Just seen a fent addict badly OD-ing in downtown Couver. The dark side
I hear the super soft on drug policy hasn't worked very well, not as bad as Portland or SF, but has made the problem much more visible.
If we are going to have an informed discussion about drug policy this is the sort of thing that we need to look at. The war on drugs has been a total disaster with very large numbers of dead. But jumping to the conclusion anything goes because it seems to have done ok in Portugal is perhaps every bit as dangerous.
We really need someone to look carefully at what works and what doesn’t.
Oregon has notably resiled from its Anything Goes legislation (though it's reasonable to think the spike in problems is because more and cheaper fent, not the law).
I suspect that comparing opiate death rates in US States with and without legal cannabis might be an interesting comparison. I expect both are up, but which by more might be a pointer.
Exactly today last year I was camping in British Columbia and sharing a legal joint with my son. Next tent was 4 very big Canadian soldiers on some sort of operation. It turns out cannabis induced paranoia does not recognise changes in the law. I spent the night gibbering with fear of being beaten half to death as a perverted dope fiend limey and then banged up in Calgary nick for 20 years.
Yup - if you want to knw what interests people about the Govt at the moment it is the stickiness of Starmer's fingers. That looks really bad and could really linger unless the Govt can show some real achievements.
Ask 90% of folk about Sue Gray and you will get a simple answer - who?
Most of the current reporting is people going through publicly available declarations. The information was available but no-one was reporting it because it’s small fry. The Tories accepted £5 million from Frank Hester, who Sunak had condemned for his racist comments, shortly before the election, but the Tories are currently irrelevant, so that’s not become a big news story.
That isn't what set this off though...it the stink around giving donors passes, parachuting in other donors to supposedly impartial positions, and these declarations not being 100% honest about what they actually were. When your pitch was we only care about public service, we are whiter than whiter.
The problem for Starmer is then his reaction was I don't care, I am going to keep taking the freebies, I am not taking any lessons from the Tories.
You’re right, this was started off by some more substantive things. But my point is that the media are trying to continue it with a bunch of irrelevancies, because the news cycle works that way.
The donor pass, the late declaration. Not good. I didn’t vote for Starmer or Labour. I’m not saying he’s perfect. But I can also tell a big story from trifles.
That was my view initially. But it turns out there are a lot of trifles. An improbably large number of trifles. Absolutely shitloads of trifles. A whole confectionery factory of trifles. Labour are looking very custardy indeed. If it was just one dress, ot just one Taylot Swift concert, or just one football match, or just one trip to New York, or just one pair of glasses ... But it's not; it's out of all proportion to any of their predecessors. It's within the rules, but only in the same way that the duck-house-on-expenses was within the rules. It's absolutely taking the piss.
It is. And not only that, it is in the first 3 months and from a government that expressly promised to “clean up politics” and dedicate itself to “service”. We just didn’t realise they meant THEY are going “to clean up” and the service meant lavishly “serving” themselves
Just seen a fent addict badly OD-ing in downtown Couver. The dark side
I hear the super soft on drug policy hasn't worked very well, not as bad as Portland or SF, but has made the problem much more visible.
If we are going to have an informed discussion about drug policy this is the sort of thing that we need to look at. The war on drugs has been a total disaster with very large numbers of dead. But jumping to the conclusion anything goes because it seems to have done ok in Portugal is perhaps every bit as dangerous.
We really need someone to look carefully at what works and what doesn’t.
Oregon has notably resiled from its Anything Goes legislation (though it's reasonable to think the spike in problems is because more and cheaper fent, not the law).
I suspect that comparing opiate death rates in US States with and without legal cannabis might be an interesting comparison. I expect both are up, but which by more might be a pointer.
Exactly today last year I was camping in British Columbia and sharing a legal joint with my son. Next tent was 4 very big Canadian soldiers on some sort of operation. It turns out cannabis induced paranoia does not recognise changes in the law. I spent the night gibbering with fear of being beaten half to death as a perverted dope fiend limey and then banged up in Calgary nick for 20 years.
You haven’t lived until you’ve spent the night gibbering in fear about being beaten to death by Canadian Soldiers. It’s called the Juno Beach Syndrome. Many Germans suffered it.
To be fair to Keith, most people wouldn’t say no to a free private box
Imagine if journalists had to declare all the freebies they’d received when writing articles.
This is all phoney war stuff. Bring on the Budget! I want the UK political discourse here to move on to something more substantial.
Yes, that's the scam of travel journalists. They get freebies from tourism authorities, hotels etc and are expected to produce puff pieces passed off as journalism, when it's really just advertising.
Of course that isn't the contract, but slag off a place as dull and expensive and the commissions dry up very quickly.
I’m sure there is a travel journalist on here, can’t remember his or her name, who is quite vocal about downsides to places. Also travel journalism, and this will shock you, isn’t as important as being whiter than white when you are running a country.
Slagging the place off on an obscure blog and slagging it off in print are two different things.
Sure, it doesn't amount to a hill of beans because it's mostly tomorrow's budgie cage liner, but it is part of how we accept corruption in daily life.
I have had a number of drug company freebies over the years to speak and focus group, but always declare them when speaking. Does that completely mitigate the financial compromise? Not entirely.
There is a big gap between corruption and giving a leg up to a business or place you were asked to do so. It won’t massively change the world if 10,000 spectator readers go to Vancouver but it matters if people think the Premier league got off lightly with the new regulator because SKS got a box at Arsenal.
I honestly agree with other posters that the premier couple should be dressed by the best of British Designers free of charge - the French would not bat an eyelid, but the piety and holier than thou shit by Starmer and then the sort of cheap way it’s been done is terrible.
If SKS said “ maybe I was a bit of a dick about freebies and I get that I’m in a job representing the best of British, Labour will never ever again criticise an opponent doing this promoting feee clothes” then that’s great. But he was such an epic cock. Like I wrote before, he’s Oliver Cromwell without the sense of humour.
I'm just astonished how shit they've been. I mean, I expected them to make poor policy decisions - these were trailed in advanced and we knew what we were getting - but the constant, daily unforced errors. It took Tony Blair about a year to say or do something he got criticised for. I'd say he's worse at politics than Rishi or Boris. Seems unlikely he can be as poor at politics as Truss, but we haven't had the budget yet.
Angela Rayner enjoyed stunning views of Manhattan and the Empire State Building on new year’s eve from a $2.5 million flat lent by the Labour donor at the centre of the row over freebies, The Telegraph can reveal.
The Deputy Prime Minister spent five nights in the luxury Manhattan apartment, with views over New York from the 56th floor of a skyscraper.
The two-bedroom property – totalling 1,300 sq ft – was lent to Ms Rayner by Lord Alli, the Labour peer, from Dec 29 to Jan 2 last year.
According to the parliamentary register of interests, Ms Rayner was given a flat as accommodation for five nights to enjoy a “personal holiday”, which she said was worth an estimated £1,250 overall.
Just seen a fent addict badly OD-ing in downtown Couver. The dark side
I hear the super soft on drug policy hasn't worked very well, not as bad as Portland or SF, but has made the problem much more visible.
If we are going to have an informed discussion about drug policy this is the sort of thing that we need to look at. The war on drugs has been a total disaster with very large numbers of dead. But jumping to the conclusion anything goes because it seems to have done ok in Portugal is perhaps every bit as dangerous.
We really need someone to look carefully at what works and what doesn’t.
To be fair to Keith, most people wouldn’t say no to a free private box
Imagine if journalists had to declare all the freebies they’d received when writing articles.
This is all phoney war stuff. Bring on the Budget! I want the UK political discourse here to move on to something more substantial.
Yes, that's the scam of travel journalists. They get freebies from tourism authorities, hotels etc and are expected to produce puff pieces passed off as journalism, when it's really just advertising.
Of course that isn't the contract, but slag off a place as dull and expensive and the commissions dry up very quickly.
Travel journalism is hard. Surprisingly hard
I mean, some people make it look easy - I guess they have a gift, I dunno - I knap flints as my main job and only do the travel stuff as hobby, really. But real pro travel journalism is extremely competitive - for obvious reasons - and it turns out that many are called and few are chosen. Every journalist has a go at it, but not many have the knack. And those few get the gigs
Not quite the toss-em-off “puff pieces” you describe
Try it for yourself. Try writing about a place that captures the spirit of it in a fresh and diverting way, that avoids cliche but ALSO avoids dipping into purple prose. Not as easy as it looks
I never said writing puff pieces was easy, just said that it was an implicit part of the deal.
It's why we never see pieces slagging off a city or destination in the travel section, though they may appear in other parts of a periodical, such as the recent articles on anti-tourism protests in Barcelona, Palma, Venice etc.
Just seen a fent addict badly OD-ing in downtown Couver. The dark side
I hear the super soft on drug policy hasn't worked very well, not as bad as Portland or SF, but has made the problem much more visible.
If we are going to have an informed discussion about drug policy this is the sort of thing that we need to look at. The war on drugs has been a total disaster with very large numbers of dead. But jumping to the conclusion anything goes because it seems to have done ok in Portugal is perhaps every bit as dangerous.
We really need someone to look carefully at what works and what doesn’t.
"Part of Mr and Mrs Starmer’s problem is the pettiness and immediacy of their grift. They are like a wealthy couple who can’t wait to check in to a struggling but charming 3 star hotel so they can steal the tiny soaps and the little towels, and maybe a bottle of average wine"
There is a particular kind of upper middle class person, who always looking to find something to complain about at a hotel, restaurant, product in a shop, just to able to push for a discount / room upgrade. We have all seen them.
That reminds me I need to write a letter of complaint about poor service I received, I will be asking for a discount ;-)
Weren't the Blair's similar? The difference is that people (generally) didn't give a **** as through his ten years as PM, Blair was able to spray money around like confetti and I think it's no coincidence he got out of Downing St. just before the economic shit hit the proverbial fan
Keith's problems are twofold:
1. He's clearly a complete and utter grifter, yet he's been presenting himself as THE voice of "probity and ethics" in public life for years. People expect politicians to to hypocrites, but Keith's hypocrisy stinks and it's almost like he's taking the voters for falls.
2. His grifting plays very badly when he's depriving the poorest pensioners of their WFA and condemning people's grannies to freeze to death this winter, just because he wants to punish them for voting Brexit while he's on the gravy train, filling his boots left, right and center...: 🤷♂️
Yup - if you want to knw what interests people about the Govt at the moment it is the stickiness of Starmer's fingers. That looks really bad and could really linger unless the Govt can show some real achievements.
Ask 90% of folk about Sue Gray and you will get a simple answer - who?
Most of the current reporting is people going through publicly available declarations. The information was available but no-one was reporting it because it’s small fry. The Tories accepted £5 million from Frank Hester, who Sunak had condemned for his racist comments, shortly before the election, but the Tories are currently irrelevant, so that’s not become a big news story.
That isn't what set this off though...it the stink around giving donors passes, parachuting in other donors to supposedly impartial positions, and these declarations not being 100% honest about what they actually were. When your pitch was we only care about public service, we are whiter than whiter.
The problem for Starmer is then his reaction was I don't care, I am going to keep taking the freebies, I am not taking any lessons from the Tories.
You’re right, this was started off by some more substantive things. But my point is that the media are trying to continue it with a bunch of irrelevancies, because the news cycle works that way.
The donor pass, the late declaration. Not good. I didn’t vote for Starmer or Labour. I’m not saying he’s perfect. But I can also tell a big story from trifles.
That was my view initially. But it turns out there are a lot of trifles. An improbably large number of trifles. Absolutely shitloads of trifles. A whole confectionery factory of trifles. Labour are looking very custardy indeed. If it was just one dress, ot just one Taylot Swift concert, or just one football match, or just one trip to New York, or just one pair of glasses ... But it's not; it's out of all proportion to any of their predecessors. It's within the rules, but only in the same way that the duck-house-on-expenses was within the rules. It's absolutely taking the piss.
It is. And not only that, it is in the first 3 months and from a government that expressly promised to “clean up politics” and dedicate itself to “service”. We just didn’t realise they meant THEY are going “to clean up” and the service meant lavishly “serving” themselves
It makes me wonder why you voted for Starmer. Or should we just accept it as part of your gullibility?
Claude at the moment is the best LLM IMO. For all the hype over ChatGPT o1, I just found that it sits and "thinks" for ages and the result isn't actually much better. At best its stopping you manually saying, do this, then this, at worst because it is trying to take many steps itself, it goes off down the wrong path and you wait 30s+ for it to pump out nonsense.
Yes. Apparently o1 is great at maths and coding but as I don’t care about maths or coding that whizzes past me
For words, Claude is still best by a fair stretch. Also the context window on ChatGPT remains relatively tiny
As it seems I am temporarily allowed to discuss AI - I’d note that I’ve seen people all over the world quietly using it, and many hyper aware of all developments. The revolution is happening but it’s sotto voce. A lot of people don’t want their employers to know they are using it
For these and other reasons I wouldn’t bet against AI. It is coming and it is inevitable. Betting against it is like betting against electricity in 1895
I have found the opposite, its shit at coding, its really infuriating. But I am not asking it to code flappy birds game or a web app. As for maths, I have asked it some things that aren't that complicated (I am not a mathematician, but I do lots of maths) and it has done very poorly.
I yield to your experience in these matters
Gemini is often overlooked. It has a massive context window and seems to be improving over time
Frankly, they are all amazing and if you showed them to people in 2014 or 2004 they’d say Wow so that’s AGI
It’s the boiling frog thing
Oh don't get me wrong, I think if you have 100-120 IQ and do very repetitive white collar role and quite low down in the company hierarchy, I would be very concerned for my future. I actually think those that have lower IQ are far better insulated against this tech because they are much more likely to be in vocational jobs that robotics are nowhere near doing their work.
But o1 at least I have found massively underwhelming for my use cases. Its like asking an undergraduate who if they don't know the answer doesn't say I don't know or I think the answer is, it gives you a 10 minute BS talk all about it.
Are we allowed to talk about AI here again, then?
In which case.
Those of us "golgafrincham b ark" types whose main grift in life has been to shuffle papers and produce reports are doomed.
I do a lot of strategy consultancy work for startups and I feed my meeting notes into Claude (as others have noted, the best of the current bunch) and it largely spits out what I would. Not as good, but probably 70-80% of the way there. So why pay me thousands for my time when you're on a tight budget and the chatbot gets you 70-80% of the way there?
Well, I like to think the extra 20% is the difference between the startups I work with that succeed, and the guys who use chatbot answers and don't. But this is not quite 2 years into the AI revolution, and at the current pace, I will be outclassed within the next few years. If I'm lucky. The next few months, if I'm not.
I consider myself fortunate to be financially secure. Because if I wasn't, I'm pretty sure I would be looking at the bread line in a few years, much as a coal miner in the 90s. A completely obsolescent skill set.
I've retired except for translation and chairing my constituency CLP. I've wondered whether the translation work (mostly for the European Commission) will go, since they send a 95% correct draft translation, but although the pay per word has gone down the pay per hour remains decent (about £50/hour, with a minimum of £17.50 even if it's a single sentence) for zipping through the drafts, filling in the 5% and spotting any errors. It's a nice little retirement earner and I think they reckon the human eye is still important as you do occasinally catch the system totally misunderstanding something.
Any news on the post retirement study ideas?
I remain awestruck by people who are competent in more than one language.
To be fair to Keith, most people wouldn’t say no to a free private box
Imagine if journalists had to declare all the freebies they’d received when writing articles.
This is all phoney war stuff. Bring on the Budget! I want the UK political discourse here to move on to something more substantial.
Yes, that's the scam of travel journalists. They get freebies from tourism authorities, hotels etc and are expected to produce puff pieces passed off as journalism, when it's really just advertising.
Of course that isn't the contract, but slag off a place as dull and expensive and the commissions dry up very quickly.
Travel journalism is hard. Surprisingly hard
I mean, some people make it look easy - I guess they have a gift, I dunno - I knap flints as my main job and only do the travel stuff as hobby, really. But real pro travel journalism is extremely competitive - for obvious reasons - and it turns out that many are called and few are chosen. Every journalist has a go at it, but not many have the knack. And those few get the gigs
Not quite the toss-em-off “puff pieces” you describe
Try it for yourself. Try writing about a place that captures the spirit of it in a fresh and diverting way, that avoids cliche but ALSO avoids dipping into purple prose. Not as easy as it looks
I never said writing puff pieces was easy, just said that it was an implicit part of the deal.
It's why we never see pieces slagging off a city or destination in the travel section, though they may appear in other parts of a periodical, such as the recent articles on anti-tourism protests in Barcelona, Palma, Venice etc.
I wouldn’t argue with that. The economics of travel journalism means that the writers must accept free hospitality: that is the way it works. And would you rather a world where the only travel opinions come from inane, 19 year old, pretty blonde Tik Tok influencers?
Yup - if you want to knw what interests people about the Govt at the moment it is the stickiness of Starmer's fingers. That looks really bad and could really linger unless the Govt can show some real achievements.
Ask 90% of folk about Sue Gray and you will get a simple answer - who?
Most of the current reporting is people going through publicly available declarations. The information was available but no-one was reporting it because it’s small fry. The Tories accepted £5 million from Frank Hester, who Sunak had condemned for his racist comments, shortly before the election, but the Tories are currently irrelevant, so that’s not become a big news story.
That isn't what set this off though...it the stink around giving donors passes, parachuting in other donors to supposedly impartial positions, and these declarations not being 100% honest about what they actually were. When your pitch was we only care about public service, we are whiter than whiter.
The problem for Starmer is then his reaction was I don't care, I am going to keep taking the freebies, I am not taking any lessons from the Tories.
You’re right, this was started off by some more substantive things. But my point is that the media are trying to continue it with a bunch of irrelevancies, because the news cycle works that way.
The donor pass, the late declaration. Not good. I didn’t vote for Starmer or Labour. I’m not saying he’s perfect. But I can also tell a big story from trifles.
That was my view initially. But it turns out there are a lot of trifles. An improbably large number of trifles. Absolutely shitloads of trifles. A whole confectionery factory of trifles. Labour are looking very custardy indeed. If it was just one dress, ot just one Taylot Swift concert, or just one football match, or just one trip to New York, or just one pair of glasses ... But it's not; it's out of all proportion to any of their predecessors. It's within the rules, but only in the same way that the duck-house-on-expenses was within the rules. It's absolutely taking the piss.
It is. And not only that, it is in the first 3 months and from a government that expressly promised to “clean up politics” and dedicate itself to “service”. We just didn’t realise they meant THEY are going “to clean up” and the service meant lavishly “serving” themselves
It makes me wonder why you voted for Starmer. Or should we just accept it as part of your gullibility?
I expect quite a lot of voters regret voting for him now
Yup - if you want to knw what interests people about the Govt at the moment it is the stickiness of Starmer's fingers. That looks really bad and could really linger unless the Govt can show some real achievements.
Ask 90% of folk about Sue Gray and you will get a simple answer - who?
Most of the current reporting is people going through publicly available declarations. The information was available but no-one was reporting it because it’s small fry. The Tories accepted £5 million from Frank Hester, who Sunak had condemned for his racist comments, shortly before the election, but the Tories are currently irrelevant, so that’s not become a big news story.
That isn't what set this off though...it the stink around giving donors passes, parachuting in other donors to supposedly impartial positions, and these declarations not being 100% honest about what they actually were. When your pitch was we only care about public service, we are whiter than whiter.
The problem for Starmer is then his reaction was I don't care, I am going to keep taking the freebies, I am not taking any lessons from the Tories.
You’re right, this was started off by some more substantive things. But my point is that the media are trying to continue it with a bunch of irrelevancies, because the news cycle works that way.
The donor pass, the late declaration. Not good. I didn’t vote for Starmer or Labour. I’m not saying he’s perfect. But I can also tell a big story from trifles.
That was my view initially. But it turns out there are a lot of trifles. An improbably large number of trifles. Absolutely shitloads of trifles. A whole confectionery factory of trifles. Labour are looking very custardy indeed. If it was just one dress, ot just one Taylot Swift concert, or just one football match, or just one trip to New York, or just one pair of glasses ... But it's not; it's out of all proportion to any of their predecessors. It's within the rules, but only in the same way that the duck-house-on-expenses was within the rules. It's absolutely taking the piss.
It is. And not only that, it is in the first 3 months and from a government that expressly promised to “clean up politics” and dedicate itself to “service”. We just didn’t realise they meant THEY are going “to clean up” and the service meant lavishly “serving” themselves
It makes me wonder why you voted for Starmer. Or should we just accept it as part of your gullibility?
To be fair to Keith, most people wouldn’t say no to a free private box
Imagine if journalists had to declare all the freebies they’d received when writing articles.
This is all phoney war stuff. Bring on the Budget! I want the UK political discourse here to move on to something more substantial.
Yes, that's the scam of travel journalists. They get freebies from tourism authorities, hotels etc and are expected to produce puff pieces passed off as journalism, when it's really just advertising.
Of course that isn't the contract, but slag off a place as dull and expensive and the commissions dry up very quickly.
Travel journalism is hard. Surprisingly hard
I mean, some people make it look easy - I guess they have a gift, I dunno - I knap flints as my main job and only do the travel stuff as hobby, really. But real pro travel journalism is extremely competitive - for obvious reasons - and it turns out that many are called and few are chosen. Every journalist has a go at it, but not many have the knack. And those few get the gigs
Not quite the toss-em-off “puff pieces” you describe
Try it for yourself. Try writing about a place that captures the spirit of it in a fresh and diverting way, that avoids cliche but ALSO avoids dipping into purple prose. Not as easy as it looks
I never said writing puff pieces was easy, just said that it was an implicit part of the deal.
It's why we never see pieces slagging off a city or destination in the travel section, though they may appear in other parts of a periodical, such as the recent articles on anti-tourism protests in Barcelona, Palma, Venice etc.
I wouldn’t argue with that. The economics of travel journalism means that the writers must accept free hospitality: that is the way it works. And would you rather a world where the only travel opinions come from inane, 19 year old, pretty blonde Tik Tok influencers?
Aren't most of them also just taking freebies (and going 'Woah, look at this stuff' in a vapid voice)?
Just seen a fent addict badly OD-ing in downtown Couver. The dark side
I hear the super soft on drug policy hasn't worked very well, not as bad as Portland or SF, but has made the problem much more visible.
If we are going to have an informed discussion about drug policy this is the sort of thing that we need to look at. The war on drugs has been a total disaster with very large numbers of dead. But jumping to the conclusion anything goes because it seems to have done ok in Portugal is perhaps every bit as dangerous.
We really need someone to look carefully at what works and what doesn’t.
We need to persuade people to stop taking drugs.
I think that we need to address the problem further upstream. Occasional alcohol or other intoxicants is normal human behaviour, but what is problematic is serial abuse that leads into a spiral of decline, crime and early death.
We need to provide a more meaningful life to people. We have to look at why people become habitual drug users in response to mental health issues and failed families.
Sure there have always been some addicts/alcoholics etc, but the increasing rates in some parts such as Scotland or Appalachia shows a society in breakdown. It's not just a matter of restricting supply, you have to address the demand.
Claude at the moment is the best LLM IMO. For all the hype over ChatGPT o1, I just found that it sits and "thinks" for ages and the result isn't actually much better. At best its stopping you manually saying, do this, then this, at worst because it is trying to take many steps itself, it goes off down the wrong path and you wait 30s+ for it to pump out nonsense.
Yes. Apparently o1 is great at maths and coding but as I don’t care about maths or coding that whizzes past me
For words, Claude is still best by a fair stretch. Also the context window on ChatGPT remains relatively tiny
As it seems I am temporarily allowed to discuss AI - I’d note that I’ve seen people all over the world quietly using it, and many hyper aware of all developments. The revolution is happening but it’s sotto voce. A lot of people don’t want their employers to know they are using it
For these and other reasons I wouldn’t bet against AI. It is coming and it is inevitable. Betting against it is like betting against electricity in 1895
I have found the opposite, its shit at coding, its really infuriating. But I am not asking it to code flappy birds game or a web app. As for maths, I have asked it some things that aren't that complicated (I am not a mathematician, but I do lots of maths) and it has done very poorly.
I yield to your experience in these matters
Gemini is often overlooked. It has a massive context window and seems to be improving over time
Frankly, they are all amazing and if you showed them to people in 2014 or 2004 they’d say Wow so that’s AGI
It’s the boiling frog thing
Oh don't get me wrong, I think if you have 100-120 IQ and do very repetitive white collar role and quite low down in the company hierarchy, I would be very concerned for my future. I actually think those that have lower IQ are far better insulated against this tech because they are much more likely to be in vocational jobs that robotics are nowhere near doing their work.
But o1 at least I have found massively underwhelming for my use cases. Its like asking an undergraduate who if they don't know the answer doesn't say I don't know or I think the answer is, it gives you a 10 minute BS talk all about it.
Are we allowed to talk about AI here again, then?
In which case.
Those of us "golgafrincham b ark" types whose main grift in life has been to shuffle papers and produce reports are doomed.
I do a lot of strategy consultancy work for startups and I feed my meeting notes into Claude (as others have noted, the best of the current bunch) and it largely spits out what I would. Not as good, but probably 70-80% of the way there. So why pay me thousands for my time when you're on a tight budget and the chatbot gets you 70-80% of the way there?
Well, I like to think the extra 20% is the difference between the startups I work with that succeed, and the guys who use chatbot answers and don't. But this is not quite 2 years into the AI revolution, and at the current pace, I will be outclassed within the next few years. If I'm lucky. The next few months, if I'm not.
