The cost of anything is the cost of the labour required to produce it.
Things are cheap where the workers get paid bugger all.
Is it tho? Printing is just a machine
You feed the paper, press a button, it prints. Very little labour involved
Surely much of the cost is the paper, “ink”, electricity, machine usage
Getting 360 pages printed in London would cost me £20-30 at its cheapest?
So it’s ten times cheaper here to use a printer, paper, etc. I’m sure a clever economist can explain it - I am somewhat surprised
Most of what you pay in London is for the premises.
I bought two ink canisters for my hp printer in Ryman this week. £99. You cannot tell me that ink costs that much to make. The model is to sell you a cheap printer and milk you on the consumables.
See also razor blades.
Yes. Its a hideous business model but it clearly works - for them - as if hasn’t changed for many years
I did a deep dive on it about a year ago when we were discussing the vileness of printers on pb. Apparently they make the machines deliberately crap and flimsy so you keep having to replace them
Even the cheapness of the machines is an illusion
I pay HP a measly sum every month and they send me new ink when I need it, checked remotely so I never run out , it arrives before you are done.
I was using HP. The printer broke. Of course. They always break
15 years or so ago I bought a Samsung laser printer for not a huge amount of money. It is probably the best technology purchase I have ever made. It had a massive toner cartridge, unlike those starter cartridges that print 10 pages before the "out of ink" message flashes up. This one went on, and on, and on. I eventually had to buy a replacement cartridge that I had to source on eBay because the printer had been out of production for years. The printer is now struggling a bit to pull the paper through, so I need to pick off each page as it is printed. I am wondering whether to replace it.
My mono laser is a Samsung (M2835), which was bought (says Amazon) in 2017 for £89.99 and is still great.
IIRC I bought it whilst I was debating the pros and cons of spending £500+ on a replacement set of third party 22k page toner cartridges for the OKI C9655 laser; the real ones were a lot more, adding up to ~£1000. Then I think there are drums for each colour, and the fuser unit . You need to need the quality and performance!
I have now recovered from a quite unusually for me nasty late-night hypo, so I can continue with the day.
If you are feeling befuddled by Sora, or bewildered, or bemused, take heart
This is the HEAD of AI at Meta, Yann LeCun. He is considered a global expert on AI, tho he is known for having a more "conservative" take on the subject - he thinks we are many years from real AGI
At a conference last week he literally said this:
"we cannot do text to video, we can't create frame after frame, basically we don't know how to do this"
He says it is far too hard and it needs new technology (which he is developing) and it will take much time
Two days later openAI released Sora. Doing exactly what he claimed we cannot do, leaving him humiliated. So if he can get it THAT wrong, so can almost anyone
Fuck me, 99.5% of people have NO idea what is about to hit us
So give us a precis.
What, when, where.
There is too much to summarise
Some serious physicists are claiming that Sora proves we ARE living in a simulation - a mad theory that has been around for a while
Another theme: Sora appears to show - this is highly contentious - that AI has developed an intuitive understanding of physics, it seems to have learned this, simply by OpenAI scaling up the visual data it is given. IF this true then that is pretty much AGI right there, maybe even ASI
These are the higher concepts
Lower down are the enormous implications for virtually every human job dependent on cognition
We should all kinda be grateful that we are lucky enough to live in this moment, the human universe is swiftly changing, indeed transforming; yes there will be pain but it is also incredibly interesting, and profound
Is it bigger than the advent of electricity? Probably. Could be more like the duscovery of fire, or even bigger than that
Last week's by-elections were a disaster for Rishi Sunak. But things are only going to get worse. He needs to call a May election, and make his final stand > Mail On Sunday >
Well if Dan Hodges is suggesting May, it’s nailed on to be in the autumn.
The thing is May is the better date but the current narrative (by election results, economy) make a May election impossible to call.
So the election will be in the Autumn and the Tory party will do disasterously because they won’t have the (remaining) troops to get he vote out.
Not sure it could be any worse than now
Oh I can easily see a summer of 3000+ people a week arriving on boats dripping more and more votes to Reform while things in the opposite direction drip feeds more votes to Labour.
The problem is there are a whole set of problems this country is facing and the Government doesn't seem to be doing anything to resolve them...
As I said a while back come May / June a lot of local authorities will be under new management looking at the finances and going - we need to fix this while we can blame the previous leadership...
Indeed but on Wellingborough swing didn't someone say they would be left with just 8 mps
I just tried electoral calculus (albeit using maths I did in my head and I don't have a reliable head) and I got the Conservatives completely wiped out in England and Wales, but with 6 seats left in Scotland.
I see SKS ordered Sue Grey to seize the personal phones of his staffers to find out who leaked the Green New Deal.
It turns out #TelAvivKeith was the nickname being used in e mails between said staffers.
Lol. SKS fans or should that be #TAK fans please explain
There is an article in the Guardian which I am not going to fetch because it would run down my monthly allowance of just 20 stories, suggesting that after Hartlepool, Starmer realised, along with the rest of us, that he was indeed the World's most incompetent dud and was on the cusp of resigning.
Sadly he didn't.
TelAviv Keith is a superb PT down. Rishi should use it at PMQs.
How does that allowance of Guardian stories work? RU abroad somewhere?
"If you think OpenAI Sora is a creative toy like DALLE, ... think again. Sora is a data-driven physics engine. It is a simulation of many worlds, real or fantastical. The simulator learns intricate rendering, "intuitive" physics, long-horizon reasoning, and semantic grounding, all by some denoising and gradient maths."
Someone on Reddit pointing out that average people do not understand the implications of AI for the same reason they do not really "get" the concept of exponential growth
Fuck me, 99.5% of people have NO idea what is about to hit us
So give us a precis.
What, when, where.
There is too much to summarise
Some serious physicists are claiming that Sora proves we ARE living in a simulation - a mad theory that has been around for a while
Another theme: Sora appears to show - this is highly contentious - that AI has developed an intuitive understanding of physics, it seems to have learned this, simply by OpenAI scaling up the visual data it is given. IF this true then that is pretty much AGI right there, maybe even ASI
These are the higher concepts
Lower down are the enormous implications for virtually every human job dependent on cognition
Whether this is a dream, a reality or a simulation is irrelevant as its the only thing we have.
So lets forget the pretentious philosophising.
Lets deal with the practicalities.
How soon will AI drive my car better than me ? How soon will AI cook my dinner better than me ? How soon will AI do my housework and gardening better than me ?
And at what cost.
And how soon will AI be able to jobs A through to Z and at what cost ?
The cost of anything is the cost of the labour required to produce it.
Things are cheap where the workers get paid bugger all.
Is it tho? Printing is just a machine
You feed the paper, press a button, it prints. Very little labour involved
Surely much of the cost is the paper, “ink”, electricity, machine usage
Getting 360 pages printed in London would cost me £20-30 at its cheapest?
So it’s ten times cheaper here to use a printer, paper, etc. I’m sure a clever economist can explain it - I am somewhat surprised
Most of what you pay in London is for the premises.
I bought two ink canisters for my hp printer in Ryman this week. £99. You cannot tell me that ink costs that much to make. The model is to sell you a cheap printer and milk you on the consumables.
Go for Epson Ecojet. Their business model is the opposite: more expensive printers, but cheap ink. And they *sip* the ink. They're blooming good if you do a fair amount of printng, and better than any HP or Lexmark inkjet I've ever had.
Trouble is I generally don't do that much printing, and it is extremely sporadic (because I travel so much) - but then suddenly I will need 200 pages done in a day, then three weeks go by and I need 7 pages, next day 2, then another 4 weeks of nothing and then I need another 100 pages and my printer breaks. Again. GAH
It's infuriating
Also I have a small flat and my printer/scanner has to be tiny as possible
I'd get a shelf and split the printer from the scanner. Do you need the scanner?
My normal scanner is a camera and possibly a monopod, unless I need really good reproduction. It does 99% of requirements.
(I used to live in a 400sqft one bed near Finsbury Square for a few years. Interesting experience.)
"If you think OpenAI Sora is a creative toy like DALLE, ... think again. Sora is a data-driven physics engine. It is a simulation of many worlds, real or fantastical. The simulator learns intricate rendering, "intuitive" physics, long-horizon reasoning, and semantic grounding, all by some denoising and gradient maths."
"Navalny's ability to see eye-to-eye with ordinary Russians (even his prison guards showed affection) and his well-informed perspective on the persistent problems of Russian governance would make him a leader like no other."
"This combination of appeal, experience, and wisdom would be impossible to replace"
I see SKS ordered Sue Grey to seize the personal phones of his staffers to find out who leaked the Green New Deal.
It turns out #TelAvivKeith was the nickname being used in e mails between said staffers.
Lol. SKS fans or should that be #TAK fans please explain
There is an article in the Guardian which I am not going to fetch because it would run down my monthly allowance of just 20 stories, suggesting that after Hartlepool, Starmer realised, along with the rest of us, that he was indeed the World's most incompetent dud and was on the cusp of resigning.
Sadly he didn't.
TelAviv Keith is a superb PT down. Rishi should use it at PMQs.
How does that allowance of Guardian stories work? RU abroad somewhere?
I thought the G was completely open.
No I am currently in the railway station car park in Llantwit Major. The mobile app allows me 20 views over the month. Look at the same article twice and that's two views. They want £6.99 a month for full access, and for that they can...
Fuck me, 99.5% of people have NO idea what is about to hit us
So give us a precis.
What, when, where.
There is too much to summarise
Some serious physicists are claiming that Sora proves we ARE living in a simulation - a mad theory that has been around for a while
Another theme: Sora appears to show - this is highly contentious - that AI has developed an intuitive understanding of physics, it seems to have learned this, simply by OpenAI scaling up the visual data it is given. IF this true then that is pretty much AGI right there, maybe even ASI
These are the higher concepts
Lower down are the enormous implications for virtually every human job dependent on cognition
Whether this is a dream, a reality or a simulation is irrelevant as its the only thing we have.
So lets forget the pretentious philosophising.
Lets deal with the practicalities.
How soon will AI drive my car better than me ? How soon will AI cook my dinner better than me ? How soon will AI do my housework and gardening better than me ?
And at what cost.
And how soon will AI be able to jobs A through to Z and at what cost ?
That's all the dull stuff (relatively!) that doesn't interest me right now. But you will find imformed answers online
'Seven Met officers outside my childhood synagogue on this Shabbat. Seven. And no one attending even blinked. Do non-Jews in this city know that this is what Jewish life is like here?'
The comments underneath are quite instructive. Some sympathetic but others suggesting it's rather precious to be complaining about your comfortable London life when people are dying in Gaza, that the extra security is due to the police favouring Jews or that this is something that only became necessary after 7 October - so the blame really rests with Netanyahu.
"If you think OpenAI Sora is a creative toy like DALLE, ... think again. Sora is a data-driven physics engine. It is a simulation of many worlds, real or fantastical. The simulator learns intricate rendering, "intuitive" physics, long-horizon reasoning, and semantic grounding, all by some denoising and gradient maths."
That's NVIDIA's Senior Research Scientist. Not a rando
The guy selling the AI chips would say that, though.
I don't think NVDIA's share price needs much boosting, TBH
Though it is precisely the advent of AI (or rather the boom in GPU-susceptible computation of which 'AI' is a part) that turned Nvidia's recent share price to strong growth.
I see SKS ordered Sue Grey to seize the personal phones of his staffers to find out who leaked the Green New Deal.
It turns out #TelAvivKeith was the nickname being used in e mails between said staffers.
Lol. SKS fans or should that be #TAK fans please explain
There is an article in the Guardian which I am not going to fetch because it would run down my monthly allowance of just 20 stories, suggesting that after Hartlepool, Starmer realised, along with the rest of us, that he was indeed the World's most incompetent dud and was on the cusp of resigning.
Sadly he didn't.
TelAviv Keith is a superb PT down. Rishi should use it at PMQs.
How does that allowance of Guardian stories work? RU abroad somewhere?
I thought the G was completely open.
No I am currently in the railway station car park in Llantwit Major. The mobile app allows me 20 views over the month. Look at the same article twice and that's two views. They want £6.99 a month for full access, and for that they can...
Yes, same on iPad
They are moving to a paywall - they have no choice, see their losses - but trying to do it "secretly"
Bazball going well. England just need a last-wicket stand of 466 to triumph. Or 9 more to reach 100, which may be possible.
Bazball has provided the most fun for any English cricket fan since I started following cricket (1993). I can't understand the curmudgeonly comments any time it's not a 100% success.
Why is there so much criticism of the best thing to ever happen to cricket in England?
Last week's by-elections were a disaster for Rishi Sunak. But things are only going to get worse. He needs to call a May election, and make his final stand > Mail On Sunday >
Well if Dan Hodges is suggesting May, it’s nailed on to be in the autumn.
The general election will be held on 23rd January, 2025. Unlike Dan Hodges, I can only be wrong once!
"If you think OpenAI Sora is a creative toy like DALLE, ... think again. Sora is a data-driven physics engine. It is a simulation of many worlds, real or fantastical. The simulator learns intricate rendering, "intuitive" physics, long-horizon reasoning, and semantic grounding, all by some denoising and gradient maths."
That's NVIDIA's Senior Research Scientist. Not a rando
The guy selling the AI chips would say that, though.
I don't think NVDIA's share price needs much boosting, TBH
Though it is precisely the advent of AI (or rather the boom in GPU-susceptible computation of which 'AI' is a part) that turned Nvidia's recent share price to strong growth.
Sure, but they don't really need their Lead Boffin to go on Twitter and lie so they can put a few more cents on the stock, do they? More to lose than gain
He is sharing his honest opinion, it seems to me
Also he is just one of many experts, often academic not commercial, discussing the deep philosophical implications of Sora et al
Last week's by-elections were a disaster for Rishi Sunak. But things are only going to get worse. He needs to call a May election, and make his final stand > Mail On Sunday >
Well if Dan Hodges is suggesting May, it’s nailed on to be in the autumn.
The general election will be held on 23rd January, 2025. Unlike Dan Hodges, I can only be wrong once!
I agree, but I’ve been wrong before, and probably will be again!
I see SKS ordered Sue Grey to seize the personal phones of his staffers to find out who leaked the Green New Deal.
It turns out #TelAvivKeith was the nickname being used in e mails between said staffers.
Lol. SKS fans or should that be #TAK fans please explain
There is an article in the Guardian which I am not going to fetch because it would run down my monthly allowance of just 20 stories, suggesting that after Hartlepool, Starmer realised, along with the rest of us, that he was indeed the World's most incompetent dud and was on the cusp of resigning.
Sadly he didn't.
TelAviv Keith is a superb PT down. Rishi should use it at PMQs.
How does that allowance of Guardian stories work? RU abroad somewhere?
I thought the G was completely open.
No I am currently in the railway station car park in Llantwit Major. The mobile app allows me 20 views over the month. Look at the same article twice and that's two views. They want £6.99 a month for full access, and for that they can...
Yes, same on iPad
They are moving to a paywall - they have no choice, see their losses - but trying to do it "secretly"
It's a bit sad
The trouble for The Guardian is that they've cultivated an audience of people expecting free content and moving to a paid model will lose them too much of their audience. It's a disaster of their own making by being so self righteous about other news pay walls, especially the original pay wall at The Times which has been extremely successful for News Group. Iirc they're up to half a million subscribers at average annual revenue of ~£80 for digital subscribers.
This is the sort of thing labour campaigners and MPs will be on the receiving end of more and more as the election campaign gets into full swing.
Wonder how this will impact labour in its inner city seats. Not just it’s Muslim vote that is very much against the slaughter in Gaza, and labours stance which is to the right of the govt, but the young in general too.
Fox jr2 says he won't vote Labour because of its stance on the Gaza conflict. He might vote Green.
How old is he ?
This is why I don’t think the Green vote share is overstated.
Early Twenties.
He is in a safe Labour seat in East London so I don't think it makes a difference.
