations and public bodies are.
I think Sunak is relying on selfish short-termism to carry through his "pro car" agenda but the truth is people of all ages do care and I suspect they prefer a Government which takes action, not in the form of eco-authoritarianism but a balanced approach around saving energy and promoting alternatives. Nor can we ignore the rest of the world - global climate change will impact us whether in human form or economic.
To his credit, @Alanbrooke has put forward a series of proposals which to my eye are fairly uncontroversial until you reach the price tag and you release no future Government is going to be able to support that degree of funding without some pain elsewhere.
"Stats for Lefties @LeftieStats 🚨 BREAKING: Leftist MP Andy McDonald has been suspended from Labour for a pro-Palestine speech.
In his speech, McDonald said: "We won’t rest ... until all people ... between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty."
Labour says this speech was "deeply offensive"."
Israelis and Palestinians living in peaceful liberty is deeply offensive
FFS SKS FANS please explain
Had that been what he wanted to say, he should have said so. Including a catchphrase which is a (barely) plausibly deniable call for getting rid of Israel completely isn't really something Starmer can pretend not to notice.
This is what people like him mean by calling to "free Palestine":
Susan Abulhawa is a Palestinian diaspora activist:
Not the main point, but what the heck does 'post capitalist' have to do with any of the rest of it?
Why does every cause online have to include every other cause?
Marxist notions that it is all about the struggle to free the oppressed from the oppressors....
I wouldn't choose marxism if I was looking for someone to free people from oppressors.
Its the first commandment of Marxism: thou shalt have no other oppressors before me.
There is a version of the Internationale recorded by Billy Bragg. It's available on YouTube with a background consisting solely of an image of Lenin giving a speech.
Again, it really isn't that hard to put forward criticisms of Israel approach, for instance the need for aid to be allowed in, without touching the antisemitism rail....you just don't include phrases about rivers to the sea, final solutions, apartheid states, or inserting any common Jewish tropes about controlling the world / banks, getting their pound of flesh etc. Its not rocket science.
A Roman emperor has been listed as “black Briton” by the BBC and some UK museums, despite not being black.
Lucius Septimius Severus died on campaign in Britain in 211AD , and has been included in teaching material and children’s books alongside influential black Britons such as Mary Seacole and Olaudah Equiano.
Is it like Cleopatra where they'll go 'Oh, we don't really know so they might have been'(which at best is still wishful thinking rather than being able to claim as fact) or is there an actual reason behind the idea? I know at least one Emperor was born in Africa and one was named 'the arab', so did they just go off that?
One quote from that article
“The ancient biographical collection Historia Augustus explains that Severus was disturbed by the sight of a black person on one occasion, taking his “ominous colour” as a bad omen while on campaign.”
I mean, I know, but. Lol
Ouch.
I mean, no one expects everyone to be an expert to know that level of detail, but does the story provide an explanation from the BBC and museums as to how they made the error? Because if it is as simple as 'Wikipedia says he was born in Africa and we just assumed' that is bad, but if that is not the reason they thought it then what was the reason?
Hard core racism was common in Ancient Rome.
In one of his rants*, Cicero likened a consul to every bad thing he could think of. Then said he (the consul) was a dumb as a black slave….
Imperialist conquerors racist? Well, it seems most unusual to me.
Septimius was Libyan of part Phoenician ancestry, so possibly browner than your average Roman. It doesn't of course stop him being prejudiced against black people.
I suspect 'slave' was considerably more prejudicial than skin tone in Roman times.
They are cognate. As I discovered in the Swabian castle of Siracusa last week. The word “grenade” comes from the French for “pomegranate” because the first, ceramic grenades looked like pomegranates
Language is fascinating. So much hidden history in words and phrases.
"The cost of processing a card payment has increased by 600 per cent in the past nine years, according to campaign group Axe the Card Tax."
Doubt.
They says costs are 2.5% now so back in 2014 costs were 0.004%?
I call fucking bullshit.
0.4%, Shirley? 600 percent is six times.
I still call fucking bullshit.
Card costs have come down.
Numerical calculation out by a factor of 100 but fronting it out and doubling down on your original claim, bold. Have you considered a career in politics, young man?
It was a lack of self confidence that stopped me going into politics.
I am way too modest for politics.
I can imagine.
I really did consider going into politics 20 years ago but there were a few insurmountable barriers
1) I would be considered gaffe prone for saying outrageous things with my colour metaphors. Apparently I have a tendency to say funny things which you really cannot say in polite society.
2) My mother wouldn't be able to cope with the constant attacks politicians come under. My private life is erm colourful. Her muslim ladies who lunch group would be ashamed by me.
3) MP pay is shit, I couldn't afford all my shoes and clothes on an MP's salary.
4) I have to keep my mind occupied, I really couldn't sit on the backbenches for a few years, I need to go straight into the cabinet.
When I was asked by the local party to consider it I went through a similar process and decided that:
1. I don't want the hassle of being backbench MP in opposition as would likely be the case by the time I won 2. It would be a gigantic pay cut and I'm not really up for it 3. I'm prone to speaking my mind and that means my ceiling is probably quite limited and the party machinery would see an end to any career beyond being a dreary constituency MP that asks the odd question on behalf of some old dear that can't use the NHS app to book an appointment. 4. And I can't stress this one enough, it would have made my wife extremely unhappy and ultimately that was the decision maker.
"Stats for Lefties @LeftieStats 🚨 BREAKING: Leftist MP Andy McDonald has been suspended from Labour for a pro-Palestine speech.
In his speech, McDonald said: "We won’t rest ... until all people ... between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty."
Labour says this speech was "deeply offensive"."
Israelis and Palestinians living in peaceful liberty is deeply offensive
FFS SKS FANS please explain
Had that been what he wanted to say, he should have said so. Including a catchphrase which is a (barely) plausibly deniable call for getting rid of Israel completely isn't really something Starmer can pretend not to notice.
This is what people like him mean by calling to "free Palestine":
Susan Abulhawa is a Palestinian diaspora activist:
i think it’s an even newer dumber form of Black with a capital B, I saw it a few times in the Aussie Voice campaign. The aboriginal people are apparently “Blaks”
Here’s a thing, some people are trying to revive “sambo” - I kid you not. But you have to use a capital S to give it dignity
What amazes me is that no one ever finds this patronizing. It is generally white, bourgeois and often female academics who determine the New Words We Must Use for The Blaks
I'd be very disappointed if the plural of Blak didn't turn out to be Blax.
Again, it really isn't that hard to put forward criticisms of Israel approach, for instance the need for aid to be allowed in, without touching the antisemitism rail....you just don't include phrases about rivers to the sea, final solutions, apartheid states, or inserting any common Jewish tropes about controlling the world / banks, getting their pound of flesh etc. Its not rocket science.
We were discussing the impact of AI on the global south yesterday. I’ve just read a cogent article saying 5m coding jobs in India will disappear immediately - ie in the next two years. Not in a decade. From now on
I use ChatGPT and CoPilot every day to assist with coding. Now I am not doing run of mill boilerplate stuff, but it still makes absolutely loads of mistakes. I would say at the moment, it is more like an a combination of decent auto-complete (like you do with text messages) and an advanced search for stack overflow (which all coders have used for donkeys years to get an idealised solution to common problems). Once you get too far from tasks that are easily found there, it starts to break down.
