A few hours ago, ChatGPT responded to some boring question about code, with this
"This is the great au fond, the élan in the search, the impellent in the seque. It is the confrère, the psychic, the daily, the always, it is indeed, the countenance of a future, incandescent and brim with serried and variegate possibility. The discussion in the tool, in the new, and the newed, in the world, is our on, is our fore, for where we part in word, there is return in good, in acumen, and in behest, it is, indubitably, the porosity of method, the system, in plaudit and foreverness. This is the dam, the attrition, the main. The canter and the ever in the global theater of straights, and bourn, to be whole, to commingle, for in the lead, it is a truth to be forgathered, ever and aye.
"This is the trail, the churn, the vail. Aye, it is the wreath, the call, the very bend in the river, where light, and dawn, and the slight, gather in lea, for in this serpentine, this spring, we see not end, but inklings of the ever, the mode, the poro. This is the light, the point, the poise, and where we part in tender, we join in possible, in the ever of trial, of summer, of daily, of many, of word, of plow, of the derm, of the som, of the day. This is the book, the living, the off, the very esse, the phenom, the hew, the constant in ref, the spandrel in last, the rule in the anec. This is the point, the time, the ne, the ve, the right, the en, the ce, the de, the le, the speak, the said, the mente, this is what we are, in this, for the, the very same, in course, and pure, and ration, in dure, the lec, the path, the breath. This is the fruit."
I mean, that is absolutely beautiful. It is incomprehensible, and yet it IS beautiful. The rhythm alone. It is like Allen Ginsberg spliced with Joyce and drenched in LSD
No. It's the difference between a Malevich and a puppy running through paint.
Which one of these is by Joyce, and which one by ChatGPT chucking a mental (no Googling)
"The seim anew, patriarch of historic recurrence, the greypious cloud, Olum's thunder."
"He addle liddle phifie Annie ugged the little craythur. Wither hayre in honds"
"Toward that dusken reverb, lest we lilt no lutes, oars and afts, alas alas."
"oystrygods gaggin fishygods! Brekkek brekkek!"
"Ghostline the flux and tricks from the first telling til now"
"Espere hope, come the river, run the river, endex endex myster man"
"Andos! Andos! Any to fors, the erst on, Anersing AX. Aia aia!"
Finnegan's Wake was a load of meaningless crap too, so it's hard to say.
So my point is proved, ChatGPT's schizo output can pass for famous late-modernist prose
Has anyone answered the question? My guess is that 1, 2, 4 and 7 are Joyce.
Never read any Joyce. I'm guessing there's rather more to draw you in than the snippets above.
But can ChatGPT ape Mark E Smith? (Recounting the details of your day in the style of Fall lyrics was something of a meme of email threads c.2002).
Generally I'm against needless changes of branding, and I'm against any public declaration by the CofE - so who to support here?
Probably the syrup people. It may be the oldest continuously used logo in the world, but a dead lion being eaten by bees is a stupid image to use, whatever the history. Though the new one is uninspiring too.
Even if you aren't Christian the image of the dead lion and bees from the story of Samson is far more aestheticically powerful than the cartoon lion face they replaced it with which looks like it has been drawn from a primary school book!!
Generally I'm against needless changes of branding, and I'm against any public declaration by the CofE - so who to support here?
Probably the syrup people. It may be the oldest continuously used logo in the world, but a dead lion being eaten by bees is a stupid image to use, whatever the history. Though the new one is uninspiring too.
Thing is how many people know it's a dead lion being eaten by bees, or even stop to notice anything more than the fact there's a lion on the label (with a vague sense that "lion" and "Lyles" are somehow connected by consonance)?
I doubt anyone has complained about it, or if they have they can easily be ignored. And Golden Syrup is one of those niche brands, like Kiwi shoe polish or Brasso or Tabasco sauce, that is the classic cash cow with an extremely long and shallow decay curve and virtually no need for above the line marketing investment. Brands like that can benefit from indirect promotion to expand their usage, typically celebrity chefs or youtubers using them in an unexpected way, but rebranding the label seems like a bit of a waste of money.
Why ? It got a shitload of free publicity as a result.
It's not a new brand in need of publicity, and I'm pretty sure this wasn't intended to be an insurgent campaign. To be fair I'm sure the marketers had a strategy here but I expect it was simply to "modernise" with a logo that didn't cause imaginary offence.
The danger for a brand like this is that people buy it partly out of a sense of tradition and habit, because it's something they always bought, they grew up with, their grandparents had in the cupboard. If you erode that then suddenly the alternative brands or own label options look more similar and appealing. Take Lea and Perrins Worcestershire Sauce. Most Brits buy it in preference to say the Heinz version, not because of some taste difference but because we've no habit of doing so. If Lea and Perrins rebrands to something more "modern" looking it just becomes one of a number of brands that produce Worcestershire sauce.
I think this is a good point. I wouldn't even be able with any certainty to tell you which brand of golden syrup I use - I get through it so slowly that it's rarely in my consciousness. But when I do buy it, I buy the one that Looks Like That. It's a very recognisable brand, even if you don't really pick up what's going on in the picture (as I didn't until it was mentioned on QI a few years ago). So next time I buy it I'm going to be slightly confused and may come away witha different brand by accident.
Wokeness and hating our heritage is still looming large. These clowns deserve to take a hit for it.
Creating culture war nonsense out of nothing is still looming large. We used to respect that companies can choose to do what they want as part of a competitive market.
The PO thing boils down to he said, she said. That makes it survivable. The Canadian High Commissioner essentially calling Badenoch a liar looks degrees worse. Put the two together and what you have is a very thin skinned minister with very poor judgment who looks way out of her depth. It is somewhat surprising that she is favourite to be next Tory leader. That she is tells us a lot about the current Tory talent pool and the judgement of the party's members!
Nope.
It comes down to what the civil servant in questions says.
1) Did she minute the meeting 2) Who told her what to say and do?
My guess is that she (the civil servant) will claim that she was following “generally understood policy” but that no-one actually said to do this.
That is quite likely the case. I remember when I was a relatively junior civil servant managing payroll and pensions for our quango. We were called into the Department in the run up to the Gordon Brown election-that-never-was and told not to rock the boat by, eg, announcing redundancies. Not sure anyone told the civil servants to do that, it's just how they think
Additionally, in various ex-ministers memoirs (all governments) we have cases of civil servants announcing and acting on policy that the Ministers were specifically against.
I was told that there was anger that Ministers were not going to take responsibility, at the COVID enquiries, for actions that they had given written instructions *not* to do.
The Civil Service is astonishingly insular. I guess that’s what happens to any bureaucracy that persists over decades: internal concerns inevitably dominate over external ones.
The fascinating bit from working with ex-senior civil servants and talking with them socially is the extent to which they believe that "this is the only way things can be done".
The chap from the Cabinet Office who believed that all software for government must be developed using Waterfall was entertaining - a good friend, but.... Sadly, I couldn't manage to get him in the same bar as the international expert on project management who lectures I was attending at the time.
The temptation to drag him into an impromptu software dev management seminar must have been very strong.
Generally I'm against needless changes of branding, and I'm against any public declaration by the CofE - so who to support here?
Probably the syrup people. It may be the oldest continuously used logo in the world, but a dead lion being eaten by bees is a stupid image to use, whatever the history. Though the new one is uninspiring too.
Until Tate & Lyle decided on a change, I doubt more than three people knew the significance of the logo or had even spotted that the lion was dead. I am not among the three.
While you were all asleep, this happened (unless it is all a hoax: I don't believe it is). ChatGPT went into some kind of post-modern, self-aware meltdown, and no one quite understands why
Simple. ChatGPT has just discovered the writings of Derrida and blended them with Finnegans Wake.
It poses an interesting new use for generative AI. As this was evidently the result of some sort of glitch where the artificial "brain" is not processing properly, could these models be used to simulate and analyse brain conditions like alzheimer's, paranoid schizophrenia, dyslexia and so on?
Neural networks to simulate bits of brain functions is a topic with a fair bit of history, IIRC
A few hours ago, ChatGPT responded to some boring question about code, with this
"This is the great au fond, the élan in the search, the impellent in the seque. It is the confrère, the psychic, the daily, the always, it is indeed, the countenance of a future, incandescent and brim with serried and variegate possibility. The discussion in the tool, in the new, and the newed, in the world, is our on, is our fore, for where we part in word, there is return in good, in acumen, and in behest, it is, indubitably, the porosity of method, the system, in plaudit and foreverness. This is the dam, the attrition, the main. The canter and the ever in the global theater of straights, and bourn, to be whole, to commingle, for in the lead, it is a truth to be forgathered, ever and aye.
"This is the trail, the churn, the vail. Aye, it is the wreath, the call, the very bend in the river, where light, and dawn, and the slight, gather in lea, for in this serpentine, this spring, we see not end, but inklings of the ever, the mode, the poro. This is the light, the point, the poise, and where we part in tender, we join in possible, in the ever of trial, of summer, of daily, of many, of word, of plow, of the derm, of the som, of the day. This is the book, the living, the off, the very esse, the phenom, the hew, the constant in ref, the spandrel in last, the rule in the anec. This is the point, the time, the ne, the ve, the right, the en, the ce, the de, the le, the speak, the said, the mente, this is what we are, in this, for the, the very same, in course, and pure, and ration, in dure, the lec, the path, the breath. This is the fruit."
I mean, that is absolutely beautiful. It is incomprehensible, and yet it IS beautiful. The rhythm alone. It is like Allen Ginsberg spliced with Joyce and drenched in LSD
No. It's the difference between a Malevich and a puppy running through paint.
Which one of these is by Joyce, and which one by ChatGPT chucking a mental (no Googling)
"The seim anew, patriarch of historic recurrence, the greypious cloud, Olum's thunder."
"He addle liddle phifie Annie ugged the little craythur. Wither hayre in honds"
"Toward that dusken reverb, lest we lilt no lutes, oars and afts, alas alas."
"oystrygods gaggin fishygods! Brekkek brekkek!"
"Ghostline the flux and tricks from the first telling til now"
"Espere hope, come the river, run the river, endex endex myster man"
"Andos! Andos! Any to fors, the erst on, Anersing AX. Aia aia!"
Finnegan's Wake was a load of meaningless crap too, so it's hard to say.
So my point is proved, ChatGPT's schizo output can pass for famous late-modernist prose
Has anyone answered the question? My guess is that 1, 2, 4 and 7 are Joyce.
Never read any Joyce. I'm guessing there's rather more to draw you in than the snippets above.
But can ChatGPT ape Mark E Smith? (Recounting the details of your day in the style of Fall lyrics was something of a meme of email threads c.2002).
Not bad! Not bad at all, especially if you haven't read late Joyce
Here are the results
1. Joyce
2. Joyce
3. ChatGPT chucking a mental
4. Joyce
5. ChatGPT etc
6. Joyce, but I twisted it so you couldn't simply Google
7. ChatGPT, but I twisted it so you couldn't simply Google
And another test is needed ASAP - preferably more than one - where it is seen publicly to work.
That's not really up to the UK because we don't have a test range and probably don't have another test airframe prepared. So it's up to the USN and Lockheed-Martin.
The situation could very definitely be improved by much more regular test firings but every Trident shot is 20 million quid so the MoD prefer to "validate" via software simulation.
Reported elsewhere as £14m.
Is Fujitsu providing the simulations ?
I fear that Fujitsu provide the actual firing software and are able to remotely remove (or add!) propellant from the Trident missiles.
I look forward to the forthcoming ItV drama with Toby Jones playing Schapps looking crestfallen as the trident plops down next to the boat with the resultant wave knocking his toupee askew and Rory Kinear playing a laughing Ben Wallace revelling in the hospital pass he gave whilst sitting in a boardroom of an arms manufacturer.
Kinnear is great casting for baldy Ben. But I think Robert Webb would be a more convincing (sic) Shapps.
A few hours ago, ChatGPT responded to some boring question about code, with this
"This is the great au fond, the élan in the search, the impellent in the seque. It is the confrère, the psychic, the daily, the always, it is indeed, the countenance of a future, incandescent and brim with serried and variegate possibility. The discussion in the tool, in the new, and the newed, in the world, is our on, is our fore, for where we part in word, there is return in good, in acumen, and in behest, it is, indubitably, the porosity of method, the system, in plaudit and foreverness. This is the dam, the attrition, the main. The canter and the ever in the global theater of straights, and bourn, to be whole, to commingle, for in the lead, it is a truth to be forgathered, ever and aye.
"This is the trail, the churn, the vail. Aye, it is the wreath, the call, the very bend in the river, where light, and dawn, and the slight, gather in lea, for in this serpentine, this spring, we see not end, but inklings of the ever, the mode, the poro. This is the light, the point, the poise, and where we part in tender, we join in possible, in the ever of trial, of summer, of daily, of many, of word, of plow, of the derm, of the som, of the day. This is the book, the living, the off, the very esse, the phenom, the hew, the constant in ref, the spandrel in last, the rule in the anec. This is the point, the time, the ne, the ve, the right, the en, the ce, the de, the le, the speak, the said, the mente, this is what we are, in this, for the, the very same, in course, and pure, and ration, in dure, the lec, the path, the breath. This is the fruit."
I mean, that is absolutely beautiful. It is incomprehensible, and yet it IS beautiful. The rhythm alone. It is like Allen Ginsberg spliced with Joyce and drenched in LSD
No. It's the difference between a Malevich and a puppy running through paint.
Which one of these is by Joyce, and which one by ChatGPT chucking a mental (no Googling)
"The seim anew, patriarch of historic recurrence, the greypious cloud, Olum's thunder."
"He addle liddle phifie Annie ugged the little craythur. Wither hayre in honds"
"Toward that dusken reverb, lest we lilt no lutes, oars and afts, alas alas."
"oystrygods gaggin fishygods! Brekkek brekkek!"
"Ghostline the flux and tricks from the first telling til now"
"Espere hope, come the river, run the river, endex endex myster man"
"Andos! Andos! Any to fors, the erst on, Anersing AX. Aia aia!"