I don't think he has a particularly deep understanding of the conflict, but is appalled by Israeli actions.
I don't think that either Netanyahu or Hamas give a toss about what foreign politicians think, except the USA for Israelis.
Has he tried adding up how many people have died due to wars / instability maintained since 1980 by the Government of Iran in the interests of the Government of Iran?
Just the current Houthi War has cost 400k lives, plus Syria - where Iranian forces are directly on the ground, plus Lebanon since 1979 where Hezbollah have been essentially part of Iran's foreign policy, plus all the rest.
It dwarfs anything Israel has done, yet we hear little or nothing about it, and the likes of Mr Corbyn has spent much of his career traipsing around as a useful idiot for anyone who opposes the West.
It's very interesting how worldviews are formed by what receives an emphasis in current public discourse vs the age of the person forming the view, and tracing out influences later on.
I'm sure that you have taught Fox Jr to scratch the surface and look beneath - it is good to be challenged (especially self-challenged) by alternative views, though we still have our own biases beneath.
Denmark has decided to send all its artillery to Ukraine — Mette Frederiksen, Prime Minister of Denmark.
"Ukraine is asking us for ammunition and artillery now. We, Denmark, have decided to transfer all our artillery to Ukraine. So, sorry, friends, there is military equipment in Europe, it is not only a matter of production. We have weapons, ammunition, air defense systems, which we do not use yet. They must be handed over to Ukraine."
I see SKS ordered Sue Grey to seize the personal phones of his staffers to find out who leaked the Green New Deal.
It turns out #TelAvivKeith was the nickname being used in e mails between said staffers.
Lol. SKS fans or should that be #TAK fans please explain
There is an article in the Guardian which I am not going to fetch because it would run down my monthly allowance of just 20 stories, suggesting that after Hartlepool, Starmer realised, along with the rest of us, that he was indeed the World's most incompetent dud and was on the cusp of resigning.
Sadly he didn't.
TelAviv Keith is a superb PT down. Rishi should use it at PMQs.
How does that allowance of Guardian stories work? RU abroad somewhere?
I thought the G was completely open.
No I am currently in the railway station car park in Llantwit Major. The mobile app allows me 20 views over the month. Look at the same article twice and that's two views. They want £6.99 a month for full access, and for that they can...
Yes, same on iPad
They are moving to a paywall - they have no choice, see their losses - but trying to do it "secretly"
It's a bit sad
The trouble for The Guardian is that they've cultivated an audience of people expecting free content and moving to a paid model will lose them too much of their audience. It's a disaster of their own making by being so self righteous about other news pay walls, especially the original pay wall at The Times which has been extremely successful for News Group. Iirc they're up to half a million subscribers at average annual revenue of ~£80 for digital subscribers.
Yes exactly
Some of PB was also REALLY sneery about Rupert's "stupid paywall"
Rupert Murdoch didn't become a media titan by luck. He just annoys people so they refuse to believe he is actually very smart, and good at what he does, as well as being a selfish evil Fascist etc
Same applies to Elon Musk. Possibly not a nice guy, but also a genius
The right are no longer conservative. If you like pragmatic, “what matters is what works” policies you head to the left. If you want to take the world forward you also vote for the left or centre.
If you want the world to burn or more radical change you head to the neo right (or far lef)t, who want to turn the clock back to an illusion of childhood before the modern world took hold.
What utter shite. If you want pragmatic “what matters is what works” policies for an advanced economy, then you copy the Singaporean government
If you’re a poor country, you copy China. If you’re a poor country with terrible crime, you cope El Salvador
What works is all about consent, in the end. You need a broad buy-in of a broad direction of travel: the Nordics, Switzerland, Singapore, Uruguay (never gets a mention but compare it to Argentina and Brazil) etc. They go through ups and downs but generally plough forward. China has had an extraordinary 30 year spurt but now faces huge headwinds which are leading to ever-greater authoritarianism. That suggests consent is not readily available. There may be big trouble ahead.
What should perhaps concern us more is the End of Democracy altogether. Young people are staggeringly illiberal, and strikingly apathetic about democracy - they see it as not working for them, so why should they?
"Younger people more likely to doubt merits of democracy – global poll
International study reveals 42% of people aged 18 to 35 supportive of military rule, against 20% of older respondents"
This is a global trend, and we see it also in the UK
See also this paragraph:
"Many respondents believed China’s growing influence would be a force for good, with nearly twice as many respondents believing it would have a positive impact (45%) on their country as a negative one (25%)."
America is no longer the beacon, in many ways China supplants it (even as China faces problems). Out here in impoverished Phnom Penh - paradoxically surging with Chinese money - I can see why. Crime is low, food is good, life gets better, there is possibly less litter in central Phnom Penh than in Paris, London or NYC
Albeit even on that poll '...57% of respondents aged 18 to 35 felt democracy was preferable to any other form of government.'
Support for China is also more a non Western trend 'Many respondents believed China’s growing influence would be a force for good, with nearly twice as many respondents believing it would have a positive impact (45%) on their country as a negative one (25%).
However, people in lower-income countries such as Pakistan (76%), Ethiopia (72%), and Egypt (71%) were markedly more enthusiastic than those in higher-income democracies such as Japan (3%), Germany (14%), the UK (16%) and the US (25%).'
Most people just want life to be better. They don't want to run the government.
Fuck me, 99.5% of people have NO idea what is about to hit us
So give us a precis.
What, when, where.
There is too much to summarise
Some serious physicists are claiming that Sora proves we ARE living in a simulation - a mad theory that has been around for a while
Another theme: Sora appears to show - this is highly contentious - that AI has developed an intuitive understanding of physics, it seems to have learned this, simply by OpenAI scaling up the visual data it is given. IF this true then that is pretty much AGI right there, maybe even ASI
These are the higher concepts
Lower down are the enormous implications for virtually every human job dependent on cognition
Whether this is a dream, a reality or a simulation is irrelevant as its the only thing we have.
So lets forget the pretentious philosophising.
Lets deal with the practicalities.
How soon will AI drive my car better than me ? How soon will AI cook my dinner better than me ? How soon will AI do my housework and gardening better than me ?
And at what cost.
And how soon will AI be able to jobs A through to Z and at what cost ?
That's all the dull stuff (relatively!) that doesn't interest me right now. But you will find imformed answers online
The "this is a simulation" is a speculation as old as humanity, as I'm sure we all know. Alongside "does something continue to exist when I'm not looking at it?".
We had the atheist-optimists in the 1920s / 30s, who were mugged by the 30s / 40s, then the drugged up philosophers of the 60s / 70s, some of whom were mugged-post-drugged by reality.
I'm reminded of the "God in the Quad" limericks, the first being from Ronald Knox.
There once was a man who said "God Must think it exceedingly odd If he finds that this tree Continues to be When there's no one about in the Quad."
Dear Sir, Your astonishment's odd. I am always about in the Quad. And that's why the tree Will continue to be Since observed by Yours faithfully, God
If objects depend on our seeing So that trees, unobserved, would cease tree-ing, Then my question is: Who Is the one who sees you And assures your persistence in being?
Dear Sir, You reason most oddly. To be's to be seen for the bod'ly. But for spirits like me, To be is to see. Sincerely, The one who is godly.
Last week's by-elections were a disaster for Rishi Sunak. But things are only going to get worse. He needs to call a May election, and make his final stand > Mail On Sunday >
Well if Dan Hodges is suggesting May, it’s nailed on to be in the autumn.
The general election will be held on 23rd January, 2025. Unlike Dan Hodges, I can only be wrong once!
If that is the case then it would likely result in the Conservatives leading a minority government. They need to go sooner to ensure a workable, albeit reduced, majority.
Fuck me, 99.5% of people have NO idea what is about to hit us
As demonstrated by Air Canada last week who discovered that when an AI invents a policy that policy is legally binding...
The thing is that what AI can sensible do and what we will expect it to be able to do are 2 completely different things.
I've certainly come across a lot of people disappointed by MS's "Copilot For Office". Some people had inflated expectations (partly due to MS's hype) but quite a lot by just how badly MS have done integrating it.
"Navalny's ability to see eye-to-eye with ordinary Russians (even his prison guards showed affection) and his well-informed perspective on the persistent problems of Russian governance would make him a leader like no other."
"This combination of appeal, experience, and wisdom would be impossible to replace"
The right are no longer conservative. If you like pragmatic, “what matters is what works” policies you head to the left. If you want to take the world forward you also vote for the left or centre.
If you want the world to burn or more radical change you head to the neo right (or far lef)t, who want to turn the clock back to an illusion of childhood before the modern world took hold.
What utter shite. If you want pragmatic “what matters is what works” policies for an advanced economy, then you copy the Singaporean government
If you’re a poor country, you copy China. If you’re a poor country with terrible crime, you cope El Salvador
What works is all about consent, in the end. You need a broad buy-in of a broad direction of travel: the Nordics, Switzerland, Singapore, Uruguay (never gets a mention but compare it to Argentina and Brazil) etc. They go through ups and downs but generally plough forward. China has had an extraordinary 30 year spurt but now faces huge headwinds which are leading to ever-greater authoritarianism. That suggests consent is not readily available. There may be big trouble ahead.
What should perhaps concern us more is the End of Democracy altogether. Young people are staggeringly illiberal, and strikingly apathetic about democracy - they see it as not working for them, so why should they?
"Younger people more likely to doubt merits of democracy – global poll
International study reveals 42% of people aged 18 to 35 supportive of military rule, against 20% of older respondents"
This is a global trend, and we see it also in the UK
See also this paragraph:
"Many respondents believed China’s growing influence would be a force for good, with nearly twice as many respondents believing it would have a positive impact (45%) on their country as a negative one (25%)."
America is no longer the beacon, in many ways China supplants it (even as China faces problems). Out here in impoverished Phnom Penh - paradoxically surging with Chinese money - I can see why. Crime is low, food is good, life gets better, there is possibly less litter in central Phnom Penh than in Paris, London or NYC
Albeit even on that poll '...57% of respondents aged 18 to 35 felt democracy was preferable to any other form of government.'
Support for China is also more a non Western trend 'Many respondents believed China’s growing influence would be a force for good, with nearly twice as many respondents believing it would have a positive impact (45%) on their country as a negative one (25%).
However, people in lower-income countries such as Pakistan (76%), Ethiopia (72%), and Egypt (71%) were markedly more enthusiastic than those in higher-income democracies such as Japan (3%), Germany (14%), the UK (16%) and the US (25%).'
Most people just want life to be better. They don't want to run the government.
It’s Maslow’s hierarchy. The more comfortable people feel the more they value abstract things like liberty, social progress, artistic freedom and so on.
One notable shift in political commentary: a month ago there was a fair bit of noise from Tory loyalists about echoes of 1992. Now the noise is about how while the Tories are facing a landslide defeat there's no enthusiasm for Labour.
We're watching the 7 stages of grief play out before us.
He's also bet on Douglas Alexander to be next Labour leader at 193 to 1...
I don't see it as a stages of grief thing, as very few Tory MPs believe the line. But they clearly can't say "we're absolutely f***ed". And it's too late in too tumultuous a Parliament to say, "well this is typical midterm, and you'll see this come round as the benefits of our long term policies come through..."
So the public line is that turnout was quite low (even though it normally is for by-elections). I don't think Tory MPs seriously believe the line that it's a voter strike, which will end in time for the General Election - it won't accord with what they see in their constituencies, or what they know about electoral politics.
Clips of yesterday's Palestine rally again included the chant "no ceasefire, no vote" which might be electorally important, especially if it spreads from London to Rochdale whose by-election is on the 29th.
Yes. Labour will be fine in our election (they have a buffer on the buffer) but I'm a bit worried about this for Biden.
One bit of data suggests that there is more to be said. If I understand the maths correctly, Labour need a swing of 12.7 percentage points to get an overall majority. Ignore Wellingborough - special case of banana ex MP and banana candidate. At Kingswood they got a 16 point swing. On the whole those predicting the result (including PBers) thought Labour would do better. That is not safe home territory when a GE campaign - which will be horrible and dirty - hasn't really started.
NOM remains value. And why else is Rishi 7/1 (Hills) and not 66/1 to be PM after the next election?
I see SKS ordered Sue Grey to seize the personal phones of his staffers to find out who leaked the Green New Deal.
It turns out #TelAvivKeith was the nickname being used in e mails between said staffers.
Lol. SKS fans or should that be #TAK fans please explain
There is an article in the Guardian which I am not going to fetch because it would run down my monthly allowance of just 20 stories, suggesting that after Hartlepool, Starmer realised, along with the rest of us, that he was indeed the World's most incompetent dud and was on the cusp of resigning.
Sadly he didn't.
TelAviv Keith is a superb PT down. Rishi should use it at PMQs.
How does that allowance of Guardian stories work? RU abroad somewhere?
I thought the G was completely open.
No I am currently in the railway station car park in Llantwit Major. The mobile app allows me 20 views over the month. Look at the same article twice and that's two views. They want £6.99 a month for full access, and for that they can...
Yes, same on iPad
They are moving to a paywall - they have no choice, see their losses - but trying to do it "secretly"
It's a bit sad
The trouble for The Guardian is that they've cultivated an audience of people expecting free content and moving to a paid model will lose them too much of their audience. It's a disaster of their own making by being so self righteous about other news pay walls, especially the original pay wall at The Times which has been extremely successful for News Group. Iirc they're up to half a million subscribers at average annual revenue of ~£80 for digital subscribers.
Yes exactly
Some of PB was also REALLY sneery about Rupert's "stupid paywall"
Rupert Murdoch didn't become a media titan by luck. He just annoys people so they refuse to believe he is actually very smart, and good at what he does, as well as being a selfish evil Fascist etc
Same applies to Elon Musk. Possibly not a nice guy, but also a genius
Musk and Murdoch are quite different I think. Musk has the creative genius and audacity but Murdoch is simply an incredibly savvy and pragmatic businessman. Musk seems to lack that side to him.
I see SKS ordered Sue Grey to seize the personal phones of his staffers to find out who leaked the Green New Deal.
It turns out #TelAvivKeith was the nickname being used in e mails between said staffers.
Lol. SKS fans or should that be #TAK fans please explain
There is an article in the Guardian which I am not going to fetch because it would run down my monthly allowance of just 20 stories, suggesting that after Hartlepool, Starmer realised, along with the rest of us, that he was indeed the World's most incompetent dud and was on the cusp of resigning.
Sadly he didn't.
TelAviv Keith is a superb PT down. Rishi should use it at PMQs.
How does that allowance of Guardian stories work? RU abroad somewhere?
I thought the G was completely open.
No I am currently in the railway station car park in Llantwit Major. The mobile app allows me 20 views over the month. Look at the same article twice and that's two views. They want £6.99 a month for full access, and for that they can...
Yes, same on iPad
They are moving to a paywall - they have no choice, see their losses - but trying to do it "secretly"
It's a bit sad
The trouble for The Guardian is that they've cultivated an audience of people expecting free content and moving to a paid model will lose them too much of their audience. It's a disaster of their own making by being so self righteous about other news pay walls, especially the original pay wall at The Times which has been extremely successful for News Group. Iirc they're up to half a million subscribers at average annual revenue of ~£80 for digital subscribers.
Yes exactly
Some of PB was also REALLY sneery about Rupert's "stupid paywall"
Rupert Murdoch didn't become a media titan by luck. He just annoys people so they refuse to believe he is actually very smart, and good at what he does, as well as being a selfish evil Fascist etc
Same applies to Elon Musk. Possibly not a nice guy, but also a genius
Well…Murdoch inheriting his Dad’s small media business, and Musk being born into wealth both helped them get started. Plenty of geniuses in the world but you also need the luck of being born somewhere and to someone that won’t actively stop you. Can’t see a genius born in North Korea or Gaza, or into comparative poverty anywhere else, being able to capitalise on their talent.
EDIT - removed the emerald reference as I appreciate that is contentious but the Musk family’s success in SA is not in doubt.