In summary, will it cause lots of job losses a few years down the line, yes. I wouldn't want to be a random coder starting out their career now. Would I trust it to go from 10 coders to 1-3 coders doing the same job, not yet, not unless you want massively buggy code.
Indeed. I use ChatGPT and AWS's CodeWhisperer, and they're great tools, but that's all they are - tools. You have to be really careful how you use them though, and you still have to understand what you are doing. I've already been caught out once or twice by suggested code that initially looked perfectly good but turned out to contain some stupid bug that I missed on checking through it.
Lots of these prognoses are predicated on another leap by AI in the next year. GPT5 etc
And if the rumours are right, and GPT5 is to GPT4 what GPT4 was to 3, then they are right to be “alarmist”
And that’s just OpenAI
GPT3 -> GPT4 for coding wasn't that big of advance. It was evolution, rather than revolution. You could say well now you can show it a picture of some maths and it will code that function, thats new, but again, its very very hit and miss. I have been trying this to speed up implementing academic papers and its really not that great. I find I have to convert image to latex (a kinda of programming language to create scientific texts) then to say python and still so so.
It just takes one of these machines to have the ability to self improve - then KABOOM
It doesn't even "understand" basic maths yet, let alone know how to improve upon that. I had it the other day arguing black is white over the incorrect details of a tensor, which is trivial maths.
This is the fundamental issue with the idea of LLM being predicted on probabilistic selection of next token.
Arguably it doesn't "understand" anything because it's a goldfish in a bowl with a 5 second memory that happens to be born with an encyclopedia inside its head.
Give it long term memory, and it starts to look shockingly like how human minds work.
An LLM with long term memory accessible the way humans can remember something from 20 years ago at a pinch, starts to look shockingly like us. Give it the ability to improve on its own code and it starts to look very much like us. The human mind is nothing special.
We may be 5-10 years away from this, or some have speculated, Google or OpenAI may be there already but holding back on releasing it for fear of what it will do. But it is coming.
... or the LLM approach is fundamentally flawed, and whilst good at imitating intelligence, will not be able to approach true intelligence or AGI.
Yes, but...
To borrow from Westworld, "if you can't tell, does it matter?"
Either we are 95% of the way to AGI, or the current route (LLM + extended memory and processing power) is a route to nothing. But what seems increasingly likely (Based on some of the uncensored local LLMs I've tried) is we're pretty much there on something that can simulate intelligence already. So if you put one of those models into a humanlike body and for all intents and purposes it behaves like one of us, what's the difference?
Some philosophical types posit that humans don't really think in a free way either, we just imagine we do after subconscious and chemical processes already determine what we will do.
“There is no absolute, or free, will,” observed Spinoza, “the mind is determined to will this or that by a cause which is also determined by another, and this again by another, and so to infinity.”
I'm fascinated by Julian Jaynes, because I think that even though he argues most of what we see as consciousness is actually just a autonomic function, and most of the time we are on autopilot, the idea that our mind itself might be dialoguing with itself (due to bicameralism) at key moments, and that is where free will comes from, is an interesting one that deserves further exploration.
Of course, it's possible to take the deterministic view that Spinoza does down to the cellular level, that every thought we have is caused by a chemical reaction, which was caused by an earlier one, which was caused by [etc and so forth]
Complex processes like cognition probably aren't deterministic, though. Chaos theory has demonstrated that even fairly simple starting conditions diverge non-deterministically, and the brain is about as far away as you can get from simple.
The mind 'dialoguing with itself' complicates the matter further.
I think it highly implausible that human cognition is deterministic.
Surely something can be both chaotic and deterministic? I thought that was the point of chaos theory.
It could be probabilistic though, if quantum effects are included.
"Stats for Lefties @LeftieStats 🚨 BREAKING: Leftist MP Andy McDonald has been suspended from Labour for a pro-Palestine speech.
In his speech, McDonald said: "We won’t rest ... until all people ... between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty."
Labour says this speech was "deeply offensive"."
Israelis and Palestinians living in peaceful liberty is deeply offensive
FFS SKS FANS please explain
Had that been what he wanted to say, he should have said so. Including a catchphrase which is a (barely) plausibly deniable call for getting rid of Israel completely isn't really something Starmer can pretend not to notice.
This is what people like him mean by calling to "free Palestine":
Susan Abulhawa is a Palestinian diaspora activist:
i think it’s an even newer dumber form of Black with a capital B, I saw it a few times in the Aussie Voice campaign. The aboriginal people are apparently “Blaks”
Here’s a thing, some people are trying to revive “sambo” - I kid you not. But you have to use a capital S to give it dignity
What amazes me is that no one ever finds this patronizing. It is generally white, bourgeois and often female academics who determine the New Words We Must Use for The Blaks
I'd be very disappointed if the plural of Blak didn't turn out to be Blax.
The one that always baked my noodle was why was "people of color" good for so many years, when "colored people" was practically like saying the N-word.
They are cognate. As I discovered in the Swabian castle of Siracusa last week. The word “grenade” comes from the French for “pomegranate” because the first, ceramic grenades looked like pomegranates
Language is fascinating. So much hidden history in words and phrases.
And this is why travel broadens the mind. I walked into that Swabian castle and saw those ancient ceramic grenades with the accompanying explanation
Kids, never turn down travel or sex. Esp travel
Just look at the different meanings of the words which are basically bomb and grenade and shell. Even within English of different eras. And that's before one gets into translation.
They are cognate. As I discovered in the Swabian castle of Siracusa last week. The word “grenade” comes from the French for “pomegranate” because the first, ceramic grenades looked like pomegranates
Language is fascinating. So much hidden history in words and phrases.
And this is why travel broadens the mind. I walked into that Swabian castle and saw those ancient ceramic grenades with the accompanying explanation
Kids, never turn down travel or sex. Esp travel
In my life experience travel tends to lead to sex, especially in your teens and early 20s.
"The cost of processing a card payment has increased by 600 per cent in the past nine years, according to campaign group Axe the Card Tax."
Doubt.
They says costs are 2.5% now so back in 2014 costs were 0.004%?
I call fucking bullshit.
0.4%, Shirley? 600 percent is six times.
I still call fucking bullshit.
Card costs have come down.
Numerical calculation out by a factor of 100 but fronting it out and doubling down on your original claim, bold. Have you considered a career in politics, young man?
It was a lack of self confidence that stopped me going into politics.
I am way too modest for politics.
I can imagine.
I really did consider going into politics 20 years ago but there were a few insurmountable barriers
1) I would be considered gaffe prone for saying outrageous things with my colour metaphors. Apparently I have a tendency to say funny things which you really cannot say in polite society.
2) My mother wouldn't be able to cope with the constant attacks politicians come under. My private life is erm colourful. Her muslim ladies who lunch group would be ashamed by me.
3) MP pay is shit, I couldn't afford all my shoes and clothes on an MP's salary.