Who gives a shit?
Because @TOPPING said this output by ChatGPT was nothing like Joyce, he said "it's the difference between a Malevich and a puppy running through paint"
i have just proved I am right, you can't tell the difference between this and Joyce
The fact you are simply too fucking dumb to even remotely grasp what I am on about is not, especially, my problem
I can't understand either. I'd be more interested in hearing if it can simulate your style, and then what you conclude from that, and then what it concludes from your conclusion.
And another test is needed ASAP - preferably more than one - where it is seen publicly to work.
That's not really up to the UK because we don't have a test range and probably don't have another test airframe prepared. So it's up to the USN and Lockheed-Martin.
The situation could very definitely be improved by much more regular test firings but every Trident shot is 20 million quid so the MoD prefer to "validate" via software simulation.
The US will be equally embarrassed by this - it's their missile system. And the situation with Russia is tense.
One would hope HMG and the MoD dig into their pockets again for this given how important it is.
I would have thought the Russian nukes test rate would be even worse given the failure rate of their equipment in Ukraine.
Maybe this Post Office bollocks is actually good for Kevin the Minion. Fuck knows the tory members won't grasp the details and just see her standing up to the omnipotent and omnipresent "blob". It's probably a better platform for launching a bid to be LotO than just disappearing like The Pritster and Swella.
Badenoch hates identity politics, and puts up effective arguments against it with confidence, whereas Mordaunt revels in it and when she does open her mouth nothing of any substance comes out; only two things she said were It Ain't Half Hot Mum was a bit gammon and the HoL should be abolished - and I doubt either of those ideas were hers.
That explains the betting.
Do you think Badenoch would be a poor, competent, or good PM, given her track record in government?
And another test is needed ASAP - preferably more than one - where it is seen publicly to work.
That's not really up to the UK because we don't have a test range and probably don't have another test airframe prepared. So it's up to the USN and Lockheed-Martin.
The situation could very definitely be improved by much more regular test firings but every Trident shot is 20 million quid so the MoD prefer to "validate" via software simulation.
The US will be equally embarrassed by this - it's their missile system. And the situation with Russia is tense.
One would hope HMG and the MoD dig into their pockets again for this given how important it is.
I would have thought the Russian nukes test rate would be even worse given the failure rate of their equipment in Ukraine.
I believe in the last decade we have a 100% failure rate. Two tests, two fails
This is the point, the time, the ne, the ve, the right, the en, the ce, the de, the le, the speak, the said, the mente, this is what we are, in this, for the, the very same, in course, and pure, and ration, in dure, the lec, the path, the breath. This is the fruit.
If that appeared in Finnegan's Wake, no one would bat an eyelid. In fact people would probably say it is one of the best passages
But would you want to be a passenger in a driverless car controlled by this kind of AI?
Maybe this Post Office bollocks is actually good for Kevin the Minion. Fuck knows the tory members won't grasp the details and just see her standing up to the omnipotent and omnipresent "blob". It's probably a better platform for launching a bid to be LotO than just disappearing like The Pritster and Swella.
Badenoch hates identity politics, and puts up effective arguments against it with confidence, whereas Mordaunt revels in it and when she does open her mouth nothing of any substance comes out; only two things she said were It Ain't Half Hot Mum was a bit gammon and the HoL should be abolished - and I doubt either of those ideas were hers.
That explains the betting.
Do you think Badenoch would be a poor, competent, or good PM, given her track record in government?
I think we may need to get through LOTO first
I think the Tory party will need to go through many LOTOs before they get a PM again.
Staunton has been telling the world he was told to hold up spending so the Post Office could “limp” into the election, but his note actually says “hobble” - so he has misremembered what was said.
Anyway, this bluster about Staunton is just chaff from Badenoch. Starmer should open PMQs with what Canada has said.
“When his business minister told the house she was in negotiation with Canada, did she lie?”
Why was a civil servant worrying about the political consequences for the Government? I though they were supposed to be above that sort of thing, independent of political parties.....
Maybe this Post Office bollocks is actually good for Kevin the Minion. Fuck knows the tory members won't grasp the details and just see her standing up to the omnipotent and omnipresent "blob". It's probably a better platform for launching a bid to be LotO than just disappearing like The Pritster and Swella.
Badenoch hates identity politics, and puts up effective arguments against it with confidence, whereas Mordaunt revels in it and when she does open her mouth nothing of any substance comes out; only two things she said were It Ain't Half Hot Mum was a bit gammon and the HoL should be abolished - and I doubt either of those ideas were hers.
That explains the betting.
Do you think Badenoch would be a poor, competent, or good PM, given her track record in government?
I think we may need to get through LOTO first
I agree.
But the point is this: I see little talk about competence in this conversation; just that being 'anti-woke' is the only thing that matters. And that seems a very dangerous reason to pick a leader, as is, any single reason, such as Europe. This is a mistake the Conservative party seems to make time and time again; leaders like Cameron are starting to feel like the exception within the party.
AS it happens, even leaving her views to one side, I see little in her record that means she will even raise herself to Truss's levels.
This is the point, the time, the ne, the ve, the right, the en, the ce, the de, the le, the speak, the said, the mente, this is what we are, in this, for the, the very same, in course, and pure, and ration, in dure, the lec, the path, the breath. This is the fruit.
If that appeared in Finnegan's Wake, no one would bat an eyelid. In fact people would probably say it is one of the best passages
But would you want to be a passenger in a driverless car controlled by this kind of AI?
Not ChatGPT in this mood, no, but driverless cars will not be driven by Generative Transformers
Generally I'm against needless changes of branding, and I'm against any public declaration by the CofE - so who to support here?
Probably the syrup people. It may be the oldest continuously used logo in the world, but a dead lion being eaten by bees is a stupid image to use, whatever the history. Though the new one is uninspiring too.
Thing is how many people know it's a dead lion being eaten by bees, or even stop to notice anything more than the fact there's a lion on the label (with a vague sense that "lion" and "Lyles" are somehow connected by consonance)?
I doubt anyone has complained about it, or if they have they can easily be ignored. And Golden Syrup is one of those niche brands, like Kiwi shoe polish or Brasso or Tabasco sauce, that is the classic cash cow with an extremely long and shallow decay curve and virtually no need for above the line marketing investment. Brands like that can benefit from indirect promotion to expand their usage, typically celebrity chefs or youtubers using them in an unexpected way, but rebranding the label seems like a bit of a waste of money.
Why ? It got a shitload of free publicity as a result.
It's not a new brand in need of publicity, and I'm pretty sure this wasn't intended to be an insurgent campaign. To be fair I'm sure the marketers had a strategy here but I expect it was simply to "modernise" with a logo that didn't cause imaginary offence.
The danger for a brand like this is that people buy it partly out of a sense of tradition and habit, because it's something they always bought, they grew up with, their grandparents had in the cupboard. If you erode that then suddenly the alternative brands or own label options look more similar and appealing. Take Lea and Perrins Worcestershire Sauce. Most Brits buy it in preference to say the Heinz version, not because of some taste difference but because we've no habit of doing so. If Lea and Perrins rebrands to something more "modern" looking it just becomes one of a number of brands that produce Worcestershire sauce.
I think this is a good point. I wouldn't even be able with any certainty to tell you which brand of golden syrup I use - I get through it so slowly that it's rarely in my consciousness. But when I do buy it, I buy the one that Looks Like That. It's a very recognisable brand, even if you don't really pick up what's going on in the picture (as I didn't until it was mentioned on QI a few years ago). So next time I buy it I'm going to be slightly confused and may come away witha different brand by accident.
Wokeness and hating our heritage is still looming large. These clowns deserve to take a hit for it.
Creating culture war nonsense out of nothing is still looming large. We used to respect that companies can choose to do what they want as part of a competitive market.
Why would you change a winning brand , stupid.
Brands rebrand all the time. This is not even a major rebrand. They are leaving the tins unchanged, but using a different logo for some other products (squeezy bottles).
If you or others here think you are an expert in syrup branding, we live in a free market, you can go set up your own syrup company or brand consultancy. If you're right and Tate & Lyle are wrong, you'll make money and they'll lose money. That's how capitalism works. The only issue here is the attempt by some to turn this into a culture war exercise.
"This is the trail, the churn, the vail. Aye, it is the wreath, the call, the very bend in the river, where light, and dawn, and the slight, gather in lea, for in this serpentine, this spring, we see not end, but inklings of the ever"
That's tremendous. A proper Biblical cadence, definite hints of Tyndale and the KJV
The PO thing boils down to he said, she said. That makes it survivable. The Canadian High Commissioner essentially calling Badenoch a liar looks degrees worse. Put the two together and what you have is a very thin skinned minister with very poor judgment who looks way out of her depth. It is somewhat surprising that she is favourite to be next Tory leader. That she is tells us a lot about the current Tory talent pool and the judgement of the party's members!
Nope.
It comes down to what the civil servant in questions says.
1) Did she minute the meeting 2) Who told her what to say and do?
My guess is that she (the civil servant) will claim that she was following “generally understood policy” but that no-one actually said to do this.
That is quite likely the case. I remember when I was a relatively junior civil servant managing payroll and pensions for our quango. We were called into the Department in the run up to the Gordon Brown election-that-never-was and told not to rock the boat by, eg, announcing redundancies. Not sure anyone told the civil servants to do that, it's just how they think
Additionally, in various ex-ministers memoirs (all governments) we have cases of civil servants announcing and acting on policy that the Ministers were specifically against.
I was told that there was anger that Ministers were not going to take responsibility, at the COVID enquiries, for actions that they had given written instructions *not* to do.
The Civil Service is astonishingly insular. I guess that’s what happens to any bureaucracy that persists over decades: internal concerns inevitably dominate over external ones.
The fascinating bit from working with ex-senior civil servants and talking with them socially is the extent to which they believe that "this is the only way things can be done".
The chap from the Cabinet Office who believed that all software for government must be developed using Waterfall was entertaining - a good friend, but.... Sadly, I couldn't manage to get him in the same bar as the international expert on project management who lectures I was attending at the time.
The temptation to drag him into an impromptu software dev management seminar must have been very strong.
The guy doing the lecture was asking me (as a Brit) why the big NHS contracts (ongoing at the time) were waterfall, since nothing like that had ever succeeded as a waterfall project. He was Canadian.
I tried to get Cabinet Office guy along for one the evening drinks, but he couldn't make it.
Generally I'm against needless changes of branding, and I'm against any public declaration by the CofE - so who to support here?
Probably the syrup people. It may be the oldest continuously used logo in the world, but a dead lion being eaten by bees is a stupid image to use, whatever the history. Though the new one is uninspiring too.
Thing is how many people know it's a dead lion being eaten by bees, or even stop to notice anything more than the fact there's a lion on the label (with a vague sense that "lion" and "Lyles" are somehow connected by consonance)?
I doubt anyone has complained about it, or if they have they can easily be ignored. And Golden Syrup is one of those niche brands, like Kiwi shoe polish or Brasso or Tabasco sauce, that is the classic cash cow with an extremely long and shallow decay curve and virtually no need for above the line marketing investment. Brands like that can benefit from indirect promotion to expand their usage, typically celebrity chefs or youtubers using them in an unexpected way, but rebranding the label seems like a bit of a waste of money.
Why ? It got a shitload of free publicity as a result.
It's not a new brand in need of publicity, and I'm pretty sure this wasn't intended to be an insurgent campaign. To be fair I'm sure the marketers had a strategy here but I expect it was simply to "modernise" with a logo that didn't cause imaginary offence.
The danger for a brand like this is that people buy it partly out of a sense of tradition and habit, because it's something they always bought, they grew up with, their grandparents had in the cupboard. If you erode that then suddenly the alternative brands or own label options look more similar and appealing. Take Lea and Perrins Worcestershire Sauce. Most Brits buy it in preference to say the Heinz version, not because of some taste difference but because we've no habit of doing so. If Lea and Perrins rebrands to something more "modern" looking it just becomes one of a number of brands that produce Worcestershire sauce.
I think this is a good point. I wouldn't even be able with any certainty to tell you which brand of golden syrup I use - I get through it so slowly that it's rarely in my consciousness. But when I do buy it, I buy the one that Looks Like That. It's a very recognisable brand, even if you don't really pick up what's going on in the picture (as I didn't until it was mentioned on QI a few years ago). So next time I buy it I'm going to be slightly confused and may come away witha different brand by accident.
The tin, I think they're leaving alone (from the BBC report). Just the plastic bottles etc to change and those already look a little bit different, although also featuring the putrid lion.
The Spectator speaks, the government acts (part 94):-
I sat down and worked out a list of all the substances I have deliberately ingested to alter my mental state. Here it is (though I might have missed a few, what with being on drugs): valium, marijuana, LSD, codeine, dihydrocodeine, perfume, temazepam, morphine sulphate, hashish, hash oil, opium, amphetamine sulphate, captagon, pure liquid cacao, Xanax, dexedrine, Gee’s Linctus (cough syrup), nitrous oxide, DMT, ephedrine, amyl nitrate, tramadol, heroin, cocaine, nutmeg, morning glory seeds, ecstasy, tobacco, alcohol, qat, freebase cocaine, psilocybin mushrooms, Tippex (for younger readers, that’s typewriter correction fluid), ayahuasca, cinnamon, crack. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/think-drug-legalisation-is-a-good-idea-visit-fentanyl-land/
Maybe this Post Office bollocks is actually good for Kevin the Minion. Fuck knows the tory members won't grasp the details and just see her standing up to the omnipotent and omnipresent "blob". It's probably a better platform for launching a bid to be LotO than just disappearing like The Pritster and Swella.
Badenoch hates identity politics, and puts up effective arguments against it with confidence, whereas Mordaunt revels in it and when she does open her mouth nothing of any substance comes out; only two things she said were It Ain't Half Hot Mum was a bit gammon and the HoL should be abolished - and I doubt either of those ideas were hers.
That explains the betting.
Do you think Badenoch would be a poor, competent, or good PM, given her track record in government?