What I don't get about this is: 1,000 pairs, $200 to $400 per pair, revenue is split with the company producing them so say Trump is getting $200 per pair, that's $200,000. What's it costing him to fly his enormous private jet to the venue where he's shilling them?
I see SKS ordered Sue Grey to seize the personal phones of his staffers to find out who leaked the Green New Deal.
It turns out #TelAvivKeith was the nickname being used in e mails between said staffers.
Lol. SKS fans or should that be #TAK fans please explain
There is an article in the Guardian which I am not going to fetch because it would run down my monthly allowance of just 20 stories, suggesting that after Hartlepool, Starmer realised, along with the rest of us, that he was indeed the World's most incompetent dud and was on the cusp of resigning.
Sadly he didn't.
TelAviv Keith is a superb PT down. Rishi should use it at PMQs.
How does that allowance of Guardian stories work? RU abroad somewhere?
I thought the G was completely open.
No I am currently in the railway station car park in Llantwit Major. The mobile app allows me 20 views over the month. Look at the same article twice and that's two views. They want £6.99 a month for full access, and for that they can...
Yes, same on iPad
They are moving to a paywall - they have no choice, see their losses - but trying to do it "secretly"
It's a bit sad
The trouble for The Guardian is that they've cultivated an audience of people expecting free content and moving to a paid model will lose them too much of their audience. It's a disaster of their own making by being so self righteous about other news pay walls, especially the original pay wall at The Times which has been extremely successful for News Group. Iirc they're up to half a million subscribers at average annual revenue of ~£80 for digital subscribers.
Yes exactly
Some of PB was also REALLY sneery about Rupert's "stupid paywall"
Rupert Murdoch didn't become a media titan by luck. He just annoys people so they refuse to believe he is actually very smart, and good at what he does, as well as being a selfish evil Fascist etc
Same applies to Elon Musk. Possibly not a nice guy, but also a genius
Can’t see a genius born in North Korea or Gaza, or into comparative poverty anywhere else, being able to capitalise on their talent.
I don't see that. Being born into poverty, or enduring through experience as a refugee, imo gives a drive that those of us born comparatively comfortably often do not have.
The right are no longer conservative. If you like pragmatic, “what matters is what works” policies you head to the left. If you want to take the world forward you also vote for the left or centre.
If you want the world to burn or more radical change you head to the neo right (or far lef)t, who want to turn the clock back to an illusion of childhood before the modern world took hold.
What utter shite. If you want pragmatic “what matters is what works” policies for an advanced economy, then you copy the Singaporean government
If you’re a poor country, you copy China. If you’re a poor country with terrible crime, you cope El Salvador
What works is all about consent, in the end. You need a broad buy-in of a broad direction of travel: the Nordics, Switzerland, Singapore, Uruguay (never gets a mention but compare it to Argentina and Brazil) etc. They go through ups and downs but generally plough forward. China has had an extraordinary 30 year spurt but now faces huge headwinds which are leading to ever-greater authoritarianism. That suggests consent is not readily available. There may be big trouble ahead.
What should perhaps concern us more is the End of Democracy altogether. Young people are staggeringly illiberal, and strikingly apathetic about democracy - they see it as not working for them, so why should they?
"Younger people more likely to doubt merits of democracy – global poll
International study reveals 42% of people aged 18 to 35 supportive of military rule, against 20% of older respondents"
This is a global trend, and we see it also in the UK
See also this paragraph:
"Many respondents believed China’s growing influence would be a force for good, with nearly twice as many respondents believing it would have a positive impact (45%) on their country as a negative one (25%)."
America is no longer the beacon, in many ways China supplants it (even as China faces problems). Out here in impoverished Phnom Penh - paradoxically surging with Chinese money - I can see why. Crime is low, food is good, life gets better, there is possibly less litter in central Phnom Penh than in Paris, London or NYC
Are we surprised?
They're all taught that Western nations and Western values are at the root of all evil in the world from the moment they're able to write.
Indeed. The problem with having the right in charge is that they routinely denigrate the tolerant liberal values that built our civilisation as being 'woke' rather than celebrate them. I may say that you are occasionally guilty of this. When you have Tory mouthpieces like the DM and the Tele screaming that the values that built us are somehow foreign, is it surprising that we are heading towards the rightist authoritarianism they crave?
This is a matter of perception. For a while I have been of the view that it is mostly the other way around, that the it is the left 'woke' thinking that is trashing civilisation. But actually, both extremes are as bad as each other and both have dictatorial and authoritarian tendencies. The point that annoys me immensely is that the woke left get an endless free pass because of the belief that they are on 'the right side of history', whereas the right are on the 'wrong side of history'. All I would comment is that, in the end, is that you have to decide these things for yourself.
It seems to me that the centrist/one nation wing of the conservative party are redundant and finished, and the question is whether the new political movement on the right comes from either within the Conservative party, or outside of it. I've said a few times that Tice and the message about 'saving Britain' comes across quite well. But it is also worth following what Dominic Cummings is saying. Essentially I expect the 'new right' movement to promote certain things that are currently not part of mainstream politics, like leave the ECHR, re do the asylum rules, fundamentally reform environmental and planning legislation, abolish net zero, change welfare and health care eligibility rules, fundamentally reform equalities rules. All these are issues that should really be on the table but aren't because of the dubious perception that they are an essential part of 'western civilisation'.
Can you clarify what you mean by ‘comes across quite well’?
If you mean it’s superficially appealing, I agree. But if you mean it is a realistic programme for the future prosperity and success of this country I find that very difficult to believe, and am surprised that someone who clearly thinks hard about this stuff would buy into a message like ‘saving Britain’.
What sort of Britain do you think Tice is trying to save? One in which we defend to the hilt our massively unequal levels of wealth in the face of a globe that is struggling to finance climate adaptation and deal with unprecedented migration as a result of food and water wars? How do you think that will actually go in practice?
It seems to me we have a genuine choice, but one that is fast disappearing. We could use our considerable remaining global credibility to lead a movement towards a more equal world with relatively high prosperity for almost all.
Or we could retreat into a Children of Men-style police state, ever worsening our own lives and those of our children in order to try to ‘save’ a Britain that will have long disappeared in the face of our own authoritarianism.
"If you think OpenAI Sora is a creative toy like DALLE, ... think again. Sora is a data-driven physics engine. It is a simulation of many worlds, real or fantastical. The simulator learns intricate rendering, "intuitive" physics, long-horizon reasoning, and semantic grounding, all by some denoising and gradient maths."
That's NVIDIA's Senior Research Scientist. Not a rando
The guy selling the AI chips would say that, though.
I don't think NVDIA's share price needs much boosting, TBH
Though it is precisely the advent of AI (or rather the boom in GPU-susceptible computation of which 'AI' is a part) that turned Nvidia's recent share price to strong growth.
Sure, but they don't really need their Lead Boffin to go on Twitter and lie so they can put a few more cents on the stock, do they? More to lose than gain
He is sharing his honest opinion, it seems to me
Also he is just one of many experts, often academic not commercial, discussing the deep philosophical implications of Sora et al
Oh, sure - I completely agree with you. While it is of course a helpful line to take, it is not one he cynically doesn't believe (at least enough to make it sincerely)
Just had a moment when I imagined myself age 30, working in the ceative sector - designer, painter, musician, writer, actor, vid game dude, copywriter, director, illustrator - basically all the arts. Imagining myself being well paid to do a job I love.....
My God, I would hate this AI, with a blinding passion. Fear it and loathe it to perdition. I would want to smash it. A machine that simultaneously take's away my life's purpose, my reason to work with joy, while ALSO taking away my income, my ability to feed my kids. At the same time! How bad is that?
I see SKS ordered Sue Grey to seize the personal phones of his staffers to find out who leaked the Green New Deal.
It turns out #TelAvivKeith was the nickname being used in e mails between said staffers.
Lol. SKS fans or should that be #TAK fans please explain
There is an article in the Guardian which I am not going to fetch because it would run down my monthly allowance of just 20 stories, suggesting that after Hartlepool, Starmer realised, along with the rest of us, that he was indeed the World's most incompetent dud and was on the cusp of resigning.
Sadly he didn't.
TelAviv Keith is a superb PT down. Rishi should use it at PMQs.
How does that allowance of Guardian stories work? RU abroad somewhere?
I thought the G was completely open.
No I am currently in the railway station car park in Llantwit Major. The mobile app allows me 20 views over the month. Look at the same article twice and that's two views. They want £6.99 a month for full access, and for that they can...
Yes, same on iPad
They are moving to a paywall - they have no choice, see their losses - but trying to do it "secretly"
It's a bit sad
The trouble for The Guardian is that they've cultivated an audience of people expecting free content and moving to a paid model will lose them too much of their audience. It's a disaster of their own making by being so self righteous about other news pay walls, especially the original pay wall at The Times which has been extremely successful for News Group. Iirc they're up to half a million subscribers at average annual revenue of ~£80 for digital subscribers.
Yes exactly
Some of PB was also REALLY sneery about Rupert's "stupid paywall"
Rupert Murdoch didn't become a media titan by luck. He just annoys people so they refuse to believe he is actually very smart, and good at what he does, as well as being a selfish evil Fascist etc
Same applies to Elon Musk. Possibly not a nice guy, but also a genius
Can’t see a genius born in North Korea or Gaza, or into comparative poverty anywhere else, being able to capitalise on their talent.
I don't see that. Being born into poverty, or enduring through experience as a refugee, imo gives a drive that those of us born comparatively comfortably often do not have.
A genius born in NK or Gaza can’t become a refugee. Said genius can’t get out. Similarly if Musk had been born in SA with a somewhat darker skin tone.
I see SKS ordered Sue Grey to seize the personal phones of his staffers to find out who leaked the Green New Deal.
It turns out #TelAvivKeith was the nickname being used in e mails between said staffers.
Lol. SKS fans or should that be #TAK fans please explain
There is an article in the Guardian which I am not going to fetch because it would run down my monthly allowance of just 20 stories, suggesting that after Hartlepool, Starmer realised, along with the rest of us, that he was indeed the World's most incompetent dud and was on the cusp of resigning.
Sadly he didn't.
TelAviv Keith is a superb PT down. Rishi should use it at PMQs.
How does that allowance of Guardian stories work? RU abroad somewhere?
I thought the G was completely open.
No I am currently in the railway station car park in Llantwit Major. The mobile app allows me 20 views over the month. Look at the same article twice and that's two views. They want £6.99 a month for full access, and for that they can...
Yes, same on iPad
They are moving to a paywall - they have no choice, see their losses - but trying to do it "secretly"
It's a bit sad
The trouble for The Guardian is that they've cultivated an audience of people expecting free content and moving to a paid model will lose them too much of their audience. It's a disaster of their own making by being so self righteous about other news pay walls, especially the original pay wall at The Times which has been extremely successful for News Group. Iirc they're up to half a million subscribers at average annual revenue of ~£80 for digital subscribers.
Yes exactly
Some of PB was also REALLY sneery about Rupert's "stupid paywall"
Rupert Murdoch didn't become a media titan by luck. He just annoys people so they refuse to believe he is actually very smart, and good at what he does, as well as being a selfish evil Fascist etc
Same applies to Elon Musk. Possibly not a nice guy, but also a genius
I read the Mail on Sunday finance pages, this is money, every week. I’ve noticed in the last couple of weeks s9me articles are now behind a paywall too.
The Guardian, by adopting it’s self righteous approach by not implementing a paywall but begging for cash has screwed itself.
It would be a shame to lose it. The media needs diverse views. Even if it is, in its own way, awful. A left wing Daily Mail.
Fuck me, 99.5% of people have NO idea what is about to hit us
As demonstrated by Air Canada last week who discovered that when an AI invents a policy that policy is legally binding...
The thing is that what AI can sensible do and what we will expect it to be able to do are 2 completely different things.
I've certainly come across a lot of people disappointed by MS's "Copilot For Office". Some people had inflated expectations (partly due to MS's hype) but quite a lot by just how badly MS have done integrating it.
It works pretty well in Visual Studio Code - most useful for boilerplating, writing tests etc.
When a team switches it off because they're working for a client that doesn't allow AI tooling, the drop in productivity is small enough that it gets lost in the noise... but everyone complains about having to do "the boring stuff" by hand. It's almost like asking them to do their work using a fountain pen rather than a computer.
"If you think OpenAI Sora is a creative toy like DALLE, ... think again. Sora is a data-driven physics engine. It is a simulation of many worlds, real or fantastical. The simulator learns intricate rendering, "intuitive" physics, long-horizon reasoning, and semantic grounding, all by some denoising and gradient maths."
That's NVIDIA's Senior Research Scientist. Not a rando
The guy selling the AI chips would say that, though.
I don't think NVDIA's share price needs much boosting, TBH
Though it is precisely the advent of AI (or rather the boom in GPU-susceptible computation of which 'AI' is a part) that turned Nvidia's recent share price to strong growth.
Sure, but they don't really need their Lead Boffin to go on Twitter and lie so they can put a few more cents on the stock, do they? More to lose than gain
He is sharing his honest opinion, it seems to me
Also he is just one of many experts, often academic not commercial, discussing the deep philosophical implications of Sora et al
We have been doing a really interesting experiment chaining together "specialised" LLM/SLM agents so that they talk to each other to produce a final result in response to a request.
So one agent can do the natural language interpretation at the front end, one is good at linear algebra, one is good at getting code to compile and run, that sort of thing.
Each thing any agent does is quite simple, and in reality the "creative" bit is actually the human defining the constraints on the system that you describe as input.
But the output is so apparently miraculously far from the input that it feels very Deep Thought.
As this researcher says, the emergent complexity from what are quite simple algorithms is fascinating. And the interesting thing about this approach is that we are starting to be able to get the system to explain how it got to the answer.
Just had a moment when I imagined myself age 30, working in the ceative sector - designer, painter, musician, writer, actor, vid game dude, copywriter, director, illustrator - basically all the arts. Imagining myself being well paid to do a job I love.....
My God, I would hate this AI, with a blinding passion. Fear it and loathe it to perdition. I would want to smash it. A machine that simultaneously take's away my life's purpose, my reason to work with joy, while ALSO taking away my income, my ability to feed my kids. At the same time! How bad is that?
I see SKS ordered Sue Grey to seize the personal phones of his staffers to find out who leaked the Green New Deal.
It turns out #TelAvivKeith was the nickname being used in e mails between said staffers.
Lol. SKS fans or should that be #TAK fans please explain
There is an article in the Guardian which I am not going to fetch because it would run down my monthly allowance of just 20 stories, suggesting that after Hartlepool, Starmer realised, along with the rest of us, that he was indeed the World's most incompetent dud and was on the cusp of resigning.
Sadly he didn't.
TelAviv Keith is a superb PT down. Rishi should use it at PMQs.
How does that allowance of Guardian stories work? RU abroad somewhere?
I thought the G was completely open.
No I am currently in the railway station car park in Llantwit Major. The mobile app allows me 20 views over the month. Look at the same article twice and that's two views. They want £6.99 a month for full access, and for that they can...
Yes, same on iPad
They are moving to a paywall - they have no choice, see their losses - but trying to do it "secretly"
It's a bit sad
The trouble for The Guardian is that they've cultivated an audience of people expecting free content and moving to a paid model will lose them too much of their audience. It's a disaster of their own making by being so self righteous about other news pay walls, especially the original pay wall at The Times which has been extremely successful for News Group. Iirc they're up to half a million subscribers at average annual revenue of ~£80 for digital subscribers.
Yes exactly
Some of PB was also REALLY sneery about Rupert's "stupid paywall"
Rupert Murdoch didn't become a media titan by luck. He just annoys people so they refuse to believe he is actually very smart, and good at what he does, as well as being a selfish evil Fascist etc
Same applies to Elon Musk. Possibly not a nice guy, but also a genius
I read the Mail on Sunday finance pages, this is money, every week. I’ve noticed in the last couple of weeks s9me articles are now behind a paywall too.