4) I have to keep my mind occupied, I really couldn't sit on the backbenches for a few years, I need to go straight into the cabinet.
When I was asked by the local party to consider it I went through a similar process and decided that:
1. I don't want the hassle of being backbench MP in opposition as would likely be the case by the time I won 2. It would be a gigantic pay cut and I'm not really up for it 3. I'm prone to speaking my mind and that means my ceiling is probably quite limited and the party machinery would see an end to any career beyond being a dreary constituency MP that asks the odd question on behalf of some old dear that can't use the NHS app to book an appointment. 4. And I can't stress this one enough, it would have made my wife extremely unhappy and ultimately that was the decision maker.
Yes, point 4 applied to me as well.
My then girlfriend/future wife was also quite clear she hated all Tories and would say so publicly.
"The cost of processing a card payment has increased by 600 per cent in the past nine years, according to campaign group Axe the Card Tax."
Doubt.
Maybe costs per card transaction have gone down, but if most of a business's transactions used to be cash with only a few card transactions, they would only have paid the card transaction cost occasionally. If they have to pay it nearly all the time it would add up to more overall?
On the other hand, cash has a cost and you would have had to secure cash on the premises and pay insurance.
It's a much lower cost than card as long as you have a bank branch with a night safe nearby.
Not that much lower, if any, unless you're risking your safety depositing cash without insurance or backup.
Unless you're getting ripped off, debit card percentage transaction fees should be sub 1% nowadays with no fixed transaction fee (or a token 1p transaction fee) either.
For example: "Once upon a time, the country was crawling with pro-life liberals and leftists. Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy, one of the period's preeminent liberal Democrats, once declared that the right to life begins at "the very moment of conception," a position he held until 1975. Further left, the Black Panther Party fiercely denounced abortion, a procedure it associated with eugenics."
(At one time, and I believe still, about 30 percent of abortions were performed on black women. If I recall correctly, Jesse Jackson once described that rate as a "holocaust".
Oddly enough, that rate, whatever it is, does not receive much coverage from our race-concious "mainstream" media.)
"The cost of processing a card payment has increased by 600 per cent in the past nine years, according to campaign group Axe the Card Tax."
Doubt.
They says costs are 2.5% now so back in 2014 costs were 0.004%?
I call fucking bullshit.
0.4%, Shirley? 600 percent is six times.
I still call fucking bullshit.
Card costs have come down.
Numerical calculation out by a factor of 100 but fronting it out and doubling down on your original claim, bold. Have you considered a career in politics, young man?
It was a lack of self confidence that stopped me going into politics.
I am way too modest for politics.
I can imagine.
I really did consider going into politics 20 years ago but there were a few insurmountable barriers
1) I would be considered gaffe prone for saying outrageous things with my colour metaphors. Apparently I have a tendency to say funny things which you really cannot say in polite society.
2) My mother wouldn't be able to cope with the constant attacks politicians come under. My private life is erm colourful. Her muslim ladies who lunch group would be ashamed by me.
3) MP pay is shit, I couldn't afford all my shoes and clothes on an MP's salary.
4) I have to keep my mind occupied, I really couldn't sit on the backbenches for a few years, I need to go straight into the cabinet.
When I was asked by the local party to consider it I went through a similar process and decided that:
1. I don't want the hassle of being backbench MP in opposition as would likely be the case by the time I won 2. It would be a gigantic pay cut and I'm not really up for it 3. I'm prone to speaking my mind and that means my ceiling is probably quite limited and the party machinery would see an end to any career beyond being a dreary constituency MP that asks the odd question on behalf of some old dear that can't use the NHS app to book an appointment. 4. And I can't stress this one enough, it would have made my wife extremely unhappy and ultimately that was the decision maker.
Yes, point 4 applied to me as well.
My then girlfriend/future wife was also quite clear she hated all Tories and would say so publicly.
Just as well you never fessed up to being one yourself then.
"Stats for Lefties @LeftieStats 🚨 BREAKING: Leftist MP Andy McDonald has been suspended from Labour for a pro-Palestine speech.
In his speech, McDonald said: "We won’t rest ... until all people ... between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty."
Labour says this speech was "deeply offensive"."
Israelis and Palestinians living in peaceful liberty is deeply offensive
FFS SKS FANS please explain
Had that been what he wanted to say, he should have said so. Including a catchphrase which is a (barely) plausibly deniable call for getting rid of Israel completely isn't really something Starmer can pretend not to notice.
This is what people like him mean by calling to "free Palestine":
Susan Abulhawa is a Palestinian diaspora activist:
i think it’s an even newer dumber form of Black with a capital B, I saw it a few times in the Aussie Voice campaign. The aboriginal people are apparently “Blaks”
Here’s a thing, some people are trying to revive “sambo” - I kid you not. But you have to use a capital S to give it dignity
What amazes me is that no one ever finds this patronizing. It is generally white, bourgeois and often female academics who determine the New Words We Must Use for The Blaks
I'd be very disappointed if the plural of Blak didn't turn out to be Blax.
Can anyone actually read every word of this handwriting?
I can read most of it but not all.
Can anyone reproduce it in full?
"We're killing the patient to tackle the tumour"
Large ppl [I think this is 'large ppl' eg people? edit - carnyx may be right about being proportion]who will die - why are we destroying the economy for people who will die anyway soon
Bed blockers
PM - there month battleplan to win
What is this/ defeat the virus. testing. interrelate[?] with etc. [Testing may be intended to be after 'with']
Though I'm unclear what the "What is this" relates to - though I appreciate no way of us knowing this.
I had read 'what is this' as a reference to the PM intending to outline the battleplan in more detail. But who knows? Even being able to read villainous handwriting does not always lead to enlightenment.
"Stats for Lefties @LeftieStats 🚨 BREAKING: Leftist MP Andy McDonald has been suspended from Labour for a pro-Palestine speech.
In his speech, McDonald said: "We won’t rest ... until all people ... between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty."
Labour says this speech was "deeply offensive"."
Israelis and Palestinians living in peaceful liberty is deeply offensive
FFS SKS FANS please explain
Had that been what he wanted to say, he should have said so. Including a catchphrase which is a (barely) plausibly deniable call for getting rid of Israel completely isn't really something Starmer can pretend not to notice.
This is what people like him mean by calling to "free Palestine":
Susan Abulhawa is a Palestinian diaspora activist:
Not the main point, but what the heck does 'post capitalist' have to do with any of the rest of it?
Why does every cause online have to include every other cause?
Marxist notions that it is all about the struggle to free the oppressed from the oppressors....
I wouldn't choose marxism if I was looking for someone to free people from oppressors.
Its the first commandment of Marxism: thou shalt have no other oppressors before me.
There is a version of the Internationale recorded by Billy Bragg. It's available on YouTube with a background consisting solely of an image of Lenin giving a speech.
We were discussing the impact of AI on the global south yesterday. I’ve just read a cogent article saying 5m coding jobs in India will disappear immediately - ie in the next two years. Not in a decade. From now on
I use ChatGPT and CoPilot every day to assist with coding. Now I am not doing run of mill boilerplate stuff, but it still makes absolutely loads of mistakes. I would say at the moment, it is more like an a combination of decent auto-complete (like you do with text messages) and an advanced search for stack overflow (which all coders have used for donkeys years to get an idealised solution to common problems). Once you get too far from tasks that are easily found there, it starts to break down.