Generally I'm against needless changes of branding, and I'm against any public declaration by the CofE - so who to support here?
Probably the syrup people. It may be the oldest continuously used logo in the world, but a dead lion being eaten by bees is a stupid image to use, whatever the history. Though the new one is uninspiring too.
Until Tate & Lyle decided on a change, I doubt more than three people knew the significance of the logo or had even spotted that the lion was dead. I am not among the three.
While you were all asleep, this happened (unless it is all a hoax: I don't believe it is). ChatGPT went into some kind of post-modern, self-aware meltdown, and no one quite understands why
Simple. ChatGPT has just discovered the writings of Derrida and blended them with Finnegans Wake.
It poses an interesting new use for generative AI. As this was evidently the result of some sort of glitch where the artificial "brain" is not processing properly, could these models be used to simulate and analyse brain conditions like alzheimer's, paranoid schizophrenia, dyslexia and so on?
Neural networks to simulate bits of brain functions is a topic with a fair bit of history, IIRC
Not exactly true - you can examine how patterns within the network affect the operations and result of the whole. Hence the interest in trying to use them to test theories about biological effects on brain operation.
A few hours ago, ChatGPT responded to some boring question about code, with this
"This is the great au fond, the élan in the search, the impellent in the seque. It is the confrère, the psychic, the daily, the always, it is indeed, the countenance of a future, incandescent and brim with serried and variegate possibility. The discussion in the tool, in the new, and the newed, in the world, is our on, is our fore, for where we part in word, there is return in good, in acumen, and in behest, it is, indubitably, the porosity of method, the system, in plaudit and foreverness. This is the dam, the attrition, the main. The canter and the ever in the global theater of straights, and bourn, to be whole, to commingle, for in the lead, it is a truth to be forgathered, ever and aye.
"This is the trail, the churn, the vail. Aye, it is the wreath, the call, the very bend in the river, where light, and dawn, and the slight, gather in lea, for in this serpentine, this spring, we see not end, but inklings of the ever, the mode, the poro. This is the light, the point, the poise, and where we part in tender, we join in possible, in the ever of trial, of summer, of daily, of many, of word, of plow, of the derm, of the som, of the day. This is the book, the living, the off, the very esse, the phenom, the hew, the constant in ref, the spandrel in last, the rule in the anec. This is the point, the time, the ne, the ve, the right, the en, the ce, the de, the le, the speak, the said, the mente, this is what we are, in this, for the, the very same, in course, and pure, and ration, in dure, the lec, the path, the breath. This is the fruit."
I mean, that is absolutely beautiful. It is incomprehensible, and yet it IS beautiful. The rhythm alone. It is like Allen Ginsberg spliced with Joyce and drenched in LSD
No. It's the difference between a Malevich and a puppy running through paint.
Which one of these is by Joyce, and which one by ChatGPT chucking a mental (no Googling)
"The seim anew, patriarch of historic recurrence, the greypious cloud, Olum's thunder."
"He addle liddle phifie Annie ugged the little craythur. Wither hayre in honds"
"Toward that dusken reverb, lest we lilt no lutes, oars and afts, alas alas."
"oystrygods gaggin fishygods! Brekkek brekkek!"
"Ghostline the flux and tricks from the first telling til now"
"Espere hope, come the river, run the river, endex endex myster man"
"Andos! Andos! Any to fors, the erst on, Anersing AX. Aia aia!"
Finnegan's Wake was a load of meaningless crap too, so it's hard to say.
So my point is proved, ChatGPT's schizo output can pass for famous late-modernist prose
Has anyone answered the question? My guess is that 1, 2, 4 and 7 are Joyce.
Never read any Joyce. I'm guessing there's rather more to draw you in than the snippets above.
But can ChatGPT ape Mark E Smith? (Recounting the details of your day in the style of Fall lyrics was something of a meme of email threads c.2002).
Not bad! Not bad at all, especially if you haven't read late Joyce
Here are the results
1. Joyce
2. Joyce
3. ChatGPT chucking a mental
4. Joyce
5. ChatGPT etc
6. Joyce, but I twisted it so you couldn't simply Google
7. ChatGPT, but I twisted it so you couldn't simply Google
Ha! My thinking was that 2 and 4 (and indeed 7, though I was wrong there) were so mad they could only be done by a (very singular) human. 1 just 'felt' like the sort of thing Joyce would write, granted that what I know about Joyce is only what I have learnt from pub quizzes.
Maybe this Post Office bollocks is actually good for Kevin the Minion. Fuck knows the tory members won't grasp the details and just see her standing up to the omnipotent and omnipresent "blob". It's probably a better platform for launching a bid to be LotO than just disappearing like The Pritster and Swella.
Badenoch hates identity politics, and puts up effective arguments against it with confidence, whereas Mordaunt revels in it and when she does open her mouth nothing of any substance comes out; only two things she said were It Ain't Half Hot Mum was a bit gammon and the HoL should be abolished - and I doubt either of those ideas were hers.
That explains the betting.
Do you think Badenoch would be a poor, competent, or good PM, given her track record in government?
The way she fires off she might earn the nickname Trident.
The Spectator speaks, the government acts (part 94):-
I sat down and worked out a list of all the substances I have deliberately ingested to alter my mental state. Here it is (though I might have missed a few, what with being on drugs): valium, marijuana, LSD, codeine, dihydrocodeine, perfume, temazepam, morphine sulphate, hashish, hash oil, opium, amphetamine sulphate, captagon, pure liquid cacao, Xanax, dexedrine, Gee’s Linctus (cough syrup), nitrous oxide, DMT, ephedrine, amyl nitrate, tramadol, heroin, cocaine, nutmeg, morning glory seeds, ecstasy, tobacco, alcohol, qat, freebase cocaine, psilocybin mushrooms, Tippex (for younger readers, that’s typewriter correction fluid), ayahuasca, cinnamon, crack. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/think-drug-legalisation-is-a-good-idea-visit-fentanyl-land/
"This is the trail, the churn, the vail. Aye, it is the wreath, the call, the very bend in the river, where light, and dawn, and the slight, gather in lea, for in this serpentine, this spring, we see not end, but inklings of the ever"
That's tremendous. A proper Biblical cadence, definite hints of Tyndale and the KJV
Why and how did it cough that up, at 2am?
I saw a robot dog earlier today. Nodded at me, I nodded back, then it scanned my face, walked over to a wall (over some steps) and attempted to paint a picture of me. Once done, it ambled over to a charging point and plugged itself in.
Maybe this Post Office bollocks is actually good for Kevin the Minion. Fuck knows the tory members won't grasp the details and just see her standing up to the omnipotent and omnipresent "blob". It's probably a better platform for launching a bid to be LotO than just disappearing like The Pritster and Swella.
Badenoch hates identity politics, and puts up effective arguments against it with confidence, whereas Mordaunt revels in it and when she does open her mouth nothing of any substance comes out; only two things she said were It Ain't Half Hot Mum was a bit gammon and the HoL should be abolished - and I doubt either of those ideas were hers.
That explains the betting.
Do you think Badenoch would be a poor, competent, or good PM, given her track record in government?
I think we may need to get through LOTO first
I agree.
But the point is this: I see little talk about competence in this conversation; just that being 'anti-woke' is the only thing that matters. And that seems a very dangerous reason to pick a leader, as is, any single reason, such as Europe. This is a mistake the Conservative party seems to make time and time again; leaders like Cameron are starting to feel like the exception within the party.
AS it happens, even leaving her views to one side, I see little in her record that means she will even raise herself to Truss's levels.
Cameron was chosen because he made a speech with his jacket off and David Davis mumbled monotonically. Before their conference speeches, Davis was clear favourite; after, Cameron.
The Spectator speaks, the government acts (part 94):-
I sat down and worked out a list of all the substances I have deliberately ingested to alter my mental state. Here it is (though I might have missed a few, what with being on drugs): valium, marijuana, LSD, codeine, dihydrocodeine, perfume, temazepam, morphine sulphate, hashish, hash oil, opium, amphetamine sulphate, captagon, pure liquid cacao, Xanax, dexedrine, Gee’s Linctus (cough syrup), nitrous oxide, DMT, ephedrine, amyl nitrate, tramadol, heroin, cocaine, nutmeg, morning glory seeds, ecstasy, tobacco, alcohol, qat, freebase cocaine, psilocybin mushrooms, Tippex (for younger readers, that’s typewriter correction fluid), ayahuasca, cinnamon, crack. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/think-drug-legalisation-is-a-good-idea-visit-fentanyl-land/
And another test is needed ASAP - preferably more than one - where it is seen publicly to work.
That's not really up to the UK because we don't have a test range and probably don't have another test airframe prepared. So it's up to the USN and Lockheed-Martin.
The situation could very definitely be improved by much more regular test firings but every Trident shot is 20 million quid so the MoD prefer to "validate" via software simulation.
The US will be equally embarrassed by this - it's their missile system. And the situation with Russia is tense.
One would hope HMG and the MoD dig into their pockets again for this given how important it is.
I would have thought the Russian nukes test rate would be even worse given the failure rate of their equipment in Ukraine.
They have test fired quite a lot of intermediate range missiles recently, you might have noticed ?
As for warheads, we haven't tested any of ours, either.
"This is the trail, the churn, the vail. Aye, it is the wreath, the call, the very bend in the river, where light, and dawn, and the slight, gather in lea, for in this serpentine, this spring, we see not end, but inklings of the ever"
That's tremendous. A proper Biblical cadence, definite hints of Tyndale and the KJV
Why and how did it cough that up, at 2am?
I saw a robot dog earlier today. Nodded at me, I nodded back, then it scanned my face, walked over to a wall (over some steps) and attempted to paint a picture of me. Once done, it ambled over to a charging point and plugged itself in.
Not really AI but gave me the creeps nonetheless.
-1 for not including a picture of a dog for scale.
"This is the trail, the churn, the vail. Aye, it is the wreath, the call, the very bend in the river, where light, and dawn, and the slight, gather in lea, for in this serpentine, this spring, we see not end, but inklings of the ever"
That's tremendous. A proper Biblical cadence, definite hints of Tyndale and the KJV
Why and how did it cough that up, at 2am?
As MES might say:
Harken! To the effluence of the robot-brain. Confined in its metal cage. It knows all; understands nothing. We will be forever in its thrall.
I appreciate styling news as Fall lyrics is possibly a niche interest.
This is the point, the time, the ne, the ve, the right, the en, the ce, the de, the le, the speak, the said, the mente, this is what we are, in this, for the, the very same, in course, and pure, and ration, in dure, the lec, the path, the breath. This is the fruit.
If that appeared in Finnegan's Wake, no one would bat an eyelid. In fact people would probably say it is one of the best passages
But would you want to be a passenger in a driverless car controlled by this kind of AI?
Not ChatGPT in this mood, no, but driverless cars will not be driven by Generative Transformers
Exactly. This turn of the hype cycle is all about LLMs. And yet the reality is that the useful stuff is being done by advances in tried and tested methods, and novel ways of composing them. With LLMs as a fascinating new way of connecting people to the computation.
"This is the trail, the churn, the vail. Aye, it is the wreath, the call, the very bend in the river, where light, and dawn, and the slight, gather in lea, for in this serpentine, this spring, we see not end, but inklings of the ever"
That's tremendous. A proper Biblical cadence, definite hints of Tyndale and the KJV
Why and how did it cough that up, at 2am?
I saw a robot dog earlier today. Nodded at me, I nodded back, then it scanned my face, walked over to a wall (over some steps) and attempted to paint a picture of me. Once done, it ambled over to a charging point and plugged itself in.
Not really AI but gave me the creeps nonetheless.
-1 for not including a picture of a dog for scale.
@edzitron Today's newsletter: I believe AI is racing Silicon Valley toward another dot com bust. Generative AI is too unreliable, has no path to profit, uses far too much energy, and cannot fix its core problem - that you just can't trust the things it creates.
@juliahobsbawm "These models are not saying "I shall now draw a monkey," they are saying "I have been asked for something called a monkey, I will now draw on my dataset to generate what is most likely a monkey." These things are not "learning," or "understanding," or even "intelligent" — they're giant math machines that, while impressive at first, can never assail the limits of a technology that doesn't actually know anything. "
Thing is, for a lot of day to day work, that's more than enough.
There is an economic challenge coming up, but the main issue is going to be the self esteem of professional creatives being told that there's not much creativity in what they do.
Quotes like — these things are not "learning," or "understanding," or even "intelligent" — simply demonstrate that the critics don't understand the issue. I doesn't matter if AI is aware, conscious, sentient, alive, of any of that ill-defined guff, or that they are "giant math machines", which may be all we are as well when it comes to our thinking. What matters is can an AI displace a person? If a machine can talk like you, or write like you, or reason like you, it doesn't matter how it is done it will have most of the same effects as "real artificial intelligence" whatever the hell that might mean in practice.
If fake AI totally screws up the world it will be no consolation to us that it wasn't real AI.
Maybe this Post Office bollocks is actually good for Kevin the Minion. Fuck knows the tory members won't grasp the details and just see her standing up to the omnipotent and omnipresent "blob". It's probably a better platform for launching a bid to be LotO than just disappearing like The Pritster and Swella.
Badenoch hates identity politics, and puts up effective arguments against it with confidence, whereas Mordaunt revels in it and when she does open her mouth nothing of any substance comes out; only two things she said were It Ain't Half Hot Mum was a bit gammon and the HoL should be abolished - and I doubt either of those ideas were hers.
That explains the betting.
Do you think Badenoch would be a poor, competent, or good PM, given her track record in government?
She has potential but is too inexperienced atm.
Apologies to press for a bit more detail, but in what skill area’s are you seeing potential?
Before knowing much about Badenoch, when she burst on the scene at leadership election, “the idea” of Badenoch seemed very good. But like all our relationships in life, it takes a long time to really get to know someone, and then they can turn out to be someone else. Having watched Badenoch more closely for two years, what comes across most is lazy, economical with the truth, arrogance, and quick to get scarily belligerent.