The Guardian, by adopting it’s self righteous approach by not implementing a paywall but begging for cash has screwed itself.
It would be a shame to lose it. The media needs diverse views. Even if it is, in its own way, awful. A left wing Daily Mail.
I agree. I generally detest the Guardian's politics, but it is a voice which needs to be heard, albeit with gritted teeth
To my mind the Mail is the superior paper AS a paper (or website). It is cannier
The Guardian feels tremendoudly stale now, and it has essentially run out of New Woke Angles. Once you've accused trees of being racist, where do you go?
It needs to hide behind a paywall, and use the money to hire the best possible writers (or AI writers). And pray that works. I don't see much alternative
When Rochdale goes to the polls...it will be for one of the weirdest byelections in the history of them. There will be no Labour candidate to vote for in a seat the party is defending. Because it is too late to remove his name from the ballot papers, Mr Ali may still become the MP, which will be embarrassing. There will be even sharper winces at Labour HQ if George Galloway, who has parachuted into the contest to run a pop-up campaign from the garage of a secondhand car dealership, takes the seat by exploiting anger about the conflict in Gaza.
You may find this surprising, but there are some senior Labour figures whose dismay about the Rochdale fiasco is lightened by a little relief. This is on the grounds that it is better that an incident like this erupts now, rather than during the general election campaign. There are even those who reckon it “a kind of blessing in disguise” because it has given a vivid warning to the party’s candidates to engage brain before opening mouth and to remember that there is no such thing as a truly “private” meeting.
After a debilitating fortnight for the leaders of both the largest parties, the big picture question is which of them has been left looking worse off? My answer is the prime minister. It is a rocky horror show for Labour in Rochdale, but the result there won’t tell us what is likely to happen at the general election.
The Tory leader can’t be anything like as sure that his position is safe. There were spectacular collapses in the support for his party in both Kingswood and Wellingborough. That reinforces the message of the national polls and speaks to the mood in both swing seats and constituencies that were once impregnably blue. It all conveys the strong impression that Britain is sick of the Tories and resolved to turn them out.
The agitators’ agenda, which is to turn the Conservatives into some kind of fusion between Trussism and Farageism, doesn’t look like a path to recovery. It is much more likely to speed them down another loop of the doom spiral. That won’t deter the agitators from further destabilising the Tory leader’s already brittle position.
"If you think OpenAI Sora is a creative toy like DALLE, ... think again. Sora is a data-driven physics engine. It is a simulation of many worlds, real or fantastical. The simulator learns intricate rendering, "intuitive" physics, long-horizon reasoning, and semantic grounding, all by some denoising and gradient maths."
That's NVIDIA's Senior Research Scientist. Not a rando
The guy selling the AI chips would say that, though.
I don't think NVDIA's share price needs much boosting, TBH
Though it is precisely the advent of AI (or rather the boom in GPU-susceptible computation of which 'AI' is a part) that turned Nvidia's recent share price to strong growth.
Sure, but they don't really need their Lead Boffin to go on Twitter and lie so they can put a few more cents on the stock, do they? More to lose than gain
He is sharing his honest opinion, it seems to me
Also he is just one of many experts, often academic not commercial, discussing the deep philosophical implications of Sora et al
We have been doing a really interesting experiment chaining together "specialised" LLM/SLM agents so that they talk to each other to produce a final result in response to a request.
So one agent can do the natural language interpretation at the front end, one is good at linear algebra, one is good at getting code to compile and run, that sort of thing.
Each thing any agent does is quite simple, and in reality the "creative" bit is actually the human defining the constraints on the system that you describe as input.
But the output is so apparently miraculously far from the input that it feels very Deep Thought.
As this researcher says, the emergent complexity from what are quite simple algorithms is fascinating. And the interesting thing about this approach is that we are starting to be able to get the system to explain how it got to the answer.
Bit of an aside, but I hope a useful perspective.
Interesting, thankyou
What an astounding development Sora is. The deeper you go, the more profound it becomes
I see SKS ordered Sue Grey to seize the personal phones of his staffers to find out who leaked the Green New Deal.
It turns out #TelAvivKeith was the nickname being used in e mails between said staffers.
Lol. SKS fans or should that be #TAK fans please explain
There is an article in the Guardian which I am not going to fetch because it would run down my monthly allowance of just 20 stories, suggesting that after Hartlepool, Starmer realised, along with the rest of us, that he was indeed the World's most incompetent dud and was on the cusp of resigning.
Sadly he didn't.
TelAviv Keith is a superb PT down. Rishi should use it at PMQs.
How does that allowance of Guardian stories work? RU abroad somewhere?
I thought the G was completely open.
No I am currently in the railway station car park in Llantwit Major. The mobile app allows me 20 views over the month. Look at the same article twice and that's two views. They want £6.99 a month for full access, and for that they can...
Yes, same on iPad
They are moving to a paywall - they have no choice, see their losses - but trying to do it "secretly"
It's a bit sad
The trouble for The Guardian is that they've cultivated an audience of people expecting free content and moving to a paid model will lose them too much of their audience. It's a disaster of their own making by being so self righteous about other news pay walls, especially the original pay wall at The Times which has been extremely successful for News Group. Iirc they're up to half a million subscribers at average annual revenue of ~£80 for digital subscribers.
Yes exactly
Some of PB was also REALLY sneery about Rupert's "stupid paywall"
Rupert Murdoch didn't become a media titan by luck. He just annoys people so they refuse to believe he is actually very smart, and good at what he does, as well as being a selfish evil Fascist etc
Same applies to Elon Musk. Possibly not a nice guy, but also a genius
I read the Mail on Sunday finance pages, this is money, every week. I’ve noticed in the last couple of weeks s9me articles are now behind a paywall too.
The Guardian, by adopting it’s self righteous approach by not implementing a paywall but begging for cash has screwed itself.
It would be a shame to lose it. The media needs diverse views. Even if it is, in its own way, awful. A left wing Daily Mail.
I would miss the Guardian too as I love some of the bizarre problems they can cause themselves with their views. The other week was a fave.
Article on homepage after the Grammys going wild about women sweeping the board in all the (gender neutral) categories.
A few inches away and article about how awful it is that men won a clean sweep of the gender neutral awards at a film festival.
Fuck me, 99.5% of people have NO idea what is about to hit us
As demonstrated by Air Canada last week who discovered that when an AI invents a policy that policy is legally binding...
The thing is that what AI can sensible do and what we will expect it to be able to do are 2 completely different things.
I've certainly come across a lot of people disappointed by MS's "Copilot For Office". Some people had inflated expectations (partly due to MS's hype) but quite a lot by just how badly MS have done integrating it.
It works pretty well in Visual Studio Code - most useful for boilerplating, writing tests etc.
When a team switches it off because they're working for a client that doesn't allow AI tooling, the drop in productivity is small enough that it gets lost in the noise... but everyone complains about having to do "the boring stuff" by hand. It's almost like asking them to do their work using a fountain pen rather than a computer.
Yeah - the copilot coding part is fantastic (my initial tests with https://codeium.com/ have also been quite positive - but only came across it a few days ago). But it's the integration with Office that was being sold to enterprises as 'this changes everything!'. And it's really coming across as a bit more Clippy than Deep Thought.
Just had a moment when I imagined myself age 30, working in the ceative sector - designer, painter, musician, writer, actor, vid game dude, copywriter, director, illustrator - basically all the arts. Imagining myself being well paid to do a job I love.....
My God, I would hate this AI, with a blinding passion. Fear it and loathe it to perdition. I would want to smash it. A machine that simultaneously take's away my life's purpose, my reason to work with joy, while ALSO taking away my income, my ability to feed my kids. At the same time! How bad is that?
I think we will see suicides
When does AI finish:
1) The Flashman series 2) Game of Thrones
My honest guess?
We will have writing AI capable of creating new Flashman books, or finishing Game of Thrones, within 3-10 years
I know that's pretty vague, but this is such a hard-to-predict field; even the very best (Yann LeCun) get it wildly wrong
What I don't get about this is: 1,000 pairs, $200 to $400 per pair, revenue is split with the company producing them so say Trump is getting $200 per pair, that's $200,000. What's it costing him to fly his enormous private jet to the venue where he's shilling them?
Probably nothing. If Trump wears a MAGA hat for 30 seconds, it's a campaign event and his PAC will pay for the jet fuel.
I see SKS ordered Sue Grey to seize the personal phones of his staffers to find out who leaked the Green New Deal.
It turns out #TelAvivKeith was the nickname being used in e mails between said staffers.
Lol. SKS fans or should that be #TAK fans please explain
There is an article in the Guardian which I am not going to fetch because it would run down my monthly allowance of just 20 stories, suggesting that after Hartlepool, Starmer realised, along with the rest of us, that he was indeed the World's most incompetent dud and was on the cusp of resigning.
Sadly he didn't.
TelAviv Keith is a superb PT down. Rishi should use it at PMQs.
How does that allowance of Guardian stories work? RU abroad somewhere?
I thought the G was completely open.
No I am currently in the railway station car park in Llantwit Major. The mobile app allows me 20 views over the month. Look at the same article twice and that's two views. They want £6.99 a month for full access, and for that they can...
Yes, same on iPad
They are moving to a paywall - they have no choice, see their losses - but trying to do it "secretly"
It's a bit sad
The trouble for The Guardian is that they've cultivated an audience of people expecting free content and moving to a paid model will lose them too much of their audience. It's a disaster of their own making by being so self righteous about other news pay walls, especially the original pay wall at The Times which has been extremely successful for News Group. Iirc they're up to half a million subscribers at average annual revenue of ~£80 for digital subscribers.
Yes exactly
Some of PB was also REALLY sneery about Rupert's "stupid paywall"
Rupert Murdoch didn't become a media titan by luck. He just annoys people so they refuse to believe he is actually very smart, and good at what he does, as well as being a selfish evil Fascist etc
Same applies to Elon Musk. Possibly not a nice guy, but also a genius
I read the Mail on Sunday finance pages, this is money, every week. I’ve noticed in the last couple of weeks s9me articles are now behind a paywall too.
The Guardian, by adopting it’s self righteous approach by not implementing a paywall but begging for cash has screwed itself.
It would be a shame to lose it. The media needs diverse views. Even if it is, in its own way, awful. A left wing Daily Mail.
I would miss the Guardian too as I love some of the bizarre problems they can cause themselves with their views. The other week was a fave.
Article on homepage after the Grammys going wild about women sweeping the board in all the (gender neutral) categories.
A few inches away and article about how awful it is that men won a clean sweep of the gender neutral awards at a film festival.
I see SKS ordered Sue Grey to seize the personal phones of his staffers to find out who leaked the Green New Deal.
It turns out #TelAvivKeith was the nickname being used in e mails between said staffers.
Lol. SKS fans or should that be #TAK fans please explain
There is an article in the Guardian which I am not going to fetch because it would run down my monthly allowance of just 20 stories, suggesting that after Hartlepool, Starmer realised, along with the rest of us, that he was indeed the World's most incompetent dud and was on the cusp of resigning.
Sadly he didn't.
TelAviv Keith is a superb PT down. Rishi should use it at PMQs.
How does that allowance of Guardian stories work? RU abroad somewhere?
I thought the G was completely open.
No I am currently in the railway station car park in Llantwit Major. The mobile app allows me 20 views over the month. Look at the same article twice and that's two views. They want £6.99 a month for full access, and for that they can...
Yes, same on iPad
They are moving to a paywall - they have no choice, see their losses - but trying to do it "secretly"
It's a bit sad
The trouble for The Guardian is that they've cultivated an audience of people expecting free content and moving to a paid model will lose them too much of their audience. It's a disaster of their own making by being so self righteous about other news pay walls, especially the original pay wall at The Times which has been extremely successful for News Group. Iirc they're up to half a million subscribers at average annual revenue of ~£80 for digital subscribers.
Yes exactly
Some of PB was also REALLY sneery about Rupert's "stupid paywall"
Rupert Murdoch didn't become a media titan by luck. He just annoys people so they refuse to believe he is actually very smart, and good at what he does, as well as being a selfish evil Fascist etc
Same applies to Elon Musk. Possibly not a nice guy, but also a genius
I read the Mail on Sunday finance pages, this is money, every week. I’ve noticed in the last couple of weeks s9me articles are now behind a paywall too.
The Guardian, by adopting it’s self righteous approach by not implementing a paywall but begging for cash has screwed itself.
It would be a shame to lose it. The media needs diverse views. Even if it is, in its own way, awful. A left wing Daily Mail.
I agree. I generally detest the Guardian's politics, but it is a voice which needs to be heard, albeit with gritted teeth
To my mind the Mail is the superior paper AS a paper (or website). It is cannier
The Guardian feels tremendoudly stale now, and it has essentially run out of New Woke Angles. Once you've accused trees of being racist, where do you go?
It needs to hide behind a paywall, and use the money to hire the best possible writers (or AI writers). And pray that works. I don't see much alternative
The obvious problem with all the newspapers and magazines ending up siloed behind paywalls is that even that small fraction of people who are willing to pay for them will only fork out for one or two subscriptions to their favourites. Which, inevitably, will be those that cleave closest to their own existing biases.
It's like with the infamous echo chambers inherent in anti-social media. People will hear less and less from, and care less and less about, anyone who doesn't talk and act and think exactly like they do. It's just another step along the path of magnifying and entrenching existing tribal divisions.
Just had a moment when I imagined myself age 30, working in the ceative sector - designer, painter, musician, writer, actor, vid game dude, copywriter, director, illustrator - basically all the arts. Imagining myself being well paid to do a job I love.....
My God, I would hate this AI, with a blinding passion. Fear it and loathe it to perdition. I would want to smash it. A machine that simultaneously take's away my life's purpose, my reason to work with joy, while ALSO taking away my income, my ability to feed my kids. At the same time! How bad is that?
I think we will see suicides
When does AI finish:
1) The Flashman series 2) Game of Thrones
Are you saying it *wasn’t* AI that finished Game of Thrones?
Gosh.
The thought that somebody was paid for the mess that was made is disturbing.
I see SKS ordered Sue Grey to seize the personal phones of his staffers to find out who leaked the Green New Deal.
It turns out #TelAvivKeith was the nickname being used in e mails between said staffers.
Lol. SKS fans or should that be #TAK fans please explain
There is an article in the Guardian which I am not going to fetch because it would run down my monthly allowance of just 20 stories, suggesting that after Hartlepool, Starmer realised, along with the rest of us, that he was indeed the World's most incompetent dud and was on the cusp of resigning.
Sadly he didn't.
TelAviv Keith is a superb PT down. Rishi should use it at PMQs.
How does that allowance of Guardian stories work? RU abroad somewhere?
I thought the G was completely open.
No I am currently in the railway station car park in Llantwit Major. The mobile app allows me 20 views over the month. Look at the same article twice and that's two views. They want £6.99 a month for full access, and for that they can...
Yes, same on iPad
They are moving to a paywall - they have no choice, see their losses - but trying to do it "secretly"
It's a bit sad
The trouble for The Guardian is that they've cultivated an audience of people expecting free content and moving to a paid model will lose them too much of their audience. It's a disaster of their own making by being so self righteous about other news pay walls, especially the original pay wall at The Times which has been extremely successful for News Group. Iirc they're up to half a million subscribers at average annual revenue of ~£80 for digital subscribers.
Yes exactly
Some of PB was also REALLY sneery about Rupert's "stupid paywall"
Rupert Murdoch didn't become a media titan by luck. He just annoys people so they refuse to believe he is actually very smart, and good at what he does, as well as being a selfish evil Fascist etc
Same applies to Elon Musk. Possibly not a nice guy, but also a genius
I read the Mail on Sunday finance pages, this is money, every week. I’ve noticed in the last couple of weeks s9me articles are now behind a paywall too.
The Guardian, by adopting it’s self righteous approach by not implementing a paywall but begging for cash has screwed itself.