In summary, will it cause lots of job losses a few years down the line, yes. I wouldn't want to be a random coder starting out their career now. Would I trust it to go from 10 coders to 1-3 coders doing the same job, not yet, not unless you want massively buggy code.
Indeed. I use ChatGPT and AWS's CodeWhisperer, and they're great tools, but that's all they are - tools. You have to be really careful how you use them though, and you still have to understand what you are doing. I've already been caught out once or twice by suggested code that initially looked perfectly good but turned out to contain some stupid bug that I missed on checking through it.
Lots of these prognoses are predicated on another leap by AI in the next year. GPT5 etc
And if the rumours are right, and GPT5 is to GPT4 what GPT4 was to 3, then they are right to be “alarmist”
And that’s just OpenAI
GPT3 -> GPT4 for coding wasn't that big of advance. It was evolution, rather than revolution. You could say well now you can show it a picture of some maths and it will code that function, thats new, but again, its very very hit and miss. I have been trying this to speed up implementing academic papers and its really not that great. I find I have to convert image to latex (a kinda of programming language to create scientific texts) then to say python and still so so.
It just takes one of these machines to have the ability to self improve - then KABOOM
It doesn't even "understand" basic maths yet, let alone know how to improve upon that. I had it the other day arguing black is white over the incorrect details of a tensor, which is trivial maths.
This is the fundamental issue with the idea of LLM being predicted on probabilistic selection of next token.
Arguably it doesn't "understand" anything because it's a goldfish in a bowl with a 5 second memory that happens to be born with an encyclopedia inside its head.
Give it long term memory, and it starts to look shockingly like how human minds work.
An LLM with long term memory accessible the way humans can remember something from 20 years ago at a pinch, starts to look shockingly like us. Give it the ability to improve on its own code and it starts to look very much like us. The human mind is nothing special.
We may be 5-10 years away from this, or some have speculated, Google or OpenAI may be there already but holding back on releasing it for fear of what it will do. But it is coming.
... or the LLM approach is fundamentally flawed, and whilst good at imitating intelligence, will not be able to approach true intelligence or AGI.
Yes, but...
To borrow from Westworld, "if you can't tell, does it matter?"
Either we are 95% of the way to AGI, or the current route (LLM + extended memory and processing power) is a route to nothing. But what seems increasingly likely (Based on some of the uncensored local LLMs I've tried) is we're pretty much there on something that can simulate intelligence already. So if you put one of those models into a humanlike body and for all intents and purposes it behaves like one of us, what's the difference?
Some philosophical types posit that humans don't really think in a free way either, we just imagine we do after subconscious and chemical processes already determine what we will do.
“There is no absolute, or free, will,” observed Spinoza, “the mind is determined to will this or that by a cause which is also determined by another, and this again by another, and so to infinity.”
I'm fascinated by Julian Jaynes, because I think that even though he argues most of what we see as consciousness is actually just a autonomic function, and most of the time we are on autopilot, the idea that our mind itself might be dialoguing with itself (due to bicameralism) at key moments, and that is where free will comes from, is an interesting one that deserves further exploration.
Of course, it's possible to take the deterministic view that Spinoza does down to the cellular level, that every thought we have is caused by a chemical reaction, which was caused by an earlier one, which was caused by [etc and so forth]
Complex processes like cognition probably aren't deterministic, though. Chaos theory has demonstrated that even fairly simple starting conditions diverge non-deterministically, and the brain is about as far away as you can get from simple.
The mind 'dialoguing with itself' complicates the matter further.
I think it highly implausible that human cognition is deterministic.
Surely something can be both chaotic and deterministic? I thought that was the point of chaos theory.
It could be probabilistic though, if quantum effects are included.
"Stats for Lefties @LeftieStats 🚨 BREAKING: Leftist MP Andy McDonald has been suspended from Labour for a pro-Palestine speech.
In his speech, McDonald said: "We won’t rest ... until all people ... between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty."
Labour says this speech was "deeply offensive"."
Israelis and Palestinians living in peaceful liberty is deeply offensive
FFS SKS FANS please explain
Had that been what he wanted to say, he should have said so. Including a catchphrase which is a (barely) plausibly deniable call for getting rid of Israel completely isn't really something Starmer can pretend not to notice.
This is what people like him mean by calling to "free Palestine":
Susan Abulhawa is a Palestinian diaspora activist:
Not the main point, but what the heck does 'post capitalist' have to do with any of the rest of it?
Why does every cause online have to include every other cause?
Marxist notions that it is all about the struggle to free the oppressed from the oppressors....
I wouldn't choose marxism if I was looking for someone to free people from oppressors.
Its the first commandment of Marxism: thou shalt have no other oppressors before me.
There is a version of the Internationale recorded by Billy Bragg. It's available on YouTube with a background consisting solely of an image of Lenin giving a speech.
"The cost of processing a card payment has increased by 600 per cent in the past nine years, according to campaign group Axe the Card Tax."
Doubt.
They says costs are 2.5% now so back in 2014 costs were 0.004%?
I call fucking bullshit.
0.4%, Shirley? 600 percent is six times.
I still call fucking bullshit.
Card costs have come down.
Numerical calculation out by a factor of 100 but fronting it out and doubling down on your original claim, bold. Have you considered a career in politics, young man?
It was a lack of self confidence that stopped me going into politics.
I am way too modest for politics.
I can imagine.
I really did consider going into politics 20 years ago but there were a few insurmountable barriers
1) I would be considered gaffe prone for saying outrageous things with my colour metaphors. Apparently I have a tendency to say funny things which you really cannot say in polite society.
2) My mother wouldn't be able to cope with the constant attacks politicians come under. My private life is erm colourful. Her muslim ladies who lunch group would be ashamed by me.
3) MP pay is shit, I couldn't afford all my shoes and clothes on an MP's salary.
4) I have to keep my mind occupied, I really couldn't sit on the backbenches for a few years, I need to go straight into the cabinet.
When I was asked by the local party to consider it I went through a similar process and decided that:
1. I don't want the hassle of being backbench MP in opposition as would likely be the case by the time I won 2. It would be a gigantic pay cut and I'm not really up for it 3. I'm prone to speaking my mind and that means my ceiling is probably quite limited and the party machinery would see an end to any career beyond being a dreary constituency MP that asks the odd question on behalf of some old dear that can't use the NHS app to book an appointment. 4. And I can't stress this one enough, it would have made my wife extremely unhappy and ultimately that was the decision maker.
Yes, point 4 applied to me as well.
My then girlfriend/future wife was also quite clear she hated all Tories and would say so publicly.
Mine doesn't really want a life in or anywhere near the public eye. She said pretty sternly that the only way she'd agree is if my aim was to become PM and since that's not realistic (I didn't go to Oxford) I decided she had a point.
"Stats for Lefties @LeftieStats 🚨 BREAKING: Leftist MP Andy McDonald has been suspended from Labour for a pro-Palestine speech.