I consider myself fortunate to be financially secure. Because if I wasn't, I'm pretty sure I would be looking at the bread line in a few years, much as a coal miner in the 90s. A completely obsolescent skill set.
I've retired except for translation and chairing my constituency CLP. I've wondered whether the translation work (mostly for the European Commission) will go, since they send a 95% correct draft translation, but although the pay per word has gone down the pay per hour remains decent (about £50/hour, with a minimum of £17.50 even if it's a single sentence) for zipping through the drafts, filling in the 5% and spotting any errors. It's a nice little retirement earner and I think they reckon the human eye is still important as you do occasinally catch the system totally misunderstanding something.
Any news on the post retirement study ideas?
I remain awestruck by people who are competent in more than one language.
My 21 year old granddaughter speaks Welsh, English, French, Italian and Japanese
Just seen a fent addict badly OD-ing in downtown Couver. The dark side
I hear the super soft on drug policy hasn't worked very well, not as bad as Portland or SF, but has made the problem much more visible.
If we are going to have an informed discussion about drug policy this is the sort of thing that we need to look at. The war on drugs has been a total disaster with very large numbers of dead. But jumping to the conclusion anything goes because it seems to have done ok in Portugal is perhaps every bit as dangerous.
We really need someone to look carefully at what works and what doesn’t.
We need to persuade people to stop taking drugs.
Actually we need to stop people being broke and hopeless. Drugs themselves are really neither here nor there.
Angela Rayner enjoyed stunning views of Manhattan and the Empire State Building on new year’s eve from a $2.5 million flat lent by the Labour donor at the centre of the row over freebies, The Telegraph can reveal.
The Deputy Prime Minister spent five nights in the luxury Manhattan apartment, with views over New York from the 56th floor of a skyscraper.
The two-bedroom property – totalling 1,300 sq ft – was lent to Ms Rayner by Lord Alli, the Labour peer, from Dec 29 to Jan 2 last year.
According to the parliamentary register of interests, Ms Rayner was given a flat as accommodation for five nights to enjoy a “personal holiday”, which she said was worth an estimated £1,250 overall.
Yup - if you want to knw what interests people about the Govt at the moment it is the stickiness of Starmer's fingers. That looks really bad and could really linger unless the Govt can show some real achievements.
Ask 90% of folk about Sue Gray and you will get a simple answer - who?
Most of the current reporting is people going through publicly available declarations. The information was available but no-one was reporting it because it’s small fry. The Tories accepted £5 million from Frank Hester, who Sunak had condemned for his racist comments, shortly before the election, but the Tories are currently irrelevant, so that’s not become a big news story.
That isn't what set this off though...it the stink around giving donors passes, parachuting in other donors to supposedly impartial positions, and these declarations not being 100% honest about what they actually were. When your pitch was we only care about public service, we are whiter than whiter.
The problem for Starmer is then his reaction was I don't care, I am going to keep taking the freebies, I am not taking any lessons from the Tories.
You’re right, this was started off by some more substantive things. But my point is that the media are trying to continue it with a bunch of irrelevancies, because the news cycle works that way.
The donor pass, the late declaration. Not good. I didn’t vote for Starmer or Labour. I’m not saying he’s perfect. But I can also tell a big story from trifles.
That was my view initially. But it turns out there are a lot of trifles. An improbably large number of trifles. Absolutely shitloads of trifles. A whole confectionery factory of trifles. Labour are looking very custardy indeed. If it was just one dress, ot just one Taylot Swift concert, or just one football match, or just one trip to New York, or just one pair of glasses ... But it's not; it's out of all proportion to any of their predecessors. It's within the rules, but only in the same way that the duck-house-on-expenses was within the rules. It's absolutely taking the piss.
It is. And not only that, it is in the first 3 months and from a government that expressly promised to “clean up politics” and dedicate itself to “service”. We just didn’t realise they meant THEY are going “to clean up” and the service meant lavishly “serving” themselves
It makes me wonder why you voted for Starmer. Or should we just accept it as part of your gullibility?
Yup - if you want to knw what interests people about the Govt at the moment it is the stickiness of Starmer's fingers. That looks really bad and could really linger unless the Govt can show some real achievements.
Ask 90% of folk about Sue Gray and you will get a simple answer - who?
Most of the current reporting is people going through publicly available declarations. The information was available but no-one was reporting it because it’s small fry. The Tories accepted £5 million from Frank Hester, who Sunak had condemned for his racist comments, shortly before the election, but the Tories are currently irrelevant, so that’s not become a big news story.
That isn't what set this off though...it the stink around giving donors passes, parachuting in other donors to supposedly impartial positions, and these declarations not being 100% honest about what they actually were. When your pitch was we only care about public service, we are whiter than whiter.
The problem for Starmer is then his reaction was I don't care, I am going to keep taking the freebies, I am not taking any lessons from the Tories.
You’re right, this was started off by some more substantive things. But my point is that the media are trying to continue it with a bunch of irrelevancies, because the news cycle works that way.
The donor pass, the late declaration. Not good. I didn’t vote for Starmer or Labour. I’m not saying he’s perfect. But I can also tell a big story from trifles.
That was my view initially. But it turns out there are a lot of trifles. An improbably large number of trifles. Absolutely shitloads of trifles. A whole confectionery factory of trifles. Labour are looking very custardy indeed. If it was just one dress, ot just one Taylot Swift concert, or just one football match, or just one trip to New York, or just one pair of glasses ... But it's not; it's out of all proportion to any of their predecessors. It's within the rules, but only in the same way that the duck-house-on-expenses was within the rules. It's absolutely taking the piss.
It is. And not only that, it is in the first 3 months and from a government that expressly promised to “clean up politics” and dedicate itself to “service”. We just didn’t realise they meant THEY are going “to clean up” and the service meant lavishly “serving” themselves
It makes me wonder why you voted for Starmer. Or should we just accept it as part of your gullibility?
Can't speak for @Leon but it was a very tricky election as clearly the Tories were done for and it was time for them to leave office...
But...
If I'd known SKS was such a grifter and what he'd do with WFA I would probably have voted Lib-Dem rather than Labour. It's too late now.. We're stuck with five years hard Labour and we've just got to get on with it...
Hopefully the choice at Election 29 will be more straightforward?
Just seen a fent addict badly OD-ing in downtown Couver. The dark side
I hear the super soft on drug policy hasn't worked very well, not as bad as Portland or SF, but has made the problem much more visible.
If we are going to have an informed discussion about drug policy this is the sort of thing that we need to look at. The war on drugs has been a total disaster with very large numbers of dead. But jumping to the conclusion anything goes because it seems to have done ok in Portugal is perhaps every bit as dangerous.
We really need someone to look carefully at what works and what doesn’t.
We need to persuade people to stop taking drugs.
I think that we need to address the problem further upstream. Occasional alcohol or other intoxicants is normal human behaviour, but what is problematic is serial abuse that leads into a spiral of decline, crime and early death.
We need to provide a more meaningful life to people. We have to look at why people become habitual drug users in response to mental health issues and failed families.
Sure there have always been some addicts/alcoholics etc, but the increasing rates in some parts such as Scotland or Appalachia shows a society in breakdown. It's not just a matter of restricting supply, you have to address the demand.
We also have to address the point, that if legal, we could have not just standards for strength and purity. But also steer people away from madly toxic, insanely addictive shit, towards safer things.
To be fair to Keith, most people wouldn’t say no to a free private box
Imagine if journalists had to declare all the freebies they’d received when writing articles.
This is all phoney war stuff. Bring on the Budget! I want the UK political discourse here to move on to something more substantial.
Yes, that's the scam of travel journalists. They get freebies from tourism authorities, hotels etc and are expected to produce puff pieces passed off as journalism, when it's really just advertising.
Of course that isn't the contract, but slag off a place as dull and expensive and the commissions dry up very quickly.
Travel journalism is hard. Surprisingly hard
I mean, some people make it look easy - I guess they have a gift, I dunno - I knap flints as my main job and only do the travel stuff as hobby, really. But real pro travel journalism is extremely competitive - for obvious reasons - and it turns out that many are called and few are chosen. Every journalist has a go at it, but not many have the knack. And those few get the gigs
Not quite the toss-em-off “puff pieces” you describe
Try it for yourself. Try writing about a place that captures the spirit of it in a fresh and diverting way, that avoids cliche but ALSO avoids dipping into purple prose. Not as easy as it looks
Tossing off Writing the piece isn't the issue. Getting commissioned is the issue.
Claude at the moment is the best LLM IMO. For all the hype over ChatGPT o1, I just found that it sits and "thinks" for ages and the result isn't actually much better. At best its stopping you manually saying, do this, then this, at worst because it is trying to take many steps itself, it goes off down the wrong path and you wait 30s+ for it to pump out nonsense.
Yes. Apparently o1 is great at maths and coding but as I don’t care about maths or coding that whizzes past me
For words, Claude is still best by a fair stretch. Also the context window on ChatGPT remains relatively tiny
As it seems I am temporarily allowed to discuss AI - I’d note that I’ve seen people all over the world quietly using it, and many hyper aware of all developments. The revolution is happening but it’s sotto voce. A lot of people don’t want their employers to know they are using it
For these and other reasons I wouldn’t bet against AI. It is coming and it is inevitable. Betting against it is like betting against electricity in 1895
I have found the opposite, its shit at coding, its really infuriating. But I am not asking it to code flappy birds game or a web app. As for maths, I have asked it some things that aren't that complicated (I am not a mathematician, but I do lots of maths) and it has done very poorly.
I yield to your experience in these matters
Gemini is often overlooked. It has a massive context window and seems to be improving over time
Frankly, they are all amazing and if you showed them to people in 2014 or 2004 they’d say Wow so that’s AGI
It’s the boiling frog thing
Oh don't get me wrong, I think if you have 100-120 IQ and do very repetitive white collar role and quite low down in the company hierarchy, I would be very concerned for my future. I actually think those that have lower IQ are far better insulated against this tech because they are much more likely to be in vocational jobs that robotics are nowhere near doing their work.
But o1 at least I have found massively underwhelming for my use cases. Its like asking an undergraduate who if they don't know the answer doesn't say I don't know or I think the answer is, it gives you a 10 minute BS talk all about it.
Are we allowed to talk about AI here again, then?
In which case.
Those of us "golgafrincham b ark" types whose main grift in life has been to shuffle papers and produce reports are doomed.
I do a lot of strategy consultancy work for startups and I feed my meeting notes into Claude (as others have noted, the best of the current bunch) and it largely spits out what I would. Not as good, but probably 70-80% of the way there. So why pay me thousands for my time when you're on a tight budget and the chatbot gets you 70-80% of the way there?
Well, I like to think the extra 20% is the difference between the startups I work with that succeed, and the guys who use chatbot answers and don't. But this is not quite 2 years into the AI revolution, and at the current pace, I will be outclassed within the next few years. If I'm lucky. The next few months, if I'm not.
I consider myself fortunate to be financially secure. Because if I wasn't, I'm pretty sure I would be looking at the bread line in a few years, much as a coal miner in the 90s. A completely obsolescent skill set.
I've retired except for translation and chairing my constituency CLP. I've wondered whether the translation work (mostly for the European Commission) will go, since they send a 95% correct draft translation, but although the pay per word has gone down the pay per hour remains decent (about £50/hour, with a minimum of £17.50 even if it's a single sentence) for zipping through the drafts, filling in the 5% and spotting any errors. It's a nice little retirement earner and I think they reckon the human eye is still important as you do occasinally catch the system totally misunderstanding something.
Any news on the post retirement study ideas?
I remain awestruck by people who are competent in more than one language.
Yup - if you want to knw what interests people about the Govt at the moment it is the stickiness of Starmer's fingers. That looks really bad and could really linger unless the Govt can show some real achievements.
Ask 90% of folk about Sue Gray and you will get a simple answer - who?
Most of the current reporting is people going through publicly available declarations. The information was available but no-one was reporting it because it’s small fry. The Tories accepted £5 million from Frank Hester, who Sunak had condemned for his racist comments, shortly before the election, but the Tories are currently irrelevant, so that’s not become a big news story.
That isn't what set this off though...it the stink around giving donors passes, parachuting in other donors to supposedly impartial positions, and these declarations not being 100% honest about what they actually were. When your pitch was we only care about public service, we are whiter than whiter.
The problem for Starmer is then his reaction was I don't care, I am going to keep taking the freebies, I am not taking any lessons from the Tories.
You’re right, this was started off by some more substantive things. But my point is that the media are trying to continue it with a bunch of irrelevancies, because the news cycle works that way.
The donor pass, the late declaration. Not good. I didn’t vote for Starmer or Labour. I’m not saying he’s perfect. But I can also tell a big story from trifles.
That was my view initially. But it turns out there are a lot of trifles. An improbably large number of trifles. Absolutely shitloads of trifles. A whole confectionery factory of trifles. Labour are looking very custardy indeed. If it was just one dress, ot just one Taylot Swift concert, or just one football match, or just one trip to New York, or just one pair of glasses ... But it's not; it's out of all proportion to any of their predecessors. It's within the rules, but only in the same way that the duck-house-on-expenses was within the rules. It's absolutely taking the piss.
It is. And not only that, it is in the first 3 months and from a government that expressly promised to “clean up politics” and dedicate itself to “service”. We just didn’t realise they meant THEY are going “to clean up” and the service meant lavishly “serving” themselves
I didn't vote for Starmer or Labour either.
I sense the irritation is not with the gifts or trifles themselves which have been a part of politics since time immaterial but the sense of hypocrisy from Labour and Starmer who made certain "promises" or "commitments" about how they were going to govern before the election and seem (to some) not to be honouring those commitments.
I'm not sure how accepting tickets to a Taylor Swift concert or going to the St Leger last Saturday (the first PM to do so since a certain Winston Churchill in 1953) undermines politics. Prime Ministers have often attended big sporting and cultural events and no one has suggested they are demeaning politics.
Where I would be concerned is, as happened with Bernie Ecclestone in 1997, there was a sense in which legislation was deliberately amended or altered to placate a donor or as a result of some inducement or gift. That would be corrupt and would be deserved to be called out.
"Getting by with a little help from my friends" is more than a line in a song but assuming all these gifts are an attempt to curry favour or store up some political capital for later use - I'm less convinced.
To be fair to Keith, most people wouldn’t say no to a free private box
Imagine if journalists had to declare all the freebies they’d received when writing articles.
This is all phoney war stuff. Bring on the Budget! I want the UK political discourse here to move on to something more substantial.
Yes, that's the scam of travel journalists. They get freebies from tourism authorities, hotels etc and are expected to produce puff pieces passed off as journalism, when it's really just advertising.
Of course that isn't the contract, but slag off a place as dull and expensive and the commissions dry up very quickly.
Travel journalism is hard. Surprisingly hard
I mean, some people make it look easy - I guess they have a gift, I dunno - I knap flints as my main job and only do the travel stuff as hobby, really. But real pro travel journalism is extremely competitive - for obvious reasons - and it turns out that many are called and few are chosen. Every journalist has a go at it, but not many have the knack. And those few get the gigs
Not quite the toss-em-off “puff pieces” you describe
Try it for yourself. Try writing about a place that captures the spirit of it in a fresh and diverting way, that avoids cliche but ALSO avoids dipping into purple prose. Not as easy as it looks
I never said writing puff pieces was easy, just said that it was an implicit part of the deal.
It's why we never see pieces slagging off a city or destination in the travel section, though they may appear in other parts of a periodical, such as the recent articles on anti-tourism protests in Barcelona, Palma, Venice etc.
I wouldn’t argue with that. The economics of travel journalism means that the writers must accept free hospitality: that is the way it works. And would you rather a world where the only travel opinions come from inane, 19 year old, pretty blonde Tik Tok influencers?
Aren't most of them also just taking freebies (and going 'Woah, look at this stuff' in a vapid voice)?
Oh, sure. Social Media is full of people on freebies pushing products or place.
My brother was in a Sandpit hotel not so long ago, and the grounds were full of Instagram "influencers" doing photos, posing by the pool, then changing outfit and background for a different shot 30 min later. Only staying one night etc but having a long holidays worth of snaps to publish.
Presumably they are scraping a living, or trying to live the dream, but like all Social Media it is an illusion.
Angela Rayner enjoyed stunning views of Manhattan and the Empire State Building on new year’s eve from a $2.5 million flat lent by the Labour donor at the centre of the row over freebies, The Telegraph can reveal.
The Deputy Prime Minister spent five nights in the luxury Manhattan apartment, with views over New York from the 56th floor of a skyscraper.
The two-bedroom property – totalling 1,300 sq ft – was lent to Ms Rayner by Lord Alli, the Labour peer, from Dec 29 to Jan 2 last year.
According to the parliamentary register of interests, Ms Rayner was given a flat as accommodation for five nights to enjoy a “personal holiday”, which she said was worth an estimated £1,250 overall.
We talked about hotel prices in North America, don't get much for £250 / night these days.
5 nights in a 2 bed, high end apartment in New York, across New Years. For £1250?
Put her in charge of buying PPE for the NHS.
Yes, utterly ridiculous
More like £5-10,000, including flights (did she go Economy? I rather doubt it)
That’s a massive freebie, and I know a massive freebie when I see one. And she has totally lied about it. Bad
Could this have the media taking a closer look at the values people are estimating for the value of gifts received.....Seems like open to abuse, you still register something so within the rules, but you under cook it to make sure it seems unexceptional and doesn't garner any real interest.
Just seen a fent addict badly OD-ing in downtown Couver. The dark side
I hear the super soft on drug policy hasn't worked very well, not as bad as Portland or SF, but has made the problem much more visible.
If we are going to have an informed discussion about drug policy this is the sort of thing that we need to look at. The war on drugs has been a total disaster with very large numbers of dead. But jumping to the conclusion anything goes because it seems to have done ok in Portugal is perhaps every bit as dangerous.
We really need someone to look carefully at what works and what doesn’t.
We need to persuade people to stop taking drugs.
I think that we need to address the problem further upstream. Occasional alcohol or other intoxicants is normal human behaviour, but what is problematic is serial abuse that leads into a spiral of decline, crime and early death.
We need to provide a more meaningful life to people. We have to look at why people become habitual drug users in response to mental health issues and failed families.
Sure there have always been some addicts/alcoholics etc, but the increasing rates in some parts such as Scotland or Appalachia shows a society in breakdown. It's not just a matter of restricting supply, you have to address the demand.
We also have to address the point, that if legal, we could have not just standards for strength and purity. But also steer people away from madly toxic, insanely addictive shit, towards safer things.
To be fair to Keith, most people wouldn’t say no to a free private box
Imagine if journalists had to declare all the freebies they’d received when writing articles.
This is all phoney war stuff. Bring on the Budget! I want the UK political discourse here to move on to something more substantial.
Yes, that's the scam of travel journalists. They get freebies from tourism authorities, hotels etc and are expected to produce puff pieces passed off as journalism, when it's really just advertising.
Of course that isn't the contract, but slag off a place as dull and expensive and the commissions dry up very quickly.
Travel journalism is hard. Surprisingly hard
I mean, some people make it look easy - I guess they have a gift, I dunno - I knap flints as my main job and only do the travel stuff as hobby, really. But real pro travel journalism is extremely competitive - for obvious reasons - and it turns out that many are called and few are chosen. Every journalist has a go at it, but not many have the knack. And those few get the gigs
Not quite the toss-em-off “puff pieces” you describe
Try it for yourself. Try writing about a place that captures the spirit of it in a fresh and diverting way, that avoids cliche but ALSO avoids dipping into purple prose. Not as easy as it looks
I never said writing puff pieces was easy, just said that it was an implicit part of the deal.
It's why we never see pieces slagging off a city or destination in the travel section, though they may appear in other parts of a periodical, such as the recent articles on anti-tourism protests in Barcelona, Palma, Venice etc.
I wouldn’t argue with that. The economics of travel journalism means that the writers must accept free hospitality: that is the way it works. And would you rather a world where the only travel opinions come from inane, 19 year old, pretty blonde Tik Tok influencers?
Aren't most of them also just taking freebies (and going 'Woah, look at this stuff' in a vapid voice)?
Oh god, yes. Of course!
Tho actually I will slightly defend TikTok and insta travel influencers. I’ve seen them at work in the Maldives and Sharm etc and it is much harder than it looks (like travel writing). That perfect 30 seconds of “spontaneous” video on the beach actually takes hours to arrange and produce, and the girls spend hours getting the make up, or “natural lack of make up”, precisely right
Also, they generally only go to luxe places (like the Maldives) which are lovely but they can quickly get boring
I consider myself more cynical than the average bear but I am staggered to see Labour shoot themselves so totally in the head within weeks of gaining power because of freebies and sleaze.
Just incredible.
Farage must be laughing himself to sleep every night as he counts the days down to 2028.
To be fair to Keith, most people wouldn’t say no to a free private box
Imagine if journalists had to declare all the freebies they’d received when writing articles.
This is all phoney war stuff. Bring on the Budget! I want the UK political discourse here to move on to something more substantial.
Yes, that's the scam of travel journalists. They get freebies from tourism authorities, hotels etc and are expected to produce puff pieces passed off as journalism, when it's really just advertising.
Of course that isn't the contract, but slag off a place as dull and expensive and the commissions dry up very quickly.
Travel journalism is hard. Surprisingly hard
I mean, some people make it look easy - I guess they have a gift, I dunno - I knap flints as my main job and only do the travel stuff as hobby, really. But real pro travel journalism is extremely competitive - for obvious reasons - and it turns out that many are called and few are chosen. Every journalist has a go at it, but not many have the knack. And those few get the gigs
Not quite the toss-em-off “puff pieces” you describe
Try it for yourself. Try writing about a place that captures the spirit of it in a fresh and diverting way, that avoids cliche but ALSO avoids dipping into purple prose. Not as easy as it looks
I never said writing puff pieces was easy, just said that it was an implicit part of the deal.
It's why we never see pieces slagging off a city or destination in the travel section, though they may appear in other parts of a periodical, such as the recent articles on anti-tourism protests in Barcelona, Palma, Venice etc.
I wouldn’t argue with that. The economics of travel journalism means that the writers must accept free hospitality: that is the way it works. And would you rather a world where the only travel opinions come from inane, 19 year old, pretty blonde Tik Tok influencers?
Aren't most of them also just taking freebies (and going 'Woah, look at this stuff' in a vapid voice)?
Oh, sure. Social Media is full of people on freebies pushing products or place.
My brother was in a Sandpit hotel not so long ago, and the grounds were full of Instagram "influencers" doing photos, posing by the pool, then changing outfit and background for a different shot 30 min later. Only staying one night etc but having a long holidays worth of snaps to publish.
Presumably they are scraping a living, or trying to live the dream, but like all Social Media it is an illusion.
Well in the Sandpit, the Instagram influencers are also often otherwise "engaged" for the rest of week....The posting swimsuit pics is not only one string to their bow, its really just the marketing funnel to getting the big bucks who don't just want to look.
Yup - if you want to knw what interests people about the Govt at the moment it is the stickiness of Starmer's fingers. That looks really bad and could really linger unless the Govt can show some real achievements.
Ask 90% of folk about Sue Gray and you will get a simple answer - who?
Most of the current reporting is people going through publicly available declarations. The information was available but no-one was reporting it because it’s small fry. The Tories accepted £5 million from Frank Hester, who Sunak had condemned for his racist comments, shortly before the election, but the Tories are currently irrelevant, so that’s not become a big news story.
That isn't what set this off though...it the stink around giving donors passes, parachuting in other donors to supposedly impartial positions, and these declarations not being 100% honest about what they actually were. When your pitch was we only care about public service, we are whiter than whiter.
The problem for Starmer is then his reaction was I don't care, I am going to keep taking the freebies, I am not taking any lessons from the Tories.
You’re right, this was started off by some more substantive things. But my point is that the media are trying to continue it with a bunch of irrelevancies, because the news cycle works that way.
The donor pass, the late declaration. Not good. I didn’t vote for Starmer or Labour. I’m not saying he’s perfect. But I can also tell a big story from trifles.
That was my view initially. But it turns out there are a lot of trifles. An improbably large number of trifles. Absolutely shitloads of trifles. A whole confectionery factory of trifles. Labour are looking very custardy indeed. If it was just one dress, ot just one Taylot Swift concert, or just one football match, or just one trip to New York, or just one pair of glasses ... But it's not; it's out of all proportion to any of their predecessors. It's within the rules, but only in the same way that the duck-house-on-expenses was within the rules. It's absolutely taking the piss.
It is. And not only that, it is in the first 3 months and from a government that expressly promised to “clean up politics” and dedicate itself to “service”. We just didn’t realise they meant THEY are going “to clean up” and the service meant lavishly “serving” themselves
It makes me wonder why you voted for Starmer. Or should we just accept it as part of your gullibility?
Can't speak for @Leon but it was a very tricky election as clearly the Tories were done for and it was time for them to leave office...
But...
If I'd known SKS was such a grifter and what he'd do with WFA I would probably have voted Lib-Dem rather than Labour. It's too late now.. We're stuck with five years hard Labour and we've just got to get on with it...
Hopefully the choice at Election 29 will be more straightforward?
If you look at my posts over the last year, I was quite clear why I wouldn't be voting Labour.
For all his many faults, and some of them shocking, I don't think we would have seen this with PM Corbyn. It's why he seemed like a breath of fresh air in 2017.