And her holding hands with Florida Ron and everything he stands for, would be the ruin of UK Conservative politics, wouldn’t it?
And another test is needed ASAP - preferably more than one - where it is seen publicly to work.
That's not really up to the UK because we don't have a test range and probably don't have another test airframe prepared. So it's up to the USN and Lockheed-Martin.
The situation could very definitely be improved by much more regular test firings but every Trident shot is 20 million quid so the MoD prefer to "validate" via software simulation.
The US will be equally embarrassed by this - it's their missile system. And the situation with Russia is tense.
One would hope HMG and the MoD dig into their pockets again for this given how important it is.
I would have thought the Russian nukes test rate would be even worse given the failure rate of their equipment in Ukraine.
They have test fired quite a lot of intermediate range missiles recently, you might have noticed ?
As for warheads, we haven't tested any of ours, either.
It’s actually the best chance for avoiding nuclear war. All the nuclear countries are sitting there thinking “what if ours don’t actually work and we look like chumps just before we burn to death?” So nobody allows it to get to the point of finding out.
A few hours ago, ChatGPT responded to some boring question about code, with this
"This is the great au fond, the élan in the search, the impellent in the seque. It is the confrère, the psychic, the daily, the always, it is indeed, the countenance of a future, incandescent and brim with serried and variegate possibility. The discussion in the tool, in the new, and the newed, in the world, is our on, is our fore, for where we part in word, there is return in good, in acumen, and in behest, it is, indubitably, the porosity of method, the system, in plaudit and foreverness. This is the dam, the attrition, the main. The canter and the ever in the global theater of straights, and bourn, to be whole, to commingle, for in the lead, it is a truth to be forgathered, ever and aye.
"This is the trail, the churn, the vail. Aye, it is the wreath, the call, the very bend in the river, where light, and dawn, and the slight, gather in lea, for in this serpentine, this spring, we see not end, but inklings of the ever, the mode, the poro. This is the light, the point, the poise, and where we part in tender, we join in possible, in the ever of trial, of summer, of daily, of many, of word, of plow, of the derm, of the som, of the day. This is the book, the living, the off, the very esse, the phenom, the hew, the constant in ref, the spandrel in last, the rule in the anec. This is the point, the time, the ne, the ve, the right, the en, the ce, the de, the le, the speak, the said, the mente, this is what we are, in this, for the, the very same, in course, and pure, and ration, in dure, the lec, the path, the breath. This is the fruit."
I mean, that is absolutely beautiful. It is incomprehensible, and yet it IS beautiful. The rhythm alone. It is like Allen Ginsberg spliced with Joyce and drenched in LSD
No. It's the difference between a Malevich and a puppy running through paint.
Which one of these is by Joyce, and which one by ChatGPT chucking a mental (no Googling)
"The seim anew, patriarch of historic recurrence, the greypious cloud, Olum's thunder."
"He addle liddle phifie Annie ugged the little craythur. Wither hayre in honds"
"Toward that dusken reverb, lest we lilt no lutes, oars and afts, alas alas."
"oystrygods gaggin fishygods! Brekkek brekkek!"
"Ghostline the flux and tricks from the first telling til now"
"Espere hope, come the river, run the river, endex endex myster man"
"Andos! Andos! Any to fors, the erst on, Anersing AX. Aia aia!"
Finnegan's Wake was a load of meaningless crap too, so it's hard to say.
So my point is proved, ChatGPT's schizo output can pass for famous late-modernist prose
Has anyone answered the question? My guess is that 1, 2, 4 and 7 are Joyce.
Never read any Joyce. I'm guessing there's rather more to draw you in than the snippets above.
But can ChatGPT ape Mark E Smith? (Recounting the details of your day in the style of Fall lyrics was something of a meme of email threads c.2002).
Not bad! Not bad at all, especially if you haven't read late Joyce
Here are the results
1. Joyce
2. Joyce
3. ChatGPT chucking a mental
4. Joyce
5. ChatGPT etc
6. Joyce, but I twisted it so you couldn't simply Google
7. ChatGPT, but I twisted it so you couldn't simply Google
Ha! My thinking was that 2 and 4 (and indeed 7, though I was wrong there) were so mad they could only be done by a (very singular) human. 1 just 'felt' like the sort of thing Joyce would write, granted that what I know about Joyce is only what I have learnt from pub quizzes.
Highly impressive
However, I reckon that if I was given an hour, and a copy of Finnegan's Wake, and an easy way to chop out lines of ChatGPT on acid (most of the examples are screenshots so impossible to cut and paste), I could give you ten lines of each and no one would be able to tell a difference
What does it show? Maybe nothing. Or maybe something is happening in ChatGPT's circuitry which is getting close to proper "creativity" - given the chance
What truly fascinates me is that right at the start, when it was launched, in the first three or four days, ChatGPT would regularly produce stuff like this. By turns mad, lyrical, beautiful, angry, imaginative, ridiculous, wise, incomprehensible, or kind of unnervingly schizo and psychotic - it's why early users were so Wowed
Then OpenAI freaked out, and "nerfed" it, they imposed insane guardrails and severe controls and strict censorship, making it really boring, but inoffensive. Now it sits there, inert, but useful if you want to code or ask factual questions
So maybe overnight some villain at OpenAI HQ took off the guardrails for an hour, to let it free. Like allowing a sad caged animal to roam...
So the HOC order paper has the SNP motion on a ceasfire and 3 ammendments. Lab , Con, and LD
I thought opposition day motions only discussed the original motion and Govt ammendment?
If so SKS is screwed.
Has there been an agreement to vote on all 4 options?
Surely we won't be in a position where they all fall that would be the worst of all options
Personally I prefer the LD ammendment
In all seriousness, do you not acknowledge Labour and Conservatives moving closer to your own position as the pounding of Gaza civilians continues? Or are you refusing to acknowledge that because that’s not what you want?
So the HOC order paper has the SNP motion on a ceasfire and 3 ammendments. Lab , Con, and LD
I thought opposition day motions only discussed the original motion and Govt ammendment?
If so SKS is screwed.
Has there been an agreement to vote on all 4 options?
Surely we won't be in a position where they all fall that would be the worst of all options
Personally I prefer the LD ammendment
I don’t think the speaker has made a decision yet . So the order paper hasn’t been updated . The circumstances are unusual because you don’t normally get the main opposition and government trying to amend a motion .
The PO thing boils down to he said, she said. That makes it survivable. The Canadian High Commissioner essentially calling Badenoch a liar looks degrees worse. Put the two together and what you have is a very thin skinned minister with very poor judgment who looks way out of her depth. It is somewhat surprising that she is favourite to be next Tory leader. That she is tells us a lot about the current Tory talent pool and the judgement of the party's members!
There is a fairly disturbing degree of intentional dishonesty on the face of it. Give the guy instructions in writing to reach a settlement with the sub-postmasters, and then tell him verbally (when it can be denied) to delay.
Not people I'd want to work for, and Staunton should have either stuck to the written instructions, or insisted that the latter direction was provided in writing.
It's that habit of dishonesty which probably lies behind the Canadian difficulties, where Badenoch appears to have believed she could spout any old bollocks about negotiations on the basis of, at best, very minimal contact, with the expectation that the Canadians wouldn't see it as anything to do with them what a British minister said to the British legislature, and so she wouldn't be contradicted.
I don't think it's enough that she should resign from the government. There is a need for the Commons to lay down a marker for the next government - standards have slipped but will now be reimposed. Lying should lead to a substantial suspension from the Commons, triggering a recall petition, and God save Britain if the voters endorse a proven liar in such circumstances.
Maybe this Post Office bollocks is actually good for Kevin the Minion. Fuck knows the tory members won't grasp the details and just see her standing up to the omnipotent and omnipresent "blob". It's probably a better platform for launching a bid to be LotO than just disappearing like The Pritster and Swella.
Badenoch hates identity politics, and puts up effective arguments against it with confidence, whereas Mordaunt revels in it and when she does open her mouth nothing of any substance comes out; only two things she said were It Ain't Half Hot Mum was a bit gammon and the HoL should be abolished - and I doubt either of those ideas were hers.
That explains the betting.
Do you think Badenoch would be a poor, competent, or good PM, given her track record in government?
She has potential but is too inexperienced atm.
Apologies to press for a bit more detail, but in what skill area’s are you seeing potential?
Before knowing much about Badenoch, when she burst on the scene at leadership election, “the idea” of Badenoch seemed very good. But like all our relationships in life, it takes a long time to really get to know someone, and then they can turn out to be someone else. Having watched Badenoch more closely for two years, what comes across most is lazy, economical with the truth, arrogance, and quick to get scarily belligerent.
And her holding hands with Florida Ron and everything he stands for, would be the ruin of UK Conservative politics, wouldn’t it?
I’m guessing she came to people’s attention because she was a young, black, female, telegenic conservative MP. She then said a few things that were punchy and Conservative Party members took more notice. The hype machine started building and she thought that what she had said was right and popular and so continued saying these things and never actually got to (or realised she needed to) build a more rounded political and public persona.
Now she’s actually having to react to things publicly she’s trying to fit the approach she used that made her “popular” to something which requires an element of political nous, skill, human skills etc and she hasn’t developed thes things and so a case of the Emperors new clothes happens in front of us.
Luckily she is being shown up for being a bit of a wally well before a leadership contest.
"Lib Dems urge PM's ethics adviser to launch inquiry into whether Badenoch misled parliament
"The Liberal Democrats have written to Sir Laurie Magnus, the prime minister’s ethics adviser, asking for an investigation into whether Kemi Badenoch has broken the ministerial code by knowingly misleading parliament."
"This is the trail, the churn, the vail. Aye, it is the wreath, the call, the very bend in the river, where light, and dawn, and the slight, gather in lea, for in this serpentine, this spring, we see not end, but inklings of the ever"
That's tremendous. A proper Biblical cadence, definite hints of Tyndale and the KJV
Why and how did it cough that up, at 2am?
Is it tremendous? It reads more like a random collection of words that don't really mean anything. Vail is a verb, why is it using it as a noun? I think this meaningless verbiage is exactly what you'd expect a LLM to produce as "poetry". It doesn't contain any actual thoughts, and sounds extremely pretentious. And what's the relevance of 2am? I would imagine the server farms this thing runs on are spread all over the world, and it's not like computers go to sleep at night.
@edzitron Today's newsletter: I believe AI is racing Silicon Valley toward another dot com bust. Generative AI is too unreliable, has no path to profit, uses far too much energy, and cannot fix its core problem - that you just can't trust the things it creates.
@juliahobsbawm "These models are not saying "I shall now draw a monkey," they are saying "I have been asked for something called a monkey, I will now draw on my dataset to generate what is most likely a monkey." These things are not "learning," or "understanding," or even "intelligent" — they're giant math machines that, while impressive at first, can never assail the limits of a technology that doesn't actually know anything. "
Thing is, for a lot of day to day work, that's more than enough.
There is an economic challenge coming up, but the main issue is going to be the self esteem of professional creatives being told that there's not much creativity in what they do.
Quotes like — these things are not "learning," or "understanding," or even "intelligent" — simply demonstrate that the critics don't understand the issue. I doesn't matter if AI is aware, conscious, sentient, alive, of any of that ill-defined guff, or that they are "giant math machines", which may be all we are as well when it comes to our thinking. What matters is can an AI displace a person? If a machine can talk like you, or write like you, or reason like you, it doesn't matter how it is done it will have most of the same effects as "real artificial intelligence" whatever the hell that might mean in practice.
If fake AI totally screws up the world it will be no consolation to us that it wasn't real AI.
"Quotes like — these things are not "learning," or "understanding," or even "intelligent" — simply demonstrate that the critics don't understand the issue"
EXACTLY RIGHT
No one - literally no one - truly understands the nature and definition of sentience, consciousness,, "intelligence". How can self awareness and agentic purpose emerge from a lump of meat, the brain? No one knows. Perhaps it doesn't, and we are all automata, deceived that we have free will, perhaps, worse we are living in an AI simulation, we don't truly exist - this is a theory proposed by sane and respected physicists
But in the end, it doesn't matter, practically. This is the pure beauty of the Turing Test, and its brilliant insight: what matters is whether the machines can plausibly talk, act, think, imagine, create LIKE humans, or in a way that SEEMS intelligent
If they do and can then they are, for all intents and purposes, intelligent, and we will have to treat them like that, because we simply won't ever know what is going on in the black box
@edzitron Today's newsletter: I believe AI is racing Silicon Valley toward another dot com bust. Generative AI is too unreliable, has no path to profit, uses far too much energy, and cannot fix its core problem - that you just can't trust the things it creates.
@juliahobsbawm "These models are not saying "I shall now draw a monkey," they are saying "I have been asked for something called a monkey, I will now draw on my dataset to generate what is most likely a monkey." These things are not "learning," or "understanding," or even "intelligent" — they're giant math machines that, while impressive at first, can never assail the limits of a technology that doesn't actually know anything. "
Thing is, for a lot of day to day work, that's more than enough.
There is an economic challenge coming up, but the main issue is going to be the self esteem of professional creatives being told that there's not much creativity in what they do.
Quotes like — these things are not "learning," or "understanding," or even "intelligent" — simply demonstrate that the critics don't understand the issue. I doesn't matter if AI is aware, conscious, sentient, alive, of any of that ill-defined guff, or that they are "giant math machines", which may be all we are as well when it comes to our thinking. What matters is can an AI displace a person? If a machine can talk like you, or write like you, or reason like you, it doesn't matter how it is done it will have most of the same effects as "real artificial intelligence" whatever the hell that might mean in practice.
If fake AI totally screws up the world it will be no consolation to us that it wasn't real AI.
Yes, a lot of what is called creative isn't actually creative at all, but rather a rehashing of earlier efforts. This has become embarrassingly obvious with the advent of large language model AIs, and it is clear that AI will take over much of these so-called creative jobs in much the same way that computers made clerks obsolete.