In his speech, McDonald said: "We won’t rest ... until all people ... between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty."
Labour says this speech was "deeply offensive"."
Israelis and Palestinians living in peaceful liberty is deeply offensive
FFS SKS FANS please explain
Had that been what he wanted to say, he should have said so. Including a catchphrase which is a (barely) plausibly deniable call for getting rid of Israel completely isn't really something Starmer can pretend not to notice.
This is what people like him mean by calling to "free Palestine":
Susan Abulhawa is a Palestinian diaspora activist:
i think it’s an even newer dumber form of Black with a capital B, I saw it a few times in the Aussie Voice campaign. The aboriginal people are apparently “Blaks”
Here’s a thing, some people are trying to revive “sambo” - I kid you not. But you have to use a capital S to give it dignity
What amazes me is that no one ever finds this patronizing. It is generally white, bourgeois and often female academics who determine the New Words We Must Use for The Blaks
I'd be very disappointed if the plural of Blak didn't turn out to be Blax.
The one that always baked my noodle was why was "people of color" good for so many years, when "colored people" was practically like saying the N-word.
Angels dancing on a pin or something.
It is, almost literally, a shibboleth - a crude verbal clue to tribal identity.
And, of course, the label of an oppressed group becomes denigrated over time if the group continues to be oppressed. My parents would have regarded Coloured as a 'nicer' word than Black whereas my granddaughter will almost certainly be taught that Queer is a better word than Gay. God knows what else she'll be taught.
"Stats for Lefties @LeftieStats 🚨 BREAKING: Leftist MP Andy McDonald has been suspended from Labour for a pro-Palestine speech.
In his speech, McDonald said: "We won’t rest ... until all people ... between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty."
Labour says this speech was "deeply offensive"."
Israelis and Palestinians living in peaceful liberty is deeply offensive
FFS SKS FANS please explain
Had that been what he wanted to say, he should have said so. Including a catchphrase which is a (barely) plausibly deniable call for getting rid of Israel completely isn't really something Starmer can pretend not to notice.
This is what people like him mean by calling to "free Palestine":
Susan Abulhawa is a Palestinian diaspora activist:
Not the main point, but what the heck does 'post capitalist' have to do with any of the rest of it?
Why does every cause online have to include every other cause?
Marxist notions that it is all about the struggle to free the oppressed from the oppressors....
I wouldn't choose marxism if I was looking for someone to free people from oppressors.
Its the first commandment of Marxism: thou shalt have no other oppressors before me.
There is a version of the Internationale recorded by Billy Bragg. It's available on YouTube with a background consisting solely of an image of Lenin giving a speech.
"The cost of processing a card payment has increased by 600 per cent in the past nine years, according to campaign group Axe the Card Tax."
Doubt.
They says costs are 2.5% now so back in 2014 costs were 0.004%?
I call fucking bullshit.
0.4%, Shirley? 600 percent is six times.
I still call fucking bullshit.
Card costs have come down.
Numerical calculation out by a factor of 100 but fronting it out and doubling down on your original claim, bold. Have you considered a career in politics, young man?
It was a lack of self confidence that stopped me going into politics.
I am way too modest for politics.
I can imagine.
I really did consider going into politics 20 years ago but there were a few insurmountable barriers
1) I would be considered gaffe prone for saying outrageous things with my colour metaphors. Apparently I have a tendency to say funny things which you really cannot say in polite society.
2) My mother wouldn't be able to cope with the constant attacks politicians come under. My private life is erm colourful. Her muslim ladies who lunch group would be ashamed by me.
3) MP pay is shit, I couldn't afford all my shoes and clothes on an MP's salary.
4) I have to keep my mind occupied, I really couldn't sit on the backbenches for a few years, I need to go straight into the cabinet.
When I was asked by the local party to consider it I went through a similar process and decided that:
1. I don't want the hassle of being backbench MP in opposition as would likely be the case by the time I won 2. It would be a gigantic pay cut and I'm not really up for it 3. I'm prone to speaking my mind and that means my ceiling is probably quite limited and the party machinery would see an end to any career beyond being a dreary constituency MP that asks the odd question on behalf of some old dear that can't use the NHS app to book an appointment. 4. And I can't stress this one enough, it would have made my wife extremely unhappy and ultimately that was the decision maker.
Yes, point 4 applied to me as well.
My then girlfriend/future wife was also quite clear she hated all Tories and would say so publicly.
Mine doesn't really want a life in or anywhere near the public eye. She said pretty sternly that the only way she'd agree is if my aim was to become PM and since that's not realistic (I didn't go to Oxford) I decided she had a point.
Off-topic, but somewhat on-topic - the older BBC reading of 'The Kraken Wakes' which has large-scale flooding is worth a go if you haven't heard it (voiced by Stephen Moore) :
They are cognate. As I discovered in the Swabian castle of Siracusa last week. The word “grenade” comes from the French for “pomegranate” because the first, ceramic grenades looked like pomegranates
Language is fascinating. So much hidden history in words and phrases.
I've always been intrigued by the people who study language to read/sing old songs and poems to discover how words used to rhyme in 'the olden days' and figure out how pronunciation had changed down the years.
I imagine (without wishing to derail things) it's something the GPT's of the world would be quite good assistants for.
We were discussing the impact of AI on the global south yesterday. I’ve just read a cogent article saying 5m coding jobs in India will disappear immediately - ie in the next two years. Not in a decade. From now on
I use ChatGPT and CoPilot every day to assist with coding. Now I am not doing run of mill boilerplate stuff, but it still makes absolutely loads of mistakes. I would say at the moment, it is more like an a combination of decent auto-complete (like you do with text messages) and an advanced search for stack overflow (which all coders have used for donkeys years to get an idealised solution to common problems). Once you get too far from tasks that are easily found there, it starts to break down.
In summary, will it cause lots of job losses a few years down the line, yes. I wouldn't want to be a random coder starting out their career now. Would I trust it to go from 10 coders to 1-3 coders doing the same job, not yet, not unless you want massively buggy code.
Indeed. I use ChatGPT and AWS's CodeWhisperer, and they're great tools, but that's all they are - tools. You have to be really careful how you use them though, and you still have to understand what you are doing. I've already been caught out once or twice by suggested code that initially looked perfectly good but turned out to contain some stupid bug that I missed on checking through it.
Lots of these prognoses are predicated on another leap by AI in the next year. GPT5 etc
And if the rumours are right, and GPT5 is to GPT4 what GPT4 was to 3, then they are right to be “alarmist”
And that’s just OpenAI
GPT3 -> GPT4 for coding wasn't that big of advance. It was evolution, rather than revolution. You could say well now you can show it a picture of some maths and it will code that function, thats new, but again, its very very hit and miss. I have been trying this to speed up implementing academic papers and its really not that great. I find I have to convert image to latex (a kinda of programming language to create scientific texts) then to say python and still so so.
It just takes one of these machines to have the ability to self improve - then KABOOM
It doesn't even "understand" basic maths yet, let alone know how to improve upon that. I had it the other day arguing black is white over the incorrect details of a tensor, which is trivial maths.