I consider myself more cynical than the average bear but I am staggered to see Labour shoot themselves so totally in the head within weeks of gaining power because of freebies and sleaze.
Just incredible.
Farage must be laughing himself to sleep every night as he counts the days down to 2028.
It will be 2029 and lets hope a sensible, moderate Conservative Party is able to emerge from the wreckage of Election 24 and will be able to defeat Farage and Reform once and for all.
Claude at the moment is the best LLM IMO. For all the hype over ChatGPT o1, I just found that it sits and "thinks" for ages and the result isn't actually much better. At best its stopping you manually saying, do this, then this, at worst because it is trying to take many steps itself, it goes off down the wrong path and you wait 30s+ for it to pump out nonsense.
Yes. Apparently o1 is great at maths and coding but as I don’t care about maths or coding that whizzes past me
For words, Claude is still best by a fair stretch. Also the context window on ChatGPT remains relatively tiny
As it seems I am temporarily allowed to discuss AI - I’d note that I’ve seen people all over the world quietly using it, and many hyper aware of all developments. The revolution is happening but it’s sotto voce. A lot of people don’t want their employers to know they are using it
For these and other reasons I wouldn’t bet against AI. It is coming and it is inevitable. Betting against it is like betting against electricity in 1895
I have found the opposite, its shit at coding, its really infuriating. But I am not asking it to code flappy birds game or a web app. As for maths, I have asked it some things that aren't that complicated (I am not a mathematician, but I do lots of maths) and it has done very poorly.
I yield to your experience in these matters
Gemini is often overlooked. It has a massive context window and seems to be improving over time
Frankly, they are all amazing and if you showed them to people in 2014 or 2004 they’d say Wow so that’s AGI
It’s the boiling frog thing
Oh don't get me wrong, I think if you have 100-120 IQ and do very repetitive white collar role and quite low down in the company hierarchy, I would be very concerned for my future. I actually think those that have lower IQ are far better insulated against this tech because they are much more likely to be in vocational jobs that robotics are nowhere near doing their work.
But o1 at least I have found massively underwhelming for my use cases. Its like asking an undergraduate who if they don't know the answer doesn't say I don't know or I think the answer is, it gives you a 10 minute BS talk all about it.
Are we allowed to talk about AI here again, then?
In which case.
Those of us "golgafrincham b ark" types whose main grift in life has been to shuffle papers and produce reports are doomed.
I do a lot of strategy consultancy work for startups and I feed my meeting notes into Claude (as others have noted, the best of the current bunch) and it largely spits out what I would. Not as good, but probably 70-80% of the way there. So why pay me thousands for my time when you're on a tight budget and the chatbot gets you 70-80% of the way there?
Well, I like to think the extra 20% is the difference between the startups I work with that succeed, and the guys who use chatbot answers and don't. But this is not quite 2 years into the AI revolution, and at the current pace, I will be outclassed within the next few years. If I'm lucky. The next few months, if I'm not.
I consider myself fortunate to be financially secure. Because if I wasn't, I'm pretty sure I would be looking at the bread line in a few years, much as a coal miner in the 90s. A completely obsolescent skill set.
I've retired except for translation and chairing my constituency CLP. I've wondered whether the translation work (mostly for the European Commission) will go, since they send a 95% correct draft translation, but although the pay per word has gone down the pay per hour remains decent (about £50/hour, with a minimum of £17.50 even if it's a single sentence) for zipping through the drafts, filling in the 5% and spotting any errors. It's a nice little retirement earner and I think they reckon the human eye is still important as you do occasinally catch the system totally misunderstanding something.
Any news on the post retirement study ideas?
I remain awestruck by people who are competent in more than one language.
My 21 year old granddaughter speaks Welsh, English, French, Italian and Japanese
Big G, could I ask a difficult question? With your age and all that, being a distinguished poster and having given us your insights of the world, being realistic there is going to be a day when you go to post in the big PB in the Sky. So when I had a heart op last year I thought that if I don’t come out the other side I would like PB to know. I sent a message to Viewcode that if I didn’t post again it had gone tits up so say goodbye for me.
The long and the short of it is, do you, and frankly other posters, have people who know of our life here where if we bail out they can let PB know? It is a community (god I hate that phrase) but would be good to mourn, salute people where they deserve it.
I consider myself more cynical than the average bear but I am staggered to see Labour shoot themselves so totally in the head within weeks of gaining power because of freebies and sleaze.
Just incredible.
Farage must be laughing himself to sleep every night as he counts the days down to 2028.
I am sure LedByDonkeys will have a Starmer Stunt planned...no? Or are they still too busy targeting people with no power?
Yup - if you want to knw what interests people about the Govt at the moment it is the stickiness of Starmer's fingers. That looks really bad and could really linger unless the Govt can show some real achievements.
Ask 90% of folk about Sue Gray and you will get a simple answer - who?
Most of the current reporting is people going through publicly available declarations. The information was available but no-one was reporting it because it’s small fry. The Tories accepted £5 million from Frank Hester, who Sunak had condemned for his racist comments, shortly before the election, but the Tories are currently irrelevant, so that’s not become a big news story.
That isn't what set this off though...it the stink around giving donors passes, parachuting in other donors to supposedly impartial positions, and these declarations not being 100% honest about what they actually were. When your pitch was we only care about public service, we are whiter than whiter.
The problem for Starmer is then his reaction was I don't care, I am going to keep taking the freebies, I am not taking any lessons from the Tories.
You’re right, this was started off by some more substantive things. But my point is that the media are trying to continue it with a bunch of irrelevancies, because the news cycle works that way.
The donor pass, the late declaration. Not good. I didn’t vote for Starmer or Labour. I’m not saying he’s perfect. But I can also tell a big story from trifles.
That was my view initially. But it turns out there are a lot of trifles. An improbably large number of trifles. Absolutely shitloads of trifles. A whole confectionery factory of trifles. Labour are looking very custardy indeed. If it was just one dress, ot just one Taylot Swift concert, or just one football match, or just one trip to New York, or just one pair of glasses ... But it's not; it's out of all proportion to any of their predecessors. It's within the rules, but only in the same way that the duck-house-on-expenses was within the rules. It's absolutely taking the piss.
It is. And not only that, it is in the first 3 months and from a government that expressly promised to “clean up politics” and dedicate itself to “service”. We just didn’t realise they meant THEY are going “to clean up” and the service meant lavishly “serving” themselves
It makes me wonder why you voted for Starmer. Or should we just accept it as part of your gullibility?
Can't speak for @Leon but it was a very tricky election as clearly the Tories were done for and it was time for them to leave office...
But...
If I'd known SKS was such a grifter and what he'd do with WFA I would probably have voted Lib-Dem rather than Labour. It's too late now.. We're stuck with five years hard Labour and we've just got to get on with it...
Hopefully the choice at Election 29 will be more straightforward?
If you look at my posts over the last year, I was quite clear why I wouldn't be voting Labour.
For all his many faults, and some of them shocking, I don't think we would have seen this with PM Corbyn. It's why he seemed like a breath of fresh air in 2017.
What makes you think Corbyn wouldn't have gratefully accepted a free pager?
I consider myself more cynical than the average bear but I am staggered to see Labour shoot themselves so totally in the head within weeks of gaining power because of freebies and sleaze.
Just incredible.
Farage must be laughing himself to sleep every night as he counts the days down to 2028.
I am sure LedByDonkeys will have a Starmer Stunt planned...no? Or are they still too busy targeting people with no power?
Just seen a fent addict badly OD-ing in downtown Couver. The dark side
I hear the super soft on drug policy hasn't worked very well, not as bad as Portland or SF, but has made the problem much more visible.
If we are going to have an informed discussion about drug policy this is the sort of thing that we need to look at. The war on drugs has been a total disaster with very large numbers of dead. But jumping to the conclusion anything goes because it seems to have done ok in Portugal is perhaps every bit as dangerous.
We really need someone to look carefully at what works and what doesn’t.
We need to persuade people to stop taking drugs.
I think that we need to address the problem further upstream. Occasional alcohol or other intoxicants is normal human behaviour, but what is problematic is serial abuse that leads into a spiral of decline, crime and early death.
We need to provide a more meaningful life to people. We have to look at why people become habitual drug users in response to mental health issues and failed families.
Sure there have always been some addicts/alcoholics etc, but the increasing rates in some parts such as Scotland or Appalachia shows a society in breakdown. It's not just a matter of restricting supply, you have to address the demand.
Andy_JS was making a not unrelated point earlier about happiness and its decline and the reasons for it.
Angela Rayner enjoyed stunning views of Manhattan and the Empire State Building on new year’s eve from a $2.5 million flat lent by the Labour donor at the centre of the row over freebies, The Telegraph can reveal.
The Deputy Prime Minister spent five nights in the luxury Manhattan apartment, with views over New York from the 56th floor of a skyscraper.
The two-bedroom property – totalling 1,300 sq ft – was lent to Ms Rayner by Lord Alli, the Labour peer, from Dec 29 to Jan 2 last year.
According to the parliamentary register of interests, Ms Rayner was given a flat as accommodation for five nights to enjoy a “personal holiday”, which she said was worth an estimated £1,250 overall.
We talked about hotel prices in North America, don't get much for £250 / night these days.
5 nights in a 2 bed, high end apartment in New York, across New Years. For £1250?
Put her in charge of buying PPE for the NHS.
Yes, utterly ridiculous
More like £5-10,000, including flights (did she go Economy? I rather doubt it)
That’s a massive freebie, and I know a massive freebie when I see one. And she has totally lied about it. Bad
Could this have the media taking a closer look at the values people are estimating for the value of gifts received.....Seems like open to abuse, you still register something so within the rules, but you under cook it to make sure it seems unexceptional and doesn't garner any real interest.
This seems to me an open-and-shut case of outright lying
No way you get a five night NYE holiday in NYC in a 2 bed luxury 55th floor apartment in Manhattan skyscraper for £1250
It’s absurd and we can all see it is absurd. At that time of year you’d be hard pushed to get a luxe 2 bed cottage in NORFOLK for £1250 for 5 nights, especially if one includes travel there and back
Midtown Manhattan?? Several thousands
Eg here’s one that looks similar. Great views, high up a skyscraper. Manhattan
It is £1500 a night = £7500 for 5 nights, plus flights; include flights (esp Biz) and you’ve over £10k easily
I consider myself more cynical than the average bear but I am staggered to see Labour shoot themselves so totally in the head within weeks of gaining power because of freebies and sleaze.
Just incredible.
Farage must be laughing himself to sleep every night as he counts the days down to 2028.
I'm not quite sure where the "sleaze" angle is but I'll let that go.
I'm no supporter of Labour per se but I'm happy to give the Government a chance to see what it can or thinks it can do.
The WFA announcement was poor politics in extemis though the fundamental argument of public money being given to people, some of whom clearly didn't need it, remains compelling.
Getting more of the 880,000 who were entitled to pension credit but didn't claim is a huge positive but the cliff-edge nature of the payment system allows those who miss the WFA by less than a fiver to cry foul (and rightly so). More thought would have led to a graduated system where perhaps the WFA payments were reduced for those with more income.
The problem as often with politics isn't the theory or the practice but the perception. As we see with immigration, what people think is happening and what is happening are often two very different things but challenging and overcoming those perceptions takes time and argument.
Yup - if you want to knw what interests people about the Govt at the moment it is the stickiness of Starmer's fingers. That looks really bad and could really linger unless the Govt can show some real achievements.
Ask 90% of folk about Sue Gray and you will get a simple answer - who?
Most of the current reporting is people going through publicly available declarations. The information was available but no-one was reporting it because it’s small fry. The Tories accepted £5 million from Frank Hester, who Sunak had condemned for his racist comments, shortly before the election, but the Tories are currently irrelevant, so that’s not become a big news story.
That isn't what set this off though...it the stink around giving donors passes, parachuting in other donors to supposedly impartial positions, and these declarations not being 100% honest about what they actually were. When your pitch was we only care about public service, we are whiter than whiter.
The problem for Starmer is then his reaction was I don't care, I am going to keep taking the freebies, I am not taking any lessons from the Tories.
You’re right, this was started off by some more substantive things. But my point is that the media are trying to continue it with a bunch of irrelevancies, because the news cycle works that way.
The donor pass, the late declaration. Not good. I didn’t vote for Starmer or Labour. I’m not saying he’s perfect. But I can also tell a big story from trifles.
That was my view initially. But it turns out there are a lot of trifles. An improbably large number of trifles. Absolutely shitloads of trifles. A whole confectionery factory of trifles. Labour are looking very custardy indeed. If it was just one dress, ot just one Taylot Swift concert, or just one football match, or just one trip to New York, or just one pair of glasses ... But it's not; it's out of all proportion to any of their predecessors. It's within the rules, but only in the same way that the duck-house-on-expenses was within the rules. It's absolutely taking the piss.
It is. And not only that, it is in the first 3 months and from a government that expressly promised to “clean up politics” and dedicate itself to “service”. We just didn’t realise they meant THEY are going “to clean up” and the service meant lavishly “serving” themselves
I didn't vote for Starmer or Labour either.
I sense the irritation is not with the gifts or trifles themselves which have been a part of politics since time immaterial but the sense of hypocrisy from Labour and Starmer who made certain "promises" or "commitments" about how they were going to govern before the election and seem (to some) not to be honouring those commitments.
I'm not sure how accepting tickets to a Taylor Swift concert or going to the St Leger last Saturday (the first PM to do so since a certain Winston Churchill in 1953) undermines politics. Prime Ministers have often attended big sporting and cultural events and no one has suggested they are demeaning politics.
Where I would be concerned is, as happened with Bernie Ecclestone in 1997, there was a sense in which legislation was deliberately amended or altered to placate a donor or as a result of some inducement or gift. That would be corrupt and would be deserved to be called out.
"Getting by with a little help from my friends" is more than a line in a song but assuming all these gifts are an attempt to curry favour or store up some political capital for later use - I'm less convinced.
I think that likely is correct re the irritation and the fact Starmer’s public image is a sort of upstanding, boring but decent sort of fellow who made a lot of hay of not being in it for himself but being in it for public service. When he’s actually challenged on the freebies he gets (in fact, when he gets challenged at all) he doesn’t half have a habit of sounding a bit prickly and snotty.
The physician also proudly acknowledged that he is part of the “national resistance.” “In 1986, at the age of 18, I was incarcerated for 100 days in Khiam Prison by the Israeli forces that occupied the country,” he said.
To be fair to Keith, most people wouldn’t say no to a free private box
Imagine if journalists had to declare all the freebies they’d received when writing articles.
This is all phoney war stuff. Bring on the Budget! I want the UK political discourse here to move on to something more substantial.
Yes, that's the scam of travel journalists. They get freebies from tourism authorities, hotels etc and are expected to produce puff pieces passed off as journalism, when it's really just advertising.
Of course that isn't the contract, but slag off a place as dull and expensive and the commissions dry up very quickly.
Travel journalism is hard. Surprisingly hard
I mean, some people make it look easy - I guess they have a gift, I dunno - I knap flints as my main job and only do the travel stuff as hobby, really. But real pro travel journalism is extremely competitive - for obvious reasons - and it turns out that many are called and few are chosen. Every journalist has a go at it, but not many have the knack. And those few get the gigs
Not quite the toss-em-off “puff pieces” you describe
Try it for yourself. Try writing about a place that captures the spirit of it in a fresh and diverting way, that avoids cliche but ALSO avoids dipping into purple prose. Not as easy as it looks
I never said writing puff pieces was easy, just said that it was an implicit part of the deal.
It's why we never see pieces slagging off a city or destination in the travel section, though they may appear in other parts of a periodical, such as the recent articles on anti-tourism protests in Barcelona, Palma, Venice etc.
I wouldn’t argue with that. The economics of travel journalism means that the writers must accept free hospitality: that is the way it works. And would you rather a world where the only travel opinions come from inane, 19 year old, pretty blonde Tik Tok influencers?
Aren't most of them also just taking freebies (and going 'Woah, look at this stuff' in a vapid voice)?
Oh god, yes. Of course!
Tho actually I will slightly defend TikTok and insta travel influencers. I’ve seen them at work in the Maldives and Sharm etc and it is much harder than it looks (like travel writing). That perfect 30 seconds of “spontaneous” video on the beach actually takes hours to arrange and produce, and the girls spend hours getting the make up, or “natural lack of make up”, precisely right
Also, they generally only go to luxe places (like the Maldives) which are lovely but they can quickly get boring
I've done this in a small way, testing out tents and such. Really hard to get the perfect sunrise shot in Scotland (those photos usually happen by pure chance) and crafting something funny for Instagram/Tik Tok is equally difficult.
I hate drones which really holds me back. I've made a few hundred from my writing though, which is immensely satisfying.
Yup - if you want to knw what interests people about the Govt at the moment it is the stickiness of Starmer's fingers. That looks really bad and could really linger unless the Govt can show some real achievements.
Ask 90% of folk about Sue Gray and you will get a simple answer - who?
Most of the current reporting is people going through publicly available declarations. The information was available but no-one was reporting it because it’s small fry. The Tories accepted £5 million from Frank Hester, who Sunak had condemned for his racist comments, shortly before the election, but the Tories are currently irrelevant, so that’s not become a big news story.
That isn't what set this off though...it the stink around giving donors passes, parachuting in other donors to supposedly impartial positions, and these declarations not being 100% honest about what they actually were. When your pitch was we only care about public service, we are whiter than whiter.
The problem for Starmer is then his reaction was I don't care, I am going to keep taking the freebies, I am not taking any lessons from the Tories.
You’re right, this was started off by some more substantive things. But my point is that the media are trying to continue it with a bunch of irrelevancies, because the news cycle works that way.
The donor pass, the late declaration. Not good. I didn’t vote for Starmer or Labour. I’m not saying he’s perfect. But I can also tell a big story from trifles.
That was my view initially. But it turns out there are a lot of trifles. An improbably large number of trifles. Absolutely shitloads of trifles. A whole confectionery factory of trifles. Labour are looking very custardy indeed. If it was just one dress, ot just one Taylot Swift concert, or just one football match, or just one trip to New York, or just one pair of glasses ... But it's not; it's out of all proportion to any of their predecessors. It's within the rules, but only in the same way that the duck-house-on-expenses was within the rules. It's absolutely taking the piss.
It is. And not only that, it is in the first 3 months and from a government that expressly promised to “clean up politics” and dedicate itself to “service”. We just didn’t realise they meant THEY are going “to clean up” and the service meant lavishly “serving” themselves
It makes me wonder why you voted for Starmer. Or should we just accept it as part of your gullibility?
Can't speak for @Leon but it was a very tricky election as clearly the Tories were done for and it was time for them to leave office...
But...
If I'd known SKS was such a grifter and what he'd do with WFA I would probably have voted Lib-Dem rather than Labour. It's too late now.. We're stuck with five years hard Labour and we've just got to get on with it...
Hopefully the choice at Election 29 will be more straightforward?
If you look at my posts over the last year, I was quite clear why I wouldn't be voting Labour.
For all his many faults, and some of them shocking, I don't think we would have seen this with PM Corbyn. It's why he seemed like a breath of fresh air in 2017.
Claude at the moment is the best LLM IMO. For all the hype over ChatGPT o1, I just found that it sits and "thinks" for ages and the result isn't actually much better. At best its stopping you manually saying, do this, then this, at worst because it is trying to take many steps itself, it goes off down the wrong path and you wait 30s+ for it to pump out nonsense.
Yes. Apparently o1 is great at maths and coding but as I don’t care about maths or coding that whizzes past me
For words, Claude is still best by a fair stretch. Also the context window on ChatGPT remains relatively tiny
As it seems I am temporarily allowed to discuss AI - I’d note that I’ve seen people all over the world quietly using it, and many hyper aware of all developments. The revolution is happening but it’s sotto voce. A lot of people don’t want their employers to know they are using it
For these and other reasons I wouldn’t bet against AI. It is coming and it is inevitable. Betting against it is like betting against electricity in 1895
I have found the opposite, its shit at coding, its really infuriating. But I am not asking it to code flappy birds game or a web app. As for maths, I have asked it some things that aren't that complicated (I am not a mathematician, but I do lots of maths) and it has done very poorly.
I yield to your experience in these matters
Gemini is often overlooked. It has a massive context window and seems to be improving over time
Frankly, they are all amazing and if you showed them to people in 2014 or 2004 they’d say Wow so that’s AGI
It’s the boiling frog thing
Oh don't get me wrong, I think if you have 100-120 IQ and do very repetitive white collar role and quite low down in the company hierarchy, I would be very concerned for my future. I actually think those that have lower IQ are far better insulated against this tech because they are much more likely to be in vocational jobs that robotics are nowhere near doing their work.
But o1 at least I have found massively underwhelming for my use cases. Its like asking an undergraduate who if they don't know the answer doesn't say I don't know or I think the answer is, it gives you a 10 minute BS talk all about it.
Are we allowed to talk about AI here again, then?
In which case.
Those of us "golgafrincham b ark" types whose main grift in life has been to shuffle papers and produce reports are doomed.
I do a lot of strategy consultancy work for startups and I feed my meeting notes into Claude (as others have noted, the best of the current bunch) and it largely spits out what I would. Not as good, but probably 70-80% of the way there. So why pay me thousands for my time when you're on a tight budget and the chatbot gets you 70-80% of the way there?
Well, I like to think the extra 20% is the difference between the startups I work with that succeed, and the guys who use chatbot answers and don't. But this is not quite 2 years into the AI revolution, and at the current pace, I will be outclassed within the next few years. If I'm lucky. The next few months, if I'm not.
I consider myself fortunate to be financially secure. Because if I wasn't, I'm pretty sure I would be looking at the bread line in a few years, much as a coal miner in the 90s. A completely obsolescent skill set.
I've retired except for translation and chairing my constituency CLP. I've wondered whether the translation work (mostly for the European Commission) will go, since they send a 95% correct draft translation, but although the pay per word has gone down the pay per hour remains decent (about £50/hour, with a minimum of £17.50 even if it's a single sentence) for zipping through the drafts, filling in the 5% and spotting any errors. It's a nice little retirement earner and I think they reckon the human eye is still important as you do occasinally catch the system totally misunderstanding something.
Any news on the post retirement study ideas?
I remain awestruck by people who are competent in more than one language.
My 21 year old granddaughter speaks Welsh, English, French, Italian and Japanese
Big G, could I ask a difficult question? With your age and all that, being a distinguished poster and having given us your insights of the world, being realistic there is going to be a day when you go to post in the big PB in the Sky. So when I had a heart op last year I thought that if I don’t come out the other side I would like PB to know. I sent a message to Viewcode that if I didn’t post again it had gone tits up so say goodbye for me.
The long and the short of it is, do you, and frankly other posters, have people who know of our life here where if we bail out they can let PB know? It is a community (god I hate that phrase) but would be good to mourn, salute people where they deserve it.
Sorry if insensitive.
No it is not sensitive and my wife would no doubt respond
Claude at the moment is the best LLM IMO. For all the hype over ChatGPT o1, I just found that it sits and "thinks" for ages and the result isn't actually much better. At best its stopping you manually saying, do this, then this, at worst because it is trying to take many steps itself, it goes off down the wrong path and you wait 30s+ for it to pump out nonsense.
Yes. Apparently o1 is great at maths and coding but as I don’t care about maths or coding that whizzes past me
For words, Claude is still best by a fair stretch. Also the context window on ChatGPT remains relatively tiny
As it seems I am temporarily allowed to discuss AI - I’d note that I’ve seen people all over the world quietly using it, and many hyper aware of all developments. The revolution is happening but it’s sotto voce. A lot of people don’t want their employers to know they are using it
For these and other reasons I wouldn’t bet against AI. It is coming and it is inevitable. Betting against it is like betting against electricity in 1895
I have found the opposite, its shit at coding, its really infuriating. But I am not asking it to code flappy birds game or a web app. As for maths, I have asked it some things that aren't that complicated (I am not a mathematician, but I do lots of maths) and it has done very poorly.
I yield to your experience in these matters
Gemini is often overlooked. It has a massive context window and seems to be improving over time
Frankly, they are all amazing and if you showed them to people in 2014 or 2004 they’d say Wow so that’s AGI
It’s the boiling frog thing
Oh don't get me wrong, I think if you have 100-120 IQ and do very repetitive white collar role and quite low down in the company hierarchy, I would be very concerned for my future. I actually think those that have lower IQ are far better insulated against this tech because they are much more likely to be in vocational jobs that robotics are nowhere near doing their work.
But o1 at least I have found massively underwhelming for my use cases. Its like asking an undergraduate who if they don't know the answer doesn't say I don't know or I think the answer is, it gives you a 10 minute BS talk all about it.
Are we allowed to talk about AI here again, then?
In which case.
Those of us "golgafrincham b ark" types whose main grift in life has been to shuffle papers and produce reports are doomed.
I do a lot of strategy consultancy work for startups and I feed my meeting notes into Claude (as others have noted, the best of the current bunch) and it largely spits out what I would. Not as good, but probably 70-80% of the way there. So why pay me thousands for my time when you're on a tight budget and the chatbot gets you 70-80% of the way there?
Well, I like to think the extra 20% is the difference between the startups I work with that succeed, and the guys who use chatbot answers and don't. But this is not quite 2 years into the AI revolution, and at the current pace, I will be outclassed within the next few years. If I'm lucky. The next few months, if I'm not.