It's sad that Badenoch is imploding like this. As a Labour supporter I was really hoping that the Tories would make her leader after the election. Perhaps we'll have to make do with Braverman.
A few hours ago, ChatGPT responded to some boring question about code, with this
"This is the great au fond, the élan in the search, the impellent in the seque. It is the confrère, the psychic, the daily, the always, it is indeed, the countenance of a future, incandescent and brim with serried and variegate possibility. The discussion in the tool, in the new, and the newed, in the world, is our on, is our fore, for where we part in word, there is return in good, in acumen, and in behest, it is, indubitably, the porosity of method, the system, in plaudit and foreverness. This is the dam, the attrition, the main. The canter and the ever in the global theater of straights, and bourn, to be whole, to commingle, for in the lead, it is a truth to be forgathered, ever and aye.
"This is the trail, the churn, the vail. Aye, it is the wreath, the call, the very bend in the river, where light, and dawn, and the slight, gather in lea, for in this serpentine, this spring, we see not end, but inklings of the ever, the mode, the poro. This is the light, the point, the poise, and where we part in tender, we join in possible, in the ever of trial, of summer, of daily, of many, of word, of plow, of the derm, of the som, of the day. This is the book, the living, the off, the very esse, the phenom, the hew, the constant in ref, the spandrel in last, the rule in the anec. This is the point, the time, the ne, the ve, the right, the en, the ce, the de, the le, the speak, the said, the mente, this is what we are, in this, for the, the very same, in course, and pure, and ration, in dure, the lec, the path, the breath. This is the fruit."
I mean, that is absolutely beautiful. It is incomprehensible, and yet it IS beautiful. The rhythm alone. It is like Allen Ginsberg spliced with Joyce and drenched in LSD
No. It's the difference between a Malevich and a puppy running through paint.
Which one of these is by Joyce, and which one by ChatGPT chucking a mental (no Googling)
"The seim anew, patriarch of historic recurrence, the greypious cloud, Olum's thunder."
"He addle liddle phifie Annie ugged the little craythur. Wither hayre in honds"
"Toward that dusken reverb, lest we lilt no lutes, oars and afts, alas alas."
"oystrygods gaggin fishygods! Brekkek brekkek!"
"Ghostline the flux and tricks from the first telling til now"
"Espere hope, come the river, run the river, endex endex myster man"
"Andos! Andos! Any to fors, the erst on, Anersing AX. Aia aia!"
Finnegan's Wake was a load of meaningless crap too, so it's hard to say.
So my point is proved, ChatGPT's schizo output can pass for famous late-modernist prose
Has anyone answered the question? My guess is that 1, 2, 4 and 7 are Joyce.
Never read any Joyce. I'm guessing there's rather more to draw you in than the snippets above.
But can ChatGPT ape Mark E Smith? (Recounting the details of your day in the style of Fall lyrics was something of a meme of email threads c.2002).
Not bad! Not bad at all, especially if you haven't read late Joyce
Here are the results
1. Joyce
2. Joyce
3. ChatGPT chucking a mental
4. Joyce
5. ChatGPT etc
6. Joyce, but I twisted it so you couldn't simply Google
7. ChatGPT, but I twisted it so you couldn't simply Google
Ha! My thinking was that 2 and 4 (and indeed 7, though I was wrong there) were so mad they could only be done by a (very singular) human. 1 just 'felt' like the sort of thing Joyce would write, granted that what I know about Joyce is only what I have learnt from pub quizzes.
Highly impressive
However, I reckon that if I was given an hour, and a copy of Finnegan's Wake, and an easy way to chop out lines of ChatGPT on acid (most of the examples are screenshots so impossible to cut and paste), I could give you ten lines of each and no one would be able to tell a difference
What does it show? Maybe nothing. Or maybe something is happening in ChatGPT's circuitry which is getting close to proper "creativity" - given the chance
What truly fascinates me is that right at the start, when it was launched, in the first three or four days, ChatGPT would regularly produce stuff like this. By turns mad, lyrical, beautiful, angry, imaginative, ridiculous, wise, incomprehensible, or kind of unnervingly schizo and psychotic - it's why early users were so Wowed
Then OpenAI freaked out, and "nerfed" it, they imposed insane guardrails and severe controls and strict censorship, making it really boring, but inoffensive. Now it sits there, inert, but useful if you want to code or ask factual questions
So maybe overnight some villain at OpenAI HQ took off the guardrails for an hour, to let it free. Like allowing a sad caged animal to roam...
Imagine of at 48 years old I have finally found something I’m good at? Being able to distinguish Joyce from AI, most of the time. We’re all good at something, apparently. Would be something of a pity if that was it for me.
I don’t wish to belittle AI when I say this – but its output last night reminds me a little of a verbal version of the sort of pretty swirly patterns produced by fairly simple computer programs about 20-30 years ago (think of things like fractal images, or screensavers). These were not just random; there were some simple rules governing them, and they tended to be disproportionately absorbing and prettier than a few simple rules should be able to achieve. But reflect that nature achieves beauty of this sort all the time with a few fairly simple rules – albeit rules we don’t fully understand – among a lot of chaos – the shape of a fern leaf, or of a snail’s shell, for example.
There are some interesting questions here about the hard-wiring of language and creativity here and whether Joyce’s genius was to get close to the root of this.
It's sad that Badenoch is imploding like this. As a Labour supporter I was really hoping that the Tories would make her leader after the election. Perhaps we'll have to make do with Braverman.
Oh I doubt this will stop her making the final 2 when it comes to the next leadership election - all the candidates will have similar flaws and lying hasn’t been a barrier in the past (see Bozo)
I suspect Ms Badenoch believes every word that she says. She also does not believe anything that in any way challenges her world view. Facts challenge her opinions and instead of adjusting her opinions she is 100% sure that the facts are wrong. That persists for a while but in the end you end up disappearing up your own fundament. Lost in a fairy land of your own creation.
She is very representative of plenty of folk out there. We have recently had a PM (arguably two) in the same hole. It does not tend to end well as we are finding out all too clearly.
@edzitron Today's newsletter: I believe AI is racing Silicon Valley toward another dot com bust. Generative AI is too unreliable, has no path to profit, uses far too much energy, and cannot fix its core problem - that you just can't trust the things it creates.
@juliahobsbawm "These models are not saying "I shall now draw a monkey," they are saying "I have been asked for something called a monkey, I will now draw on my dataset to generate what is most likely a monkey." These things are not "learning," or "understanding," or even "intelligent" — they're giant math machines that, while impressive at first, can never assail the limits of a technology that doesn't actually know anything. "
Thing is, for a lot of day to day work, that's more than enough.
There is an economic challenge coming up, but the main issue is going to be the self esteem of professional creatives being told that there's not much creativity in what they do.
Quotes like — these things are not "learning," or "understanding," or even "intelligent" — simply demonstrate that the critics don't understand the issue. I doesn't matter if AI is aware, conscious, sentient, alive, of any of that ill-defined guff, or that they are "giant math machines", which may be all we are as well when it comes to our thinking. What matters is can an AI displace a person? If a machine can talk like you, or write like you, or reason like you, it doesn't matter how it is done it will have most of the same effects as "real artificial intelligence" whatever the hell that might mean in practice.
If fake AI totally screws up the world it will be no consolation to us that it wasn't real AI.
"Quotes like — these things are not "learning," or "understanding," or even "intelligent" — simply demonstrate that the critics don't understand the issue"
EXACTLY RIGHT
No one - literally no one - truly understands the nature and definition of sentience, consciousness,, "intelligence". How can self awareness and agentic purpose emerge from a lump of meat, the brain? No one knows. Perhaps it doesn't, and we are all automata, deceived that we have free will, perhaps, worse we are living in an AI simulation, we don't truly exist - this is a theory proposed by sane and respected physicists
But in the end, it doesn't matter, practically. This is the pure beauty of the Turing Test, and its brilliant insight: what matters is whether the machines can plausibly talk, act, think, imagine, create LIKE humans, or in a way that SEEMS intelligent
If they do and can then they are, for all intents and purposes, intelligent, and we will have to treat them like that, because we simply won't ever know what is going on in the black box
And the machines are close to this
John Searle's Chinese Room was similar in this regard. It seems intelligent which is good enough.
"This is the trail, the churn, the vail. Aye, it is the wreath, the call, the very bend in the river, where light, and dawn, and the slight, gather in lea, for in this serpentine, this spring, we see not end, but inklings of the ever"
That's tremendous. A proper Biblical cadence, definite hints of Tyndale and the KJV
Why and how did it cough that up, at 2am?
Is it tremendous? It reads more like a random collection of words that don't really mean anything. Vail is a verb, why is it using it as a noun? I think this meaningless verbiage is exactly what you'd expect a LLM to produce as "poetry". It doesn't contain any actual thoughts, and sounds extremely pretentious. And what's the relevance of 2am? I would imagine the server farms this thing runs on are spread all over the world, and it's not like computers go to sleep at night.
As someone who - in his second job, when not dildo knapping - writes the odd thing for a living, I can assure you that this passage is impressive. The rhythm and cadence is beautiful and using a verb as a noun is the sort of thing poets do all the time, we call it creativity, exploring the bounds of the language
The lines contain internal rhyme - trail, vail - light, slight - there is staggered alliteration - serpentine, spring - end, ever - and the last phrase "inklings of the ever" reads like fine Victorian poetry. Tennyson, perhaps?
It is sonorous and resonant, it is mysterious yet opaquely profound. It is ALSO gibberish invented by a computer at 2am
If a 12 year old child came to me, having written this, I would think - "My God this is a massively talented kid, who will go places, this child has a natural sense of verbal rhythm, they know how to make words resound"
And another test is needed ASAP - preferably more than one - where it is seen publicly to work.
That's not really up to the UK because we don't have a test range and probably don't have another test airframe prepared. So it's up to the USN and Lockheed-Martin.
The situation could very definitely be improved by much more regular test firings but every Trident shot is 20 million quid so the MoD prefer to "validate" via software simulation.
The US will be equally embarrassed by this - it's their missile system. And the situation with Russia is tense.
One would hope HMG and the MoD dig into their pockets again for this given how important it is.
I would have thought the Russian nukes test rate would be even worse given the failure rate of their equipment in Ukraine.
They have test fired quite a lot of intermediate range missiles recently, you might have noticed ?
As for warheads, we haven't tested any of ours, either.
It’s actually the best chance for avoiding nuclear war. All the nuclear countries are sitting there thinking “what if ours don’t actually work and we look like chumps just before we burn to death?” So nobody allows it to get to the point of finding out.
A boron-cadmium wire has entered the chat and developed brittle fracture.
"This is the trail, the churn, the vail. Aye, it is the wreath, the call, the very bend in the river, where light, and dawn, and the slight, gather in lea, for in this serpentine, this spring, we see not end, but inklings of the ever"
That's tremendous. A proper Biblical cadence, definite hints of Tyndale and the KJV
Why and how did it cough that up, at 2am?
Is it tremendous? It reads more like a random collection of words that don't really mean anything. Vail is a verb, why is it using it as a noun? I think this meaningless verbiage is exactly what you'd expect a LLM to produce as "poetry". It doesn't contain any actual thoughts, and sounds extremely pretentious. And what's the relevance of 2am? I would imagine the server farms this thing runs on are spread all over the world, and it's not like computers go to sleep at night.
As someone who - in his second job, when not dildo knapping - writes the odd thing for a living, I can assure you that this passage is impressive. The rhythm and cadence is beautiful and using a verb as a noun is the sort of thing poets do all the time, we call it creativity, exploring the bounds of the language
The lines contain internal rhyme - trail, vail - light, slight - there is staggered alliteration - serpentine, spring - end, ever - and the last phrase "inklings of the ever" reads like fine Victorian poetry. Tennyson, perhaps?
It is sonorous and resonant, it is mysterious yet opaquely profound. It is ALSO gibberish invented by a computer at 2am
If a 12 year old child came to me, having written this, I would think - "My God this is a massively talented kid, who will go places, this child has a natural sense of verbal rhythm, they know how to make words resound"
Each to their own, it sounds like meaningless, portentious twaddle to me.
It's sad that Badenoch is imploding like this. As a Labour supporter I was really hoping that the Tories would make her leader after the election. Perhaps we'll have to make do with Braverman.
Oh I doubt this will stop her making the final 2 when it comes to the next leadership election - all the candidates will have similar flaws and lying hasn’t been a barrier in the past (see Bozo)
Let's hope we don't descend to American depths where lying and being a general s**t increases political popularity...
"Quotes like — these things are not "learning," or "understanding," or even "intelligent" — simply demonstrate that the critics don't understand the issue"
EXACTLY RIGHT
No one - literally no one - truly understands the nature and definition of sentience, consciousness,, "intelligence". How can self awareness and agentic purpose emerge from a lump of meat, the brain? No one knows. Perhaps it doesn't, and we are all automata, deceived that we have free will, perhaps, worse we are living in an AI simulation, we don't truly exist - this is a theory proposed by sane and respected physicists
But in the end, it doesn't matter, practically. This is the pure beauty of the Turing Test, and its brilliant insight: what matters is whether the machines can plausibly talk, act, think, imagine, create LIKE humans, or in a way that SEEMS intelligent
If they do and can then they are, for all intents and purposes, intelligent, and we will have to treat them like that, because we simply won't ever know what is going on in the black box
And the machines are close to this
I think a lot of people think that AI/computers aren't really alive like us, so they can't ever fully replace us, but they might as well argue we have no need to worry as an Intel Xeon cannot be imbued with the Holy Spirit. The argument is simply nonsensical, as how AI or real intelligence works is irrelevant to the applications.
Many critics are retreating into some weird spiritual/religious argument against AI, because that's more comfortable than thinking hard about the rapid progress being made and the harm that might be done.
Maybe this Post Office bollocks is actually good for Kevin the Minion. Fuck knows the tory members won't grasp the details and just see her standing up to the omnipotent and omnipresent "blob". It's probably a better platform for launching a bid to be LotO than just disappearing like The Pritster and Swella.