This is the fundamental issue with the idea of LLM being predicted on probabilistic selection of next token.
Arguably it doesn't "understand" anything because it's a goldfish in a bowl with a 5 second memory that happens to be born with an encyclopedia inside its head.
Give it long term memory, and it starts to look shockingly like how human minds work.
An LLM with long term memory accessible the way humans can remember something from 20 years ago at a pinch, starts to look shockingly like us. Give it the ability to improve on its own code and it starts to look very much like us. The human mind is nothing special.
We may be 5-10 years away from this, or some have speculated, Google or OpenAI may be there already but holding back on releasing it for fear of what it will do. But it is coming.
... or the LLM approach is fundamentally flawed, and whilst good at imitating intelligence, will not be able to approach true intelligence or AGI.
Yes, but...
To borrow from Westworld, "if you can't tell, does it matter?"
Either we are 95% of the way to AGI, or the current route (LLM + extended memory and processing power) is a route to nothing. But what seems increasingly likely (Based on some of the uncensored local LLMs I've tried) is we're pretty much there on something that can simulate intelligence already. So if you put one of those models into a humanlike body and for all intents and purposes it behaves like one of us, what's the difference?
Some philosophical types posit that humans don't really think in a free way either, we just imagine we do after subconscious and chemical processes already determine what we will do.
“There is no absolute, or free, will,” observed Spinoza, “the mind is determined to will this or that by a cause which is also determined by another, and this again by another, and so to infinity.”
I'm fascinated by Julian Jaynes, because I think that even though he argues most of what we see as consciousness is actually just a autonomic function, and most of the time we are on autopilot, the idea that our mind itself might be dialoguing with itself (due to bicameralism) at key moments, and that is where free will comes from, is an interesting one that deserves further exploration.
Of course, it's possible to take the deterministic view that Spinoza does down to the cellular level, that every thought we have is caused by a chemical reaction, which was caused by an earlier one, which was caused by [etc and so forth]
Complex processes like cognition probably aren't deterministic, though. Chaos theory has demonstrated that even fairly simple starting conditions diverge non-deterministically, and the brain is about as far away as you can get from simple.
The mind 'dialoguing with itself' complicates the matter further.
I think it highly implausible that human cognition is deterministic.
Surely something can be both chaotic and deterministic? I thought that was the point of chaos theory.
It could be probabilistic though, if quantum effects are included.
If ?
OK, everything is quantum physics, but in enough bulk that isn't discernable.
I don't know enough about neurons to say whether their behaviour is deterministic. If forced to guess I would say it isn't, so in the multiverse I posted on here 60% of the time and but went and did something useful 40% of the time.
But that's different to chaos, which is normally applied to an deterministic processes that cannot be predicted due to a lack of precise information.
"The cost of processing a card payment has increased by 600 per cent in the past nine years, according to campaign group Axe the Card Tax."
Doubt.
They says costs are 2.5% now so back in 2014 costs were 0.004%?
I call fucking bullshit.
0.4%, Shirley? 600 percent is six times.
I still call fucking bullshit.
Card costs have come down.
Numerical calculation out by a factor of 100 but fronting it out and doubling down on your original claim, bold. Have you considered a career in politics, young man?
It was a lack of self confidence that stopped me going into politics.
I am way too modest for politics.
I can imagine.
I really did consider going into politics 20 years ago but there were a few insurmountable barriers
1) I would be considered gaffe prone for saying outrageous things with my colour metaphors. Apparently I have a tendency to say funny things which you really cannot say in polite society.
2) My mother wouldn't be able to cope with the constant attacks politicians come under. My private life is erm colourful. Her muslim ladies who lunch group would be ashamed by me.
3) MP pay is shit, I couldn't afford all my shoes and clothes on an MP's salary.
4) I have to keep my mind occupied, I really couldn't sit on the backbenches for a few years, I need to go straight into the cabinet.
When I was asked by the local party to consider it I went through a similar process and decided that:
1. I don't want the hassle of being backbench MP in opposition as would likely be the case by the time I won 2. It would be a gigantic pay cut and I'm not really up for it 3. I'm prone to speaking my mind and that means my ceiling is probably quite limited and the party machinery would see an end to any career beyond being a dreary constituency MP that asks the odd question on behalf of some old dear that can't use the NHS app to book an appointment. 4. And I can't stress this one enough, it would have made my wife extremely unhappy and ultimately that was the decision maker.
Yes, point 4 applied to me as well.
My then girlfriend/future wife was also quite clear she hated all Tories and would say so publicly.
Mine doesn't really want a life in or anywhere near the public eye. She said pretty sternly that the only way she'd agree is if my aim was to become PM and since that's not realistic (I didn't go to Oxford) I decided she had a point.
Again, it really isn't that hard to put forward criticisms of Israel approach, for instance the need for aid to be allowed in, without touching the antisemitism rail....you just don't include phrases about rivers to the sea, final solutions, apartheid states, or inserting any common Jewish tropes about controlling the world / banks, getting their pound of flesh etc. Its not rocket science.
Off-topic, but somewhat on-topic - the older BBC reading of 'The Kraken Wakes' which has large-scale flooding is worth a go if you haven't heard it (voiced by Stephen Moore) :
"The cost of processing a card payment has increased by 600 per cent in the past nine years, according to campaign group Axe the Card Tax."
Doubt.
They says costs are 2.5% now so back in 2014 costs were 0.004%?
I call fucking bullshit.
0.4%, Shirley? 600 percent is six times.
I still call fucking bullshit.
Card costs have come down.
Numerical calculation out by a factor of 100 but fronting it out and doubling down on your original claim, bold. Have you considered a career in politics, young man?
It was a lack of self confidence that stopped me going into politics.
I am way too modest for politics.
I can imagine.
I really did consider going into politics 20 years ago but there were a few insurmountable barriers
1) I would be considered gaffe prone for saying outrageous things with my colour metaphors. Apparently I have a tendency to say funny things which you really cannot say in polite society.
2) My mother wouldn't be able to cope with the constant attacks politicians come under. My private life is erm colourful. Her muslim ladies who lunch group would be ashamed by me.
3) MP pay is shit, I couldn't afford all my shoes and clothes on an MP's salary.
4) I have to keep my mind occupied, I really couldn't sit on the backbenches for a few years, I need to go straight into the cabinet.
When I was asked by the local party to consider it I went through a similar process and decided that:
1. I don't want the hassle of being backbench MP in opposition as would likely be the case by the time I won 2. It would be a gigantic pay cut and I'm not really up for it 3. I'm prone to speaking my mind and that means my ceiling is probably quite limited and the party machinery would see an end to any career beyond being a dreary constituency MP that asks the odd question on behalf of some old dear that can't use the NHS app to book an appointment. 4. And I can't stress this one enough, it would have made my wife extremely unhappy and ultimately that was the decision maker.
Yes, point 4 applied to me as well.
My then girlfriend/future wife was also quite clear she hated all Tories and would say so publicly.
Mine doesn't really want a life in or anywhere near the public eye. She said pretty sternly that the only way she'd agree is if my aim was to become PM and since that's not realistic (I didn't go to Oxford) I decided she had a point.