I consider myself fortunate to be financially secure. Because if I wasn't, I'm pretty sure I would be looking at the bread line in a few years, much as a coal miner in the 90s. A completely obsolescent skill set.
I've retired except for translation and chairing my constituency CLP. I've wondered whether the translation work (mostly for the European Commission) will go, since they send a 95% correct draft translation, but although the pay per word has gone down the pay per hour remains decent (about £50/hour, with a minimum of £17.50 even if it's a single sentence) for zipping through the drafts, filling in the 5% and spotting any errors. It's a nice little retirement earner and I think they reckon the human eye is still important as you do occasinally catch the system totally misunderstanding something.
Any news on the post retirement study ideas?
I remain awestruck by people who are competent in more than one language.
My 21 year old granddaughter speaks Welsh, English, French, Italian and Japanese
Big G, could I ask a difficult question? With your age and all that, being a distinguished poster and having given us your insights of the world, being realistic there is going to be a day when you go to post in the big PB in the Sky. So when I had a heart op last year I thought that if I don’t come out the other side I would like PB to know. I sent a message to Viewcode that if I didn’t post again it had gone tits up so say goodbye for me.
The long and the short of it is, do you, and frankly other posters, have people who know of our life here where if we bail out they can let PB know? It is a community (god I hate that phrase) but would be good to mourn, salute people where they deserve it.
Sorry if insensitive.
I have to say that is a little bit insensitive....
As far as as I know we have had a number of very prominent pbCOMers take that giant leap into the unknown, very sadly Plato and SBS.
We have JackW who must be older than those trees in California too, but I think he'll survive into the Big Crunch...
I don't think BiG G has any plans to check out anytime soon
Claude at the moment is the best LLM IMO. For all the hype over ChatGPT o1, I just found that it sits and "thinks" for ages and the result isn't actually much better. At best its stopping you manually saying, do this, then this, at worst because it is trying to take many steps itself, it goes off down the wrong path and you wait 30s+ for it to pump out nonsense.
Yes. Apparently o1 is great at maths and coding but as I don’t care about maths or coding that whizzes past me
For words, Claude is still best by a fair stretch. Also the context window on ChatGPT remains relatively tiny
As it seems I am temporarily allowed to discuss AI - I’d note that I’ve seen people all over the world quietly using it, and many hyper aware of all developments. The revolution is happening but it’s sotto voce. A lot of people don’t want their employers to know they are using it
For these and other reasons I wouldn’t bet against AI. It is coming and it is inevitable. Betting against it is like betting against electricity in 1895
I have found the opposite, its shit at coding, its really infuriating. But I am not asking it to code flappy birds game or a web app. As for maths, I have asked it some things that aren't that complicated (I am not a mathematician, but I do lots of maths) and it has done very poorly.
I yield to your experience in these matters
Gemini is often overlooked. It has a massive context window and seems to be improving over time
Frankly, they are all amazing and if you showed them to people in 2014 or 2004 they’d say Wow so that’s AGI
It’s the boiling frog thing
Oh don't get me wrong, I think if you have 100-120 IQ and do very repetitive white collar role and quite low down in the company hierarchy, I would be very concerned for my future. I actually think those that have lower IQ are far better insulated against this tech because they are much more likely to be in vocational jobs that robotics are nowhere near doing their work.
But o1 at least I have found massively underwhelming for my use cases. Its like asking an undergraduate who if they don't know the answer doesn't say I don't know or I think the answer is, it gives you a 10 minute BS talk all about it.
Are we allowed to talk about AI here again, then?
In which case.
Those of us "golgafrincham b ark" types whose main grift in life has been to shuffle papers and produce reports are doomed.
I do a lot of strategy consultancy work for startups and I feed my meeting notes into Claude (as others have noted, the best of the current bunch) and it largely spits out what I would. Not as good, but probably 70-80% of the way there. So why pay me thousands for my time when you're on a tight budget and the chatbot gets you 70-80% of the way there?
Well, I like to think the extra 20% is the difference between the startups I work with that succeed, and the guys who use chatbot answers and don't. But this is not quite 2 years into the AI revolution, and at the current pace, I will be outclassed within the next few years. If I'm lucky. The next few months, if I'm not.
I consider myself fortunate to be financially secure. Because if I wasn't, I'm pretty sure I would be looking at the bread line in a few years, much as a coal miner in the 90s. A completely obsolescent skill set.
I've retired except for translation and chairing my constituency CLP. I've wondered whether the translation work (mostly for the European Commission) will go, since they send a 95% correct draft translation, but although the pay per word has gone down the pay per hour remains decent (about £50/hour, with a minimum of £17.50 even if it's a single sentence) for zipping through the drafts, filling in the 5% and spotting any errors. It's a nice little retirement earner and I think they reckon the human eye is still important as you do occasinally catch the system totally misunderstanding something.
Any news on the post retirement study ideas?
I remain awestruck by people who are competent in more than one language.
My 21 year old granddaughter speaks Welsh, English, French, Italian and Japanese
If you will excuse the immodesty for a moment, my brain rarely lets me down. I reckon myself adept at English: I may not have anything interesting to say, but if someone else does I can spot whuch words they are using wrong and select the right ones. I can proof read well. And it's not just words; I am good at maths and can remember facts. But I am awful at foreign languages. I have not the slightest ear for them; their lexica remain forever elusive. It seems the hardest thing in the world to achieve even a basic competence. And yet, go to Europe and almost everyone there is able to switch effortlessly switch between four languages. These aren't specialists who've spent years striving to master a language - it's everyone. Waiters, actors, shopkeepers, children, passers-by. How is this possible? Dura Ace recently suggested it was just hours of hard work. Where do these people - like your granddaughter - find the time?
To be fair to Keith, most people wouldn’t say no to a free private box
Imagine if journalists had to declare all the freebies they’d received when writing articles.
This is all phoney war stuff. Bring on the Budget! I want the UK political discourse here to move on to something more substantial.
Yes, that's the scam of travel journalists. They get freebies from tourism authorities, hotels etc and are expected to produce puff pieces passed off as journalism, when it's really just advertising.
Of course that isn't the contract, but slag off a place as dull and expensive and the commissions dry up very quickly.
Travel journalism is hard. Surprisingly hard
I mean, some people make it look easy - I guess they have a gift, I dunno - I knap flints as my main job and only do the travel stuff as hobby, really. But real pro travel journalism is extremely competitive - for obvious reasons - and it turns out that many are called and few are chosen. Every journalist has a go at it, but not many have the knack. And those few get the gigs
Not quite the toss-em-off “puff pieces” you describe
Try it for yourself. Try writing about a place that captures the spirit of it in a fresh and diverting way, that avoids cliche but ALSO avoids dipping into purple prose. Not as easy as it looks
I never said writing puff pieces was easy, just said that it was an implicit part of the deal.
It's why we never see pieces slagging off a city or destination in the travel section, though they may appear in other parts of a periodical, such as the recent articles on anti-tourism protests in Barcelona, Palma, Venice etc.
I wouldn’t argue with that. The economics of travel journalism means that the writers must accept free hospitality: that is the way it works. And would you rather a world where the only travel opinions come from inane, 19 year old, pretty blonde Tik Tok influencers?
Aren't most of them also just taking freebies (and going 'Woah, look at this stuff' in a vapid voice)?
Oh god, yes. Of course!
Tho actually I will slightly defend TikTok and insta travel influencers. I’ve seen them at work in the Maldives and Sharm etc and it is much harder than it looks (like travel writing). That perfect 30 seconds of “spontaneous” video on the beach actually takes hours to arrange and produce, and the girls spend hours getting the make up, or “natural lack of make up”, precisely right
Also, they generally only go to luxe places (like the Maldives) which are lovely but they can quickly get boring
I've done this in a small way, testing out tents and such. Really hard to get the perfect sunrise shot in Scotland (those photos usually happen by pure chance) and crafting something funny for Instagram/Tik Tok is equally difficult.
I hate drones which really holds me back. I've made a few hundred from my writing though, which is immensely satisfying.
Drones can get great shots tho. Eg we were talking about Victoria Falls recently. And how I went where with a zimbo nutter
I consider myself more cynical than the average bear but I am staggered to see Labour shoot themselves so totally in the head within weeks of gaining power because of freebies and sleaze.
Just incredible.
Farage must be laughing himself to sleep every night as he counts the days down to 2028.
I'm not quite sure where the "sleaze" angle is but I'll let that go.
I'm no supporter of Labour per se but I'm happy to give the Government a chance to see what it can or thinks it can do.
The WFA announcement was poor politics in extemis though the fundamental argument of public money being given to people, some of whom clearly didn't need it, remains compelling.
Getting more of the 880,000 who were entitled to pension credit but didn't claim is a huge positive but the cliff-edge nature of the payment system allows those who miss the WFA by less than a fiver to cry foul (and rightly so). More thought would have led to a graduated system where perhaps the WFA payments were reduced for those with more income.
The problem as often with politics isn't the theory or the practice but the perception. As we see with immigration, what people think is happening and what is happening are often two very different things but challenging and overcoming those perceptions takes time and argument.
"I'm not quite sure where the "sleaze" angle is but I'll let that go."
Ok, yeh, maybe too strong a word at this point.
But I still think: what possesses these people?
We are being treated to almost hourly drip drip of free holidays, flats, tickets, dresses, football boxes etc etc.
Do they ever think - that would be very nice, I like NY on New Year's Eve, but if this got out it would make me look shit.
Claude at the moment is the best LLM IMO. For all the hype over ChatGPT o1, I just found that it sits and "thinks" for ages and the result isn't actually much better. At best its stopping you manually saying, do this, then this, at worst because it is trying to take many steps itself, it goes off down the wrong path and you wait 30s+ for it to pump out nonsense.
Yes. Apparently o1 is great at maths and coding but as I don’t care about maths or coding that whizzes past me
For words, Claude is still best by a fair stretch. Also the context window on ChatGPT remains relatively tiny
As it seems I am temporarily allowed to discuss AI - I’d note that I’ve seen people all over the world quietly using it, and many hyper aware of all developments. The revolution is happening but it’s sotto voce. A lot of people don’t want their employers to know they are using it
For these and other reasons I wouldn’t bet against AI. It is coming and it is inevitable. Betting against it is like betting against electricity in 1895
I have found the opposite, its shit at coding, its really infuriating. But I am not asking it to code flappy birds game or a web app. As for maths, I have asked it some things that aren't that complicated (I am not a mathematician, but I do lots of maths) and it has done very poorly.
I yield to your experience in these matters
Gemini is often overlooked. It has a massive context window and seems to be improving over time
Frankly, they are all amazing and if you showed them to people in 2014 or 2004 they’d say Wow so that’s AGI
It’s the boiling frog thing
Oh don't get me wrong, I think if you have 100-120 IQ and do very repetitive white collar role and quite low down in the company hierarchy, I would be very concerned for my future. I actually think those that have lower IQ are far better insulated against this tech because they are much more likely to be in vocational jobs that robotics are nowhere near doing their work.
But o1 at least I have found massively underwhelming for my use cases. Its like asking an undergraduate who if they don't know the answer doesn't say I don't know or I think the answer is, it gives you a 10 minute BS talk all about it.
Are we allowed to talk about AI here again, then?
In which case.
Those of us "golgafrincham b ark" types whose main grift in life has been to shuffle papers and produce reports are doomed.
I do a lot of strategy consultancy work for startups and I feed my meeting notes into Claude (as others have noted, the best of the current bunch) and it largely spits out what I would. Not as good, but probably 70-80% of the way there. So why pay me thousands for my time when you're on a tight budget and the chatbot gets you 70-80% of the way there?
Well, I like to think the extra 20% is the difference between the startups I work with that succeed, and the guys who use chatbot answers and don't. But this is not quite 2 years into the AI revolution, and at the current pace, I will be outclassed within the next few years. If I'm lucky. The next few months, if I'm not.
I consider myself fortunate to be financially secure. Because if I wasn't, I'm pretty sure I would be looking at the bread line in a few years, much as a coal miner in the 90s. A completely obsolescent skill set.
I've retired except for translation and chairing my constituency CLP. I've wondered whether the translation work (mostly for the European Commission) will go, since they send a 95% correct draft translation, but although the pay per word has gone down the pay per hour remains decent (about £50/hour, with a minimum of £17.50 even if it's a single sentence) for zipping through the drafts, filling in the 5% and spotting any errors. It's a nice little retirement earner and I think they reckon the human eye is still important as you do occasinally catch the system totally misunderstanding something.
Any news on the post retirement study ideas?
I remain awestruck by people who are competent in more than one language.
My 21 year old granddaughter speaks Welsh, English, French, Italian and Japanese
Big G, could I ask a difficult question? With your age and all that, being a distinguished poster and having given us your insights of the world, being realistic there is going to be a day when you go to post in the big PB in the Sky. So when I had a heart op last year I thought that if I don’t come out the other side I would like PB to know. I sent a message to Viewcode that if I didn’t post again it had gone tits up so say goodbye for me.
The long and the short of it is, do you, and frankly other posters, have people who know of our life here where if we bail out they can let PB know? It is a community (god I hate that phrase) but would be good to mourn, salute people where they deserve it.
Sorry if insensitive.
I have to say that is a little bit insensitive....
As far as as I know we have had a number of very prominent pbCOMers take that giant leap into the unknown, very sadly Plato and SBS.
We have JackW who must be older than those trees in California too, but I think he'll survive into the Big Crunch...
I don't think BiG G has any plans to check out anytime soon
My point was that I have told my sister if I check out to log in and post a message. I wish, for example Plato had someone who could have just left an epitaph and notice. I don’t for one moment want or think Big G is checking out soon but I like the idea that we don’t just disappear and that people know we haven’t flounced, just sort of died. And maybe leave a valedictory message.
Yup - if you want to knw what interests people about the Govt at the moment it is the stickiness of Starmer's fingers. That looks really bad and could really linger unless the Govt can show some real achievements.
Ask 90% of folk about Sue Gray and you will get a simple answer - who?
Most of the current reporting is people going through publicly available declarations. The information was available but no-one was reporting it because it’s small fry. The Tories accepted £5 million from Frank Hester, who Sunak had condemned for his racist comments, shortly before the election, but the Tories are currently irrelevant, so that’s not become a big news story.
That isn't what set this off though...it the stink around giving donors passes, parachuting in other donors to supposedly impartial positions, and these declarations not being 100% honest about what they actually were. When your pitch was we only care about public service, we are whiter than whiter.
The problem for Starmer is then his reaction was I don't care, I am going to keep taking the freebies, I am not taking any lessons from the Tories.
You’re right, this was started off by some more substantive things. But my point is that the media are trying to continue it with a bunch of irrelevancies, because the news cycle works that way.
The donor pass, the late declaration. Not good. I didn’t vote for Starmer or Labour. I’m not saying he’s perfect. But I can also tell a big story from trifles.
That was my view initially. But it turns out there are a lot of trifles. An improbably large number of trifles. Absolutely shitloads of trifles. A whole confectionery factory of trifles. Labour are looking very custardy indeed. If it was just one dress, ot just one Taylot Swift concert, or just one football match, or just one trip to New York, or just one pair of glasses ... But it's not; it's out of all proportion to any of their predecessors. It's within the rules, but only in the same way that the duck-house-on-expenses was within the rules. It's absolutely taking the piss.
It is. And not only that, it is in the first 3 months and from a government that expressly promised to “clean up politics” and dedicate itself to “service”. We just didn’t realise they meant THEY are going “to clean up” and the service meant lavishly “serving” themselves
I didn't vote for Starmer or Labour either.
I sense the irritation is not with the gifts or trifles themselves which have been a part of politics since time immaterial but the sense of hypocrisy from Labour and Starmer who made certain "promises" or "commitments" about how they were going to govern before the election and seem (to some) not to be honouring those commitments.
I'm not sure how accepting tickets to a Taylor Swift concert or going to the St Leger last Saturday (the first PM to do so since a certain Winston Churchill in 1953) undermines politics. Prime Ministers have often attended big sporting and cultural events and no one has suggested they are demeaning politics.
Where I would be concerned is, as happened with Bernie Ecclestone in 1997, there was a sense in which legislation was deliberately amended or altered to placate a donor or as a result of some inducement or gift. That would be corrupt and would be deserved to be called out.
"Getting by with a little help from my friends" is more than a line in a song but assuming all these gifts are an attempt to curry favour or store up some political capital for later use - I'm less convinced.
I think that likely is correct re the irritation and the fact Starmer’s public image is a sort of upstanding, boring but decent sort of fellow who made a lot of hay of not being in it for himself but being in it for public service. When he’s actually challenged on the freebies he gets (in fact, when he gets challenged at all) he doesn’t half have a habit of sounding a bit prickly and snotty.
I consider myself more cynical than the average bear but I am staggered to see Labour shoot themselves so totally in the head within weeks of gaining power because of freebies and sleaze.
Just incredible.
Farage must be laughing himself to sleep every night as he counts the days down to 2028.
I'm not quite sure where the "sleaze" angle is but I'll let that go.
I'm no supporter of Labour per se but I'm happy to give the Government a chance to see what it can or thinks it can do.
The WFA announcement was poor politics in extemis though the fundamental argument of public money being given to people, some of whom clearly didn't need it, remains compelling.
Getting more of the 880,000 who were entitled to pension credit but didn't claim is a huge positive but the cliff-edge nature of the payment system allows those who miss the WFA by less than a fiver to cry foul (and rightly so). More thought would have led to a graduated system where perhaps the WFA payments were reduced for those with more income.
The problem as often with politics isn't the theory or the practice but the perception. As we see with immigration, what people think is happening and what is happening are often two very different things but challenging and overcoming those perceptions takes time and argument.
"I'm not quite sure where the "sleaze" angle is but I'll let that go."
Ok, yeh, maybe too strong a word at this point.
But I still think: what possesses these people?
We are being treated to almost hourly drip drip of free holidays, flats, tickets, dresses, football boxes etc etc.
Do they ever think - that would be very nice, I like NY on New Year's Eve, but if this got out it would make me look shit.
“Well OK it actually would have cost £12,000 but I’ll just lie and reduce that by an order of magnitude and pretend it cost the same as three nights in St Ives”
Claude at the moment is the best LLM IMO. For all the hype over ChatGPT o1, I just found that it sits and "thinks" for ages and the result isn't actually much better. At best its stopping you manually saying, do this, then this, at worst because it is trying to take many steps itself, it goes off down the wrong path and you wait 30s+ for it to pump out nonsense.
Yes. Apparently o1 is great at maths and coding but as I don’t care about maths or coding that whizzes past me
For words, Claude is still best by a fair stretch. Also the context window on ChatGPT remains relatively tiny
As it seems I am temporarily allowed to discuss AI - I’d note that I’ve seen people all over the world quietly using it, and many hyper aware of all developments. The revolution is happening but it’s sotto voce. A lot of people don’t want their employers to know they are using it
For these and other reasons I wouldn’t bet against AI. It is coming and it is inevitable. Betting against it is like betting against electricity in 1895
I have found the opposite, its shit at coding, its really infuriating. But I am not asking it to code flappy birds game or a web app. As for maths, I have asked it some things that aren't that complicated (I am not a mathematician, but I do lots of maths) and it has done very poorly.
I yield to your experience in these matters
Gemini is often overlooked. It has a massive context window and seems to be improving over time
Frankly, they are all amazing and if you showed them to people in 2014 or 2004 they’d say Wow so that’s AGI
It’s the boiling frog thing
Oh don't get me wrong, I think if you have 100-120 IQ and do very repetitive white collar role and quite low down in the company hierarchy, I would be very concerned for my future. I actually think those that have lower IQ are far better insulated against this tech because they are much more likely to be in vocational jobs that robotics are nowhere near doing their work.
But o1 at least I have found massively underwhelming for my use cases. Its like asking an undergraduate who if they don't know the answer doesn't say I don't know or I think the answer is, it gives you a 10 minute BS talk all about it.
Are we allowed to talk about AI here again, then?
In which case.
Those of us "golgafrincham b ark" types whose main grift in life has been to shuffle papers and produce reports are doomed.
I do a lot of strategy consultancy work for startups and I feed my meeting notes into Claude (as others have noted, the best of the current bunch) and it largely spits out what I would. Not as good, but probably 70-80% of the way there. So why pay me thousands for my time when you're on a tight budget and the chatbot gets you 70-80% of the way there?
Well, I like to think the extra 20% is the difference between the startups I work with that succeed, and the guys who use chatbot answers and don't. But this is not quite 2 years into the AI revolution, and at the current pace, I will be outclassed within the next few years. If I'm lucky. The next few months, if I'm not.
I consider myself fortunate to be financially secure. Because if I wasn't, I'm pretty sure I would be looking at the bread line in a few years, much as a coal miner in the 90s. A completely obsolescent skill set.
I've retired except for translation and chairing my constituency CLP. I've wondered whether the translation work (mostly for the European Commission) will go, since they send a 95% correct draft translation, but although the pay per word has gone down the pay per hour remains decent (about £50/hour, with a minimum of £17.50 even if it's a single sentence) for zipping through the drafts, filling in the 5% and spotting any errors. It's a nice little retirement earner and I think they reckon the human eye is still important as you do occasinally catch the system totally misunderstanding something.
Any news on the post retirement study ideas?
I remain awestruck by people who are competent in more than one language.
My 21 year old granddaughter speaks Welsh, English, French, Italian and Japanese
Big G, could I ask a difficult question? With your age and all that, being a distinguished poster and having given us your insights of the world, being realistic there is going to be a day when you go to post in the big PB in the Sky. So when I had a heart op last year I thought that if I don’t come out the other side I would like PB to know. I sent a message to Viewcode that if I didn’t post again it had gone tits up so say goodbye for me.
The long and the short of it is, do you, and frankly other posters, have people who know of our life here where if we bail out they can let PB know? It is a community (god I hate that phrase) but would be good to mourn, salute people where they deserve it.
Sorry if insensitive.
No it is not sensitive and my wife would no doubt respond
Thanks Big G, and Boulay too for raising. It's something that worries me too, with the health troubles you've had. I feel like I've known you for nearly two decades now, and it would leave a dreadful hole if one day you just weren't there. You'd be missed. That goes for some of our other more venerable posters too.
Claude at the moment is the best LLM IMO. For all the hype over ChatGPT o1, I just found that it sits and "thinks" for ages and the result isn't actually much better. At best its stopping you manually saying, do this, then this, at worst because it is trying to take many steps itself, it goes off down the wrong path and you wait 30s+ for it to pump out nonsense.
Yes. Apparently o1 is great at maths and coding but as I don’t care about maths or coding that whizzes past me
For words, Claude is still best by a fair stretch. Also the context window on ChatGPT remains relatively tiny
As it seems I am temporarily allowed to discuss AI - I’d note that I’ve seen people all over the world quietly using it, and many hyper aware of all developments. The revolution is happening but it’s sotto voce. A lot of people don’t want their employers to know they are using it
For these and other reasons I wouldn’t bet against AI. It is coming and it is inevitable. Betting against it is like betting against electricity in 1895
I have found the opposite, its shit at coding, its really infuriating. But I am not asking it to code flappy birds game or a web app. As for maths, I have asked it some things that aren't that complicated (I am not a mathematician, but I do lots of maths) and it has done very poorly.
I yield to your experience in these matters
Gemini is often overlooked. It has a massive context window and seems to be improving over time
Frankly, they are all amazing and if you showed them to people in 2014 or 2004 they’d say Wow so that’s AGI
It’s the boiling frog thing
Oh don't get me wrong, I think if you have 100-120 IQ and do very repetitive white collar role and quite low down in the company hierarchy, I would be very concerned for my future. I actually think those that have lower IQ are far better insulated against this tech because they are much more likely to be in vocational jobs that robotics are nowhere near doing their work.
But o1 at least I have found massively underwhelming for my use cases. Its like asking an undergraduate who if they don't know the answer doesn't say I don't know or I think the answer is, it gives you a 10 minute BS talk all about it.
Are we allowed to talk about AI here again, then?
In which case.
Those of us "golgafrincham b ark" types whose main grift in life has been to shuffle papers and produce reports are doomed.
I do a lot of strategy consultancy work for startups and I feed my meeting notes into Claude (as others have noted, the best of the current bunch) and it largely spits out what I would. Not as good, but probably 70-80% of the way there. So why pay me thousands for my time when you're on a tight budget and the chatbot gets you 70-80% of the way there?
Well, I like to think the extra 20% is the difference between the startups I work with that succeed, and the guys who use chatbot answers and don't. But this is not quite 2 years into the AI revolution, and at the current pace, I will be outclassed within the next few years. If I'm lucky. The next few months, if I'm not.
I consider myself fortunate to be financially secure. Because if I wasn't, I'm pretty sure I would be looking at the bread line in a few years, much as a coal miner in the 90s. A completely obsolescent skill set.
I've retired except for translation and chairing my constituency CLP. I've wondered whether the translation work (mostly for the European Commission) will go, since they send a 95% correct draft translation, but although the pay per word has gone down the pay per hour remains decent (about £50/hour, with a minimum of £17.50 even if it's a single sentence) for zipping through the drafts, filling in the 5% and spotting any errors. It's a nice little retirement earner and I think they reckon the human eye is still important as you do occasinally catch the system totally misunderstanding something.
Any news on the post retirement study ideas?
I remain awestruck by people who are competent in more than one language.