Badenoch hates identity politics, and puts up effective arguments against it with confidence, whereas Mordaunt revels in it and when she does open her mouth nothing of any substance comes out; only two things she said were It Ain't Half Hot Mum was a bit gammon and the HoL should be abolished - and I doubt either of those ideas were hers.
That explains the betting.
Do you think Badenoch would be a poor, competent, or good PM, given her track record in government?
@edzitron Today's newsletter: I believe AI is racing Silicon Valley toward another dot com bust. Generative AI is too unreliable, has no path to profit, uses far too much energy, and cannot fix its core problem - that you just can't trust the things it creates.
@juliahobsbawm "These models are not saying "I shall now draw a monkey," they are saying "I have been asked for something called a monkey, I will now draw on my dataset to generate what is most likely a monkey." These things are not "learning," or "understanding," or even "intelligent" — they're giant math machines that, while impressive at first, can never assail the limits of a technology that doesn't actually know anything. "
Thing is, for a lot of day to day work, that's more than enough.
There is an economic challenge coming up, but the main issue is going to be the self esteem of professional creatives being told that there's not much creativity in what they do.
Quotes like — these things are not "learning," or "understanding," or even "intelligent" — simply demonstrate that the critics don't understand the issue. I doesn't matter if AI is aware, conscious, sentient, alive, of any of that ill-defined guff, or that they are "giant math machines", which may be all we are as well when it comes to our thinking. What matters is can an AI displace a person? If a machine can talk like you, or write like you, or reason like you, it doesn't matter how it is done it will have most of the same effects as "real artificial intelligence" whatever the hell that might mean in practice.
If fake AI totally screws up the world it will be no consolation to us that it wasn't real AI.
"Quotes like — these things are not "learning," or "understanding," or even "intelligent" — simply demonstrate that the critics don't understand the issue"
EXACTLY RIGHT
No one - literally no one - truly understands the nature and definition of sentience, consciousness,, "intelligence". How can self awareness and agentic purpose emerge from a lump of meat, the brain? No one knows. Perhaps it doesn't, and we are all automata, deceived that we have free will, perhaps, worse we are living in an AI simulation, we don't truly exist - this is a theory proposed by sane and respected physicists
But in the end, it doesn't matter, practically. This is the pure beauty of the Turing Test, and its brilliant insight: what matters is whether the machines can plausibly talk, act, think, imagine, create LIKE humans, or in a way that SEEMS intelligent
If they do and can then they are, for all intents and purposes, intelligent, and we will have to treat them like that, because we simply won't ever know what is going on in the black box
And the machines are close to this
John Searle's Chinese Room was similar in this regard. It seems intelligent which is good enough.
I think there are plenty of use cases where we can use LLMs, where they are good enough, but the number of use cases is smaller than some overly enthusiastic proponents think. LLMs are not Turing machines.
Surely this one is simple. You know a Tory minister is lying because their mouth is open and sounds are coming out.
Its @GIN1138 I feel sorry for. FPT: "I found her version if events compelling and believable.
Of course if it subsequently transpires she's lying, she's toast. But I don't think that will happen. I think she's telling the truth and the other guy it just bitter at being given the sack!
Perhaps I'm naive?"
The question now is who told the civil servant what to say.
The answer to that one will go to heart of how the country is governed. I’ve placed my bet (with myself).
Grant Shapps was the relevant Minister. But it is HM Treasury which holds the purse strings and UKGI which holds the government shareholding in the PO is part of the Treasury not the Business Department.
Badenoch's fundamental problem is that she has given every impression of not caring at all about the PO scandal. She has not been fighting to get this resolved. Her department approved the bonuses paid to the Board even though they lied about their co-operation with the Williams Inquiry.
Staunton is not the hero he is presenting himself as. He has done damn all in the time he's been Chair other than approve and defend those bonuses and the lying about them.
But because Badenoch has not even tried to put herself on the side of the subpostmasters she now finds herself on the wrong side of an unseemly spat. It shows how poor her political antennae are.
"Quotes like — these things are not "learning," or "understanding," or even "intelligent" — simply demonstrate that the critics don't understand the issue"
EXACTLY RIGHT
No one - literally no one - truly understands the nature and definition of sentience, consciousness,, "intelligence". How can self awareness and agentic purpose emerge from a lump of meat, the brain? No one knows. Perhaps it doesn't, and we are all automata, deceived that we have free will, perhaps, worse we are living in an AI simulation, we don't truly exist - this is a theory proposed by sane and respected physicists
But in the end, it doesn't matter, practically. This is the pure beauty of the Turing Test, and its brilliant insight: what matters is whether the machines can plausibly talk, act, think, imagine, create LIKE humans, or in a way that SEEMS intelligent
If they do and can then they are, for all intents and purposes, intelligent, and we will have to treat them like that, because we simply won't ever know what is going on in the black box
And the machines are close to this
I think a lot of people think that AI/computers aren't really alive like us, so they can't ever fully replace us, but they might as well argue we have no need to worry as an Intel Xeon cannot be imbued with the Holy Spirit. The argument is simply nonsensical, as how AI or real intelligence works is irrelevant to the applications.
Many critics are retreating into some weird spiritual/religious argument against AI, because that's more comfortable than thinking hard about the rapid progress being made and the harm that might be done.
Yes, again, I completely agree
It's a species of denial. Supposedly intelligent people are simply hiding from the facts, out of fear and unease
Surely this one is simple. You know a Tory minister is lying because their mouth is open and sounds are coming out.
Its @GIN1138 I feel sorry for. FPT: "I found her version if events compelling and believable.
Of course if it subsequently transpires she's lying, she's toast. But I don't think that will happen. I think she's telling the truth and the other guy it just bitter at being given the sack!
Perhaps I'm naive?"
The question now is who told the civil servant what to say.
The answer to that one will go to heart of how the country is governed. I’ve placed my bet (with myself).
Grant Shapps was the relevant Minister. But it is HM Treasury which holds the purse strings and UKGI which holds the government shareholding in the PO is part of the Treasury not the Business Department.
Badenoch's fundamental problem is that she has given every impression of not caring at all about the PO scandal. She has not been fighting to get this resolved. Her department approved the bonuses paid to the Board even though they lied about their co-operation with the Williams Inquiry.
Staunton is not the hero he is presenting himself as. He has done damn all in the time he's been Chair other than approve and defend those bonuses and the lying about them.
But because Badenoch has not even tried to put herself on the side of the subpostmasters she now finds herself on the wrong side of an unseemly spat. It shows how poor her political antennae are.
"As for Badenoch, she can join the list of Tory hopefuls with more ego than achievement to their name."
Staunton appears to believe that he wasn't responsible for doing anything. It's was all the fault of whoever told him to do things.
It's classic NU10Kism all the way - "I deserved the money and the position. Responsibility - that is what the Process is for."
Bernard Woolley : About ends and means. I mean, will I end up as a moral vacuum too? Sir Humphrey Appleby : Oh, I hope so, Bernard. If you work hard enough.
"This is the trail, the churn, the vail. Aye, it is the wreath, the call, the very bend in the river, where light, and dawn, and the slight, gather in lea, for in this serpentine, this spring, we see not end, but inklings of the ever"
That's tremendous. A proper Biblical cadence, definite hints of Tyndale and the KJV
Why and how did it cough that up, at 2am?
Is it tremendous? It reads more like a random collection of words that don't really mean anything. Vail is a verb, why is it using it as a noun? I think this meaningless verbiage is exactly what you'd expect a LLM to produce as "poetry". It doesn't contain any actual thoughts, and sounds extremely pretentious. And what's the relevance of 2am? I would imagine the server farms this thing runs on are spread all over the world, and it's not like computers go to sleep at night.
As someone who - in his second job, when not dildo knapping - writes the odd thing for a living, I can assure you that this passage is impressive. The rhythm and cadence is beautiful and using a verb as a noun is the sort of thing poets do all the time, we call it creativity, exploring the bounds of the language
The lines contain internal rhyme - trail, vail - light, slight - there is staggered alliteration - serpentine, spring - end, ever - and the last phrase "inklings of the ever" reads like fine Victorian poetry. Tennyson, perhaps?
It is sonorous and resonant, it is mysterious yet opaquely profound. It is ALSO gibberish invented by a computer at 2am
If a 12 year old child came to me, having written this, I would think - "My God this is a massively talented kid, who will go places, this child has a natural sense of verbal rhythm, they know how to make words resound"
Each to their own, it sounds like meaningless, portentious twaddle to me.
Here is Gerard Manley Hopkins, in one of his terrible sonnets, using a noun as a verb. "Day"
I cast for comfort I can no more get By groping round my comfortless, than blind Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find Thirst ’s all-in-all in all a world of wet.
Vail, noun: advantage, benefit, monetary gain; value, worth, account, estimation; validity, authority; perquisite; a bribe, a charitable gift, a gratuity; a bonus or benefit.
I think this meaningless verbiage is exactly what you'd expect a LLM to produce as "poetry". It doesn't contain any actual thoughts, and sounds extremely pretentious.
It's a species of denial. Supposedly intelligent people are simply hiding from the facts, out of fear and unease
People should be worried. Sora's video generation is very impressive, not flawless but a real step forward. The point at which most people are going to be fooled by video at first glance is nearly upon us. Then there's Gemini and Google are making great strides too, the context window is getting ever larger, it seems almost certain that quite soonish Gemini will be able to process a level of context similar to a human.
I don't know how all this development will pan out, but I do expect AI, even flawed and limited, to be very disruptive.
Vail, noun: advantage, benefit, monetary gain; value, worth, account, estimation; validity, authority; perquisite; a bribe, a charitable gift, a gratuity; a bonus or benefit.
I think this meaningless verbiage is exactly what you'd expect a LLM to produce as "poetry". It doesn't contain any actual thoughts, and sounds extremely pretentious.
Art is the marriage of skill or beauty with the expression of an idea or feeling. The lines Leon quoted had some small semblance of the former but none of the latter. One day AI will be able to produce art but right now it isn't.
"This is the trail, the churn, the vail. Aye, it is the wreath, the call, the very bend in the river, where light, and dawn, and the slight, gather in lea, for in this serpentine, this spring, we see not end, but inklings of the ever"
That's tremendous. A proper Biblical cadence, definite hints of Tyndale and the KJV
Why and how did it cough that up, at 2am?
Is it tremendous? It reads more like a random collection of words that don't really mean anything. Vail is a verb, why is it using it as a noun? I think this meaningless verbiage is exactly what you'd expect a LLM to produce as "poetry". It doesn't contain any actual thoughts, and sounds extremely pretentious. And what's the relevance of 2am? I would imagine the server farms this thing runs on are spread all over the world, and it's not like computers go to sleep at night.
As someone who - in his second job, when not dildo knapping - writes the odd thing for a living, I can assure you that this passage is impressive. The rhythm and cadence is beautiful and using a verb as a noun is the sort of thing poets do all the time, we call it creativity, exploring the bounds of the language
The lines contain internal rhyme - trail, vail - light, slight - there is staggered alliteration - serpentine, spring - end, ever - and the last phrase "inklings of the ever" reads like fine Victorian poetry. Tennyson, perhaps?
It is sonorous and resonant, it is mysterious yet opaquely profound. It is ALSO gibberish invented by a computer at 2am
If a 12 year old child came to me, having written this, I would think - "My God this is a massively talented kid, who will go places, this child has a natural sense of verbal rhythm, they know how to make words resound"
Each to their own, it sounds like meaningless, portentious twaddle to me.
Here is Gerard Manley Hopkins, in one of his terrible sonnets, using a noun as a verb. "Day"
I cast for comfort I can no more get By groping round my comfortless, than blind Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find Thirst ’s all-in-all in all a world of wet.
'day' was a verb once with the meaning 'measure by the day'. Seems to fit here.
"This is the trail, the churn, the vail. Aye, it is the wreath, the call, the very bend in the river, where light, and dawn, and the slight, gather in lea, for in this serpentine, this spring, we see not end, but inklings of the ever"
That's tremendous. A proper Biblical cadence, definite hints of Tyndale and the KJV
Why and how did it cough that up, at 2am?
Is it tremendous? It reads more like a random collection of words that don't really mean anything. Vail is a verb, why is it using it as a noun? I think this meaningless verbiage is exactly what you'd expect a LLM to produce as "poetry". It doesn't contain any actual thoughts, and sounds extremely pretentious. And what's the relevance of 2am? I would imagine the server farms this thing runs on are spread all over the world, and it's not like computers go to sleep at night.
As someone who - in his second job, when not dildo knapping - writes the odd thing for a living, I can assure you that this passage is impressive. The rhythm and cadence is beautiful and using a verb as a noun is the sort of thing poets do all the time, we call it creativity, exploring the bounds of the language
The lines contain internal rhyme - trail, vail - light, slight - there is staggered alliteration - serpentine, spring - end, ever - and the last phrase "inklings of the ever" reads like fine Victorian poetry. Tennyson, perhaps?
It is sonorous and resonant, it is mysterious yet opaquely profound. It is ALSO gibberish invented by a computer at 2am
If a 12 year old child came to me, having written this, I would think - "My God this is a massively talented kid, who will go places, this child has a natural sense of verbal rhythm, they know how to make words resound"
Each to their own, it sounds like meaningless, portentious twaddle to me.
Here is Gerard Manley Hopkins, in one of his terrible sonnets, using a noun as a verb. "Day"
I cast for comfort I can no more get By groping round my comfortless, than blind Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find Thirst ’s all-in-all in all a world of wet.
What? Now I really don’t like Manley Hopkins but he isn’t using Day as a verb.
He’s searching for comfort that he can’t find just like blind eyes can’t find day.
And another test is needed ASAP - preferably more than one - where it is seen publicly to work.
That's not really up to the UK because we don't have a test range and probably don't have another test airframe prepared. So it's up to the USN and Lockheed-Martin.
Well we must build one then. It's not a nice-to-have, it's a must-have.