Major didn't go to Oxford either!
Nor did Gordon Brown.
Name the last UK general election winner who graduated from a university other than Oxford?
Off-topic, but somewhat on-topic - the older BBC reading of 'The Kraken Wakes' which has large-scale flooding is worth a go if you haven't heard it (voiced by Stephen Moore) :
It's always puzzled me why it's never been made into a film or TV series compared to the endless Triffids takes.
The Kraken Wakes was always my favorite John Wyndham novel.
Yeah - it's... a kraker.
Sorry.
But it's themes of alien species,climate change, understanding of science, media, politics etc - it seems ripe for an on-screen adaptation.
See also The Death of Grass.
Edit: Just to say I did quite enjoy the somewhat recent Val McDermid version of The Kraken Wakes via BBC R4. But surely someone with AppleTV/Netflix/Amazon's money could do something with it.
I thought the "new GOP" were against bundling issues together and wanted individual issues approved or denied on their own merits rather than in omnibus packages?
"The cost of processing a card payment has increased by 600 per cent in the past nine years, according to campaign group Axe the Card Tax."
Doubt.
They says costs are 2.5% now so back in 2014 costs were 0.004%?
I call fucking bullshit.
0.4%, Shirley? 600 percent is six times.
I still call fucking bullshit.
Card costs have come down.
Numerical calculation out by a factor of 100 but fronting it out and doubling down on your original claim, bold. Have you considered a career in politics, young man?
It was a lack of self confidence that stopped me going into politics.
I am way too modest for politics.
I can imagine.
I really did consider going into politics 20 years ago but there were a few insurmountable barriers
1) I would be considered gaffe prone for saying outrageous things with my colour metaphors. Apparently I have a tendency to say funny things which you really cannot say in polite society.
2) My mother wouldn't be able to cope with the constant attacks politicians come under. My private life is erm colourful. Her muslim ladies who lunch group would be ashamed by me.
3) MP pay is shit, I couldn't afford all my shoes and clothes on an MP's salary.
4) I have to keep my mind occupied, I really couldn't sit on the backbenches for a few years, I need to go straight into the cabinet.
When I was asked by the local party to consider it I went through a similar process and decided that:
1. I don't want the hassle of being backbench MP in opposition as would likely be the case by the time I won 2. It would be a gigantic pay cut and I'm not really up for it 3. I'm prone to speaking my mind and that means my ceiling is probably quite limited and the party machinery would see an end to any career beyond being a dreary constituency MP that asks the odd question on behalf of some old dear that can't use the NHS app to book an appointment. 4. And I can't stress this one enough, it would have made my wife extremely unhappy and ultimately that was the decision maker.
Yes, point 4 applied to me as well.
My then girlfriend/future wife was also quite clear she hated all Tories and would say so publicly.
Mine doesn't really want a life in or anywhere near the public eye. She said pretty sternly that the only way she'd agree is if my aim was to become PM and since that's not realistic (I didn't go to Oxford) I decided she had a point.
Major didn't go to Oxford either!
Nor did Gordon Brown.
Name the last UK general election winner who graduated from a university other than Oxford?
And, let me add immediately, that congressional Republicans reacted to this scandal by cutting back on the IRS budget. That may be understandable given the Obmaa administration's unwillingness to clean house, but the budget cutting has certainly helped protect many wealthy tax cheats
"The cost of processing a card payment has increased by 600 per cent in the past nine years, according to campaign group Axe the Card Tax."
Doubt.
They says costs are 2.5% now so back in 2014 costs were 0.004%?
I call fucking bullshit.
0.4%, Shirley? 600 percent is six times.
I still call fucking bullshit.
Card costs have come down.
Numerical calculation out by a factor of 100 but fronting it out and doubling down on your original claim, bold. Have you considered a career in politics, young man?
It was a lack of self confidence that stopped me going into politics.
I am way too modest for politics.
I can imagine.
I really did consider going into politics 20 years ago but there were a few insurmountable barriers
1) I would be considered gaffe prone for saying outrageous things with my colour metaphors. Apparently I have a tendency to say funny things which you really cannot say in polite society.
2) My mother wouldn't be able to cope with the constant attacks politicians come under. My private life is erm colourful. Her muslim ladies who lunch group would be ashamed by me.
3) MP pay is shit, I couldn't afford all my shoes and clothes on an MP's salary.
4) I have to keep my mind occupied, I really couldn't sit on the backbenches for a few years, I need to go straight into the cabinet.
When I was asked by the local party to consider it I went through a similar process and decided that:
1. I don't want the hassle of being backbench MP in opposition as would likely be the case by the time I won 2. It would be a gigantic pay cut and I'm not really up for it 3. I'm prone to speaking my mind and that means my ceiling is probably quite limited and the party machinery would see an end to any career beyond being a dreary constituency MP that asks the odd question on behalf of some old dear that can't use the NHS app to book an appointment. 4. And I can't stress this one enough, it would have made my wife extremely unhappy and ultimately that was the decision maker.
Yes, point 4 applied to me as well.
My then girlfriend/future wife was also quite clear she hated all Tories and would say so publicly.
Mine doesn't really want a life in or anywhere near the public eye. She said pretty sternly that the only way she'd agree is if my aim was to become PM and since that's not realistic (I didn't go to Oxford) I decided she had a point.
Major didn't go to Oxford either!
Nor did Gordon Brown.
Name the last UK general election winner who graduated from a university other than Oxford?
Very late to the party but thanks @Alanbrooke for an interesting header.
My instinctive thoughts are that you are very probably under estimating the costs of adaption by an order of magnitude. Almost nothing we have in the way of drainage, sewerage, sea defences, barriers and reservoirs will do. The amount of work to be done to future proof our infrastructure is going to dominate public spending for the next 30 years.
We need to prioritise this. Doing our bit for the planet is not a good use of resources. The money, if we have it , would be much better spent elsewhere where there opportunities for a much bigger bang for our bucks.
Time for a new party that represents Muslims adequately. We will not win overall but could easily win parliamentary seats. We are currently in active discussions to get this done. Muslim Labour MPs have let the community down. Change is needed.
they will want England to be like Palestine next
Full of dead Brown People?
Not really.
You should stick to your area of expertise Malc.!
What drove you off the edge BJ, you were normal on here once.
Wanting to stop Kids being slaughtered is normal 76% of people agree with me
Wanting the slaughter to continue is being "driven off the edge" and "Normal" No
Listen to yourself mate
Sounds like you are off your trolley. Making up garbage like that about people is pretty sick. Go Fcuk yourself you sick arsehole. @bigjohnowls
We need a new Green Policy – Part 2 – politicalbetting.com
In Part 1 I argued that Net Zero is the wrong path for the UK. To be clear that does not mean we should not have an environmental plan we definitely need one. Just not the one in place at present. Net Zero is focused on solving worldwide problems , we need instead to focus on our own requirements.
Part 2, a revelation after Part 1. It's good. We need to do this.
I'd add in a massive push to end fossil fuel extraction. Just stop oil are on the right track. Food security and climate driven migration are going to be very disruptive.