My 21 year old granddaughter speaks Welsh, English, French, Italian and Japanese
Big G, could I ask a difficult question? With your age and all that, being a distinguished poster and having given us your insights of the world, being realistic there is going to be a day when you go to post in the big PB in the Sky. So when I had a heart op last year I thought that if I don’t come out the other side I would like PB to know. I sent a message to Viewcode that if I didn’t post again it had gone tits up so say goodbye for me.
The long and the short of it is, do you, and frankly other posters, have people who know of our life here where if we bail out they can let PB know? It is a community (god I hate that phrase) but would be good to mourn, salute people where they deserve it.
Sorry if insensitive.
I have to say that is a little bit insensitive....
As far as as I know we have had a number of very prominent pbCOMers take that giant leap into the unknown, very sadly Plato and SBS.
We have JackW who must be older than those trees in California too, but I think he'll survive into the Big Crunch...
I don't think BiG G has any plans to check out anytime soon
My point was that I have told my sister if I check out to log in and post a message. I wish, for example Plato had someone who could have just left an epitaph and notice. I don’t for one moment want or think Big G is checking out soon but I like the idea that we don’t just disappear and that people know we haven’t flounced, just sort of died. And maybe leave a valedictory message.
I’ve also thought about this. None of my friends or fam are really aware that I “often” comment on here….
I consider myself more cynical than the average bear but I am staggered to see Labour shoot themselves so totally in the head within weeks of gaining power because of freebies and sleaze.
Just incredible.
Farage must be laughing himself to sleep every night as he counts the days down to 2028.
I'm not quite sure where the "sleaze" angle is but I'll let that go.
I'm no supporter of Labour per se but I'm happy to give the Government a chance to see what it can or thinks it can do.
The WFA announcement was poor politics in extemis though the fundamental argument of public money being given to people, some of whom clearly didn't need it, remains compelling.
Getting more of the 880,000 who were entitled to pension credit but didn't claim is a huge positive but the cliff-edge nature of the payment system allows those who miss the WFA by less than a fiver to cry foul (and rightly so). More thought would have led to a graduated system where perhaps the WFA payments were reduced for those with more income.
The problem as often with politics isn't the theory or the practice but the perception. As we see with immigration, what people think is happening and what is happening are often two very different things but challenging and overcoming those perceptions takes time and argument.
"I'm not quite sure where the "sleaze" angle is but I'll let that go."
Ok, yeh, maybe too strong a word at this point.
But I still think: what possesses these people?
We are being treated to almost hourly drip drip of free holidays, flats, tickets, dresses, football boxes etc etc.
Do they ever think - that would be very nice, I like NY on New Year's Eve, but if this got out it would make me look shit.
Normally these stories come out only occasionally and don't make a splash. The chance of an individual MP making the front page is small. It's only when it snowballs, or metastasizes like MPs expenses or #MeToo that everyone gets scared.
MPs donations is, I suppose, a bit like MPs expenses. Perhaps it should have been dealt with decisively at the same time.
Claude at the moment is the best LLM IMO. For all the hype over ChatGPT o1, I just found that it sits and "thinks" for ages and the result isn't actually much better. At best its stopping you manually saying, do this, then this, at worst because it is trying to take many steps itself, it goes off down the wrong path and you wait 30s+ for it to pump out nonsense.
Yes. Apparently o1 is great at maths and coding but as I don’t care about maths or coding that whizzes past me
For words, Claude is still best by a fair stretch. Also the context window on ChatGPT remains relatively tiny
As it seems I am temporarily allowed to discuss AI - I’d note that I’ve seen people all over the world quietly using it, and many hyper aware of all developments. The revolution is happening but it’s sotto voce. A lot of people don’t want their employers to know they are using it
For these and other reasons I wouldn’t bet against AI. It is coming and it is inevitable. Betting against it is like betting against electricity in 1895
I have found the opposite, its shit at coding, its really infuriating. But I am not asking it to code flappy birds game or a web app. As for maths, I have asked it some things that aren't that complicated (I am not a mathematician, but I do lots of maths) and it has done very poorly.
I yield to your experience in these matters
Gemini is often overlooked. It has a massive context window and seems to be improving over time
Frankly, they are all amazing and if you showed them to people in 2014 or 2004 they’d say Wow so that’s AGI
It’s the boiling frog thing
Oh don't get me wrong, I think if you have 100-120 IQ and do very repetitive white collar role and quite low down in the company hierarchy, I would be very concerned for my future. I actually think those that have lower IQ are far better insulated against this tech because they are much more likely to be in vocational jobs that robotics are nowhere near doing their work.
But o1 at least I have found massively underwhelming for my use cases. Its like asking an undergraduate who if they don't know the answer doesn't say I don't know or I think the answer is, it gives you a 10 minute BS talk all about it.
Are we allowed to talk about AI here again, then?
In which case.
Those of us "golgafrincham b ark" types whose main grift in life has been to shuffle papers and produce reports are doomed.
I do a lot of strategy consultancy work for startups and I feed my meeting notes into Claude (as others have noted, the best of the current bunch) and it largely spits out what I would. Not as good, but probably 70-80% of the way there. So why pay me thousands for my time when you're on a tight budget and the chatbot gets you 70-80% of the way there?
Well, I like to think the extra 20% is the difference between the startups I work with that succeed, and the guys who use chatbot answers and don't. But this is not quite 2 years into the AI revolution, and at the current pace, I will be outclassed within the next few years. If I'm lucky. The next few months, if I'm not.
I consider myself fortunate to be financially secure. Because if I wasn't, I'm pretty sure I would be looking at the bread line in a few years, much as a coal miner in the 90s. A completely obsolescent skill set.
I've retired except for translation and chairing my constituency CLP. I've wondered whether the translation work (mostly for the European Commission) will go, since they send a 95% correct draft translation, but although the pay per word has gone down the pay per hour remains decent (about £50/hour, with a minimum of £17.50 even if it's a single sentence) for zipping through the drafts, filling in the 5% and spotting any errors. It's a nice little retirement earner and I think they reckon the human eye is still important as you do occasinally catch the system totally misunderstanding something.
Any news on the post retirement study ideas?
I remain awestruck by people who are competent in more than one language.
My 21 year old granddaughter speaks Welsh, English, French, Italian and Japanese
Big G, could I ask a difficult question? With your age and all that, being a distinguished poster and having given us your insights of the world, being realistic there is going to be a day when you go to post in the big PB in the Sky. So when I had a heart op last year I thought that if I don’t come out the other side I would like PB to know. I sent a message to Viewcode that if I didn’t post again it had gone tits up so say goodbye for me.
The long and the short of it is, do you, and frankly other posters, have people who know of our life here where if we bail out they can let PB know? It is a community (god I hate that phrase) but would be good to mourn, salute people where they deserve it.
Sorry if insensitive.
I have to say that is a little bit insensitive....
As far as as I know we have had a number of very prominent pbCOMers take that giant leap into the unknown, very sadly Plato and SBS.
We have JackW who must be older than those trees in California too, but I think he'll survive into the Big Crunch...
I don't think BiG G has any plans to check out anytime soon
I am happy that the question was asked and that @boulay felt it could be asked
I have no plans for my family to sing 'Abide with me' and hope to post for years to come
My dear wife has fallen 3 times in the last 24 hours bless her, and she's OK but our secret to a long marriage is to have a great sense of humour and we have laughed about it as age does not come alone
To be fair to Keith, most people wouldn’t say no to a free private box
Imagine if journalists had to declare all the freebies they’d received when writing articles.
This is all phoney war stuff. Bring on the Budget! I want the UK political discourse here to move on to something more substantial.
Yes, that's the scam of travel journalists. They get freebies from tourism authorities, hotels etc and are expected to produce puff pieces passed off as journalism, when it's really just advertising.
Of course that isn't the contract, but slag off a place as dull and expensive and the commissions dry up very quickly.
Travel journalism is hard. Surprisingly hard
I mean, some people make it look easy - I guess they have a gift, I dunno - I knap flints as my main job and only do the travel stuff as hobby, really. But real pro travel journalism is extremely competitive - for obvious reasons - and it turns out that many are called and few are chosen. Every journalist has a go at it, but not many have the knack. And those few get the gigs
Not quite the toss-em-off “puff pieces” you describe
Try it for yourself. Try writing about a place that captures the spirit of it in a fresh and diverting way, that avoids cliche but ALSO avoids dipping into purple prose. Not as easy as it looks
I never said writing puff pieces was easy, just said that it was an implicit part of the deal.
It's why we never see pieces slagging off a city or destination in the travel section, though they may appear in other parts of a periodical, such as the recent articles on anti-tourism protests in Barcelona, Palma, Venice etc.
I wouldn’t argue with that. The economics of travel journalism means that the writers must accept free hospitality: that is the way it works. And would you rather a world where the only travel opinions come from inane, 19 year old, pretty blonde Tik Tok influencers?
Aren't most of them also just taking freebies (and going 'Woah, look at this stuff' in a vapid voice)?
Oh god, yes. Of course!
Tho actually I will slightly defend TikTok and insta travel influencers. I’ve seen them at work in the Maldives and Sharm etc and it is much harder than it looks (like travel writing). That perfect 30 seconds of “spontaneous” video on the beach actually takes hours to arrange and produce, and the girls spend hours getting the make up, or “natural lack of make up”, precisely right
Also, they generally only go to luxe places (like the Maldives) which are lovely but they can quickly get boring
I've done this in a small way, testing out tents and such. Really hard to get the perfect sunrise shot in Scotland (those photos usually happen by pure chance) and crafting something funny for Instagram/Tik Tok is equally difficult.
I hate drones which really holds me back. I've made a few hundred from my writing though, which is immensely satisfying.
Drones can get great shots tho. Eg we were talking about Victoria Falls recently. And how I went where with a zimbo nutter
He also had a drone. I am in this photo
Bin there, by helicopter
Also bin 2 da blue Nile falls and was devastated to find you have to go at the weekend. Monday to Friday they TURN THEM OFF and pipe the water through a hydro electric set-up. Every day we stray further from God.
Iguazu Falls next February. I will report how they stack up.
Yup - if you want to knw what interests people about the Govt at the moment it is the stickiness of Starmer's fingers. That looks really bad and could really linger unless the Govt can show some real achievements.
Ask 90% of folk about Sue Gray and you will get a simple answer - who?
Most of the current reporting is people going through publicly available declarations. The information was available but no-one was reporting it because it’s small fry. The Tories accepted £5 million from Frank Hester, who Sunak had condemned for his racist comments, shortly before the election, but the Tories are currently irrelevant, so that’s not become a big news story.
That isn't what set this off though...it the stink around giving donors passes, parachuting in other donors to supposedly impartial positions, and these declarations not being 100% honest about what they actually were. When your pitch was we only care about public service, we are whiter than whiter.
The problem for Starmer is then his reaction was I don't care, I am going to keep taking the freebies, I am not taking any lessons from the Tories.
You’re right, this was started off by some more substantive things. But my point is that the media are trying to continue it with a bunch of irrelevancies, because the news cycle works that way.
The donor pass, the late declaration. Not good. I didn’t vote for Starmer or Labour. I’m not saying he’s perfect. But I can also tell a big story from trifles.
That was my view initially. But it turns out there are a lot of trifles. An improbably large number of trifles. Absolutely shitloads of trifles. A whole confectionery factory of trifles. Labour are looking very custardy indeed. If it was just one dress, ot just one Taylot Swift concert, or just one football match, or just one trip to New York, or just one pair of glasses ... But it's not; it's out of all proportion to any of their predecessors. It's within the rules, but only in the same way that the duck-house-on-expenses was within the rules. It's absolutely taking the piss.
It is. And not only that, it is in the first 3 months and from a government that expressly promised to “clean up politics” and dedicate itself to “service”. We just didn’t realise they meant THEY are going “to clean up” and the service meant lavishly “serving” themselves
I didn't vote for Starmer or Labour either.
I sense the irritation is not with the gifts or trifles themselves which have been a part of politics since time immaterial but the sense of hypocrisy from Labour and Starmer who made certain "promises" or "commitments" about how they were going to govern before the election and seem (to some) not to be honouring those commitments.
I'm not sure how accepting tickets to a Taylor Swift concert or going to the St Leger last Saturday (the first PM to do so since a certain Winston Churchill in 1953) undermines politics. Prime Ministers have often attended big sporting and cultural events and no one has suggested they are demeaning politics.
Where I would be concerned is, as happened with Bernie Ecclestone in 1997, there was a sense in which legislation was deliberately amended or altered to placate a donor or as a result of some inducement or gift. That would be corrupt and would be deserved to be called out.
"Getting by with a little help from my friends" is more than a line in a song but assuming all these gifts are an attempt to curry favour or store up some political capital for later use - I'm less convinced.
I think that likely is correct re the irritation and the fact Starmer’s public image is a sort of upstanding, boring but decent sort of fellow who made a lot of hay of not being in it for himself but being in it for public service. When he’s actually challenged on the freebies he gets (in fact, when he gets challenged at all) he doesn’t half have a habit of sounding a bit prickly and snotty.
It isn’t a great look.
He was supposed to be Colin Firth.
Turn's out he's a rather grubby Hugh Grant.
I promise you I’m the grubby high grant/daniel cleaver and would take it every time over being Sir Keir Sponger. I bet he doesn’t even pay for his Christmas jumper at this year’s Downing Street Christmas party where they celebrate a cromwellian Christmas by frowning on booze whilst carrying up the packages of new dresses to Victoria Sponge’s Christmas Tree sponsored by John Lewis’s in advance of Sharon White moving from John Lewis to a senior gov position.
I consider myself more cynical than the average bear but I am staggered to see Labour shoot themselves so totally in the head within weeks of gaining power because of freebies and sleaze.
Just incredible.
Farage must be laughing himself to sleep every night as he counts the days down to 2028.
I'm not quite sure where the "sleaze" angle is but I'll let that go.
I'm no supporter of Labour per se but I'm happy to give the Government a chance to see what it can or thinks it can do.
The WFA announcement was poor politics in extemis though the fundamental argument of public money being given to people, some of whom clearly didn't need it, remains compelling.
Getting more of the 880,000 who were entitled to pension credit but didn't claim is a huge positive but the cliff-edge nature of the payment system allows those who miss the WFA by less than a fiver to cry foul (and rightly so). More thought would have led to a graduated system where perhaps the WFA payments were reduced for those with more income.
The problem as often with politics isn't the theory or the practice but the perception. As we see with immigration, what people think is happening and what is happening are often two very different things but challenging and overcoming those perceptions takes time and argument.
"I'm not quite sure where the "sleaze" angle is but I'll let that go."
Ok, yeh, maybe too strong a word at this point.
But I still think: what possesses these people?
We are being treated to almost hourly drip drip of free holidays, flats, tickets, dresses, football boxes etc etc.
Do they ever think - that would be very nice, I like NY on New Year's Eve, but if this got out it would make me look shit.
“Well OK it actually would have cost £12,000 but I’ll just lie and reduce that by an order of magnitude and pretend it cost the same as three nights in St Ives”
How do we measure the cost of off-market things? I've stayed in a friend's flat in London which would go for £500 a night. But it's full of his stuff, so he can't rent it out for that or any figure to strangers. So what's the benefit to me? Probably £100 a night because that's the cost of the dive hotel I would be at if I couldn't borrow his place.
Claude at the moment is the best LLM IMO. For all the hype over ChatGPT o1, I just found that it sits and "thinks" for ages and the result isn't actually much better. At best its stopping you manually saying, do this, then this, at worst because it is trying to take many steps itself, it goes off down the wrong path and you wait 30s+ for it to pump out nonsense.
Yes. Apparently o1 is great at maths and coding but as I don’t care about maths or coding that whizzes past me
For words, Claude is still best by a fair stretch. Also the context window on ChatGPT remains relatively tiny
As it seems I am temporarily allowed to discuss AI - I’d note that I’ve seen people all over the world quietly using it, and many hyper aware of all developments. The revolution is happening but it’s sotto voce. A lot of people don’t want their employers to know they are using it
For these and other reasons I wouldn’t bet against AI. It is coming and it is inevitable. Betting against it is like betting against electricity in 1895
I have found the opposite, its shit at coding, its really infuriating. But I am not asking it to code flappy birds game or a web app. As for maths, I have asked it some things that aren't that complicated (I am not a mathematician, but I do lots of maths) and it has done very poorly.
I yield to your experience in these matters
Gemini is often overlooked. It has a massive context window and seems to be improving over time
Frankly, they are all amazing and if you showed them to people in 2014 or 2004 they’d say Wow so that’s AGI
It’s the boiling frog thing
Oh don't get me wrong, I think if you have 100-120 IQ and do very repetitive white collar role and quite low down in the company hierarchy, I would be very concerned for my future. I actually think those that have lower IQ are far better insulated against this tech because they are much more likely to be in vocational jobs that robotics are nowhere near doing their work.
But o1 at least I have found massively underwhelming for my use cases. Its like asking an undergraduate who if they don't know the answer doesn't say I don't know or I think the answer is, it gives you a 10 minute BS talk all about it.
Are we allowed to talk about AI here again, then?
In which case.
Those of us "golgafrincham b ark" types whose main grift in life has been to shuffle papers and produce reports are doomed.
I do a lot of strategy consultancy work for startups and I feed my meeting notes into Claude (as others have noted, the best of the current bunch) and it largely spits out what I would. Not as good, but probably 70-80% of the way there. So why pay me thousands for my time when you're on a tight budget and the chatbot gets you 70-80% of the way there?
Well, I like to think the extra 20% is the difference between the startups I work with that succeed, and the guys who use chatbot answers and don't. But this is not quite 2 years into the AI revolution, and at the current pace, I will be outclassed within the next few years. If I'm lucky. The next few months, if I'm not.
I consider myself fortunate to be financially secure. Because if I wasn't, I'm pretty sure I would be looking at the bread line in a few years, much as a coal miner in the 90s. A completely obsolescent skill set.
I've retired except for translation and chairing my constituency CLP. I've wondered whether the translation work (mostly for the European Commission) will go, since they send a 95% correct draft translation, but although the pay per word has gone down the pay per hour remains decent (about £50/hour, with a minimum of £17.50 even if it's a single sentence) for zipping through the drafts, filling in the 5% and spotting any errors. It's a nice little retirement earner and I think they reckon the human eye is still important as you do occasinally catch the system totally misunderstanding something.
Any news on the post retirement study ideas?
I remain awestruck by people who are competent in more than one language.
My 21 year old granddaughter speaks Welsh, English, French, Italian and Japanese
Big G, could I ask a difficult question? With your age and all that, being a distinguished poster and having given us your insights of the world, being realistic there is going to be a day when you go to post in the big PB in the Sky. So when I had a heart op last year I thought that if I don’t come out the other side I would like PB to know. I sent a message to Viewcode that if I didn’t post again it had gone tits up so say goodbye for me.
The long and the short of it is, do you, and frankly other posters, have people who know of our life here where if we bail out they can let PB know? It is a community (god I hate that phrase) but would be good to mourn, salute people where they deserve it.
Sorry if insensitive.
No it is not sensitive and my wife would no doubt respond
Thanks Big G, and Boulay too for raising. It's something that worries me too, with the health troubles you've had. I feel like I've known you for nearly two decades now, and it would leave a dreadful hole if one day you just weren't there. You'd be missed. That goes for some of our other more venerable posters too.
I consider myself more cynical than the average bear but I am staggered to see Labour shoot themselves so totally in the head within weeks of gaining power because of freebies and sleaze.
Just incredible.
Farage must be laughing himself to sleep every night as he counts the days down to 2028.
I'm not quite sure where the "sleaze" angle is but I'll let that go.
I'm no supporter of Labour per se but I'm happy to give the Government a chance to see what it can or thinks it can do.
The WFA announcement was poor politics in extemis though the fundamental argument of public money being given to people, some of whom clearly didn't need it, remains compelling.
Getting more of the 880,000 who were entitled to pension credit but didn't claim is a huge positive but the cliff-edge nature of the payment system allows those who miss the WFA by less than a fiver to cry foul (and rightly so). More thought would have led to a graduated system where perhaps the WFA payments were reduced for those with more income.
The problem as often with politics isn't the theory or the practice but the perception. As we see with immigration, what people think is happening and what is happening are often two very different things but challenging and overcoming those perceptions takes time and argument.
"I'm not quite sure where the "sleaze" angle is but I'll let that go."
Ok, yeh, maybe too strong a word at this point.
But I still think: what possesses these people?
We are being treated to almost hourly drip drip of free holidays, flats, tickets, dresses, football boxes etc etc.
Do they ever think - that would be very nice, I like NY on New Year's Eve, but if this got out it would make me look shit.
“Well OK it actually would have cost £12,000 but I’ll just lie and reduce that by an order of magnitude and pretend it cost the same as three nights in St Ives”
How do we measure the cost of off-market things? I've stayed in a friend's flat in London which would go for £500 a night. But it's full of his stuff, so he can't rent it out for that or any figure to strangers. So what's the benefit to me? Probably £100 a night because that's the cost of the dive hotel I would be at if I couldn't borrow his place.
Well its fairly easy now with AirBnB and Booking to estimate a value in kind...and again if you are politician and you want to be seen as whiter than whiter you either don't take the freebie or if you do you put down an estimate on the high end so not accused of hiding anything.
Are we going to find like expenses its the "done thing" amongst MPs to basically book these things are minimal as possible / average cost if you went to a run of the mill place.
Claude at the moment is the best LLM IMO. For all the hype over ChatGPT o1, I just found that it sits and "thinks" for ages and the result isn't actually much better. At best its stopping you manually saying, do this, then this, at worst because it is trying to take many steps itself, it goes off down the wrong path and you wait 30s+ for it to pump out nonsense.
Yes. Apparently o1 is great at maths and coding but as I don’t care about maths or coding that whizzes past me
For words, Claude is still best by a fair stretch. Also the context window on ChatGPT remains relatively tiny
As it seems I am temporarily allowed to discuss AI - I’d note that I’ve seen people all over the world quietly using it, and many hyper aware of all developments. The revolution is happening but it’s sotto voce. A lot of people don’t want their employers to know they are using it
For these and other reasons I wouldn’t bet against AI. It is coming and it is inevitable. Betting against it is like betting against electricity in 1895
I have found the opposite, its shit at coding, its really infuriating. But I am not asking it to code flappy birds game or a web app. As for maths, I have asked it some things that aren't that complicated (I am not a mathematician, but I do lots of maths) and it has done very poorly.
I yield to your experience in these matters
Gemini is often overlooked. It has a massive context window and seems to be improving over time
Frankly, they are all amazing and if you showed them to people in 2014 or 2004 they’d say Wow so that’s AGI
It’s the boiling frog thing
Oh don't get me wrong, I think if you have 100-120 IQ and do very repetitive white collar role and quite low down in the company hierarchy, I would be very concerned for my future. I actually think those that have lower IQ are far better insulated against this tech because they are much more likely to be in vocational jobs that robotics are nowhere near doing their work.
But o1 at least I have found massively underwhelming for my use cases. Its like asking an undergraduate who if they don't know the answer doesn't say I don't know or I think the answer is, it gives you a 10 minute BS talk all about it.
Are we allowed to talk about AI here again, then?
In which case.
Those of us "golgafrincham b ark" types whose main grift in life has been to shuffle papers and produce reports are doomed.
I do a lot of strategy consultancy work for startups and I feed my meeting notes into Claude (as others have noted, the best of the current bunch) and it largely spits out what I would. Not as good, but probably 70-80% of the way there. So why pay me thousands for my time when you're on a tight budget and the chatbot gets you 70-80% of the way there?
Well, I like to think the extra 20% is the difference between the startups I work with that succeed, and the guys who use chatbot answers and don't. But this is not quite 2 years into the AI revolution, and at the current pace, I will be outclassed within the next few years. If I'm lucky. The next few months, if I'm not.
I consider myself fortunate to be financially secure. Because if I wasn't, I'm pretty sure I would be looking at the bread line in a few years, much as a coal miner in the 90s. A completely obsolescent skill set.
I've retired except for translation and chairing my constituency CLP. I've wondered whether the translation work (mostly for the European Commission) will go, since they send a 95% correct draft translation, but although the pay per word has gone down the pay per hour remains decent (about £50/hour, with a minimum of £17.50 even if it's a single sentence) for zipping through the drafts, filling in the 5% and spotting any errors. It's a nice little retirement earner and I think they reckon the human eye is still important as you do occasinally catch the system totally misunderstanding something.
Any news on the post retirement study ideas?
I remain awestruck by people who are competent in more than one language.
My 21 year old granddaughter speaks Welsh, English, French, Italian and Japanese
Big G, could I ask a difficult question? With your age and all that, being a distinguished poster and having given us your insights of the world, being realistic there is going to be a day when you go to post in the big PB in the Sky. So when I had a heart op last year I thought that if I don’t come out the other side I would like PB to know. I sent a message to Viewcode that if I didn’t post again it had gone tits up so say goodbye for me.
The long and the short of it is, do you, and frankly other posters, have people who know of our life here where if we bail out they can let PB know? It is a community (god I hate that phrase) but would be good to mourn, salute people where they deserve it.
Sorry if insensitive.
I have to say that is a little bit insensitive....
As far as as I know we have had a number of very prominent pbCOMers take that giant leap into the unknown, very sadly Plato and SBS.
We have JackW who must be older than those trees in California too, but I think he'll survive into the Big Crunch...