It would be a shame to lose it. The media needs diverse views. Even if it is, in its own way, awful. A left wing Daily Mail.
I agree. I generally detest the Guardian's politics, but it is a voice which needs to be heard, albeit with gritted teeth
To my mind the Mail is the superior paper AS a paper (or website). It is cannier
The Guardian feels tremendoudly stale now, and it has essentially run out of New Woke Angles. Once you've accused trees of being racist, where do you go?
It needs to hide behind a paywall, and use the money to hire the best possible writers (or AI writers). And pray that works. I don't see much alternative
The obvious problem with all the newspapers and magazines ending up siloed behind paywalls is that even that small fraction of people who are willing to pay for them will only fork out for one or two subscriptions to their favourites. Which, inevitably, will be those that cleave closest to their own existing biases.
It's like with the infamous echo chambers inherent in anti-social media. People will hear less and less from, and care less and less about, anyone who doesn't talk and act and think exactly like they do. It's just another step along the path of magnifying and entrenching existing tribal divisions.
I don't disagree, it is a real problem
Thank God for TwiX - it really is a political mix. Maybe the last space left? And PB of course!
Clips of yesterday's Palestine rally again included the chant "no ceasefire, no vote" which might be electorally important, especially if it spreads from London to Rochdale whose by-election is on the 29th.
Yes. Labour will be fine in our election (they have a buffer on the buffer) but I'm a bit worried about this for Biden.
One bit of data suggests that there is more to be said. If I understand the maths correctly, Labour need a swing of 12.7 percentage points to get an overall majority. Ignore Wellingborough - special case of banana ex MP and banana candidate. At Kingswood they got a 16 point swing. On the whole those predicting the result (including PBers) thought Labour would do better. That is not safe home territory when a GE campaign - which will be horrible and dirty - hasn't really started.
NOM remains value. And why else is Rishi 7/1 (Hills) and not 66/1 to be PM after the next election?
I don’t think it’s simply a case of Kingswood being the normal swing and Wellingborough being freakish. At the real election I reckon we’re going to get some very variable swing in different types of constituency.
Kingswood is another urban fringe seat like Uxbridge. In this parliament the defences that have fared best for the Conservatives have been Old Bexley and Crayford (10% swing), Uxbridge and South Ruislip (6.7%), and Kingswood. The worst for them have been rural Southern towns and Red Wall seats.
The GE will be fascinating. There will be surprise Labour victories in unexpected places, particularly coastal towns and the countryside, and tenacious Tory holds in rurban fringe metrolands. Labour will flatline in London and the Tories not do too badly.
Just had a moment when I imagined myself age 30, working in the ceative sector - designer, painter, musician, writer, actor, vid game dude, copywriter, director, illustrator - basically all the arts. Imagining myself being well paid to do a job I love.....
My God, I would hate this AI, with a blinding passion. Fear it and loathe it to perdition. I would want to smash it. A machine that simultaneously take's away my life's purpose, my reason to work with joy, while ALSO taking away my income, my ability to feed my kids. At the same time! How bad is that?
I think we will see suicides
When does AI finish:
1) The Flashman series 2) Game of Thrones
Are you saying it *wasn’t* AI that finished Game of Thrones?
Gosh.
The thought that somebody was paid for the mess that was made is disturbing.
I think he means the final book rather than the TV.
Just had a moment when I imagined myself age 30, working in the ceative sector - designer, painter, musician, writer, actor, vid game dude, copywriter, director, illustrator - basically all the arts. Imagining myself being well paid to do a job I love.....
My God, I would hate this AI, with a blinding passion. Fear it and loathe it to perdition. I would want to smash it. A machine that simultaneously take's away my life's purpose, my reason to work with joy, while ALSO taking away my income, my ability to feed my kids. At the same time! How bad is that?
I think we will see suicides
You are a travel writer. Fear the moment the Gazette editor realises AI can do the job nearly as well and a damn sight cheaper based on input from hotel and tourist board websites and tripadvisor reviews.
It's not the top creatives who will be replaced but those lower down the scale. In your own trade, subeditors seem already to have been replaced. AI will also open opportunities for some. Ford and Toyota will continue to use expensive advertising agencies. Your local used car dealer with six cars out front will in future use AI to knock up a video advert good enough for the cheap 3am slot on TikTok.
Just had a moment when I imagined myself age 30, working in the ceative sector - designer, painter, musician, writer, actor, vid game dude, copywriter, director, illustrator - basically all the arts. Imagining myself being well paid to do a job I love.....
My God, I would hate this AI, with a blinding passion. Fear it and loathe it to perdition. I would want to smash it. A machine that simultaneously take's away my life's purpose, my reason to work with joy, while ALSO taking away my income, my ability to feed my kids. At the same time! How bad is that?
I think we will see suicides
When does AI finish:
1) The Flashman series 2) Game of Thrones
My honest guess?
We will have writing AI capable of creating new Flashman books, or finishing Game of Thrones, within 3-10 years
I know that's pretty vague, but this is such a hard-to-predict field; even the very best (Yann LeCun) get it wildly wrong
GoT is an interesting one to think about.
Who would AI make as the King in the final season/book?
Just had a moment when I imagined myself age 30, working in the ceative sector - designer, painter, musician, writer, actor, vid game dude, copywriter, director, illustrator - basically all the arts. Imagining myself being well paid to do a job I love.....
My God, I would hate this AI, with a blinding passion. Fear it and loathe it to perdition. I would want to smash it. A machine that simultaneously take's away my life's purpose, my reason to work with joy, while ALSO taking away my income, my ability to feed my kids. At the same time! How bad is that?
I think we will see suicides
When does AI finish:
1) The Flashman series 2) Game of Thrones
My honest guess?
We will have writing AI capable of creating new Flashman books, or finishing Game of Thrones, within 3-10 years
I know that's pretty vague, but this is such a hard-to-predict field; even the very best (Yann LeCun) get it wildly wrong
It’s worth noting that all the “AI” output needs finishing work. Some needs throwing away, some rework, some light touches.
Many artists (including the greatest), historically used assistants to do the shovel work for them. How many Old Masters are 100% the Old Master? Zero, pretty much.
In coding, we have long had a pyramid of tools that mean we are a long way from the bare metal. Code completion tools were already common - start typing and the machine offers options to finish the line…
Last week's by-elections were a disaster for Rishi Sunak. But things are only going to get worse. He needs to call a May election, and make his final stand > Mail On Sunday >
Well if Dan Hodges is suggesting May, it’s nailed on to be in the autumn.
The general election will be held on 23rd January, 2025. Unlike Dan Hodges, I can only be wrong once!
If that is the case then it would likely result in the Conservatives leading a minority government. They need to go sooner to ensure a workable, albeit reduced, majority.
I see SKS ordered Sue Grey to seize the personal phones of his staffers to find out who leaked the Green New Deal.
It turns out #TelAvivKeith was the nickname being used in e mails between said staffers.
Lol. SKS fans or should that be #TAK fans please explain
There is an article in the Guardian which I am not going to fetch because it would run down my monthly allowance of just 20 stories, suggesting that after Hartlepool, Starmer realised, along with the rest of us, that he was indeed the World's most incompetent dud and was on the cusp of resigning.
Sadly he didn't.
TelAviv Keith is a superb PT down. Rishi should use it at PMQs.
How does that allowance of Guardian stories work? RU abroad somewhere?
I thought the G was completely open.
No I am currently in the railway station car park in Llantwit Major. The mobile app allows me 20 views over the month. Look at the same article twice and that's two views. They want £6.99 a month for full access, and for that they can...
Yes, same on iPad
They are moving to a paywall - they have no choice, see their losses - but trying to do it "secretly"
It's a bit sad
The trouble for The Guardian is that they've cultivated an audience of people expecting free content and moving to a paid model will lose them too much of their audience. It's a disaster of their own making by being so self righteous about other news pay walls, especially the original pay wall at The Times which has been extremely successful for News Group. Iirc they're up to half a million subscribers at average annual revenue of ~£80 for digital subscribers.
Yes exactly
Some of PB was also REALLY sneery about Rupert's "stupid paywall"
Rupert Murdoch didn't become a media titan by luck. He just annoys people so they refuse to believe he is actually very smart, and good at what he does, as well as being a selfish evil Fascist etc
Same applies to Elon Musk. Possibly not a nice guy, but also a genius
I read the Mail on Sunday finance pages, this is money, every week. I’ve noticed in the last couple of weeks s9me articles are now behind a paywall too.
The Guardian, by adopting it’s self righteous approach by not implementing a paywall but begging for cash has screwed itself.
It would be a shame to lose it. The media needs diverse views. Even if it is, in its own way, awful. A left wing Daily Mail.
I would miss the Guardian too as I love some of the bizarre problems they can cause themselves with their views. The other week was a fave.
Article on homepage after the Grammys going wild about women sweeping the board in all the (gender neutral) categories.
A few inches away and article about how awful it is that men won a clean sweep of the gender neutral awards at a film festival.
OK forget what I said. I hope the Guardian dies
I thought the Guardian was loudly trumpeting the success of its guilt-based payment model? Albeit that was before they restricted the number of articles you can read, which suggests otherwise. Anyone got any figures?
Just had a moment when I imagined myself age 30, working in the ceative sector - designer, painter, musician, writer, actor, vid game dude, copywriter, director, illustrator - basically all the arts. Imagining myself being well paid to do a job I love.....
My God, I would hate this AI, with a blinding passion. Fear it and loathe it to perdition. I would want to smash it. A machine that simultaneously take's away my life's purpose, my reason to work with joy, while ALSO taking away my income, my ability to feed my kids. At the same time! How bad is that?
I think we will see suicides
You are a travel writer. Fear the moment the Gazette editor realises AI can do the job nearly as well and a damn sight cheaper based on input from hotel and tourist board websites and tripadvisor reviews.
It's not the top creatives who will be replaced but those lower down the scale. In your own trade, subeditors seem already to have been replaced. AI will also open opportunities for some. Ford and Toyota will continue to use expensive advertising agencies. Your local used car dealer with six cars out front will in future use AI to knock up a video advert good enough for the cheap 3am slot on TikTok.
No, I think it is considerably worse than that. I can see AI taking 99% of creative jobs
Look at it like weaving in the 18th century, replaced by the machines
People DO still professionally create textiles, handmade - and that handmade human aspect is much valued, even if machines can do a "better" job, quicker and cheaper
But the number of pro weavers handlooming cloth in the west must be 0.001% of the number of weavers before the spinning jenny
Read across for art forms now. As for travel writers, they might be some of the last to depart, simply coz a robot can't go to Cuba and sip Mojitos as a lived experience
Someone on Reddit pointing out that average people do not understand the implications of AI for the same reason they do not really "get" the concept of exponential growth
An illuminating analogy
When 'average people' discover exponential growth it doesn't always end well:
Last week's by-elections were a disaster for Rishi Sunak. But things are only going to get worse. He needs to call a May election, and make his final stand > Mail On Sunday >
Well if Dan Hodges is suggesting May, it’s nailed on to be in the autumn.
The thing is May is the better date but the current narrative (by election results, economy) make a May election impossible to call.
So the election will be in the Autumn and the Tory party will do disasterously because they won’t have the (remaining) troops to get he vote out.
By-election defeats are one thing, but if they lose 1,000 councillors that will change the narrative irretrievably for Sunak. You’re right that May is the best date, but that means calling the election in a fortnight, and it’s always easier to not take the decision.
Have they got a thousand councillors defending their seats? Looking at the numbers up for election, there are a grand total of 2,565 seats up for grabs. Two cycles ago (because the 2020 cycle was wrapped in to the 2021 one) in 2016, they had 842 councillors out of 2,769 elected that year, and I think they've gone down, if anything, since then.
Which might have betting implications, if that's true - anyone offering odds on more Conservative councillor losses than there are defending their seats should have their hand bitten off at the wrist.
Just had a moment when I imagined myself age 30, working in the ceative sector - designer, painter, musician, writer, actor, vid game dude, copywriter, director, illustrator - basically all the arts. Imagining myself being well paid to do a job I love.....
My God, I would hate this AI, with a blinding passion. Fear it and loathe it to perdition. I would want to smash it. A machine that simultaneously take's away my life's purpose, my reason to work with joy, while ALSO taking away my income, my ability to feed my kids. At the same time! How bad is that?
I think we will see suicides
You are a travel writer. Fear the moment the Gazette editor realises AI can do the job nearly as well and a damn sight cheaper based on input from hotel and tourist board websites and tripadvisor reviews.
It's not the top creatives who will be replaced but those lower down the scale. In your own trade, subeditors seem already to have been replaced. AI will also open opportunities for some. Ford and Toyota will continue to use expensive advertising agencies. Your local used car dealer with six cars out front will in future use AI to knock up a video advert good enough for the cheap 3am slot on TikTok.
No, I think it is considerably worse than that. I can see AI taking 99% of creative jobs
Look at it like weaving in the 18th century, replaced by the machines
People DO still professionally create textiles, handmade - and that handmade human aspect is much valued, even if machines can do a "better" job, quicker and cheaper
But the number of pro weavers handlooming cloth in the west must be 0.001% of the number of weavers before the spinning jenny
Read across for art forms now. As for travel writers, they might be some of the last to depart, simply coz a robot can't go to Cuba and sip Mojitos as a lived experience
It depends on what you mean by ‘weavers.’
If you mean ‘full time, professional weavers who do nothing else,’ I doubt if the dial has actually moved markedly.
If you mean ‘people who do weaving’ it would be a fraction because before the creation of mass spinning frames most people would make their own cloth from fleece sheared from their own sheep.
The cost of anything is the cost of the labour required to produce it.
Things are cheap where the workers get paid bugger all.
Is it tho? Printing is just a machine
You feed the paper, press a button, it prints. Very little labour involved
Surely much of the cost is the paper, “ink”, electricity, machine usage
Getting 360 pages printed in London would cost me £20-30 at its cheapest?
So it’s ten times cheaper here to use a printer, paper, etc. I’m sure a clever economist can explain it - I am somewhat surprised
Most of what you pay in London is for the premises.
I bought two ink canisters for my hp printer in Ryman this week. £99. You cannot tell me that ink costs that much to make. The model is to sell you a cheap printer and milk you on the consumables.
Go for Epson Ecojet. Their business model is the opposite: more expensive printers, but cheap ink. And they *sip* the ink. They're blooming good if you do a fair amount of printng, and better than any HP or Lexmark inkjet I've ever had.
Trouble is I generally don't do that much printing, and it is extremely sporadic (because I travel so much) - but then suddenly I will need 200 pages done in a day, then three weeks go by and I need 7 pages, next day 2, then another 4 weeks of nothing and then I need another 100 pages and my printer breaks. Again. GAH
It's infuriating
Also I have a small flat and my printer/scanner has to be tiny as possible
Same here - my printing comes in bursts: I tend to do nothing for a couple of weeks or a month, and then print hundreds of pages. And that meant my old HP would be gunked up, and I'd use loads of ink aligning heads to get acceptable print quality. I don't have that issue with the EcoJet. Even better: because it prints well without hassle, I use it more. If I'm going somewhere, I often print out a local map to backup my phone. As it's easy, I do it.
Can't help with the flat size, though...
There might be money to be made renting one little room which contains several excellent business printers - where people can come and do their own printing. A bit like a laundrette, but for printers
That's actually not a bad idea, if you want to run a really boring business that makes modest profits
It looks like a change election is coming, there’s new boundaries, and it’s better to plan ahead for a new life after politics, than be left in the same position as dozens of others the day after the election.
Indeed, and with the Conservatives heading for defeat, there is no prospect of government roles for those left behind.
Yes, there’s only one ‘ministerial’ salary available to those in opposition, so for many it’ll be quite the comedown even if they’re re-elected.
I know it’s fun to take the piss out of politicians, and we all had a good laugh at the remarkably honest George Freeman, but they’re still humans, and still have to make a living and pay their mortgages. For many, an MP job will have been a pay cut, and the salary affords a comfortable rather than a lavish lifestyle. The retirees will have mostly been elected in 2005 or 2010, and will be looking for a change of scenery having served in office for more than a decade.