Part 2, a revelation after Part 1. It's good. We need to do this.
I'd add in a massive push to end fossil fuel extraction. Just stop oil are on the right track. Food security and climate driven migration are going to be very disruptive.
Comments
R&W have the Labour lead back at 20 points. It was 20 points in the first poll of the year in January so to say little has changed wouldn't be an understatement. The Conservatives bump around the mid to upper 20s. Labour bumps around the mid to upper 40s. The gap between Starmer and Sunak on the who would be the better PM question widens slightly but is now 12 points.
The England numbers are Labour 46%, Conservative 26%, Liberal Democrat 13% which is a 16.5% swing since 2019 and an 11% swing from Conservative to Liberal Democrat. The YouGov numbers last week were Labour 49%, Conservative 26% and Liberal Democrat 10%.
1. I don't want the hassle of being backbench MP in opposition as would likely be the case by the time I won
2. It would be a gigantic pay cut and I'm not really up for it
3. I'm prone to speaking my mind and that means my ceiling is probably quite limited and the party machinery would see an end to any career beyond being a dreary constituency MP that asks the odd question on behalf of some old dear that can't use the NHS app to book an appointment.
4. And I can't stress this one enough, it would have made my wife extremely unhappy and ultimately that was the decision maker.
The previous three? LeBron James, Michael Jordan, and Tiger Woods.
In Australia the Torres Strait Islanders are counted as a distinct group within what was previously 'indigenous Australians' (wiki says Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples is often preferred) apparently, but not other groups from the mainland.
Without looking into it I'd assume terms like First Nations peoples, which I first heard in relation to Canada, has gained traction because it emphasises the interrelation - the various peoples being there 'first' compared to European settlers - but also subtly emphasises not all are the same, hence 'First Nations', not 'First Nation'.
Kids, never turn down travel or sex. Esp travel
Yeh Gods. These people haven't a bloody scoopy have they?
(When the Sierra Club had more scientists, proportionately, they were pro-nuclear.)
The mind 'dialoguing with itself' complicates the matter further.
I think it highly implausible that human cognition is deterministic.
Some interesting thoughts as always from @Alanbrooke for which many thanks.
One or two comments - Councils have asked on occasion to reduce street lighting and even to turn off traffic lights at certain quieter junctions overnight but that has always been refused or resisted. I can't help but notice the office lights burning long into the night at Canary Wharf and elsewhere, the shop fronts illuminated etc. With the pandemic, the 24 hour society has just stepped back a notch and perhaps we need to consider how wasteful organisations and public bodies are.
I think Sunak is relying on selfish short-termism to carry through his "pro car" agenda but the truth is people of all ages do care and I suspect they prefer a Government which takes action, not in the form of eco-authoritarianism but a balanced approach around saving energy and promoting alternatives. Nor can we ignore the rest of the world - global climate change will impact us whether in human form or economic.
To his credit, @Alanbrooke has put forward a series of proposals which to my eye are fairly uncontroversial until you reach the price tag and you release no future Government is going to be able to support that degree of funding without some pain elsewhere.
It could be probabilistic though, if quantum effects are included.
Angels dancing on a pin or something.
My then girlfriend/future wife was also quite clear she hated all Tories and would say so publicly.
Unless you're getting ripped off, debit card percentage transaction fees should be sub 1% nowadays with no fixed transaction fee (or a token 1p transaction fee) either.
https://reason.com/2022/05/06/when-ted-kennedy-was-pro-life-and-ronald-reagan-was-expanding-abortion-access/
For example: "Once upon a time, the country was crawling with pro-life liberals and leftists. Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy, one of the period's preeminent liberal Democrats, once declared that the right to life begins at "the very moment of conception," a position he held until 1975. Further left, the Black Panther Party fiercely denounced abortion, a procedure it associated with eugenics."
(At one time, and I believe still, about 30 percent of abortions were performed on black women. If I recall correctly, Jesse Jackson once described that rate as a "holocaust".
Oddly enough, that rate, whatever it is, does not receive much coverage from our race-concious "mainstream" media.)
And, of course, the label of an oppressed group becomes denigrated over time if the group continues to be oppressed. My parents would have regarded Coloured as a 'nicer' word than Black whereas my granddaughter will almost certainly be taught that Queer is a better word than Gay. God knows what else she'll be taught.
Now clear 2nd favourite at 10 for nomination.
And 14.5 for Presidency - implying if she gets the nomination she is heavily odds on to win.
Israeli President Herzog endorses Macron’s plan for a coalition to fight Hamas
French president’s suggestion ‘was innovative, original, it makes sense.’
https://www.politico.eu/article/israel-isaac-herzog-france-emmanuel-macron-hamas-war-coalition/
‘The Polaroids that kept us together will surely fade away like the love we spoke of together on St Swithin’s Day’ is some lyric!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8B2ZJBoqNGk&list=PLWdIQronRkykeSN_p4k2BCxmmaOJJ7EyR
It's always puzzled me why it's never been made into a film or TV series compared to the endless Triffids takes.
I imagine (without wishing to derail things) it's something the GPT's of the world would be quite good assistants for.
I don't know enough about neurons to say whether their behaviour is deterministic. If forced to guess I would say it isn't, so in the multiverse I posted on here 60% of the time and but went and did something useful 40% of the time.
But that's different to chaos, which is normally applied to an deterministic processes that cannot be predicted due to a lack of precise information.
It offsets $14.3 billion in Israel aid with $14.3 bllion in cuts to IRS from the Inflation Reduction Act.
This offset will NEVER, EVER fly. Dems will reject it out of hand.
https://twitter.com/JakeSherman/status/1719073906391220528
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EURJiQQEaQ4
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/10/30/fbi-investigates-anti-semitic-threats-at-cornell-university/
Sorry.
But it's themes of alien species,climate change, understanding of science, media, politics etc - it seems ripe for an on-screen adaptation.
See also The Death of Grass.
Edit: Just to say I did quite enjoy the somewhat recent Val McDermid version of The Kraken Wakes via BBC R4. But surely someone with AppleTV/Netflix/Amazon's money could do something with it.
And, let me add immediately, that congressional Republicans reacted to this scandal by cutting back on the IRS budget. That may be understandable given the Obmaa administration's unwillingness to clean house, but the budget cutting has certainly helped protect many wealthy tax cheats
My instinctive thoughts are that you are very probably under estimating the costs of adaption by an order of magnitude. Almost nothing we have in the way of drainage, sewerage, sea defences, barriers and reservoirs will do. The amount of work to be done to future proof our infrastructure is going to dominate public spending for the next 30 years.
We need to prioritise this. Doing our bit for the planet is not a good use of resources. The money, if we have it , would be much better spent elsewhere where there opportunities for a much bigger bang for our bucks.
I'd add in a massive push to end fossil fuel extraction. Just stop oil are on the right track. Food security and climate driven migration are going to be very disruptive.
You are getting there.
Part 2, a revelation after Part 1. It's good. We need to do this.
I'd add in a massive push to end fossil fuel extraction. Just stop oil are on the right track. Food security and climate driven migration are going to be very disruptive.
You are getting there.