I don't think BiG G has any plans to check out anytime soon
My point was that I have told my sister if I check out to log in and post a message. I wish, for example Plato had someone who could have just left an epitaph and notice. I don’t for one moment want or think Big G is checking out soon but I like the idea that we don’t just disappear and that people know we haven’t flounced, just sort of died. And maybe leave a valedictory message.
I’ve also thought about this. None of my friends or fam are really aware that I “often” comment on here….
Just ask your mates LadyG or Sir Eadric or Byronic to log back on and let us know when you have your crazy ballooning death over South Sudan.
To be fair to Keith, most people wouldn’t say no to a free private box
Imagine if journalists had to declare all the freebies they’d received when writing articles.
This is all phoney war stuff. Bring on the Budget! I want the UK political discourse here to move on to something more substantial.
Yes, that's the scam of travel journalists. They get freebies from tourism authorities, hotels etc and are expected to produce puff pieces passed off as journalism, when it's really just advertising.
Of course that isn't the contract, but slag off a place as dull and expensive and the commissions dry up very quickly.
Travel journalism is hard. Surprisingly hard
I mean, some people make it look easy - I guess they have a gift, I dunno - I knap flints as my main job and only do the travel stuff as hobby, really. But real pro travel journalism is extremely competitive - for obvious reasons - and it turns out that many are called and few are chosen. Every journalist has a go at it, but not many have the knack. And those few get the gigs
Not quite the toss-em-off “puff pieces” you describe
Try it for yourself. Try writing about a place that captures the spirit of it in a fresh and diverting way, that avoids cliche but ALSO avoids dipping into purple prose. Not as easy as it looks
I never said writing puff pieces was easy, just said that it was an implicit part of the deal.
It's why we never see pieces slagging off a city or destination in the travel section, though they may appear in other parts of a periodical, such as the recent articles on anti-tourism protests in Barcelona, Palma, Venice etc.
I wouldn’t argue with that. The economics of travel journalism means that the writers must accept free hospitality: that is the way it works. And would you rather a world where the only travel opinions come from inane, 19 year old, pretty blonde Tik Tok influencers?
Aren't most of them also just taking freebies (and going 'Woah, look at this stuff' in a vapid voice)?
Oh god, yes. Of course!
Tho actually I will slightly defend TikTok and insta travel influencers. I’ve seen them at work in the Maldives and Sharm etc and it is much harder than it looks (like travel writing). That perfect 30 seconds of “spontaneous” video on the beach actually takes hours to arrange and produce, and the girls spend hours getting the make up, or “natural lack of make up”, precisely right
Also, they generally only go to luxe places (like the Maldives) which are lovely but they can quickly get boring
I've done this in a small way, testing out tents and such. Really hard to get the perfect sunrise shot in Scotland (those photos usually happen by pure chance) and crafting something funny for Instagram/Tik Tok is equally difficult.
I hate drones which really holds me back. I've made a few hundred from my writing though, which is immensely satisfying.
Drones can get great shots tho. Eg we were talking about Victoria Falls recently. And how I went where with a zimbo nutter
He also had a drone. I am in this photo
Bin there, by helicopter
Also bin 2 da blue Nile falls and was devastated to find you have to go at the weekend. Monday to Friday they TURN THEM OFF and pipe the water through a hydro electric set-up. Every day we stray further from God.
Iguazu Falls next February. I will report how they stack up.
Bin there, Iguazu. And BY HELICOPTER
Iguazu is vastly more impressive than Victoria Falls. I like the smoke that thunders, I like the zebras in the garden in that posh colonial hotel, I like dipping in the Devil’s Pool, but Iguazu is on a different scale. And also it doesn’t really suffer the seasonality of Victoria Falls, it is always immense
It may be the single most exhilarating natural spectacle on earth, alongside Erta Ale lava lake in Ethiopia
Yup - if you want to knw what interests people about the Govt at the moment it is the stickiness of Starmer's fingers. That looks really bad and could really linger unless the Govt can show some real achievements.
Ask 90% of folk about Sue Gray and you will get a simple answer - who?
Most of the current reporting is people going through publicly available declarations. The information was available but no-one was reporting it because it’s small fry. The Tories accepted £5 million from Frank Hester, who Sunak had condemned for his racist comments, shortly before the election, but the Tories are currently irrelevant, so that’s not become a big news story.
That isn't what set this off though...it the stink around giving donors passes, parachuting in other donors to supposedly impartial positions, and these declarations not being 100% honest about what they actually were. When your pitch was we only care about public service, we are whiter than whiter.
The problem for Starmer is then his reaction was I don't care, I am going to keep taking the freebies, I am not taking any lessons from the Tories.
You’re right, this was started off by some more substantive things. But my point is that the media are trying to continue it with a bunch of irrelevancies, because the news cycle works that way.
The donor pass, the late declaration. Not good. I didn’t vote for Starmer or Labour. I’m not saying he’s perfect. But I can also tell a big story from trifles.
That was my view initially. But it turns out there are a lot of trifles. An improbably large number of trifles. Absolutely shitloads of trifles. A whole confectionery factory of trifles. Labour are looking very custardy indeed. If it was just one dress, ot just one Taylot Swift concert, or just one football match, or just one trip to New York, or just one pair of glasses ... But it's not; it's out of all proportion to any of their predecessors. It's within the rules, but only in the same way that the duck-house-on-expenses was within the rules. It's absolutely taking the piss.
It is. And not only that, it is in the first 3 months and from a government that expressly promised to “clean up politics” and dedicate itself to “service”. We just didn’t realise they meant THEY are going “to clean up” and the service meant lavishly “serving” themselves
I didn't vote for Starmer or Labour either.
I sense the irritation is not with the gifts or trifles themselves which have been a part of politics since time immaterial but the sense of hypocrisy from Labour and Starmer who made certain "promises" or "commitments" about how they were going to govern before the election and seem (to some) not to be honouring those commitments.
I'm not sure how accepting tickets to a Taylor Swift concert or going to the St Leger last Saturday (the first PM to do so since a certain Winston Churchill in 1953) undermines politics. Prime Ministers have often attended big sporting and cultural events and no one has suggested they are demeaning politics.
Where I would be concerned is, as happened with Bernie Ecclestone in 1997, there was a sense in which legislation was deliberately amended or altered to placate a donor or as a result of some inducement or gift. That would be corrupt and would be deserved to be called out.
"Getting by with a little help from my friends" is more than a line in a song but assuming all these gifts are an attempt to curry favour or store up some political capital for later use - I'm less convinced.
I think that likely is correct re the irritation and the fact Starmer’s public image is a sort of upstanding, boring but decent sort of fellow who made a lot of hay of not being in it for himself but being in it for public service. When he’s actually challenged on the freebies he gets (in fact, when he gets challenged at all) he doesn’t half have a habit of sounding a bit prickly and snotty.
Claude at the moment is the best LLM IMO. For all the hype over ChatGPT o1, I just found that it sits and "thinks" for ages and the result isn't actually much better. At best its stopping you manually saying, do this, then this, at worst because it is trying to take many steps itself, it goes off down the wrong path and you wait 30s+ for it to pump out nonsense.
Yes. Apparently o1 is great at maths and coding but as I don’t care about maths or coding that whizzes past me
For words, Claude is still best by a fair stretch. Also the context window on ChatGPT remains relatively tiny
As it seems I am temporarily allowed to discuss AI - I’d note that I’ve seen people all over the world quietly using it, and many hyper aware of all developments. The revolution is happening but it’s sotto voce. A lot of people don’t want their employers to know they are using it
For these and other reasons I wouldn’t bet against AI. It is coming and it is inevitable. Betting against it is like betting against electricity in 1895
I have found the opposite, its shit at coding, its really infuriating. But I am not asking it to code flappy birds game or a web app. As for maths, I have asked it some things that aren't that complicated (I am not a mathematician, but I do lots of maths) and it has done very poorly.
I yield to your experience in these matters
Gemini is often overlooked. It has a massive context window and seems to be improving over time
Frankly, they are all amazing and if you showed them to people in 2014 or 2004 they’d say Wow so that’s AGI
It’s the boiling frog thing
Oh don't get me wrong, I think if you have 100-120 IQ and do very repetitive white collar role and quite low down in the company hierarchy, I would be very concerned for my future. I actually think those that have lower IQ are far better insulated against this tech because they are much more likely to be in vocational jobs that robotics are nowhere near doing their work.
But o1 at least I have found massively underwhelming for my use cases. Its like asking an undergraduate who if they don't know the answer doesn't say I don't know or I think the answer is, it gives you a 10 minute BS talk all about it.
Are we allowed to talk about AI here again, then?
In which case.
Those of us "golgafrincham b ark" types whose main grift in life has been to shuffle papers and produce reports are doomed.
I do a lot of strategy consultancy work for startups and I feed my meeting notes into Claude (as others have noted, the best of the current bunch) and it largely spits out what I would. Not as good, but probably 70-80% of the way there. So why pay me thousands for my time when you're on a tight budget and the chatbot gets you 70-80% of the way there?
Well, I like to think the extra 20% is the difference between the startups I work with that succeed, and the guys who use chatbot answers and don't. But this is not quite 2 years into the AI revolution, and at the current pace, I will be outclassed within the next few years. If I'm lucky. The next few months, if I'm not.
I consider myself fortunate to be financially secure. Because if I wasn't, I'm pretty sure I would be looking at the bread line in a few years, much as a coal miner in the 90s. A completely obsolescent skill set.
I've retired except for translation and chairing my constituency CLP. I've wondered whether the translation work (mostly for the European Commission) will go, since they send a 95% correct draft translation, but although the pay per word has gone down the pay per hour remains decent (about £50/hour, with a minimum of £17.50 even if it's a single sentence) for zipping through the drafts, filling in the 5% and spotting any errors. It's a nice little retirement earner and I think they reckon the human eye is still important as you do occasinally catch the system totally misunderstanding something.
Any news on the post retirement study ideas?
I remain awestruck by people who are competent in more than one language.
My 21 year old granddaughter speaks Welsh, English, French, Italian and Japanese
If you will excuse the immodesty for a moment, my brain rarely lets me down. I reckon myself adept at English: I may not have anything interesting to say, but if someone else does I can spot whuch words they are using wrong and select the right ones. I can proof read well. And it's not just words; I am good at maths and can remember facts. But I am awful at foreign languages. I have not the slightest ear for them; their lexica remain forever elusive. It seems the hardest thing in the world to achieve even a basic competence. And yet, go to Europe and almost everyone there is able to switch effortlessly switch between four languages. These aren't specialists who've spent years striving to master a language - it's everyone. Waiters, actors, shopkeepers, children, passers-by. How is this possible? Dura Ace recently suggested it was just hours of hard work. Where do these people - like your granddaughter - find the time?
My granddaughter has the gift for languages so much so she was offered a place at Kyoto University but chose Turin for the last year before returning to Leeds University
We all have different talents and certainly I can manage French and once delivered a speech in Belgium in French ( No - not EU related, it was an international charity event)
To be fair to Keith, most people wouldn’t say no to a free private box
Imagine if journalists had to declare all the freebies they’d received when writing articles.
This is all phoney war stuff. Bring on the Budget! I want the UK political discourse here to move on to something more substantial.
Yes, that's the scam of travel journalists. They get freebies from tourism authorities, hotels etc and are expected to produce puff pieces passed off as journalism, when it's really just advertising.
Of course that isn't the contract, but slag off a place as dull and expensive and the commissions dry up very quickly.
Travel journalism is hard. Surprisingly hard
I mean, some people make it look easy - I guess they have a gift, I dunno - I knap flints as my main job and only do the travel stuff as hobby, really. But real pro travel journalism is extremely competitive - for obvious reasons - and it turns out that many are called and few are chosen. Every journalist has a go at it, but not many have the knack. And those few get the gigs
Not quite the toss-em-off “puff pieces” you describe
Try it for yourself. Try writing about a place that captures the spirit of it in a fresh and diverting way, that avoids cliche but ALSO avoids dipping into purple prose. Not as easy as it looks
I never said writing puff pieces was easy, just said that it was an implicit part of the deal.
It's why we never see pieces slagging off a city or destination in the travel section, though they may appear in other parts of a periodical, such as the recent articles on anti-tourism protests in Barcelona, Palma, Venice etc.
I wouldn’t argue with that. The economics of travel journalism means that the writers must accept free hospitality: that is the way it works. And would you rather a world where the only travel opinions come from inane, 19 year old, pretty blonde Tik Tok influencers?
Aren't most of them also just taking freebies (and going 'Woah, look at this stuff' in a vapid voice)?
Oh god, yes. Of course!
Tho actually I will slightly defend TikTok and insta travel influencers. I’ve seen them at work in the Maldives and Sharm etc and it is much harder than it looks (like travel writing). That perfect 30 seconds of “spontaneous” video on the beach actually takes hours to arrange and produce, and the girls spend hours getting the make up, or “natural lack of make up”, precisely right
Also, they generally only go to luxe places (like the Maldives) which are lovely but they can quickly get boring
I've done this in a small way, testing out tents and such. Really hard to get the perfect sunrise shot in Scotland (those photos usually happen by pure chance) and crafting something funny for Instagram/Tik Tok is equally difficult.
I hate drones which really holds me back. I've made a few hundred from my writing though, which is immensely satisfying.
Drones can get great shots tho. Eg we were talking about Victoria Falls recently. And how I went where with a zimbo nutter
He also had a drone. I am in this photo
Bin there, by helicopter
Also bin 2 da blue Nile falls and was devastated to find you have to go at the weekend. Monday to Friday they TURN THEM OFF and pipe the water through a hydro electric set-up. Every day we stray further from God.
Iguazu Falls next February. I will report how they stack up.
Bin there, Iguazu. And BY HELICOPTER
Iguazu is vastly more impressive than Victoria Falls. I like the smoke that thunders, I like the zebras in the garden in that posh colonial hotel, I like dipping in the Devil’s Pool, but Iguazu is on a different scale. And also it doesn’t really suffer the seasonality of Victoria Falls, it is always immense
It may be the single most exhilarating natural spectacle on earth, alongside Erta Ale lava lake in Ethiopia
Shit. I had no idea about Erta Ale and I have spent 5 continuous weeks in Ethiopia. The most fabulous country I have visited, but the worst cuisine. Enjera.
To be fair to Keith, most people wouldn’t say no to a free private box
Imagine if journalists had to declare all the freebies they’d received when writing articles.
This is all phoney war stuff. Bring on the Budget! I want the UK political discourse here to move on to something more substantial.
Yes, that's the scam of travel journalists. They get freebies from tourism authorities, hotels etc and are expected to produce puff pieces passed off as journalism, when it's really just advertising.
Of course that isn't the contract, but slag off a place as dull and expensive and the commissions dry up very quickly.
Travel journalism is hard. Surprisingly hard
I mean, some people make it look easy - I guess they have a gift, I dunno - I knap flints as my main job and only do the travel stuff as hobby, really. But real pro travel journalism is extremely competitive - for obvious reasons - and it turns out that many are called and few are chosen. Every journalist has a go at it, but not many have the knack. And those few get the gigs
Not quite the toss-em-off “puff pieces” you describe
Try it for yourself. Try writing about a place that captures the spirit of it in a fresh and diverting way, that avoids cliche but ALSO avoids dipping into purple prose. Not as easy as it looks
I never said writing puff pieces was easy, just said that it was an implicit part of the deal.
It's why we never see pieces slagging off a city or destination in the travel section, though they may appear in other parts of a periodical, such as the recent articles on anti-tourism protests in Barcelona, Palma, Venice etc.
I wouldn’t argue with that. The economics of travel journalism means that the writers must accept free hospitality: that is the way it works. And would you rather a world where the only travel opinions come from inane, 19 year old, pretty blonde Tik Tok influencers?
Aren't most of them also just taking freebies (and going 'Woah, look at this stuff' in a vapid voice)?
Oh god, yes. Of course!
Tho actually I will slightly defend TikTok and insta travel influencers. I’ve seen them at work in the Maldives and Sharm etc and it is much harder than it looks (like travel writing). That perfect 30 seconds of “spontaneous” video on the beach actually takes hours to arrange and produce, and the girls spend hours getting the make up, or “natural lack of make up”, precisely right
Also, they generally only go to luxe places (like the Maldives) which are lovely but they can quickly get boring
I've done this in a small way, testing out tents and such. Really hard to get the perfect sunrise shot in Scotland (those photos usually happen by pure chance) and crafting something funny for Instagram/Tik Tok is equally difficult.
I hate drones which really holds me back. I've made a few hundred from my writing though, which is immensely satisfying.
Drones can get great shots tho. Eg we were talking about Victoria Falls recently. And how I went where with a zimbo nutter
He also had a drone. I am in this photo
Yes of course, but consider the people you might have pissed off.
I am getting more and more grumpy about this. I had yet another glorious moment in the mountains ruined by some twat with one. About 5m above my head and I'd been waiting 3 hours for the local golden eagle to make an appearance.
The whole fucking point is to get away from stuff like this. A summit can accommodate loads of people sitting quietly, munching quietly on sandwiches, admiring the view. Until: ZZZZZZZZZZZZ.
I consider myself more cynical than the average bear but I am staggered to see Labour shoot themselves so totally in the head within weeks of gaining power because of freebies and sleaze.
Just incredible.
Farage must be laughing himself to sleep every night as he counts the days down to 2028.
I'm not quite sure where the "sleaze" angle is but I'll let that go.
I'm no supporter of Labour per se but I'm happy to give the Government a chance to see what it can or thinks it can do.
The WFA announcement was poor politics in extemis though the fundamental argument of public money being given to people, some of whom clearly didn't need it, remains compelling.
Getting more of the 880,000 who were entitled to pension credit but didn't claim is a huge positive but the cliff-edge nature of the payment system allows those who miss the WFA by less than a fiver to cry foul (and rightly so). More thought would have led to a graduated system where perhaps the WFA payments were reduced for those with more income.
The problem as often with politics isn't the theory or the practice but the perception. As we see with immigration, what people think is happening and what is happening are often two very different things but challenging and overcoming those perceptions takes time and argument.
"I'm not quite sure where the "sleaze" angle is but I'll let that go."
Ok, yeh, maybe too strong a word at this point.
But I still think: what possesses these people?
We are being treated to almost hourly drip drip of free holidays, flats, tickets, dresses, football boxes etc etc.
Do they ever think - that would be very nice, I like NY on New Year's Eve, but if this got out it would make me look shit.
As I've said, I'm no supporter of Labour.
My only thought is naivety - having been on the outside for so long and having seen all the "gifts" go to the Conservatives, I can only presume Labour might have thought "what the hell, we've won, let's enjoy a little of the good life". As you say, myopic at best.
I imagine for the Conservatives the truth is they are now on the outside and watching the good stuff go to their opponents and they aren't happy.
Two wrongs don't make a Taylor Swift concert ticket, however, but there's a wider issue. My father used to get alcohol, hampers and other Christmas gifts when working for private companies. I presume the clients gave this stuff to all the firms with whom they worked. In many ways, that's always been how the world works and the same is true in politics (and it was far worse in former times).
The concern currently is how much of this largesse flows from a single individual and the impression it gives the Government is bought and paid for - it wouldn't the first Government to whom that epithet could be attributed.
To be fair to Keith, most people wouldn’t say no to a free private box
Imagine if journalists had to declare all the freebies they’d received when writing articles.
This is all phoney war stuff. Bring on the Budget! I want the UK political discourse here to move on to something more substantial.
Yes, that's the scam of travel journalists. They get freebies from tourism authorities, hotels etc and are expected to produce puff pieces passed off as journalism, when it's really just advertising.
Of course that isn't the contract, but slag off a place as dull and expensive and the commissions dry up very quickly.
Travel journalism is hard. Surprisingly hard
I mean, some people make it look easy - I guess they have a gift, I dunno - I knap flints as my main job and only do the travel stuff as hobby, really. But real pro travel journalism is extremely competitive - for obvious reasons - and it turns out that many are called and few are chosen. Every journalist has a go at it, but not many have the knack. And those few get the gigs
Not quite the toss-em-off “puff pieces” you describe
Try it for yourself. Try writing about a place that captures the spirit of it in a fresh and diverting way, that avoids cliche but ALSO avoids dipping into purple prose. Not as easy as it looks
I never said writing puff pieces was easy, just said that it was an implicit part of the deal.
It's why we never see pieces slagging off a city or destination in the travel section, though they may appear in other parts of a periodical, such as the recent articles on anti-tourism protests in Barcelona, Palma, Venice etc.
I wouldn’t argue with that. The economics of travel journalism means that the writers must accept free hospitality: that is the way it works. And would you rather a world where the only travel opinions come from inane, 19 year old, pretty blonde Tik Tok influencers?
Aren't most of them also just taking freebies (and going 'Woah, look at this stuff' in a vapid voice)?
Oh god, yes. Of course!
Tho actually I will slightly defend TikTok and insta travel influencers. I’ve seen them at work in the Maldives and Sharm etc and it is much harder than it looks (like travel writing). That perfect 30 seconds of “spontaneous” video on the beach actually takes hours to arrange and produce, and the girls spend hours getting the make up, or “natural lack of make up”, precisely right
Also, they generally only go to luxe places (like the Maldives) which are lovely but they can quickly get boring
I've done this in a small way, testing out tents and such. Really hard to get the perfect sunrise shot in Scotland (those photos usually happen by pure chance) and crafting something funny for Instagram/Tik Tok is equally difficult.
I hate drones which really holds me back. I've made a few hundred from my writing though, which is immensely satisfying.
Drones can get great shots tho. Eg we were talking about Victoria Falls recently. And how I went where with a zimbo nutter
He also had a drone. I am in this photo
Yes of course, but consider the people you might have pissed off.
I am getting more and more grumpy about this. I had yet another glorious moment in the mountains ruined by some twat with one. About 5m above my head and I'd been waiting 3 hours for the local golden eagle to make an appearance.
The whole fucking point is to get away from stuff like this. A summit can accommodate loads of people sitting quietly, munching quietly on sandwiches, admiring the view. Until: ZZZZZZZZZZZZ.
It's the only argument I can think of for loosening our gun laws.
I consider myself more cynical than the average bear but I am staggered to see Labour shoot themselves so totally in the head within weeks of gaining power because of freebies and sleaze.
Just incredible.
Farage must be laughing himself to sleep every night as he counts the days down to 2028.
I'm not quite sure where the "sleaze" angle is but I'll let that go.
I'm no supporter of Labour per se but I'm happy to give the Government a chance to see what it can or thinks it can do.
The WFA announcement was poor politics in extemis though the fundamental argument of public money being given to people, some of whom clearly didn't need it, remains compelling.
Getting more of the 880,000 who were entitled to pension credit but didn't claim is a huge positive but the cliff-edge nature of the payment system allows those who miss the WFA by less than a fiver to cry foul (and rightly so). More thought would have led to a graduated system where perhaps the WFA payments were reduced for those with more income.
The problem as often with politics isn't the theory or the practice but the perception. As we see with immigration, what people think is happening and what is happening are often two very different things but challenging and overcoming those perceptions takes time and argument.
"I'm not quite sure where the "sleaze" angle is but I'll let that go."
Ok, yeh, maybe too strong a word at this point.
But I still think: what possesses these people?
We are being treated to almost hourly drip drip of free holidays, flats, tickets, dresses, football boxes etc etc.
Do they ever think - that would be very nice, I like NY on New Year's Eve, but if this got out it would make me look shit.
“Well OK it actually would have cost £12,000 but I’ll just lie and reduce that by an order of magnitude and pretend it cost the same as three nights in St Ives”
How do we measure the cost of off-market things? I've stayed in a friend's flat in London which would go for £500 a night. But it's full of his stuff, so he can't rent it out for that or any figure to strangers. So what's the benefit to me? Probably £100 a night because that's the cost of the dive hotel I would be at if I couldn't borrow his place.
Utterly preposterous
She might as well say “this would actually cost me £0 a night because that’s the cost of me staying at home and going nowhere which is what I would do if I hadn’t been given this amazing apartment in NYC, so I will register the gift of a zero pound holiday”
You estimate it by seeing it’s equal on the market, adding that, then adding in the cost of flights. There. Sorted
Claude at the moment is the best LLM IMO. For all the hype over ChatGPT o1, I just found that it sits and "thinks" for ages and the result isn't actually much better. At best its stopping you manually saying, do this, then this, at worst because it is trying to take many steps itself, it goes off down the wrong path and you wait 30s+ for it to pump out nonsense.
Yes. Apparently o1 is great at maths and coding but as I don’t care about maths or coding that whizzes past me
For words, Claude is still best by a fair stretch. Also the context window on ChatGPT remains relatively tiny
As it seems I am temporarily allowed to discuss AI - I’d note that I’ve seen people all over the world quietly using it, and many hyper aware of all developments. The revolution is happening but it’s sotto voce. A lot of people don’t want their employers to know they are using it
For these and other reasons I wouldn’t bet against AI. It is coming and it is inevitable. Betting against it is like betting against electricity in 1895
I have found the opposite, its shit at coding, its really infuriating. But I am not asking it to code flappy birds game or a web app. As for maths, I have asked it some things that aren't that complicated (I am not a mathematician, but I do lots of maths) and it has done very poorly.