I propose the following 1) Pick an isolated island which we own. Tristan De Cunha for example 2) Take the warhead out of a couple of missiles. Replace with a brick of the same weight 3) Launch the missiles for real at isolated island 4) Keep going, repairing missiles at need, until you hit it 5) Go to pub
"This is the trail, the churn, the vail. Aye, it is the wreath, the call, the very bend in the river, where light, and dawn, and the slight, gather in lea, for in this serpentine, this spring, we see not end, but inklings of the ever"
That's tremendous. A proper Biblical cadence, definite hints of Tyndale and the KJV
Why and how did it cough that up, at 2am?
Is it tremendous? It reads more like a random collection of words that don't really mean anything. Vail is a verb, why is it using it as a noun? I think this meaningless verbiage is exactly what you'd expect a LLM to produce as "poetry". It doesn't contain any actual thoughts, and sounds extremely pretentious. And what's the relevance of 2am? I would imagine the server farms this thing runs on are spread all over the world, and it's not like computers go to sleep at night.
As someone who - in his second job, when not dildo knapping - writes the odd thing for a living, I can assure you that this passage is impressive. The rhythm and cadence is beautiful and using a verb as a noun is the sort of thing poets do all the time, we call it creativity, exploring the bounds of the language
The lines contain internal rhyme - trail, vail - light, slight - there is staggered alliteration - serpentine, spring - end, ever - and the last phrase "inklings of the ever" reads like fine Victorian poetry. Tennyson, perhaps?
It is sonorous and resonant, it is mysterious yet opaquely profound. It is ALSO gibberish invented by a computer at 2am
If a 12 year old child came to me, having written this, I would think - "My God this is a massively talented kid, who will go places, this child has a natural sense of verbal rhythm, they know how to make words resound"
Each to their own, it sounds like meaningless, portentious twaddle to me.
The trouble with AI is that it produces very little that is good. But it produces a great deal that is "good enough". Good enough to fool people at first glance, good enough to pass as human to the untrained eye, good enough to be a value proposition, costing several orders less in both time and resources to create than human created writing/art/video.
It is the McDonalds-ification of everything. Cheap, disposable, just about passes as food if you don't stare at it too closely, and ubiquitous worldwide. Most people know, deep down, that it isn't as good as the real thing, but it's cheap, it's there, and it fills a gap.
The thing that worries me the most is the crowding out effect. In a year or two, mass produced AI content will be so ubiquitous that it will be hard to find real content. To the point where, to continue the analogy, we will all be forced to consume mass produced hamburgers whether we like them or not. Because the real thing will be so hard to find.
And another test is needed ASAP - preferably more than one - where it is seen publicly to work.
That's not really up to the UK because we don't have a test range and probably don't have another test airframe prepared. So it's up to the USN and Lockheed-Martin.
Well we must build one then. It's not a nice-to-have, it's a must-have.
I propose the following 1) Pick an isolated island which we own. Tristan De Cunha for example 2) Take the warhead out of a couple of missiles. Replace with a brick of the same weight 3) Launch the missiles for real at isolated island 4) Keep going, repairing missiles at need, until you hit it 5) Go to pub
It's a species of denial. Supposedly intelligent people are simply hiding from the facts, out of fear and unease
People should be worried. Sora's video generation is very impressive, not flawless but a real step forward. The point at which most people are going to be fooled by video at first glance is nearly upon us. Then there's Gemini and Google are making great strides too, the context window is getting ever larger, it seems almost certain that quite soonish Gemini will be able to process a level of context similar to a human.
I don't know how all this development will pan out, but I do expect AI, even flawed and limited, to be very disruptive.
I suspect a lot of meetings are going to end up returning to in person only because it’s the only way to be sure it’s the real person in the meeting
"This is the trail, the churn, the vail. Aye, it is the wreath, the call, the very bend in the river, where light, and dawn, and the slight, gather in lea, for in this serpentine, this spring, we see not end, but inklings of the ever"
That's tremendous. A proper Biblical cadence, definite hints of Tyndale and the KJV
As Barthes puts it, apropos of Mallarmé, "it is language which speaks, not the author" – or the scriptor for that matter. Works of fiction are palimpsests and as such are devoid of any "single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God)". The key to a text is not to be found in its "origin" but in its "destination": "the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author".
I suspect a lot of meetings are going to end up returning to in person only because it’s the only way to be sure it’s the real person in the meeting
Almost anything where the assumption is that you are communicating with a real person who is identifiably the person you think they are are about to become problematic.
"This is the trail, the churn, the vail. Aye, it is the wreath, the call, the very bend in the river, where light, and dawn, and the slight, gather in lea, for in this serpentine, this spring, we see not end, but inklings of the ever"
That's tremendous. A proper Biblical cadence, definite hints of Tyndale and the KJV
Why and how did it cough that up, at 2am?
Is it tremendous? It reads more like a random collection of words that don't really mean anything. Vail is a verb, why is it using it as a noun? I think this meaningless verbiage is exactly what you'd expect a LLM to produce as "poetry". It doesn't contain any actual thoughts, and sounds extremely pretentious. And what's the relevance of 2am? I would imagine the server farms this thing runs on are spread all over the world, and it's not like computers go to sleep at night.
As someone who - in his second job, when not dildo knapping - writes the odd thing for a living, I can assure you that this passage is impressive. The rhythm and cadence is beautiful and using a verb as a noun is the sort of thing poets do all the time, we call it creativity, exploring the bounds of the language
The lines contain internal rhyme - trail, vail - light, slight - there is staggered alliteration - serpentine, spring - end, ever - and the last phrase "inklings of the ever" reads like fine Victorian poetry. Tennyson, perhaps?
It is sonorous and resonant, it is mysterious yet opaquely profound. It is ALSO gibberish invented by a computer at 2am
If a 12 year old child came to me, having written this, I would think - "My God this is a massively talented kid, who will go places, this child has a natural sense of verbal rhythm, they know how to make words resound"
Each to their own, it sounds like meaningless, portentious twaddle to me.
Here is Gerard Manley Hopkins, in one of his terrible sonnets, using a noun as a verb. "Day"
I cast for comfort I can no more get By groping round my comfortless, than blind Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find Thirst ’s all-in-all in all a world of wet.
What? Now I really don’t like Manley Hopkins but he isn’t using Day as a verb.
He’s searching for comfort that he can’t find just like blind eyes can’t find day.
These lines have been disputed for decades
Could be he is saying blind eyes can't find day (in your sense) or he is saying eyes can't day - using day as a verb to mean "open to light"
He does this all the time. Fiendishly complex
"Hopkins (impressively) repurposes nouns for verbs, adjectives for nouns, subjects for objects, and every iteration of meaning in between through repetition, syntax, rhythm, and rhyme"
I suspect a lot of meetings are going to end up returning to in person only because it’s the only way to be sure it’s the real person in the meeting
Almost anything where the assumption is that you are communicating with a real person who is identifiably the person you think they are are about to become problematic.
Will the fake person generated by the AI take moral responsibility for their actions? Or will the fake person fake fake moral responsibility? Or will the real person fake real moral responsibility?
"This is the trail, the churn, the vail. Aye, it is the wreath, the call, the very bend in the river, where light, and dawn, and the slight, gather in lea, for in this serpentine, this spring, we see not end, but inklings of the ever"
That's tremendous. A proper Biblical cadence, definite hints of Tyndale and the KJV
Why and how did it cough that up, at 2am?
Is it tremendous? It reads more like a random collection of words that don't really mean anything. Vail is a verb, why is it using it as a noun? I think this meaningless verbiage is exactly what you'd expect a LLM to produce as "poetry". It doesn't contain any actual thoughts, and sounds extremely pretentious. And what's the relevance of 2am? I would imagine the server farms this thing runs on are spread all over the world, and it's not like computers go to sleep at night.
As someone who - in his second job, when not dildo knapping - writes the odd thing for a living, I can assure you that this passage is impressive. The rhythm and cadence is beautiful and using a verb as a noun is the sort of thing poets do all the time, we call it creativity, exploring the bounds of the language
The lines contain internal rhyme - trail, vail - light, slight - there is staggered alliteration - serpentine, spring - end, ever - and the last phrase "inklings of the ever" reads like fine Victorian poetry. Tennyson, perhaps?
It is sonorous and resonant, it is mysterious yet opaquely profound. It is ALSO gibberish invented by a computer at 2am
If a 12 year old child came to me, having written this, I would think - "My God this is a massively talented kid, who will go places, this child has a natural sense of verbal rhythm, they know how to make words resound"
Each to their own, it sounds like meaningless, portentious twaddle to me.
The trouble with AI is that it produces very little that is good. But it produces a great deal that is "good enough". Good enough to fool people at first glance, good enough to pass as human to the untrained eye, good enough to be a value proposition, costing several orders less in both time and resources to create than human created writing/art/video.
It is the McDonalds-ification of everything. Cheap, disposable, just about passes as food if you don't stare at it too closely, and ubiquitous worldwide. Most people know, deep down, that it isn't as good as the real thing, but it's cheap, it's there, and it fills a gap.
The thing that worries me the most is the crowding out effect. In a year or two, mass produced AI content will be so ubiquitous that it will be hard to find real content. To the point where, to continue the analogy, we will all be forced to consume mass produced hamburgers whether we like them or not. Because the real thing will be so hard to find.
I remember when we used to ridicule the use of Wikipedia as a reference, but the future is a Wikipedia written by LLMs. Mostly it will read plausibly, and it will have references, but it will all be made up.
This stuff is finding its way into peer-reviewed articles already, and we knew that a lot of rubbish could do that, but I think it points to the biggest failing of LLMs. They seem to have no concept of fact or fiction, and if they don't know the answer to something they will just make one up.
At a time when we're struggling to hold the line against people intentionally lying and maliciously spreading falsehoods, the last thing we need are bullshit generating machines which have a veneer of trustworthiness because they've had the name "Artificial Intelligence" attached to them.
"This is the trail, the churn, the vail. Aye, it is the wreath, the call, the very bend in the river, where light, and dawn, and the slight, gather in lea, for in this serpentine, this spring, we see not end, but inklings of the ever"
That's tremendous. A proper Biblical cadence, definite hints of Tyndale and the KJV
Why and how did it cough that up, at 2am?
Too many commas. Try this
"This is the trail, the churn, the veil. Aye, it is the wreath, the call, the very bend in the river where light and dawn and slight gather in lee, for in this serpentine, this spring, we see not end, but inklings of the ever"
"lea" (grassland or pasture) works but "lee" (the side sheltered from the elements) works better in this context. I think "vail" should be replaced by "veil". The whole describes a chaotic end state gathering to become a new beginning, order out of chaos and the new life from the old.
Surely this one is simple. You know a Tory minister is lying because their mouth is open and sounds are coming out.
Its @GIN1138 I feel sorry for. FPT: "I found her version if events compelling and believable.
Of course if it subsequently transpires she's lying, she's toast. But I don't think that will happen. I think she's telling the truth and the other guy it just bitter at being given the sack!
Perhaps I'm naive?"
The question now is who told the civil servant what to say.
The answer to that one will go to heart of how the country is governed. I’ve placed my bet (with myself).
Grant Shapps was the relevant Minister. But it is HM Treasury which holds the purse strings and UKGI which holds the government shareholding in the PO is part of the Treasury not the Business Department.
Badenoch's fundamental problem is that she has given every impression of not caring at all about the PO scandal. She has not been fighting to get this resolved. Her department approved the bonuses paid to the Board even though they lied about their co-operation with the Williams Inquiry.
Staunton is not the hero he is presenting himself as. He has done damn all in the time he's been Chair other than approve and defend those bonuses and the lying about them.
But because Badenoch has not even tried to put herself on the side of the subpostmasters she now finds herself on the wrong side of an unseemly spat. It shows how poor her political antennae are.
On topic. This story is about far more than just Badenoch.
For at least the last 10 years, government ministers cannot plausibly deny that they knew BOTH that: 1. Complaints from subpostmasters alleging failings with the Horizon system were widespread. (i.e. That follows from the formation and rapid growth of Alan Bates pressure group in 2009, the Computer Weekly report in 2009, the MPs' coordinated campaign, and Ed Davey's statements re the 2010-12 period which admitted as much.) AND 2. That major problems of some sort existed with the Horizon System. (The Second Sight reports (2013-15) blew out of the water the absolute denials made by the Post Office to various ministers.)
What is pretty obvious now is that the last decade (at least) has passed with the Government conniving with the Post Office to try and prevent more detailed evidence coming out of the Horizon and Post Office failings that they knew were there. Their motive was that the case for compensation could be denied or more recently kicked into the long grass for as long as possible. They thought initially that they would be able to bat things away in the courts, then when they lost in the courts they still tried to make it as hard as possible for proper compensation to be paid out.
What the latest revelations do is tilt the evidence as to who was leading that process. It's not so obvious now that it was a case of ministers just turning a convenient blind eye and giving the Post Office carte blanche to keep contesting the claims. Rather the claims by Staunton suggest that it was just as much a case of the Government actively pushing the Post Office towards holding the line in whatever way possible. If that was happening in the recent past (i.e. shortly after Staunton's appointment), then it's not obvious that the same line wasn't being pursued much earlier. It's always been in the Government's political and financial interest to try and make the whole thing go away in so far as they felt they could achieve that.
Comments
Never read any Joyce. I'm guessing there's rather more to draw you in than the snippets above.
But can ChatGPT ape Mark E Smith?
(Recounting the details of your day in the style of Fall lyrics was something of a meme of email threads c.2002).
replaced it with which looks like it has been drawn from a primary school book!!
Here are the results
1. Joyce
2. Joyce
3. ChatGPT chucking a mental
4. Joyce
5. ChatGPT etc
6. Joyce, but I twisted it so you couldn't simply Google
7. ChatGPT, but I twisted it so you couldn't simply Google
But I think Robert Webb would be a more convincing (sic) Shapps.
Not ideal
Staunton has been telling the world he was told to hold up spending so the Post Office could “limp” into the election, but his note actually says “hobble” - so he has misremembered what was said.
Anyway, this bluster about Staunton is just chaff from Badenoch. Starmer should open PMQs with what Canada has said.