I can't find it in my heart to have any sympathy with the current lot. Losing your job is a terrible blow, but these fuckers haven't covered themselves in glory so why should we care what happens to most of them? We're skinter than ever, in hock to big business, can't build owt, can't repair owt, can't get a dentist, have to wait 18 months for an operation and the armed forces are fecked. Ask someone who's just about to remortgage onto a rate that they'll barely be able to afford if they feel sorry for Freeman? Government aren't responsible for every ill in the country, but they claim the good times are their doing, so they've got to own the bad times. If they hadn't been so incompetent and corrupt, I'd cut them some slack.
Just had a moment when I imagined myself age 30, working in the ceative sector - designer, painter, musician, writer, actor, vid game dude, copywriter, director, illustrator - basically all the arts. Imagining myself being well paid to do a job I love.....
My God, I would hate this AI, with a blinding passion. Fear it and loathe it to perdition. I would want to smash it. A machine that simultaneously take's away my life's purpose, my reason to work with joy, while ALSO taking away my income, my ability to feed my kids. At the same time! How bad is that?
I think we will see suicides
You are a travel writer. Fear the moment the Gazette editor realises AI can do the job nearly as well and a damn sight cheaper based on input from hotel and tourist board websites and tripadvisor reviews.
It's not the top creatives who will be replaced but those lower down the scale. In your own trade, subeditors seem already to have been replaced. AI will also open opportunities for some. Ford and Toyota will continue to use expensive advertising agencies. Your local used car dealer with six cars out front will in future use AI to knock up a video advert good enough for the cheap 3am slot on TikTok.
No, I think it is considerably worse than that. I can see AI taking 99% of creative jobs
Look at it like weaving in the 18th century, replaced by the machines
People DO still professionally create textiles, handmade - and that handmade human aspect is much valued, even if machines can do a "better" job, quicker and cheaper
But the number of pro weavers handlooming cloth in the west must be 0.001% of the number of weavers before the spinning jenny
Read across for art forms now. As for travel writers, they might be some of the last to depart, simply coz a robot can't go to Cuba and sip Mojitos as a lived experience
It depends on what you mean by ‘weavers.’
If you mean ‘full time, professional weavers who do nothing else,’ I doubt if the dial has actually moved markedly.
If you mean ‘people who do weaving’ it would be a fraction because before the creation of mass spinning frames most people would make their own cloth from fleece sheared from their own sheep.
Are you sure?
The Industrial Revolution initially boosted weaving, but then....
"There had been approximately 75,000 handloom weavers in Britain in 1795. This grew to more than 200,000 by 1812, when there was a burgeoning number of power-loom factories. The number of town weavers increased and their characteristic three-storey weavers’ cottages were built in larger numbers."
and then....
"The number of power looms in British factories was estimated to have risen from 2,400 in 1813 to over 115,000 by 1835. The profitability of handloom weaving fell even further, and the number of weavers in Lancashire dropped from about 180,000 in 1821 to around 30,000 in 1861."
And on it went, down and down
How many pro weavers are left? People looming textiles? Well, here's one
Just had a moment when I imagined myself age 30, working in the ceative sector - designer, painter, musician, writer, actor, vid game dude, copywriter, director, illustrator - basically all the arts. Imagining myself being well paid to do a job I love.....
My God, I would hate this AI, with a blinding passion. Fear it and loathe it to perdition. I would want to smash it. A machine that simultaneously take's away my life's purpose, my reason to work with joy, while ALSO taking away my income, my ability to feed my kids. At the same time! How bad is that?
I think we will see suicides
You are a travel writer. Fear the moment the Gazette editor realises AI can do the job nearly as well and a damn sight cheaper based on input from hotel and tourist board websites and tripadvisor reviews.
It's not the top creatives who will be replaced but those lower down the scale. In your own trade, subeditors seem already to have been replaced. AI will also open opportunities for some. Ford and Toyota will continue to use expensive advertising agencies. Your local used car dealer with six cars out front will in future use AI to knock up a video advert good enough for the cheap 3am slot on TikTok.
No, I think it is considerably worse than that. I can see AI taking 99% of creative jobs
Look at it like weaving in the 18th century, replaced by the machines
People DO still professionally create textiles, handmade - and that handmade human aspect is much valued, even if machines can do a "better" job, quicker and cheaper
But the number of pro weavers handlooming cloth in the west must be 0.001% of the number of weavers before the spinning jenny
Read across for art forms now. As for travel writers, they might be some of the last to depart, simply coz a robot can't go to Cuba and sip Mojitos as a lived experience
It depends on what you mean by ‘weavers.’
If you mean ‘full time, professional weavers who do nothing else,’ I doubt if the dial has actually moved markedly.
If you mean ‘people who do weaving’ it would be a fraction because before the creation of mass spinning frames most people would make their own cloth from fleece sheared from their own sheep.
Are you sure?
The Industrial Revolution initially boosted weaving, but then....
"There had been approximately 75,000 handloom weavers in Britain in 1795. This grew to more than 200,000 by 1812, when there was a burgeoning number of power-loom factories. The number of town weavers increased and their characteristic three-storey weavers’ cottages were built in larger numbers."
and then....
"The number of power looms in British factories was estimated to have risen from 2,400 in 1813 to over 115,000 by 1835. The profitability of handloom weaving fell even further, and the number of weavers in Lancashire dropped from about 180,000 in 1821 to around 30,000 in 1861."
And on it went, down and down
How many pro weavers are left? People looming textiles? Well, here's one
Just had a moment when I imagined myself age 30, working in the ceative sector - designer, painter, musician, writer, actor, vid game dude, copywriter, director, illustrator - basically all the arts. Imagining myself being well paid to do a job I love.....
My God, I would hate this AI, with a blinding passion. Fear it and loathe it to perdition. I would want to smash it. A machine that simultaneously take's away my life's purpose, my reason to work with joy, while ALSO taking away my income, my ability to feed my kids. At the same time! How bad is that?
I think we will see suicides
You are a travel writer. Fear the moment the Gazette editor realises AI can do the job nearly as well and a damn sight cheaper based on input from hotel and tourist board websites and tripadvisor reviews.
It's not the top creatives who will be replaced but those lower down the scale. In your own trade, subeditors seem already to have been replaced. AI will also open opportunities for some. Ford and Toyota will continue to use expensive advertising agencies. Your local used car dealer with six cars out front will in future use AI to knock up a video advert good enough for the cheap 3am slot on TikTok.
No, I think it is considerably worse than that. I can see AI taking 99% of creative jobs
Look at it like weaving in the 18th century, replaced by the machines
People DO still professionally create textiles, handmade - and that handmade human aspect is much valued, even if machines can do a "better" job, quicker and cheaper
But the number of pro weavers handlooming cloth in the west must be 0.001% of the number of weavers before the spinning jenny
Read across for art forms now. As for travel writers, they might be some of the last to depart, simply coz a robot can't go to Cuba and sip Mojitos as a lived experience
It depends on what you mean by ‘weavers.’
If you mean ‘full time, professional weavers who do nothing else,’ I doubt if the dial has actually moved markedly.
If you mean ‘people who do weaving’ it would be a fraction because before the creation of mass spinning frames most people would make their own cloth from fleece sheared from their own sheep.
Are you sure?
The Industrial Revolution initially boosted weaving, but then....
"There had been approximately 75,000 handloom weavers in Britain in 1795. This grew to more than 200,000 by 1812, when there was a burgeoning number of power-loom factories. The number of town weavers increased and their characteristic three-storey weavers’ cottages were built in larger numbers."
and then....
"The number of power looms in British factories was estimated to have risen from 2,400 in 1813 to over 115,000 by 1835. The profitability of handloom weaving fell even further, and the number of weavers in Lancashire dropped from about 180,000 in 1821 to around 30,000 in 1861."
And on it went, down and down
How many pro weavers are left? People looming textiles? Well, here's one
'Seven Met officers outside my childhood synagogue on this Shabbat. Seven. And no one attending even blinked. Do non-Jews in this city know that this is what Jewish life is like here?'
The comments underneath are quite instructive. Some sympathetic but others suggesting it's rather precious to be complaining about your comfortable London life when people are dying in Gaza, that the extra security is due to the police favouring Jews or that this is something that only became necessary after 7 October - so the blame really rests with Netanyahu.
So sad to see the level of security now required, and really not good at all to see victim-blaming online. Hope none of the protagonists plan to stand for Labour at the election.
Just had a moment when I imagined myself age 30, working in the ceative sector - designer, painter, musician, writer, actor, vid game dude, copywriter, director, illustrator - basically all the arts. Imagining myself being well paid to do a job I love.....
My God, I would hate this AI, with a blinding passion. Fear it and loathe it to perdition. I would want to smash it. A machine that simultaneously take's away my life's purpose, my reason to work with joy, while ALSO taking away my income, my ability to feed my kids. At the same time! How bad is that?
I think we will see suicides
You are a travel writer. Fear the moment the Gazette editor realises AI can do the job nearly as well and a damn sight cheaper based on input from hotel and tourist board websites and tripadvisor reviews.
It's not the top creatives who will be replaced but those lower down the scale. In your own trade, subeditors seem already to have been replaced. AI will also open opportunities for some. Ford and Toyota will continue to use expensive advertising agencies. Your local used car dealer with six cars out front will in future use AI to knock up a video advert good enough for the cheap 3am slot on TikTok.
No, I think it is considerably worse than that. I can see AI taking 99% of creative jobs
Look at it like weaving in the 18th century, replaced by the machines
People DO still professionally create textiles, handmade - and that handmade human aspect is much valued, even if machines can do a "better" job, quicker and cheaper
But the number of pro weavers handlooming cloth in the west must be 0.001% of the number of weavers before the spinning jenny
Read across for art forms now. As for travel writers, they might be some of the last to depart, simply coz a robot can't go to Cuba and sip Mojitos as a lived experience
Bad news: it is I'll be harder to impossible to make a living doing things.
Good news: there will be much less pressure to make a living, because machines make things super cheap.
There's the potential for everyone to become a gentleman scholar-artist. Not everyone will, any more than any other generation of aristos.
But that's the potential, and the challenge is to manage that as well as possible.
Denmark has decided to send all its artillery to Ukraine — Mette Frederiksen, Prime Minister of Denmark.
"Ukraine is asking us for ammunition and artillery now. We, Denmark, have decided to transfer all our artillery to Ukraine. So, sorry, friends, there is military equipment in Europe, it is not only a matter of production. We have weapons, ammunition, air defense systems, which we do not use yet. They must be handed over to Ukraine."
I approve - but such drastic measures underline the urgency of the 'what if Ukraine loses' question.
There is a real shortage of usable weapons and ammunition stocks - particularly the latter - across Europe. The possible availability of a few hundred thousand artillery shells from S Korea and Turkey doesn't change that.
We need to rebuild our defence manufacturing base quickly.
Just had a moment when I imagined myself age 30, working in the ceative sector - designer, painter, musician, writer, actor, vid game dude, copywriter, director, illustrator - basically all the arts. Imagining myself being well paid to do a job I love.....
My God, I would hate this AI, with a blinding passion. Fear it and loathe it to perdition. I would want to smash it. A machine that simultaneously take's away my life's purpose, my reason to work with joy, while ALSO taking away my income, my ability to feed my kids. At the same time! How bad is that?
I think we will see suicides
You are a travel writer. Fear the moment the Gazette editor realises AI can do the job nearly as well and a damn sight cheaper based on input from hotel and tourist board websites and tripadvisor reviews.
It's not the top creatives who will be replaced but those lower down the scale. In your own trade, subeditors seem already to have been replaced. AI will also open opportunities for some. Ford and Toyota will continue to use expensive advertising agencies. Your local used car dealer with six cars out front will in future use AI to knock up a video advert good enough for the cheap 3am slot on TikTok.
No, I think it is considerably worse than that. I can see AI taking 99% of creative jobs
Look at it like weaving in the 18th century, replaced by the machines
People DO still professionally create textiles, handmade - and that handmade human aspect is much valued, even if machines can do a "better" job, quicker and cheaper
But the number of pro weavers handlooming cloth in the west must be 0.001% of the number of weavers before the spinning jenny
Read across for art forms now. As for travel writers, they might be some of the last to depart, simply coz a robot can't go to Cuba and sip Mojitos as a lived experience
Bad news: it is I'll be harder to impossible to make a living doing things.
Good news: there will be much less pressure to make a living, because machines make things super cheap.
There's the potential for everyone to become a gentleman scholar-artist. Not everyone will, any more than any other generation of aristos.
But that's the potential, and the challenge is to manage that as well as possible.
Yes, getting from here to there might be exceptionally painful
Just had a moment when I imagined myself age 30, working in the ceative sector - designer, painter, musician, writer, actor, vid game dude, copywriter, director, illustrator - basically all the arts. Imagining myself being well paid to do a job I love.....
My God, I would hate this AI, with a blinding passion. Fear it and loathe it to perdition. I would want to smash it. A machine that simultaneously take's away my life's purpose, my reason to work with joy, while ALSO taking away my income, my ability to feed my kids. At the same time! How bad is that?
I think we will see suicides
When does AI finish:
1) The Flashman series 2) Game of Thrones
My honest guess?
We will have writing AI capable of creating new Flashman books, or finishing Game of Thrones, within 3-10 years
I know that's pretty vague, but this is such a hard-to-predict field; even the very best (Yann LeCun) get it wildly wrong
It’s worth noting that all the “AI” output needs finishing work. Some needs throwing away, some rework, some light touches.
Many artists (including the greatest), historically used assistants to do the shovel work for them. How many Old Masters are 100% the Old Master? Zero, pretty much.
In coding, we have long had a pyramid of tools that mean we are a long way from the bare metal. Code completion tools were already common - start typing and the machine offers options to finish the line…
History suggests that, far from putting people out of work, AI could just as easily generate a lot more work for people to do.
Another point on Reform - the SDP appear to be attracting more of the academic types like Goodwin and Kaufmann but they don't seem to be going anywhere even though leader William Clousten gets the odd interview on Talk TV. They are however a genuine party whereas Reform seems to be largely a Farage vehicle.
Neither do the SDP appear to be standing in by elections. What's the plan?
I see SKS ordered Sue Grey to seize the personal phones of his staffers to find out who leaked the Green New Deal.
It turns out #TelAvivKeith was the nickname being used in e mails between said staffers.
Lol. SKS fans or should that be #TAK fans please explain
There is an article in the Guardian which I am not going to fetch because it would run down my monthly allowance of just 20 stories, suggesting that after Hartlepool, Starmer realised, along with the rest of us, that he was indeed the World's most incompetent dud and was on the cusp of resigning.
Sadly he didn't.
TelAviv Keith is a superb PT down. Rishi should use it at PMQs.
How does that allowance of Guardian stories work? RU abroad somewhere?
I thought the G was completely open.
No I am currently in the railway station car park in Llantwit Major. The mobile app allows me 20 views over the month. Look at the same article twice and that's two views. They want £6.99 a month for full access, and for that they can...
Yes, same on iPad
They are moving to a paywall - they have no choice, see their losses - but trying to do it "secretly"
It's a bit sad
The trouble for The Guardian is that they've cultivated an audience of people expecting free content and moving to a paid model will lose them too much of their audience. It's a disaster of their own making by being so self righteous about other news pay walls, especially the original pay wall at The Times which has been extremely successful for News Group. Iirc they're up to half a million subscribers at average annual revenue of ~£80 for digital subscribers.
Yes exactly
Some of PB was also REALLY sneery about Rupert's "stupid paywall"
Rupert Murdoch didn't become a media titan by luck. He just annoys people so they refuse to believe he is actually very smart, and good at what he does, as well as being a selfish evil Fascist etc
Same applies to Elon Musk. Possibly not a nice guy, but also a genius
I read the Mail on Sunday finance pages, this is money, every week. I’ve noticed in the last couple of weeks s9me articles are now behind a paywall too.