I yield to your experience in these matters
Gemini is often overlooked. It has a massive context window and seems to be improving over time
Frankly, they are all amazing and if you showed them to people in 2014 or 2004 they’d say Wow so that’s AGI
It’s the boiling frog thing
Oh don't get me wrong, I think if you have 100-120 IQ and do very repetitive white collar role and quite low down in the company hierarchy, I would be very concerned for my future. I actually think those that have lower IQ are far better insulated against this tech because they are much more likely to be in vocational jobs that robotics are nowhere near doing their work.
But o1 at least I have found massively underwhelming for my use cases. Its like asking an undergraduate who if they don't know the answer doesn't say I don't know or I think the answer is, it gives you a 10 minute BS talk all about it.
Are we allowed to talk about AI here again, then?
In which case.
Those of us "golgafrincham b ark" types whose main grift in life has been to shuffle papers and produce reports are doomed.
I do a lot of strategy consultancy work for startups and I feed my meeting notes into Claude (as others have noted, the best of the current bunch) and it largely spits out what I would. Not as good, but probably 70-80% of the way there. So why pay me thousands for my time when you're on a tight budget and the chatbot gets you 70-80% of the way there?
Well, I like to think the extra 20% is the difference between the startups I work with that succeed, and the guys who use chatbot answers and don't. But this is not quite 2 years into the AI revolution, and at the current pace, I will be outclassed within the next few years. If I'm lucky. The next few months, if I'm not.
I consider myself fortunate to be financially secure. Because if I wasn't, I'm pretty sure I would be looking at the bread line in a few years, much as a coal miner in the 90s. A completely obsolescent skill set.
I've retired except for translation and chairing my constituency CLP. I've wondered whether the translation work (mostly for the European Commission) will go, since they send a 95% correct draft translation, but although the pay per word has gone down the pay per hour remains decent (about £50/hour, with a minimum of £17.50 even if it's a single sentence) for zipping through the drafts, filling in the 5% and spotting any errors. It's a nice little retirement earner and I think they reckon the human eye is still important as you do occasinally catch the system totally misunderstanding something.
Any news on the post retirement study ideas?
I remain awestruck by people who are competent in more than one language.
My 21 year old granddaughter speaks Welsh, English, French, Italian and Japanese
Big G, could I ask a difficult question? With your age and all that, being a distinguished poster and having given us your insights of the world, being realistic there is going to be a day when you go to post in the big PB in the Sky. So when I had a heart op last year I thought that if I don’t come out the other side I would like PB to know. I sent a message to Viewcode that if I didn’t post again it had gone tits up so say goodbye for me.
The long and the short of it is, do you, and frankly other posters, have people who know of our life here where if we bail out they can let PB know? It is a community (god I hate that phrase) but would be good to mourn, salute people where they deserve it.
Sorry if insensitive.
I have to say that is a little bit insensitive....
As far as as I know we have had a number of very prominent pbCOMers take that giant leap into the unknown, very sadly Plato and SBS.
We have JackW who must be older than those trees in California too, but I think he'll survive into the Big Crunch...
I don't think BiG G has any plans to check out anytime soon
My point was that I have told my sister if I check out to log in and post a message. I wish, for example Plato had someone who could have just left an epitaph and notice. I don’t for one moment want or think Big G is checking out soon but I like the idea that we don’t just disappear and that people know we haven’t flounced, just sort of died. And maybe leave a valedictory message.
I’ve also thought about this. None of my friends or fam are really aware that I “often” comment on here….
Me neither. And even at nearly 50, it doesn't really feel like it's something I need to do anuthing about. For most of us, if we reach our life expectancy, we'll have been commenting on here for 40 or 50 years. It seems almost inconceivable that human civilisation, the internet and specifically this site will still be here when I check out on [checks actuarial site] 27th Feb 2064. And yet I wouldn't have thought when I first got involved here back in 2005 - in a previous city, a previous career, with a previous girlfriend - that I'd still be commenting 19 and a quarter years later. Tempus fugits.
To be fair to Keith, most people wouldn’t say no to a free private box
Imagine if journalists had to declare all the freebies they’d received when writing articles.
This is all phoney war stuff. Bring on the Budget! I want the UK political discourse here to move on to something more substantial.
Yes, that's the scam of travel journalists. They get freebies from tourism authorities, hotels etc and are expected to produce puff pieces passed off as journalism, when it's really just advertising.
Of course that isn't the contract, but slag off a place as dull and expensive and the commissions dry up very quickly.
Travel journalism is hard. Surprisingly hard
I mean, some people make it look easy - I guess they have a gift, I dunno - I knap flints as my main job and only do the travel stuff as hobby, really. But real pro travel journalism is extremely competitive - for obvious reasons - and it turns out that many are called and few are chosen. Every journalist has a go at it, but not many have the knack. And those few get the gigs
Not quite the toss-em-off “puff pieces” you describe
Try it for yourself. Try writing about a place that captures the spirit of it in a fresh and diverting way, that avoids cliche but ALSO avoids dipping into purple prose. Not as easy as it looks
I never said writing puff pieces was easy, just said that it was an implicit part of the deal.
It's why we never see pieces slagging off a city or destination in the travel section, though they may appear in other parts of a periodical, such as the recent articles on anti-tourism protests in Barcelona, Palma, Venice etc.
I wouldn’t argue with that. The economics of travel journalism means that the writers must accept free hospitality: that is the way it works. And would you rather a world where the only travel opinions come from inane, 19 year old, pretty blonde Tik Tok influencers?
Aren't most of them also just taking freebies (and going 'Woah, look at this stuff' in a vapid voice)?
Oh god, yes. Of course!
Tho actually I will slightly defend TikTok and insta travel influencers. I’ve seen them at work in the Maldives and Sharm etc and it is much harder than it looks (like travel writing). That perfect 30 seconds of “spontaneous” video on the beach actually takes hours to arrange and produce, and the girls spend hours getting the make up, or “natural lack of make up”, precisely right
Also, they generally only go to luxe places (like the Maldives) which are lovely but they can quickly get boring
I've done this in a small way, testing out tents and such. Really hard to get the perfect sunrise shot in Scotland (those photos usually happen by pure chance) and crafting something funny for Instagram/Tik Tok is equally difficult.
I hate drones which really holds me back. I've made a few hundred from my writing though, which is immensely satisfying.
Drones can get great shots tho. Eg we were talking about Victoria Falls recently. And how I went where with a zimbo nutter
He also had a drone. I am in this photo
Bin there, by helicopter
Also bin 2 da blue Nile falls and was devastated to find you have to go at the weekend. Monday to Friday they TURN THEM OFF and pipe the water through a hydro electric set-up. Every day we stray further from God.
Iguazu Falls next February. I will report how they stack up.
Bin there, Iguazu. And BY HELICOPTER
Iguazu is vastly more impressive than Victoria Falls. I like the smoke that thunders, I like the zebras in the garden in that posh colonial hotel, I like dipping in the Devil’s Pool, but Iguazu is on a different scale. And also it doesn’t really suffer the seasonality of Victoria Falls, it is always immense
It may be the single most exhilarating natural spectacle on earth, alongside Erta Ale lava lake in Ethiopia
Shit. I had no idea about Erta Ale and I have spent 5 continuous weeks in Ethiopia. The most fabulous country I have visited, but the worst cuisine. Enjera.
Oh, Ethiopian cuisine, when Live Aid happened they thought everyone in Ethiopia was starving because there was no food, that wasn’t the case, they just couldn’t eat that crap anymore and anything ok was being shipped out of the country to wanky restaurants in European cities.
All it needed was 400 McDonald’s and we wouldn’t have needed Phil Collins playing in London and Philadelphia in one day making the environment worse for Ethiopia through the Concorde fuel.
To be fair to Keith, most people wouldn’t say no to a free private box
Imagine if journalists had to declare all the freebies they’d received when writing articles.
This is all phoney war stuff. Bring on the Budget! I want the UK political discourse here to move on to something more substantial.
Yes, that's the scam of travel journalists. They get freebies from tourism authorities, hotels etc and are expected to produce puff pieces passed off as journalism, when it's really just advertising.
Of course that isn't the contract, but slag off a place as dull and expensive and the commissions dry up very quickly.
Travel journalism is hard. Surprisingly hard
I mean, some people make it look easy - I guess they have a gift, I dunno - I knap flints as my main job and only do the travel stuff as hobby, really. But real pro travel journalism is extremely competitive - for obvious reasons - and it turns out that many are called and few are chosen. Every journalist has a go at it, but not many have the knack. And those few get the gigs
Not quite the toss-em-off “puff pieces” you describe
Try it for yourself. Try writing about a place that captures the spirit of it in a fresh and diverting way, that avoids cliche but ALSO avoids dipping into purple prose. Not as easy as it looks
I never said writing puff pieces was easy, just said that it was an implicit part of the deal.
It's why we never see pieces slagging off a city or destination in the travel section, though they may appear in other parts of a periodical, such as the recent articles on anti-tourism protests in Barcelona, Palma, Venice etc.
I wouldn’t argue with that. The economics of travel journalism means that the writers must accept free hospitality: that is the way it works. And would you rather a world where the only travel opinions come from inane, 19 year old, pretty blonde Tik Tok influencers?
Aren't most of them also just taking freebies (and going 'Woah, look at this stuff' in a vapid voice)?
Oh god, yes. Of course!
Tho actually I will slightly defend TikTok and insta travel influencers. I’ve seen them at work in the Maldives and Sharm etc and it is much harder than it looks (like travel writing). That perfect 30 seconds of “spontaneous” video on the beach actually takes hours to arrange and produce, and the girls spend hours getting the make up, or “natural lack of make up”, precisely right
Also, they generally only go to luxe places (like the Maldives) which are lovely but they can quickly get boring
I've done this in a small way, testing out tents and such. Really hard to get the perfect sunrise shot in Scotland (those photos usually happen by pure chance) and crafting something funny for Instagram/Tik Tok is equally difficult.
I hate drones which really holds me back. I've made a few hundred from my writing though, which is immensely satisfying.
Drones can get great shots tho. Eg we were talking about Victoria Falls recently. And how I went where with a zimbo nutter
He also had a drone. I am in this photo
Bin there, by helicopter
Also bin 2 da blue Nile falls and was devastated to find you have to go at the weekend. Monday to Friday they TURN THEM OFF and pipe the water through a hydro electric set-up. Every day we stray further from God.
Iguazu Falls next February. I will report how they stack up.
Bin there, Iguazu. And BY HELICOPTER
Iguazu is vastly more impressive than Victoria Falls. I like the smoke that thunders, I like the zebras in the garden in that posh colonial hotel, I like dipping in the Devil’s Pool, but Iguazu is on a different scale. And also it doesn’t really suffer the seasonality of Victoria Falls, it is always immense
It may be the single most exhilarating natural spectacle on earth, alongside Erta Ale lava lake in Ethiopia
Shit. I had no idea about Erta Ale and I have spent 5 continuous weeks in Ethiopia. The most fabulous country I have visited, but the worst cuisine. Enjera.
It’s extremely hard to reach and in quite dangerous territory. But OMG it is worth it, so worth it
Claude at the moment is the best LLM IMO. For all the hype over ChatGPT o1, I just found that it sits and "thinks" for ages and the result isn't actually much better. At best its stopping you manually saying, do this, then this, at worst because it is trying to take many steps itself, it goes off down the wrong path and you wait 30s+ for it to pump out nonsense.
Yes. Apparently o1 is great at maths and coding but as I don’t care about maths or coding that whizzes past me
For words, Claude is still best by a fair stretch. Also the context window on ChatGPT remains relatively tiny
As it seems I am temporarily allowed to discuss AI - I’d note that I’ve seen people all over the world quietly using it, and many hyper aware of all developments. The revolution is happening but it’s sotto voce. A lot of people don’t want their employers to know they are using it
For these and other reasons I wouldn’t bet against AI. It is coming and it is inevitable. Betting against it is like betting against electricity in 1895
I have found the opposite, its shit at coding, its really infuriating. But I am not asking it to code flappy birds game or a web app. As for maths, I have asked it some things that aren't that complicated (I am not a mathematician, but I do lots of maths) and it has done very poorly.
I yield to your experience in these matters
Gemini is often overlooked. It has a massive context window and seems to be improving over time
Frankly, they are all amazing and if you showed them to people in 2014 or 2004 they’d say Wow so that’s AGI
It’s the boiling frog thing
Oh don't get me wrong, I think if you have 100-120 IQ and do very repetitive white collar role and quite low down in the company hierarchy, I would be very concerned for my future. I actually think those that have lower IQ are far better insulated against this tech because they are much more likely to be in vocational jobs that robotics are nowhere near doing their work.
But o1 at least I have found massively underwhelming for my use cases. Its like asking an undergraduate who if they don't know the answer doesn't say I don't know or I think the answer is, it gives you a 10 minute BS talk all about it.
Are we allowed to talk about AI here again, then?
In which case.
Those of us "golgafrincham b ark" types whose main grift in life has been to shuffle papers and produce reports are doomed.
I do a lot of strategy consultancy work for startups and I feed my meeting notes into Claude (as others have noted, the best of the current bunch) and it largely spits out what I would. Not as good, but probably 70-80% of the way there. So why pay me thousands for my time when you're on a tight budget and the chatbot gets you 70-80% of the way there?
Well, I like to think the extra 20% is the difference between the startups I work with that succeed, and the guys who use chatbot answers and don't. But this is not quite 2 years into the AI revolution, and at the current pace, I will be outclassed within the next few years. If I'm lucky. The next few months, if I'm not.
I consider myself fortunate to be financially secure. Because if I wasn't, I'm pretty sure I would be looking at the bread line in a few years, much as a coal miner in the 90s. A completely obsolescent skill set.
I've retired except for translation and chairing my constituency CLP. I've wondered whether the translation work (mostly for the European Commission) will go, since they send a 95% correct draft translation, but although the pay per word has gone down the pay per hour remains decent (about £50/hour, with a minimum of £17.50 even if it's a single sentence) for zipping through the drafts, filling in the 5% and spotting any errors. It's a nice little retirement earner and I think they reckon the human eye is still important as you do occasinally catch the system totally misunderstanding something.
Any news on the post retirement study ideas?
I remain awestruck by people who are competent in more than one language.
My 21 year old granddaughter speaks Welsh, English, French, Italian and Japanese
If you will excuse the immodesty for a moment, my brain rarely lets me down. I reckon myself adept at English: I may not have anything interesting to say, but if someone else does I can spot whuch words they are using wrong and select the right ones. I can proof read well. And it's not just words; I am good at maths and can remember facts. But I am awful at foreign languages. I have not the slightest ear for them; their lexica remain forever elusive. It seems the hardest thing in the world to achieve even a basic competence. And yet, go to Europe and almost everyone there is able to switch effortlessly switch between four languages. These aren't specialists who've spent years striving to master a language - it's everyone. Waiters, actors, shopkeepers, children, passers-by. How is this possible? Dura Ace recently suggested it was just hours of hard work. Where do these people - like your granddaughter - find the time?
My granddaughter has the gift for languages so much so she was offered a place at Kyoto University but chose Turin for the last year before returning to Leeds University
We all have different talents and certainly I can manage French and once delivered a speech in Belgium in French ( No - not EU related, it was an international charity event)
I am impressed. By both you and your granddaughter.
Yup - if you want to knw what interests people about the Govt at the moment it is the stickiness of Starmer's fingers. That looks really bad and could really linger unless the Govt can show some real achievements.
Ask 90% of folk about Sue Gray and you will get a simple answer - who?
Most of the current reporting is people going through publicly available declarations. The information was available but no-one was reporting it because it’s small fry. The Tories accepted £5 million from Frank Hester, who Sunak had condemned for his racist comments, shortly before the election, but the Tories are currently irrelevant, so that’s not become a big news story.
That isn't what set this off though...it the stink around giving donors passes, parachuting in other donors to supposedly impartial positions, and these declarations not being 100% honest about what they actually were. When your pitch was we only care about public service, we are whiter than whiter.
The problem for Starmer is then his reaction was I don't care, I am going to keep taking the freebies, I am not taking any lessons from the Tories.
You’re right, this was started off by some more substantive things. But my point is that the media are trying to continue it with a bunch of irrelevancies, because the news cycle works that way.
The donor pass, the late declaration. Not good. I didn’t vote for Starmer or Labour. I’m not saying he’s perfect. But I can also tell a big story from trifles.
That was my view initially. But it turns out there are a lot of trifles. An improbably large number of trifles. Absolutely shitloads of trifles. A whole confectionery factory of trifles. Labour are looking very custardy indeed. If it was just one dress, ot just one Taylot Swift concert, or just one football match, or just one trip to New York, or just one pair of glasses ... But it's not; it's out of all proportion to any of their predecessors. It's within the rules, but only in the same way that the duck-house-on-expenses was within the rules. It's absolutely taking the piss.
It is. And not only that, it is in the first 3 months and from a government that expressly promised to “clean up politics” and dedicate itself to “service”. We just didn’t realise they meant THEY are going “to clean up” and the service meant lavishly “serving” themselves
I didn't vote for Starmer or Labour either.
I sense the irritation is not with the gifts or trifles themselves which have been a part of politics since time immaterial but the sense of hypocrisy from Labour and Starmer who made certain "promises" or "commitments" about how they were going to govern before the election and seem (to some) not to be honouring those commitments.
I'm not sure how accepting tickets to a Taylor Swift concert or going to the St Leger last Saturday (the first PM to do so since a certain Winston Churchill in 1953) undermines politics. Prime Ministers have often attended big sporting and cultural events and no one has suggested they are demeaning politics.
Where I would be concerned is, as happened with Bernie Ecclestone in 1997, there was a sense in which legislation was deliberately amended or altered to placate a donor or as a result of some inducement or gift. That would be corrupt and would be deserved to be called out.
"Getting by with a little help from my friends" is more than a line in a song but assuming all these gifts are an attempt to curry favour or store up some political capital for later use - I'm less convinced.
I think that likely is correct re the irritation and the fact Starmer’s public image is a sort of upstanding, boring but decent sort of fellow who made a lot of hay of not being in it for himself but being in it for public service. When he’s actually challenged on the freebies he gets (in fact, when he gets challenged at all) he doesn’t half have a habit of sounding a bit prickly and snotty.
To be fair to Keith, most people wouldn’t say no to a free private box
Imagine if journalists had to declare all the freebies they’d received when writing articles.
This is all phoney war stuff. Bring on the Budget! I want the UK political discourse here to move on to something more substantial.
Yes, that's the scam of travel journalists. They get freebies from tourism authorities, hotels etc and are expected to produce puff pieces passed off as journalism, when it's really just advertising.
Of course that isn't the contract, but slag off a place as dull and expensive and the commissions dry up very quickly.
Travel journalism is hard. Surprisingly hard
I mean, some people make it look easy - I guess they have a gift, I dunno - I knap flints as my main job and only do the travel stuff as hobby, really. But real pro travel journalism is extremely competitive - for obvious reasons - and it turns out that many are called and few are chosen. Every journalist has a go at it, but not many have the knack. And those few get the gigs
Not quite the toss-em-off “puff pieces” you describe
Try it for yourself. Try writing about a place that captures the spirit of it in a fresh and diverting way, that avoids cliche but ALSO avoids dipping into purple prose. Not as easy as it looks
I never said writing puff pieces was easy, just said that it was an implicit part of the deal.
It's why we never see pieces slagging off a city or destination in the travel section, though they may appear in other parts of a periodical, such as the recent articles on anti-tourism protests in Barcelona, Palma, Venice etc.
I wouldn’t argue with that. The economics of travel journalism means that the writers must accept free hospitality: that is the way it works. And would you rather a world where the only travel opinions come from inane, 19 year old, pretty blonde Tik Tok influencers?
Aren't most of them also just taking freebies (and going 'Woah, look at this stuff' in a vapid voice)?
Oh god, yes. Of course!
Tho actually I will slightly defend TikTok and insta travel influencers. I’ve seen them at work in the Maldives and Sharm etc and it is much harder than it looks (like travel writing). That perfect 30 seconds of “spontaneous” video on the beach actually takes hours to arrange and produce, and the girls spend hours getting the make up, or “natural lack of make up”, precisely right
Also, they generally only go to luxe places (like the Maldives) which are lovely but they can quickly get boring
I've done this in a small way, testing out tents and such. Really hard to get the perfect sunrise shot in Scotland (those photos usually happen by pure chance) and crafting something funny for Instagram/Tik Tok is equally difficult.
I hate drones which really holds me back. I've made a few hundred from my writing though, which is immensely satisfying.
Drones can get great shots tho. Eg we were talking about Victoria Falls recently. And how I went where with a zimbo nutter
He also had a drone. I am in this photo
Yes of course, but consider the people you might have pissed off.
I am getting more and more grumpy about this. I had yet another glorious moment in the mountains ruined by some twat with one. About 5m above my head and I'd been waiting 3 hours for the local golden eagle to make an appearance.
The whole fucking point is to get away from stuff like this. A summit can accommodate loads of people sitting quietly, munching quietly on sandwiches, admiring the view. Until: ZZZZZZZZZZZZ.
Yes, they are annoying
TBF to this guy this was quite early in drone technology, around 2014 or something? (hence the poor quality of the image). It might have been the first time I encountered it
Robinson says he’s staying in NC governor’s race after bombshell CNN report
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4889150-north-carolina-lieutenant-governor-mark-robinson/ ..CNN’s story, which went up about a half-hour after Robinson’s video, revealed a wide range of inflammatory comments that he reportedly made on a pornography website’s message board more than 10 years ago, including calling himself a “black NAZI” and wishing for slavery to be reinstated. The outlet reported that Robinson made these comments between 2008 and 2012, before his political career began, on a website called “Nude Africa.” An account with the username “minisoldr” made the posts, and CNN identified the account as belonging to Robinson through his full name being listed on the account, an email address that Robinson used elsewhere and biographical details that line up with his background. CNN reported that Robinson often shared his thoughts on various issues like race, gender and abortion on the forum. He wrote while discussing Black Republicans in 2010 “I’m a Black Nazi” and on another occasion that he supported slavery coming back. “Slavery is not bad. Some people need to be slaves. I wish they would bring it [slavery] back. I would certainly buy a few,” he said. Robinson also reportedly made posts in 2011 criticizing Martin Luther King Jr. as a “commie bastard” and “worse than a maggot” and in 2012 saying that he would prefer Adolf Hitler to be in charge over “any of the sh-t that’s in Washington.” CNN reported Robinson made various sexually graphic comments on the pornography website message board, including describing his pornography preferences…
To be fair to Keith, most people wouldn’t say no to a free private box
Imagine if journalists had to declare all the freebies they’d received when writing articles.
This is all phoney war stuff. Bring on the Budget! I want the UK political discourse here to move on to something more substantial.
Yes, that's the scam of travel journalists. They get freebies from tourism authorities, hotels etc and are expected to produce puff pieces passed off as journalism, when it's really just advertising.
Of course that isn't the contract, but slag off a place as dull and expensive and the commissions dry up very quickly.
Travel journalism is hard. Surprisingly hard
I mean, some people make it look easy - I guess they have a gift, I dunno - I knap flints as my main job and only do the travel stuff as hobby, really. But real pro travel journalism is extremely competitive - for obvious reasons - and it turns out that many are called and few are chosen. Every journalist has a go at it, but not many have the knack. And those few get the gigs
Not quite the toss-em-off “puff pieces” you describe
Try it for yourself. Try writing about a place that captures the spirit of it in a fresh and diverting way, that avoids cliche but ALSO avoids dipping into purple prose. Not as easy as it looks
I never said writing puff pieces was easy, just said that it was an implicit part of the deal.
It's why we never see pieces slagging off a city or destination in the travel section, though they may appear in other parts of a periodical, such as the recent articles on anti-tourism protests in Barcelona, Palma, Venice etc.
I wouldn’t argue with that. The economics of travel journalism means that the writers must accept free hospitality: that is the way it works. And would you rather a world where the only travel opinions come from inane, 19 year old, pretty blonde Tik Tok influencers?
Aren't most of them also just taking freebies (and going 'Woah, look at this stuff' in a vapid voice)?
Oh god, yes. Of course!
Tho actually I will slightly defend TikTok and insta travel influencers. I’ve seen them at work in the Maldives and Sharm etc and it is much harder than it looks (like travel writing). That perfect 30 seconds of “spontaneous” video on the beach actually takes hours to arrange and produce, and the girls spend hours getting the make up, or “natural lack of make up”, precisely right
Also, they generally only go to luxe places (like the Maldives) which are lovely but they can quickly get boring
I've done this in a small way, testing out tents and such. Really hard to get the perfect sunrise shot in Scotland (those photos usually happen by pure chance) and crafting something funny for Instagram/Tik Tok is equally difficult.
I hate drones which really holds me back. I've made a few hundred from my writing though, which is immensely satisfying.
Drones can get great shots tho. Eg we were talking about Victoria Falls recently. And how I went where with a zimbo nutter
He also had a drone. I am in this photo
Bin there, by helicopter
Also bin 2 da blue Nile falls and was devastated to find you have to go at the weekend. Monday to Friday they TURN THEM OFF and pipe the water through a hydro electric set-up. Every day we stray further from God.
Iguazu Falls next February. I will report how they stack up.
Bin there, Iguazu. And BY HELICOPTER
Iguazu is vastly more impressive than Victoria Falls. I like the smoke that thunders, I like the zebras in the garden in that posh colonial hotel, I like dipping in the Devil’s Pool, but Iguazu is on a different scale. And also it doesn’t really suffer the seasonality of Victoria Falls, it is always immense
It may be the single most exhilarating natural spectacle on earth, alongside Erta Ale lava lake in Ethiopia
Shit. I had no idea about Erta Ale and I have spent 5 continuous weeks in Ethiopia. The most fabulous country I have visited, but the worst cuisine. Enjera.