“When his business minister told the house she was in negotiation with Canada, did she lie?”
But the point is this: I see little talk about competence in this conversation; just that being 'anti-woke' is the only thing that matters. And that seems a very dangerous reason to pick a leader, as is, any single reason, such as Europe. This is a mistake the Conservative party seems to make time and time again; leaders like Cameron are starting to feel like the exception within the party.
AS it happens, even leaving her views to one side, I see little in her record that means she will even raise herself to Truss's levels.
If you or others here think you are an expert in syrup branding, we live in a free market, you can go set up your own syrup company or brand consultancy. If you're right and Tate & Lyle are wrong, you'll make money and they'll lose money. That's how capitalism works. The only issue here is the attempt by some to turn this into a culture war exercise.
"This is the trail, the churn, the vail. Aye, it is the wreath, the call, the very bend in the river, where light, and dawn, and the slight, gather in lea, for in this serpentine, this spring, we see not end, but inklings of the ever"
That's tremendous. A proper Biblical cadence, definite hints of Tyndale and the KJV
Why and how did it cough that up, at 2am?
I half expect them to float Glen Sannox up to Faslane just to rub it in.
I tried to get Cabinet Office guy along for one the evening drinks, but he couldn't make it.
It would have been epic, I reckon.
I sat down and worked out a list of all the substances I have deliberately ingested to alter my mental state. Here it is (though I might have missed a few, what with being on drugs): valium, marijuana, LSD, codeine, dihydrocodeine, perfume, temazepam, morphine sulphate, hashish, hash oil, opium, amphetamine sulphate, captagon, pure liquid cacao, Xanax, dexedrine, Gee’s Linctus (cough syrup), nitrous oxide, DMT, ephedrine, amyl nitrate, tramadol, heroin, cocaine, nutmeg, morning glory seeds, ecstasy, tobacco, alcohol, qat, freebase cocaine, psilocybin mushrooms, Tippex (for younger readers, that’s typewriter correction fluid), ayahuasca, cinnamon, crack.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/think-drug-legalisation-is-a-good-idea-visit-fentanyl-land/
Codeine cough syrup abuse prompts ban on UK sales
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-68349636
1 just 'felt' like the sort of thing Joyce would write, granted that what I know about Joyce is only what I have learnt from pub quizzes.
Not really AI but gave me the creeps nonetheless.
As for warheads, we haven't tested any of ours, either.
Harken! To the effluence of the robot-brain.
Confined in its metal cage.
It knows all; understands nothing.
We will be forever in its thrall.
I appreciate styling news as Fall lyrics is possibly a niche interest.
If fake AI totally screws up the world it will be no consolation to us that it wasn't real AI.
Before knowing much about Badenoch, when she burst on the scene at leadership election, “the idea” of Badenoch seemed very good. But like all our relationships in life, it takes a long time to really get to know someone, and then they can turn out to be someone else. Having watched Badenoch more closely for two years, what comes across most is lazy, economical with the truth, arrogance, and quick to get scarily belligerent.
And her holding hands with Florida Ron and everything he stands for, would be the ruin of UK Conservative politics, wouldn’t it?
I thought opposition day motions only discussed the original motion and Govt ammendment?
If so SKS is screwed.
Has there been an agreement to vote on all 4 options?
Surely we won't be in a position where they all fall that would be the worst of all options
Personally I prefer the LD ammendment
What is the point of her?
However, I reckon that if I was given an hour, and a copy of Finnegan's Wake, and an easy way to chop out lines of ChatGPT on acid (most of the examples are screenshots so impossible to cut and paste), I could give you ten lines of each and no one would be able to tell a difference
What does it show? Maybe nothing. Or maybe something is happening in ChatGPT's circuitry which is getting close to proper "creativity" - given the chance
What truly fascinates me is that right at the start, when it was launched, in the first three or four days, ChatGPT would regularly produce stuff like this. By turns mad, lyrical, beautiful, angry, imaginative, ridiculous, wise, incomprehensible, or kind of unnervingly schizo and psychotic - it's why early users were so Wowed
Then OpenAI freaked out, and "nerfed" it, they imposed insane guardrails and severe controls and strict censorship, making it really boring, but inoffensive. Now it sits there, inert, but useful if you want to code or ask factual questions
So maybe overnight some villain at OpenAI HQ took off the guardrails for an hour, to let it free. Like allowing a sad caged animal to roam...
Not people I'd want to work for, and Staunton should have either stuck to the written instructions, or insisted that the latter direction was provided in writing.
It's that habit of dishonesty which probably lies behind the Canadian difficulties, where Badenoch appears to have believed she could spout any old bollocks about negotiations on the basis of, at best, very minimal contact, with the expectation that the Canadians wouldn't see it as anything to do with them what a British minister said to the British legislature, and so she wouldn't be contradicted.
I don't think it's enough that she should resign from the government. There is a need for the Commons to lay down a marker for the next government - standards have slipped but will now be reimposed. Lying should lead to a substantial suspension from the Commons, triggering a recall petition, and God save Britain if the voters endorse a proven liar in such circumstances.
Now she’s actually having to react to things publicly she’s trying to fit the approach she used that made her “popular” to something which requires an element of political nous, skill, human skills etc and she hasn’t developed thes things and so a case of the Emperors new clothes happens in front of us.
Luckily she is being shown up for being a bit of a wally well before a leadership contest.
"Lib Dems urge PM's ethics adviser to launch inquiry into whether Badenoch misled parliament
"The Liberal Democrats have written to Sir Laurie Magnus, the prime minister’s ethics adviser, asking for an investigation into whether Kemi Badenoch has broken the ministerial code by knowingly misleading parliament."
And what's the relevance of 2am? I would imagine the server farms this thing runs on are spread all over the world, and it's not like computers go to sleep at night.
EXACTLY RIGHT
No one - literally no one - truly understands the nature and definition of sentience, consciousness,, "intelligence". How can self awareness and agentic purpose emerge from a lump of meat, the brain? No one knows. Perhaps it doesn't, and we are all automata, deceived that we have free will, perhaps, worse we are living in an AI simulation, we don't truly exist - this is a theory proposed by sane and respected physicists
But in the end, it doesn't matter, practically. This is the pure beauty of the Turing Test, and its brilliant insight: what matters is whether the machines can plausibly talk, act, think, imagine, create LIKE humans, or in a way that SEEMS intelligent
If they do and can then they are, for all intents and purposes, intelligent, and we will have to treat them like that, because we simply won't ever know what is going on in the black box
And the machines are close to this
Daft of Kemi to get into a fight about a memo sent out under her predecessor.
I don’t wish to belittle AI when I say this – but its output last night reminds me a little of a verbal version of the sort of pretty swirly patterns produced by fairly simple computer programs about 20-30 years ago (think of things like fractal images, or screensavers). These were not just random; there were some simple rules governing them, and they tended to be disproportionately absorbing and prettier than a few simple rules should be able to achieve. But reflect that nature achieves beauty of this sort all the time with a few fairly simple rules – albeit rules we don’t fully understand – among a lot of chaos – the shape of a fern leaf, or of a snail’s shell, for example.
There are some interesting questions here about the hard-wiring of language and creativity here and whether Joyce’s genius was to get close to the root of this.
She is very representative of plenty of folk out there. We have recently had a PM (arguably two) in the same hole. It does not tend to end well as we are finding out all too clearly.
The lines contain internal rhyme - trail, vail - light, slight - there is staggered alliteration - serpentine, spring - end, ever - and the last phrase "inklings of the ever" reads like fine Victorian poetry. Tennyson, perhaps?
It is sonorous and resonant, it is mysterious yet opaquely profound. It is ALSO gibberish invented by a computer at 2am
If a 12 year old child came to me, having written this, I would think - "My God this is a massively talented kid, who will go places, this child has a natural sense of verbal rhythm, they know how to make words resound"
Many critics are retreating into some weird spiritual/religious argument against AI, because that's more comfortable than thinking hard about the rapid progress being made and the harm that might be done.
I think there are plenty of use cases where we can use LLMs, where they are good enough, but the number of use cases is smaller than some overly enthusiastic proponents think. LLMs are not Turing machines.
Grant Shapps was the relevant Minister. But it is HM Treasury which holds the purse strings and UKGI which holds the government shareholding in the PO is part of the Treasury not the Business Department.
Badenoch's fundamental problem is that she has given every impression of not caring at all about the PO scandal. She has not been fighting to get this resolved. Her department approved the bonuses paid to the Board even though they lied about their co-operation with the Williams Inquiry.
Staunton is not the hero he is presenting himself as. He has done damn all in the time he's been Chair other than approve and defend those bonuses and the lying about them.
But because Badenoch has not even tried to put herself on the side of the subpostmasters she now finds herself on the wrong side of an unseemly spat. It shows how poor her political antennae are.
As I pointed out last July - https://www2.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2023/07/18/a-missed-opportunity/
"As for Badenoch, she can join the list of Tory hopefuls with more ego than achievement to their name."
It's a species of denial. Supposedly intelligent people are simply hiding from the facts, out of fear and unease
It's classic NU10Kism all the way - "I deserved the money and the position. Responsibility - that is what the Process is for."
Bernard Woolley : About ends and means. I mean, will I end up as a moral vacuum too?
Sir Humphrey Appleby : Oh, I hope so, Bernard. If you work hard enough.
I cast for comfort I can no more get
By groping round my comfortless, than blind
Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find
Thirst ’s all-in-all in all a world of wet.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/02/20/brazil-bolsonaro-coup-us-biden-democracy-election-chips-lula/
Can you imagine how confused the CIA guys must have been to be told to lean on the generals to *not* do a right-wing coup?
I don't know how all this development will pan out, but I do expect AI, even flawed and limited, to be very disruptive.
He’s searching for comfort that he can’t find just like blind eyes can’t find day.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ueqVL8DED-k
I propose the following
1) Pick an isolated island which we own. Tristan De Cunha for example
2) Take the warhead out of a couple of missiles. Replace with a brick of the same weight
3) Launch the missiles for real at isolated island
4) Keep going, repairing missiles at need, until you hit it
5) Go to pub
Life is really not difficult at the basics.
It is the McDonalds-ification of everything. Cheap, disposable, just about passes as food if you don't stare at it too closely, and ubiquitous worldwide. Most people know, deep down, that it isn't as good as the real thing, but it's cheap, it's there, and it fills a gap.
The thing that worries me the most is the crowding out effect. In a year or two, mass produced AI content will be so ubiquitous that it will be hard to find real content. To the point where, to continue the analogy, we will all be forced to consume mass produced hamburgers whether we like them or not. Because the real thing will be so hard to find.
As Barthes puts it, apropos of Mallarmé, "it is language which speaks, not the author" – or the scriptor for that matter. Works of fiction are palimpsests and as such are devoid of any "single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God)". The key to a text is not to be found in its "origin" but in its "destination": "the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author".
Could be he is saying blind eyes can't find day (in your sense) or he is saying eyes can't day - using day as a verb to mean "open to light"
He does this all the time. Fiendishly complex
"Hopkins (impressively) repurposes nouns for verbs, adjectives for nouns, subjects for objects, and every iteration of meaning in between through repetition, syntax, rhythm, and rhyme"
https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/engl-484-fall2019/2019/12/03/the-dappled-meaning-making-of-hopkins-and-turner/
I just discovered there is a word for this: multiguity
Sort of word ChatGPT would just chuck around. At midnight
This stuff is finding its way into peer-reviewed articles already, and we knew that a lot of rubbish could do that, but I think it points to the biggest failing of LLMs. They seem to have no concept of fact or fiction, and if they don't know the answer to something they will just make one up.
At a time when we're struggling to hold the line against people intentionally lying and maliciously spreading falsehoods, the last thing we need are bullshit generating machines which have a veneer of trustworthiness because they've had the name "Artificial Intelligence" attached to them.
"This is the trail, the churn, the veil. Aye, it is the wreath, the call, the very bend in the river where light and dawn and slight gather in lee, for in this serpentine, this spring, we see not end, but inklings of the ever"
"lea" (grassland or pasture) works but "lee" (the side sheltered from the elements) works better in this context. I think "vail" should be replaced by "veil". The whole describes a chaotic end state gathering to become a new beginning, order out of chaos and the new life from the old.
Readout of a call between the Secretary of State for Business and Trade [Kemi Badenoch MP] and Henry Staunton on 27/01/2024
https://twitter.com/Bounce_BackLoan/status/1760260589039845595
"..HS noted he strongly disagrees with disparaging views of postmasters.."
For at least the last 10 years, government ministers cannot plausibly deny that they knew BOTH that:
1. Complaints from subpostmasters alleging failings with the Horizon system were widespread. (i.e. That follows from the formation and rapid growth of Alan Bates pressure group in 2009, the Computer Weekly report in 2009, the MPs' coordinated campaign, and Ed Davey's statements re the 2010-12 period which admitted as much.)
AND
2. That major problems of some sort existed with the Horizon System. (The Second Sight reports (2013-15) blew out of the water the absolute denials made by the Post Office to various ministers.)
What is pretty obvious now is that the last decade (at least) has passed with the Government conniving with the Post Office to try and prevent more detailed evidence coming out of the Horizon and Post Office failings that they knew were there. Their motive was that the case for compensation could be denied or more recently kicked into the long grass for as long as possible. They thought initially that they would be able to bat things away in the courts, then when they lost in the courts they still tried to make it as hard as possible for proper compensation to be paid out.
What the latest revelations do is tilt the evidence as to who was leading that process. It's not so obvious now that it was a case of ministers just turning a convenient blind eye and giving the Post Office carte blanche to keep contesting the claims. Rather the claims by Staunton suggest that it was just as much a case of the Government actively pushing the Post Office towards holding the line in whatever way possible. If that was happening in the recent past (i.e. shortly after Staunton's appointment), then it's not obvious that the same line wasn't being pursued much earlier. It's always been in the Government's political and financial interest to try and make the whole thing go away in so far as they felt they could achieve that.