The Guardian, by adopting it’s self righteous approach by not implementing a paywall but begging for cash has screwed itself.
It would be a shame to lose it. The media needs diverse views. Even if it is, in its own way, awful. A left wing Daily Mail.
I would miss the Guardian too as I love some of the bizarre problems they can cause themselves with their views. The other week was a fave.
Article on homepage after the Grammys going wild about women sweeping the board in all the (gender neutral) categories.
A few inches away and article about how awful it is that men won a clean sweep of the gender neutral awards at a film festival.
"If you think OpenAI Sora is a creative toy like DALLE, ... think again. Sora is a data-driven physics engine. It is a simulation of many worlds, real or fantastical. The simulator learns intricate rendering, "intuitive" physics, long-horizon reasoning, and semantic grounding, all by some denoising and gradient maths."
Just had a moment when I imagined myself age 30, working in the ceative sector - designer, painter, musician, writer, actor, vid game dude, copywriter, director, illustrator - basically all the arts. Imagining myself being well paid to do a job I love.....
My God, I would hate this AI, with a blinding passion. Fear it and loathe it to perdition. I would want to smash it. A machine that simultaneously take's away my life's purpose, my reason to work with joy, while ALSO taking away my income, my ability to feed my kids. At the same time! How bad is that?
I think we will see suicides
You are a travel writer. Fear the moment the Gazette editor realises AI can do the job nearly as well and a damn sight cheaper based on input from hotel and tourist board websites and tripadvisor reviews.
It's not the top creatives who will be replaced but those lower down the scale. In your own trade, subeditors seem already to have been replaced. AI will also open opportunities for some. Ford and Toyota will continue to use expensive advertising agencies. Your local used car dealer with six cars out front will in future use AI to knock up a video advert good enough for the cheap 3am slot on TikTok.
No, I think it is considerably worse than that. I can see AI taking 99% of creative jobs
Look at it like weaving in the 18th century, replaced by the machines
People DO still professionally create textiles, handmade - and that handmade human aspect is much valued, even if machines can do a "better" job, quicker and cheaper
But the number of pro weavers handlooming cloth in the west must be 0.001% of the number of weavers before the spinning jenny
Read across for art forms now. As for travel writers, they might be some of the last to depart, simply coz a robot can't go to Cuba and sip Mojitos as a lived experience
It depends on what you mean by ‘weavers.’
If you mean ‘full time, professional weavers who do nothing else,’ I doubt if the dial has actually moved markedly.
If you mean ‘people who do weaving’ it would be a fraction because before the creation of mass spinning frames most people would make their own cloth from fleece sheared from their own sheep.
Are you sure?
The Industrial Revolution initially boosted weaving, but then....
"There had been approximately 75,000 handloom weavers in Britain in 1795. This grew to more than 200,000 by 1812, when there was a burgeoning number of power-loom factories. The number of town weavers increased and their characteristic three-storey weavers’ cottages were built in larger numbers."
and then....
"The number of power looms in British factories was estimated to have risen from 2,400 in 1813 to over 115,000 by 1835. The profitability of handloom weaving fell even further, and the number of weavers in Lancashire dropped from about 180,000 in 1821 to around 30,000 in 1861."
And on it went, down and down
How many pro weavers are left? People looming textiles? Well, here's one
I see SKS ordered Sue Grey to seize the personal phones of his staffers to find out who leaked the Green New Deal.
It turns out #TelAvivKeith was the nickname being used in e mails between said staffers.
Lol. SKS fans or should that be #TAK fans please explain
There is an article in the Guardian which I am not going to fetch because it would run down my monthly allowance of just 20 stories, suggesting that after Hartlepool, Starmer realised, along with the rest of us, that he was indeed the World's most incompetent dud and was on the cusp of resigning.
Sadly he didn't.
TelAviv Keith is a superb PT down. Rishi should use it at PMQs.
How does that allowance of Guardian stories work? RU abroad somewhere?
The right are no longer conservative. If you like pragmatic, “what matters is what works” policies you head to the left. If you want to take the world forward you also vote for the left or centre.
If you want the world to burn or more radical change you head to the neo right (or far lef)t, who want to turn the clock back to an illusion of childhood before the modern world took hold.
What utter shite. If you want pragmatic “what matters is what works” policies for an advanced economy, then you copy the Singaporean government
If you’re a poor country, you copy China. If you’re a poor country with terrible crime, you cope El Salvador
What works is all about consent, in the end. You need a broad buy-in of a broad direction of travel: the Nordics, Switzerland, Singapore, Uruguay (never gets a mention but compare it to Argentina and Brazil) etc. They go through ups and downs but generally plough forward. China has had an extraordinary 30 year spurt but now faces huge headwinds which are leading to ever-greater authoritarianism. That suggests consent is not readily available. There may be big trouble ahead.
What should perhaps concern us more is the End of Democracy altogether. Young people are staggeringly illiberal, and strikingly apathetic about democracy - they see it as not working for them, so why should they?
"Younger people more likely to doubt merits of democracy – global poll
International study reveals 42% of people aged 18 to 35 supportive of military rule, against 20% of older respondents"
This is a global trend, and we see it also in the UK
See also this paragraph:
"Many respondents believed China’s growing influence would be a force for good, with nearly twice as many respondents believing it would have a positive impact (45%) on their country as a negative one (25%)."
America is no longer the beacon, in many ways China supplants it (even as China faces problems). Out here in impoverished Phnom Penh - paradoxically surging with Chinese money - I can see why. Crime is low, food is good, life gets better, there is possibly less litter in central Phnom Penh than in Paris, London or NYC
Albeit even on that poll '...57% of respondents aged 18 to 35 felt democracy was preferable to any other form of government.'
Support for China is also more a non Western trend 'Many respondents believed China’s growing influence would be a force for good, with nearly twice as many respondents believing it would have a positive impact (45%) on their country as a negative one (25%).
However, people in lower-income countries such as Pakistan (76%), Ethiopia (72%), and Egypt (71%) were markedly more enthusiastic than those in higher-income democracies such as Japan (3%), Germany (14%), the UK (16%) and the US (25%).'
Most people just want life to be better. They don't want to run the government.
It’s Maslow’s hierarchy. The more comfortable people feel the more they value abstract things like liberty, social progress, artistic freedom and so on.
Indeed, which is why some of the most bonkers ideas come out of places like elite universities.
The cost of anything is the cost of the labour required to produce it.
Things are cheap where the workers get paid bugger all.
Is it tho? Printing is just a machine
You feed the paper, press a button, it prints. Very little labour involved
Surely much of the cost is the paper, “ink”, electricity, machine usage
Getting 360 pages printed in London would cost me £20-30 at its cheapest?
So it’s ten times cheaper here to use a printer, paper, etc. I’m sure a clever economist can explain it - I am somewhat surprised
Most of what you pay in London is for the premises.
I bought two ink canisters for my hp printer in Ryman this week. £99. You cannot tell me that ink costs that much to make. The model is to sell you a cheap printer and milk you on the consumables.
Go for Epson Ecojet. Their business model is the opposite: more expensive printers, but cheap ink. And they *sip* the ink. They're blooming good if you do a fair amount of printng, and better than any HP or Lexmark inkjet I've ever had.
Trouble is I generally don't do that much printing, and it is extremely sporadic (because I travel so much) - but then suddenly I will need 200 pages done in a day, then three weeks go by and I need 7 pages, next day 2, then another 4 weeks of nothing and then I need another 100 pages and my printer breaks. Again. GAH
It's infuriating
Also I have a small flat and my printer/scanner has to be tiny as possible
Same here - my printing comes in bursts: I tend to do nothing for a couple of weeks or a month, and then print hundreds of pages. And that meant my old HP would be gunked up, and I'd use loads of ink aligning heads to get acceptable print quality. I don't have that issue with the EcoJet. Even better: because it prints well without hassle, I use it more. If I'm going somewhere, I often print out a local map to backup my phone. As it's easy, I do it.
Can't help with the flat size, though...
There might be money to be made renting one little room which contains several excellent business printers - where people can come and do their own printing. A bit like a laundrette, but for printers
That's actually not a bad idea, if you want to run a really boring business that makes modest profits
Just had a moment when I imagined myself age 30, working in the ceative sector - designer, painter, musician, writer, actor, vid game dude, copywriter, director, illustrator - basically all the arts. Imagining myself being well paid to do a job I love.....
My God, I would hate this AI, with a blinding passion. Fear it and loathe it to perdition. I would want to smash it. A machine that simultaneously take's away my life's purpose, my reason to work with joy, while ALSO taking away my income, my ability to feed my kids. At the same time! How bad is that?
I think we will see suicides
I think we are already there in the music industry with the way pop music is produced.
And yet you still get runaway success garage bands that play real instruments and don't auto-tune.
I see SKS ordered Sue Grey to seize the personal phones of his staffers to find out who leaked the Green New Deal.
It turns out #TelAvivKeith was the nickname being used in e mails between said staffers.
Lol. SKS fans or should that be #TAK fans please explain
There is an article in the Guardian which I am not going to fetch because it would run down my monthly allowance of just 20 stories, suggesting that after Hartlepool, Starmer realised, along with the rest of us, that he was indeed the World's most incompetent dud and was on the cusp of resigning.
Sadly he didn't.
TelAviv Keith is a superb PT down. Rishi should use it at PMQs.
How does that allowance of Guardian stories work? RU abroad somewhere?
I thought the G was completely open.
No I am currently in the railway station car park in Llantwit Major. The mobile app allows me 20 views over the month. Look at the same article twice and that's two views. They want £6.99 a month for full access, and for that they can...
Yes, same on iPad
They are moving to a paywall - they have no choice, see their losses - but trying to do it "secretly"
It's a bit sad
The trouble for The Guardian is that they've cultivated an audience of people expecting free content and moving to a paid model will lose them too much of their audience. It's a disaster of their own making by being so self righteous about other news pay walls, especially the original pay wall at The Times which has been extremely successful for News Group. Iirc they're up to half a million subscribers at average annual revenue of ~£80 for digital subscribers.
Yes exactly
Some of PB was also REALLY sneery about Rupert's "stupid paywall"
Rupert Murdoch didn't become a media titan by luck. He just annoys people so they refuse to believe he is actually very smart, and good at what he does, as well as being a selfish evil Fascist etc
Same applies to Elon Musk. Possibly not a nice guy, but also a genius
I read the Mail on Sunday finance pages, this is money, every week. I’ve noticed in the last couple of weeks s9me articles are now behind a paywall too.
The Guardian, by adopting it’s self righteous approach by not implementing a paywall but begging for cash has screwed itself.
It would be a shame to lose it. The media needs diverse views. Even if it is, in its own way, awful. A left wing Daily Mail.
I agree. I generally detest the Guardian's politics, but it is a voice which needs to be heard, albeit with gritted teeth
To my mind the Mail is the superior paper AS a paper (or website). It is cannier
The Guardian feels tremendoudly stale now, and it has essentially run out of New Woke Angles. Once you've accused trees of being racist, where do you go?
It needs to hide behind a paywall, and use the money to hire the best possible writers (or AI writers). And pray that works. I don't see much alternative
The obvious problem with all the newspapers and magazines ending up siloed behind paywalls is that even that small fraction of people who are willing to pay for them will only fork out for one or two subscriptions to their favourites. Which, inevitably, will be those that cleave closest to their own existing biases.
It's like with the infamous echo chambers inherent in anti-social media. People will hear less and less from, and care less and less about, anyone who doesn't talk and act and think exactly like they do. It's just another step along the path of magnifying and entrenching existing tribal divisions.
Is that really true ? I might be unusual, but I crave news which is not unduly skewed by political opinion in any direction. And the most interesting opinion writers are those who seek to persuade rather than propagandise.
For now you can still get a broad range if opinion for free (see for example Politico and The Hill) but if everything were to become paywalled, I want a lot more than an echo chamber for my views.
'Seven Met officers outside my childhood synagogue on this Shabbat. Seven. And no one attending even blinked. Do non-Jews in this city know that this is what Jewish life is like here?'
The comments underneath are quite instructive. Some sympathetic but others suggesting it's rather precious to be complaining about your comfortable London life when people are dying in Gaza, that the extra security is due to the police favouring Jews or that this is something that only became necessary after 7 October - so the blame really rests with Netanyahu.
So sad to see the level of security now required, and really not good at all to see victim-blaming online. Hope none of the protagonists plan to stand for Labour at the election.
When, after the London Bombings, the Met Police executed, with an unusual efficiency and effectiveness, protection for many mosques - how many people blamed the Muslims who worshipped there? How many suggested they needed to understand the anger etc?
Another point on Reform - the SDP appear to be attracting more of the academic types like Goodwin and Kaufmann but they don't seem to be going anywhere even though leader William Clousten gets the odd interview on Talk TV. They are however a genuine party whereas Reform seems to be largely a Farage vehicle.
Neither do the SDP appear to be standing in by elections. What's the plan?
The most interesting thing about Clousten's AMA was that he ran a car wash in Gateshead for 10 years. It was all downhill from there.
Reform are a fucking joke but they push the same socially conservative tripe as the SDP with a bit more energy and, presumably, money.
"If you think OpenAI Sora is a creative toy like DALLE, ... think again. Sora is a data-driven physics engine. It is a simulation of many worlds, real or fantastical. The simulator learns intricate rendering, "intuitive" physics, long-horizon reasoning, and semantic grounding, all by some denoising and gradient maths."
That's NVIDIA's Senior Research Scientist. Not a rando
He further qualifies: ..Sora learns a physics engine implicitly in the neural parameters by gradient descent through massive amounts of videos...
"Learns a physics engine implicitly" doesn't seem quite correct to me. What say our resident nerds ?
It’s a black box. You can’t directly see what it has learnt. But, in some sense, sure, it can probably be said to have an implicit physics engine. That is, it will create things that generally follow some sort of physics behaviour.
The question is how good is that implicit physics engine. Once lots of people start playing with it, I suspect people will find the quirks in it, as we have with LLMs.
Just had a moment when I imagined myself age 30, working in the ceative sector - designer, painter, musician, writer, actor, vid game dude, copywriter, director, illustrator - basically all the arts. Imagining myself being well paid to do a job I love.....
My God, I would hate this AI, with a blinding passion. Fear it and loathe it to perdition. I would want to smash it. A machine that simultaneously take's away my life's purpose, my reason to work with joy, while ALSO taking away my income, my ability to feed my kids. At the same time! How bad is that?
I think we will see suicides
I think we are already there in the music industry with the way pop music is produced.
And yet you still get runaway success garage bands that play real instruments and don't auto-tune.
Just fewer of them "make it big".
Few make it big but do more or less make it fair-to-middling?
Speaking of pop music, in the 1970s when PBers read Sounds, Melody Maker and NME, music journalists would be flown round the world to review bands in exotic climes. That sweet gig ended long before AI.
Clips of yesterday's Palestine rally again included the chant "no ceasefire, no vote" which might be electorally important, especially if it spreads from London to Rochdale whose by-election is on the 29th.
Yes. Labour will be fine in our election (they have a buffer on the buffer) but I'm a bit worried about this for Biden.
One bit of data suggests that there is more to be said. If I understand the maths correctly, Labour need a swing of 12.7 percentage points to get an overall majority. Ignore Wellingborough - special case of banana ex MP and banana candidate. At Kingswood they got a 16 point swing. On the whole those predicting the result (including PBers) thought Labour would do better. That is not safe home territory when a GE campaign - which will be horrible and dirty - hasn't really started.
NOM remains value. And why else is Rishi 7/1 (Hills) and not 66/1 to be PM after the next election?
I don’t think it’s simply a case of Kingswood being the normal swing and Wellingborough being freakish. At the real election I reckon we’re going to get some very variable swing in different types of constituency.
Kingswood is another urban fringe seat like Uxbridge. In this parliament the defences that have fared best for the Conservatives have been Old Bexley and Crayford (10% swing), Uxbridge and South Ruislip (6.7%), and Kingswood. The worst for them have been rural Southern towns and Red Wall seats.
The GE will be fascinating. There will be surprise Labour victories in unexpected places, particularly coastal towns and the countryside, and tenacious Tory holds in rurban fringe metrolands. Labour will flatline in London and the Tories not do too badly.
Rishi is relatively more popular than Boris now in London and cities and suburban areas but less popular than Boris in coastal towns, market towns and rural areas
Comments
IIRC I bought it whilst I was debating the pros and cons of spending £500+ on a replacement set of third party 22k page toner cartridges for the OKI C9655 laser; the real ones were a lot more, adding up to ~£1000. Then I think there are drums for each colour, and the fuser unit
I have now recovered from a quite unusually for me nasty late-night hypo, so I can continue with the day.
Have a good day everyone.
This is the HEAD of AI at Meta, Yann LeCun. He is considered a global expert on AI, tho he is known for having a more "conservative" take on the subject - he thinks we are many years from real AGI
At a conference last week he literally said this:
"we cannot do text to video, we can't create frame after frame, basically we don't know how to do this"
He says it is far too hard and it needs new technology (which he is developing) and it will take much time
Two days later openAI released Sora. Doing exactly what he claimed we cannot do, leaving him humiliated. So if he can get it THAT wrong, so can almost anyone
https://x.com/ricburton/status/1758378835395932643?s=20
Thanks
We should all kinda be grateful that we are lucky enough to live in this moment, the human universe is swiftly changing, indeed transforming; yes there will be pain but it is also incredibly interesting, and profound
Is it bigger than the advent of electricity? Probably. Could be more like the duscovery of fire, or even bigger than that
I thought the G was completely open.
An illuminating analogy
So lets forget the pretentious philosophising.
Lets deal with the practicalities.
How soon will AI drive my car better than me ?
How soon will AI cook my dinner better than me ?
How soon will AI do my housework and gardening better than me ?
And at what cost.
And how soon will AI be able to jobs A through to Z and at what cost ?
My normal scanner is a camera and possibly a monopod, unless I need really good reproduction. It does 99% of requirements.
(I used to live in a 400sqft one bed near Finsbury Square for a few years. Interesting experience.)
"Navalny's ability to see eye-to-eye with ordinary Russians (even his prison guards showed affection) and his well-informed perspective on the persistent problems of Russian governance would make him a leader like no other."
"This combination of appeal, experience, and wisdom would be impossible to replace"
https://twitter.com/SergeySanovich/status/1758847260149063804
Either way, certainly no Rishi recession in SW London last night, pubs packed!
'Seven Met officers outside my childhood synagogue on this Shabbat. Seven. And no one attending even blinked. Do non-Jews in this city know that this is what Jewish life is like here?'
The comments underneath are quite instructive. Some sympathetic but others suggesting it's rather precious to be complaining about your comfortable London life when people are dying in Gaza, that the extra security is due to the police favouring Jews or that this is something that only became necessary after 7 October - so the blame really rests with Netanyahu.
They are moving to a paywall - they have no choice, see their losses - but trying to do it "secretly"
It's a bit sad
https://www.barrons.com/amp/news/argentina-sees-first-monthly-budget-surplus-in-12-years-a148e46a
Argentina Sees First Monthly Budget Surplus In 12 Years
Why is there so much criticism of the best thing to ever happen to cricket in England?
He is sharing his honest opinion, it seems to me
Also he is just one of many experts, often academic not commercial, discussing the deep philosophical implications of Sora et al
Just the current Houthi War has cost 400k lives, plus Syria - where Iranian forces are directly on the ground, plus Lebanon since 1979 where Hezbollah have been essentially part of Iran's foreign policy, plus all the rest.
It dwarfs anything Israel has done, yet we hear little or nothing about it, and the likes of Mr Corbyn has spent much of his career traipsing around as a useful idiot for anyone who opposes the West.
It's very interesting how worldviews are formed by what receives an emphasis in current public discourse vs the age of the person forming the view, and tracing out influences later on.
I'm sure that you have taught Fox Jr to scratch the surface and look beneath - it is good to be challenged (especially self-challenged) by alternative views, though we still have our own biases beneath.
"Ukraine is asking us for ammunition and artillery now. We, Denmark, have decided to transfer all our artillery to Ukraine. So, sorry, friends, there is military equipment in Europe, it is not only a matter of production. We have weapons, ammunition, air defense systems, which we do not use yet. They must be handed over to Ukraine."
Some of PB was also REALLY sneery about Rupert's "stupid paywall"
Rupert Murdoch didn't become a media titan by luck. He just annoys people so they refuse to believe he is actually very smart, and good at what he does, as well as being a selfish evil Fascist etc
Same applies to Elon Musk. Possibly not a nice guy, but also a genius
We had the atheist-optimists in the 1920s / 30s, who were mugged by the 30s / 40s, then the drugged up philosophers of the 60s / 70s, some of whom were mugged-post-drugged by reality.
I'm reminded of the "God in the Quad" limericks, the first being from Ronald Knox.
There once was a man who said "God
Must think it exceedingly odd
If he finds that this tree
Continues to be
When there's no one about in the Quad."
Dear Sir,
Your astonishment's odd.
I am always about in the Quad.
And that's why the tree
Will continue to be
Since observed by
Yours faithfully,
God
If objects depend on our seeing
So that trees, unobserved, would cease tree-ing,
Then my question is: Who
Is the one who sees you
And assures your persistence in being?
Dear Sir,
You reason most oddly.
To be's to be seen for the bod'ly.
But for spirits like me,
To be is to see.
Sincerely,
The one who is godly.
So the public line is that turnout was quite low (even though it normally is for by-elections). I don't think Tory MPs seriously believe the line that it's a voter strike, which will end in time for the General Election - it won't accord with what they see in their constituencies, or what they know about electoral politics.
NOM remains value. And why else is Rishi 7/1 (Hills) and not 66/1 to be PM after the next election?
EDIT - removed the emerald reference as I appreciate that is contentious but the Musk family’s success in SA is not in doubt.
across quite well’?
If you mean it’s superficially appealing, I
agree. But if you mean it is a realistic
programme for the future prosperity and
success of this country I find that very
difficult to believe, and am surprised that someone who clearly thinks hard about this
stuff would buy into a message like ‘saving
Britain’.
What sort of Britain do you think Tice is
trying to save? One in which we defend to the hilt our massively unequal levels of wealth in the face of a globe that is struggling to finance climate adaptation and deal with unprecedented migration as a result of food and water wars? How do you think that will actually go in practice?
It seems to me we have a genuine choice, but one that is fast disappearing. We could use our considerable remaining global credibility to lead a movement towards a more equal world with relatively high prosperity for almost all.
Or we could retreat into a Children of Men-style police state, ever worsening our own lives and those of our children in order to try to ‘save’ a Britain that will have long disappeared in the face of our own authoritarianism.
My God, I would hate this AI, with a blinding passion. Fear it and loathe it to perdition. I would want to smash it. A machine that simultaneously take's away my life's purpose, my reason to work with joy, while ALSO taking away my income, my ability to feed my kids. At the same time! How bad is that?
I think we will see suicides
The Guardian, by adopting it’s self righteous approach by not implementing a paywall but begging for cash has screwed itself.
It would be a shame to lose it. The media needs diverse views. Even if it is, in its own way, awful. A left wing Daily Mail.
When a team switches it off because they're working for a client that doesn't allow AI tooling, the drop in productivity is small enough that it gets lost in the noise... but everyone complains about having to do "the boring stuff" by hand. It's almost like asking them to do their work using a fountain pen rather than a computer.
So one agent can do the natural language interpretation at the front end, one is good at linear algebra, one is good at getting code to compile and run, that sort of thing.
Each thing any agent does is quite simple, and in reality the "creative" bit is actually the human defining the constraints on the system that you describe as input.
But the output is so apparently miraculously far from the input that it feels very Deep Thought.
As this researcher says, the emergent complexity from what are quite simple algorithms is fascinating. And the interesting thing about this approach is that we are starting to be able to get the system to explain how it got to the answer.
Bit of an aside, but I hope a useful perspective.
1) The Flashman series
2) Game of Thrones
To my mind the Mail is the superior paper AS a paper (or website). It is cannier
The Guardian feels tremendoudly stale now, and it has essentially run out of New Woke Angles. Once you've accused trees of being racist, where do you go?
It needs to hide behind a paywall, and use the money to hire the best possible writers (or AI writers). And pray that works. I don't see much alternative
When Rochdale goes to the polls...it will be for one of the weirdest byelections in the history of them. There will be no Labour candidate to vote for in a seat the party is defending. Because it is too late to remove his name from the ballot papers, Mr Ali may still become the MP, which will be embarrassing. There will be even sharper winces at Labour HQ if George Galloway, who has parachuted into the contest to run a pop-up campaign from the garage of a secondhand car dealership, takes the seat by exploiting anger about the conflict in Gaza.
You may find this surprising, but there are some senior Labour figures whose dismay about the Rochdale fiasco is lightened by a little relief. This is on the grounds that it is better that an incident like this erupts now, rather than during the general election campaign. There are even those who reckon it “a kind of blessing in disguise” because it has given a vivid warning to the party’s candidates to engage brain before opening mouth and to remember that there is no such thing as a truly “private” meeting.
After a debilitating fortnight for the leaders of both the largest parties, the big picture question is which of them has been left looking worse off? My answer is the prime minister. It is a rocky horror show for Labour in Rochdale, but the result there won’t tell us what is likely to happen at the general election.
The Tory leader can’t be anything like as sure that his position is safe. There were spectacular collapses in the support for his party in both Kingswood and Wellingborough. That reinforces the message of the national polls and speaks to the mood in both swing seats and constituencies that were once impregnably blue. It all conveys the strong impression that Britain is sick of the Tories and resolved to turn them out.
The agitators’ agenda, which is to turn the Conservatives into some kind of fusion between Trussism and Farageism, doesn’t look like a path to recovery. It is much more likely to speed them down another loop of the doom spiral. That won’t deter the agitators from further destabilising the Tory leader’s already brittle position.
What an astounding development Sora is. The deeper you go, the more profound it becomes
Article on homepage after the Grammys going wild about women sweeping the board in all the (gender neutral) categories.
A few inches away and article about how awful it is that men won a clean sweep of the gender neutral awards at a film festival.
We will have writing AI capable of creating new Flashman books, or finishing Game of Thrones, within 3-10 years
I know that's pretty vague, but this is such a hard-to-predict field; even the very best (Yann LeCun) get it wildly wrong
Off to read, watch football and have a hearty Sunday lunch. In that order.
It's like with the infamous echo chambers inherent in anti-social media. People will hear less and less from, and care less and less about, anyone who doesn't talk and act and think exactly like they do. It's just another step along the path of magnifying and entrenching existing tribal divisions.
Gosh.
The thought that somebody was paid for the mess that was made is disturbing.
Thank God for TwiX - it really is a political mix. Maybe the last space left? And PB of course!
Kingswood is another urban fringe seat like Uxbridge. In this parliament the defences that have fared best for the Conservatives have been Old Bexley and Crayford (10% swing), Uxbridge and South Ruislip (6.7%), and Kingswood. The worst for them have been rural Southern towns and Red Wall seats.
The GE will be fascinating. There will be surprise Labour victories in unexpected places, particularly coastal towns and the countryside, and tenacious Tory holds in rurban fringe metrolands. Labour will flatline in London and the Tories not do too badly.
It's not the top creatives who will be replaced but those lower down the scale. In your own trade, subeditors seem already to have been replaced. AI will also open opportunities for some. Ford and Toyota will continue to use expensive advertising agencies. Your local used car dealer with six cars out front will in future use AI to knock up a video advert good enough for the cheap 3am slot on TikTok.
Who would AI make as the King in the final season/book?
Many artists (including the greatest), historically used assistants to do the shovel work for them. How many Old Masters are 100% the Old Master? Zero, pretty much.
In coding, we have long had a pyramid of tools that mean we are a long way from the bare metal. Code completion tools were already common - start typing and the machine offers options to finish the line…
Look at it like weaving in the 18th century, replaced by the machines
People DO still professionally create textiles, handmade - and that handmade human aspect is much valued, even if machines can do a "better" job, quicker and cheaper
But the number of pro weavers handlooming cloth in the west must be 0.001% of the number of weavers before the spinning jenny
Read across for art forms now. As for travel writers, they might be some of the last to depart, simply coz a robot can't go to Cuba and sip Mojitos as a lived experience
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusions_and_the_Madness_of_Crowds
Looking at the numbers up for election, there are a grand total of 2,565 seats up for grabs.
Two cycles ago (because the 2020 cycle was wrapped in to the 2021 one) in 2016, they had 842 councillors out of 2,769 elected that year, and I think they've gone down, if anything, since then.
Which might have betting implications, if that's true - anyone offering odds on more Conservative councillor losses than there are defending their seats should have their hand bitten off at the wrist.
If you mean ‘full time, professional weavers who do nothing else,’ I doubt if the dial has actually moved markedly.
If you mean ‘people who do weaving’ it would be a fraction because before the creation of mass spinning frames most people would make their own cloth from fleece sheared from their own sheep.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FedEx_Office
Government aren't responsible for every ill in the country, but they claim the good times are their doing, so they've got to own the bad times. If they hadn't been so incompetent and corrupt, I'd cut them some slack.
The Industrial Revolution initially boosted weaving, but then....
"There had been approximately 75,000 handloom weavers in Britain in 1795. This grew to more than 200,000 by 1812, when there was a burgeoning number of power-loom factories. The number of town weavers increased and their characteristic three-storey weavers’ cottages were built in larger numbers."
and then....
"The number of power looms in British factories was estimated to have risen from 2,400 in 1813 to over 115,000 by 1835. The profitability of handloom weaving fell even further, and the number of weavers in Lancashire dropped from about 180,000 in 1821 to around 30,000 in 1861."
And on it went, down and down
How many pro weavers are left? People looming textiles? Well, here's one
https://www.jessicaecutler.co.uk/about
How many are there now? No idea. Would it surprise me if it was close to 75,000? Not very much.
If you're talking about numbers per head, of course...
Good news: there will be much less pressure to make a living, because machines make things super cheap.
There's the potential for everyone to become a gentleman scholar-artist. Not everyone will, any more than any other generation of aristos.
But that's the potential, and the challenge is to manage that as well as possible.
There is a real shortage of usable weapons and ammunition stocks - particularly the latter - across Europe. The possible availability of a few hundred thousand artillery shells from S Korea and Turkey doesn't change that.
We need to rebuild our defence manufacturing base quickly.
Neither do the SDP appear to be standing in by elections. What's the plan?
..Sora learns a physics engine implicitly in the neural parameters by gradient descent through massive amounts of videos...
"Learns a physics engine implicitly" doesn't seem quite correct to me. What say our resident nerds ?
Artists' supplies: https://www.yell.com/l/art+and+craft+shops.html
DIY: https://www.yell.com/l/diy+stores.html
And yet you still get runaway success garage bands that play real instruments and don't auto-tune.
Just fewer of them "make it big".
I might be unusual, but I crave news which is not unduly skewed by political opinion in any direction.
And the most interesting opinion writers are those who seek to persuade rather than propagandise.
For now you can still get a broad range if opinion for free (see for example Politico and The Hill) but if everything were to become paywalled, I want a lot more than an echo chamber for my views.
Reform are a fucking joke but they push the same socially conservative tripe as the SDP with a bit more energy and, presumably, money.
The question is how good is that implicit physics engine. Once lots of people start playing with it, I suspect people will find the quirks in it, as we have with LLMs.
Speaking of pop music, in the 1970s when PBers read Sounds, Melody Maker and NME, music journalists would be flown round the world to review bands in exotic climes. That sweet gig ended long before AI.