Oh, Ethiopian cuisine, when Live Aid happened they thought everyone in Ethiopia was starving because there was no food, that wasn’t the case, they just couldn’t eat that crap anymore and anything ok was being shipped out of the country to wanky restaurants in European cities.
All it needed was 400 McDonald’s and we wouldn’t have needed Phil Collins playing in London and Philadelphia in one day making the environment worse for Ethiopia through the Concorde fuel.
Yeah, I was all, like, don't they have the deliveroo app? on the roof of a houseboat on Dal Lake in Kashmir. Stoned.
Claude at the moment is the best LLM IMO. For all the hype over ChatGPT o1, I just found that it sits and "thinks" for ages and the result isn't actually much better. At best its stopping you manually saying, do this, then this, at worst because it is trying to take many steps itself, it goes off down the wrong path and you wait 30s+ for it to pump out nonsense.
Yes. Apparently o1 is great at maths and coding but as I don’t care about maths or coding that whizzes past me
For words, Claude is still best by a fair stretch. Also the context window on ChatGPT remains relatively tiny
As it seems I am temporarily allowed to discuss AI - I’d note that I’ve seen people all over the world quietly using it, and many hyper aware of all developments. The revolution is happening but it’s sotto voce. A lot of people don’t want their employers to know they are using it
For these and other reasons I wouldn’t bet against AI. It is coming and it is inevitable. Betting against it is like betting against electricity in 1895
I have found the opposite, its shit at coding, its really infuriating. But I am not asking it to code flappy birds game or a web app. As for maths, I have asked it some things that aren't that complicated (I am not a mathematician, but I do lots of maths) and it has done very poorly.
I yield to your experience in these matters
Gemini is often overlooked. It has a massive context window and seems to be improving over time
Frankly, they are all amazing and if you showed them to people in 2014 or 2004 they’d say Wow so that’s AGI
It’s the boiling frog thing
Oh don't get me wrong, I think if you have 100-120 IQ and do very repetitive white collar role and quite low down in the company hierarchy, I would be very concerned for my future. I actually think those that have lower IQ are far better insulated against this tech because they are much more likely to be in vocational jobs that robotics are nowhere near doing their work.
But o1 at least I have found massively underwhelming for my use cases. Its like asking an undergraduate who if they don't know the answer doesn't say I don't know or I think the answer is, it gives you a 10 minute BS talk all about it.
Are we allowed to talk about AI here again, then?
In which case.
Those of us "golgafrincham b ark" types whose main grift in life has been to shuffle papers and produce reports are doomed.
I do a lot of strategy consultancy work for startups and I feed my meeting notes into Claude (as others have noted, the best of the current bunch) and it largely spits out what I would. Not as good, but probably 70-80% of the way there. So why pay me thousands for my time when you're on a tight budget and the chatbot gets you 70-80% of the way there?
Well, I like to think the extra 20% is the difference between the startups I work with that succeed, and the guys who use chatbot answers and don't. But this is not quite 2 years into the AI revolution, and at the current pace, I will be outclassed within the next few years. If I'm lucky. The next few months, if I'm not.
I consider myself fortunate to be financially secure. Because if I wasn't, I'm pretty sure I would be looking at the bread line in a few years, much as a coal miner in the 90s. A completely obsolescent skill set.
I've retired except for translation and chairing my constituency CLP. I've wondered whether the translation work (mostly for the European Commission) will go, since they send a 95% correct draft translation, but although the pay per word has gone down the pay per hour remains decent (about £50/hour, with a minimum of £17.50 even if it's a single sentence) for zipping through the drafts, filling in the 5% and spotting any errors. It's a nice little retirement earner and I think they reckon the human eye is still important as you do occasinally catch the system totally misunderstanding something.
Any news on the post retirement study ideas?
I remain awestruck by people who are competent in more than one language.
My 21 year old granddaughter speaks Welsh, English, French, Italian and Japanese
If you will excuse the immodesty for a moment, my brain rarely lets me down. I reckon myself adept at English: I may not have anything interesting to say, but if someone else does I can spot whuch words they are using wrong and select the right ones. I can proof read well. And it's not just words; I am good at maths and can remember facts. But I am awful at foreign languages. I have not the slightest ear for them; their lexica remain forever elusive. It seems the hardest thing in the world to achieve even a basic competence. And yet, go to Europe and almost everyone there is able to switch effortlessly switch between four languages. These aren't specialists who've spent years striving to master a language - it's everyone. Waiters, actors, shopkeepers, children, passers-by. How is this possible? Dura Ace recently suggested it was just hours of hard work. Where do these people - like your granddaughter - find the time?
My granddaughter has the gift for languages so much so she was offered a place at Kyoto University but chose Turin for the last year before returning to Leeds University
We all have different talents and certainly I can manage French and once delivered a speech in Belgium in French ( No - not EU related, it was an international charity event)
I am impressed. By both you and your granddaughter.
Thank you but we all have our own talents and it is good we have
Robinson says he’s staying in NC governor’s race after bombshell CNN report
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4889150-north-carolina-lieutenant-governor-mark-robinson/ ..CNN’s story, which went up about a half-hour after Robinson’s video, revealed a wide range of inflammatory comments that he reportedly made on a pornography website’s message board more than 10 years ago, including calling himself a “black NAZI” and wishing for slavery to be reinstated. The outlet reported that Robinson made these comments between 2008 and 2012, before his political career began, on a website called “Nude Africa.” An account with the username “minisoldr” made the posts, and CNN identified the account as belonging to Robinson through his full name being listed on the account, an email address that Robinson used elsewhere and biographical details that line up with his background. CNN reported that Robinson often shared his thoughts on various issues like race, gender and abortion on the forum. He wrote while discussing Black Republicans in 2010 “I’m a Black Nazi” and on another occasion that he supported slavery coming back. “Slavery is not bad. Some people need to be slaves. I wish they would bring it [slavery] back. I would certainly buy a few,” he said. Robinson also reportedly made posts in 2011 criticizing Martin Luther King Jr. as a “commie bastard” and “worse than a maggot” and in 2012 saying that he would prefer Adolf Hitler to be in charge over “any of the sh-t that’s in Washington.” CNN reported Robinson made various sexually graphic comments on the pornography website message board, including describing his pornography preferences…
Nooooooo......really....on a pron site he talked about sex.....Given all the other shit he has allegedly done, that is just laughable to mention that as part of the scandal.
Just seen a fent addict badly OD-ing in downtown Couver. The dark side
I hear the super soft on drug policy hasn't worked very well, not as bad as Portland or SF, but has made the problem much more visible.
If we are going to have an informed discussion about drug policy this is the sort of thing that we need to look at. The war on drugs has been a total disaster with very large numbers of dead. But jumping to the conclusion anything goes because it seems to have done ok in Portugal is perhaps every bit as dangerous.
We really need someone to look carefully at what works and what doesn’t.
Oregon has notably resiled from its Anything Goes legislation (though it's reasonable to think the spike in problems is because more and cheaper fent, not the law).
I suspect that comparing opiate death rates in US States with and without legal cannabis might be an interesting comparison. I expect both are up, but which by more might be a pointer.
Exactly today last year I was camping in British Columbia and sharing a legal joint with my son. Next tent was 4 very big Canadian soldiers on some sort of operation. It turns out cannabis induced paranoia does not recognise changes in the law. I spent the night gibbering with fear of being beaten half to death as a perverted dope fiend limey and then banged up in Calgary nick for 20 years.
Robinson says he’s staying in NC governor’s race after bombshell CNN report
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4889150-north-carolina-lieutenant-governor-mark-robinson/ ..CNN’s story, which went up about a half-hour after Robinson’s video, revealed a wide range of inflammatory comments that he reportedly made on a pornography website’s message board more than 10 years ago, including calling himself a “black NAZI” and wishing for slavery to be reinstated. The outlet reported that Robinson made these comments between 2008 and 2012, before his political career began, on a website called “Nude Africa.” An account with the username “minisoldr” made the posts, and CNN identified the account as belonging to Robinson through his full name being listed on the account, an email address that Robinson used elsewhere and biographical details that line up with his background. CNN reported that Robinson often shared his thoughts on various issues like race, gender and abortion on the forum. He wrote while discussing Black Republicans in 2010 “I’m a Black Nazi” and on another occasion that he supported slavery coming back. “Slavery is not bad. Some people need to be slaves. I wish they would bring it [slavery] back. I would certainly buy a few,” he said. Robinson also reportedly made posts in 2011 criticizing Martin Luther King Jr. as a “commie bastard” and “worse than a maggot” and in 2012 saying that he would prefer Adolf Hitler to be in charge over “any of the sh-t that’s in Washington.” CNN reported Robinson made various sexually graphic comments on the pornography website message board, including describing his pornography preferences…
Nooooooo......really....on a pron site he talked about sex.....Given all the other shit he has allegedly done, that is just laughable to mention that as part of the scandal.
Yeah I am very unstaggered by this and far too busy laughing at the Klouseau and Klebb combo to spend time on the US. And who doesn't like to eyeball a little trans porn?
Just seen a fent addict badly OD-ing in downtown Couver. The dark side
I hear the super soft on drug policy hasn't worked very well, not as bad as Portland or SF, but has made the problem much more visible.
If we are going to have an informed discussion about drug policy this is the sort of thing that we need to look at. The war on drugs has been a total disaster with very large numbers of dead. But jumping to the conclusion anything goes because it seems to have done ok in Portugal is perhaps every bit as dangerous.
We really need someone to look carefully at what works and what doesn’t.
Oregon has notably resiled from its Anything Goes legislation (though it's reasonable to think the spike in problems is because more and cheaper fent, not the law).
I suspect that comparing opiate death rates in US States with and without legal cannabis might be an interesting comparison. I expect both are up, but which by more might be a pointer.
Exactly today last year I was camping in British Columbia and sharing a legal joint with my son. Next tent was 4 very big Canadian soldiers on some sort of operation. It turns out cannabis induced paranoia does not recognise changes in the law. I spent the night gibbering with fear of being beaten half to death as a perverted dope fiend limey and then banged up in Calgary nick for 20 years.
Claude at the moment is the best LLM IMO. For all the hype over ChatGPT o1, I just found that it sits and "thinks" for ages and the result isn't actually much better. At best its stopping you manually saying, do this, then this, at worst because it is trying to take many steps itself, it goes off down the wrong path and you wait 30s+ for it to pump out nonsense.
Yes. Apparently o1 is great at maths and coding but as I don’t care about maths or coding that whizzes past me
For words, Claude is still best by a fair stretch. Also the context window on ChatGPT remains relatively tiny
As it seems I am temporarily allowed to discuss AI - I’d note that I’ve seen people all over the world quietly using it, and many hyper aware of all developments. The revolution is happening but it’s sotto voce. A lot of people don’t want their employers to know they are using it
For these and other reasons I wouldn’t bet against AI. It is coming and it is inevitable. Betting against it is like betting against electricity in 1895
I have found the opposite, its shit at coding, its really infuriating. But I am not asking it to code flappy birds game or a web app. As for maths, I have asked it some things that aren't that complicated (I am not a mathematician, but I do lots of maths) and it has done very poorly.
I yield to your experience in these matters
Gemini is often overlooked. It has a massive context window and seems to be improving over time
Frankly, they are all amazing and if you showed them to people in 2014 or 2004 they’d say Wow so that’s AGI
It’s the boiling frog thing
Oh don't get me wrong, I think if you have 100-120 IQ and do very repetitive white collar role and quite low down in the company hierarchy, I would be very concerned for my future. I actually think those that have lower IQ are far better insulated against this tech because they are much more likely to be in vocational jobs that robotics are nowhere near doing their work.
But o1 at least I have found massively underwhelming for my use cases. Its like asking an undergraduate who if they don't know the answer doesn't say I don't know or I think the answer is, it gives you a 10 minute BS talk all about it.
Are we allowed to talk about AI here again, then?
In which case.
Those of us "golgafrincham b ark" types whose main grift in life has been to shuffle papers and produce reports are doomed.
I do a lot of strategy consultancy work for startups and I feed my meeting notes into Claude (as others have noted, the best of the current bunch) and it largely spits out what I would. Not as good, but probably 70-80% of the way there. So why pay me thousands for my time when you're on a tight budget and the chatbot gets you 70-80% of the way there?
Well, I like to think the extra 20% is the difference between the startups I work with that succeed, and the guys who use chatbot answers and don't. But this is not quite 2 years into the AI revolution, and at the current pace, I will be outclassed within the next few years. If I'm lucky. The next few months, if I'm not.
I consider myself fortunate to be financially secure. Because if I wasn't, I'm pretty sure I would be looking at the bread line in a few years, much as a coal miner in the 90s. A completely obsolescent skill set.
I've retired except for translation and chairing my constituency CLP. I've wondered whether the translation work (mostly for the European Commission) will go, since they send a 95% correct draft translation, but although the pay per word has gone down the pay per hour remains decent (about £50/hour, with a minimum of £17.50 even if it's a single sentence) for zipping through the drafts, filling in the 5% and spotting any errors. It's a nice little retirement earner and I think they reckon the human eye is still important as you do occasinally catch the system totally misunderstanding something.
Any news on the post retirement study ideas?
I remain awestruck by people who are competent in more than one language.
My 21 year old granddaughter speaks Welsh, English, French, Italian and Japanese
If you will excuse the immodesty for a moment, my brain rarely lets me down. I reckon myself adept at English: I may not have anything interesting to say, but if someone else does I can spot whuch words they are using wrong and select the right ones. I can proof read well. And it's not just words; I am good at maths and can remember facts. But I am awful at foreign languages. I have not the slightest ear for them; their lexica remain forever elusive. It seems the hardest thing in the world to achieve even a basic competence. And yet, go to Europe and almost everyone there is able to switch effortlessly switch between four languages. These aren't specialists who've spent years striving to master a language - it's everyone. Waiters, actors, shopkeepers, children, passers-by. How is this possible? Dura Ace recently suggested it was just hours of hard work. Where do these people - like your granddaughter - find the time?
My granddaughter has the gift for languages so much so she was offered a place at Kyoto University but chose Turin for the last year before returning to Leeds University
We all have different talents and certainly I can manage French and once delivered a speech in Belgium in French ( No - not EU related, it was an international charity event)
I am impressed. By both you and your granddaughter.
Especially her ability to choose to study at the finest university in the western world.
Comments
I'd say he's worse at politics than Rishi or Boris.
Seems unlikely he can be as poor at politics as Truss, but we haven't had the budget yet.
Put her in charge of buying PPE for the NHS.
It's why we never see pieces slagging off a city or destination in the travel section, though they may appear in other parts of a periodical, such as the recent articles on anti-tourism protests in Barcelona, Palma, Venice etc.
Keith's problems are twofold:
1. He's clearly a complete and utter grifter, yet he's been presenting himself as THE voice of "probity and ethics" in public life for years. People expect politicians to to hypocrites, but Keith's hypocrisy stinks and it's almost like he's taking the voters for falls.
2. His grifting plays very badly when he's depriving the poorest pensioners of their WFA and condemning people's grannies to freeze to death this winter, just because he wants to punish them for voting Brexit while he's on the gravy train, filling his boots left, right and center...: 🤷♂️
We need to provide a more meaningful life to people. We have to look at why people become habitual drug users in response to mental health issues and failed families.
Sure there have always been some addicts/alcoholics etc, but the increasing rates in some parts such as Scotland or Appalachia shows a society in breakdown. It's not just a matter of restricting supply, you have to address the demand.
More like £5-10,000, including flights (did she go Economy? I rather doubt it)
That’s a massive freebie, and I know a massive freebie when I see one. And she has totally lied about it. Bad
But...
If I'd known SKS was such a grifter and what he'd do with WFA I would probably have voted Lib-Dem rather than Labour. It's too late now.. We're stuck with five years hard Labour and we've just got to get on with it...
Hopefully the choice at Election 29 will be more straightforward?
Tossing offWriting the piece isn't the issue. Getting commissioned is the issue.I sense the irritation is not with the gifts or trifles themselves which have been a part of politics since time immaterial but the sense of hypocrisy from Labour and Starmer who made certain "promises" or "commitments" about how they were going to govern before the election and seem (to some) not to be honouring those commitments.
I'm not sure how accepting tickets to a Taylor Swift concert or going to the St Leger last Saturday (the first PM to do so since a certain Winston Churchill in 1953) undermines politics. Prime Ministers have often attended big sporting and cultural events and no one has suggested they are demeaning politics.
Where I would be concerned is, as happened with Bernie Ecclestone in 1997, there was a sense in which legislation was deliberately amended or altered to placate a donor or as a result of some inducement or gift. That would be corrupt and would be deserved to be called out.
"Getting by with a little help from my friends" is more than a line in a song but assuming all these gifts are an attempt to curry favour or store up some political capital for later use - I'm less convinced.
My brother was in a Sandpit hotel not so long ago, and the grounds were full of Instagram "influencers" doing photos, posing by the pool, then changing outfit and background for a different shot 30 min later. Only staying one night etc but having a long holidays worth of snaps to publish.
Presumably they are scraping a living, or trying to live the dream, but like all Social Media it is an illusion.
Tho actually I will slightly defend TikTok and insta travel influencers. I’ve seen them at work in the Maldives and Sharm etc and it is much harder than it looks (like travel writing). That perfect 30 seconds of “spontaneous” video on the beach actually takes hours to arrange and produce, and the girls spend hours getting the make up, or “natural lack of make up”, precisely right
Also, they generally only go to luxe places (like the Maldives) which are lovely but they can quickly get boring
Just incredible.
Farage must be laughing himself to sleep every night as he counts the days down to 2028.
For all his many faults, and some of them shocking, I don't think we would have seen this with PM Corbyn. It's why he seemed like a breath of fresh air in 2017.
The long and the short of it is, do you, and frankly other posters, have people who know of our life here where if we bail out they can let PB know? It is a community (god I hate that phrase) but would be good to mourn, salute people where they deserve it.
Sorry if insensitive.
Sophy Ridge
@SophyRidgeSky
Is there even such a thing as a political honeymoon any more?
...
But I do want to make one point though.
Someone in No10 or close to No10 is leaking stories to cause maximum damage to the PM’s most senior staff member.
https://x.com/SophyRidgeSky/status/1836845939442487444
===
Can't think who this might be...
No way you get a five night NYE holiday in NYC in a 2 bed luxury 55th floor apartment in Manhattan skyscraper for £1250
It’s absurd and we can all see it is absurd. At that time of year you’d be hard pushed to get a luxe 2 bed cottage in NORFOLK for £1250 for 5 nights, especially if one includes travel there and back
Midtown Manhattan?? Several thousands
Eg here’s one that looks similar. Great views, high up a skyscraper. Manhattan
It is £1500 a night = £7500 for 5 nights, plus flights; include flights (esp Biz) and you’ve over £10k easily
https://www.airbnb.com/slink/8eWfOPLb
So presumably someone can investigate this and prove that it is a lie. Then what?
I'm no supporter of Labour per se but I'm happy to give the Government a chance to see what it can or thinks it can do.
The WFA announcement was poor politics in extemis though the fundamental argument of public money being given to people, some of whom clearly didn't need it, remains compelling.
Getting more of the 880,000 who were entitled to pension credit but didn't claim is a huge positive but the cliff-edge nature of the payment system allows those who miss the WFA by less than a fiver to cry foul (and rightly so). More thought would have led to a graduated system where perhaps the WFA payments were reduced for those with more income.
The problem as often with politics isn't the theory or the practice but the perception. As we see with immigration, what people think is happening and what is happening are often two very different things but challenging and overcoming those perceptions takes time and argument.
It isn’t a great look.
Elias Jaradeh described the wounded he treated as looking "mostly civilian"..."Most of the patients were young men in their twenties...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c04p7q3k4k9o
Weird, the BBC missed this bit about him.
The physician also proudly acknowledged that he is part of the “national resistance.” “In 1986, at the age of 18, I was incarcerated for 100 days in Khiam Prison by the Israeli forces that occupied the country,” he said.
https://today.lorientlejour.com/article/1300238/elias-jaradeh-hopes-to-be-a-doctor-at-lebanons-bedside.html
I hate drones which really holds me back. I've made a few hundred from my writing though, which is immensely satisfying.
I doubt it.
As far as as I know we have had a number of very prominent pbCOMers take that giant leap into the unknown, very sadly Plato and SBS.
We have JackW who must be older than those trees in California too, but I think he'll survive into the Big Crunch...
I don't think BiG G has any plans to check out anytime soon
And yet, go to Europe and almost everyone there is able to switch effortlessly switch between four languages. These aren't specialists who've spent years striving to master a language - it's everyone. Waiters, actors, shopkeepers, children, passers-by. How is this possible? Dura Ace recently suggested it was just hours of hard work. Where do these people - like your granddaughter - find the time?
He also had a drone. I am in this photo
Ok, yeh, maybe too strong a word at this point.
But I still think: what possesses these people?
We are being treated to almost hourly drip drip of free holidays, flats, tickets, dresses, football boxes etc etc.
Do they ever think - that would be very nice, I like NY on New Year's Eve, but if this got out it would make me look shit.
Turn's out he's a rather grubby Hugh Grant.
That goes for some of our other more venerable posters too.
MPs donations is, I suppose, a bit like MPs expenses. Perhaps it should have been dealt with decisively at the same time.
I have no plans for my family to sing 'Abide with me' and hope to post for years to come
My dear wife has fallen 3 times in the last 24 hours bless her, and she's OK but our secret to a long marriage is to have a great sense of humour and we have laughed about it as age does not come alone
Also bin 2 da blue Nile falls and was devastated to find you have to go at the weekend. Monday to Friday they TURN THEM OFF and pipe the water through a hydro electric set-up. Every day we stray further from God.
Iguazu Falls next February. I will report how they stack up.
Are we going to find like expenses its the "done thing" amongst MPs to basically book these things are minimal as possible / average cost if you went to a run of the mill place.
Even the Star...
George Mann
@sgfmann
·
2m
Daily Star: What planet are they on? #TomorrowsPapersToday
Iguazu is vastly more impressive than Victoria Falls. I like the smoke that thunders, I like the zebras in the garden in that posh colonial hotel, I like dipping in the Devil’s Pool, but Iguazu is on a different scale. And also it doesn’t really suffer the seasonality of Victoria Falls, it is always immense
It may be the single most exhilarating natural spectacle on earth, alongside Erta Ale lava lake in Ethiopia
We all have different talents and certainly I can manage French and once delivered a speech in Belgium in French ( No - not EU related, it was an international charity event)
I am getting more and more grumpy about this. I had yet another glorious moment in the mountains ruined by some twat with one. About 5m above my head and I'd been waiting 3 hours for the local golden eagle to make an appearance.
The whole fucking point is to get away from stuff like this. A summit can accommodate loads of people sitting quietly, munching quietly on sandwiches, admiring the view. Until: ZZZZZZZZZZZZ.
My only thought is naivety - having been on the outside for so long and having seen all the "gifts" go to the Conservatives, I can only presume Labour might have thought "what the hell, we've won, let's enjoy a little of the good life". As you say, myopic at best.
I imagine for the Conservatives the truth is they are now on the outside and watching the good stuff go to their opponents and they aren't happy.
Two wrongs don't make a Taylor Swift concert ticket, however, but there's a wider issue. My father used to get alcohol, hampers and other Christmas gifts when working for private companies. I presume the clients gave this stuff to all the firms with whom they worked. In many ways, that's always been how the world works and the same is true in politics (and it was far worse in former times).
The concern currently is how much of this largesse flows from a single individual and the impression it gives the Government is bought and paid for - it wouldn't the first Government to whom that epithet could be attributed.
Edit: the drones not the eagles
She might as well say “this would actually cost me £0 a night because that’s the cost of me staying at home and going nowhere which is what I would do if I hadn’t been given this amazing apartment in NYC, so I will register the gift of a zero pound holiday”
You estimate it by seeing it’s equal on the market, adding that, then adding in the cost of flights. There. Sorted
And even at nearly 50, it doesn't really feel like it's something I need to do anuthing about. For most of us, if we reach our life expectancy, we'll have been commenting on here for 40 or 50 years. It seems almost inconceivable that human civilisation, the internet and specifically this site will still be here when I check out on [checks actuarial site] 27th Feb 2064.
And yet I wouldn't have thought when I first got involved here back in 2005 - in a previous city, a previous career, with a previous girlfriend - that I'd still be commenting 19 and a quarter years later. Tempus fugits.
#NEW Texas Senate General Election Poll
🔵 Allred 45% (+1)
🔴 Cruz (Inc) 44%
@MorningConsult
https://x.com/PpollingNumbers/status/1836875827348156717
All it needed was 400 McDonald’s and we wouldn’t have needed Phil Collins playing in London and Philadelphia in one day making the environment worse for Ethiopia through the Concorde fuel.
Michigan - 🔵 Harris +8
Pennsylvania - 🔵 Harris +2
Wisconsin - 🔵 Harris +6
Georgia - 🔴 Trump +1
Nevada - 🔵 Harris +4
N. Carolina - 🔵 Harris +2
Arizona - 🔵 Harris +1
Morning Consult #C - LV - 9/19
https://x.com/PpollingNumbers/status/1836872886877049077
Hugh Grant is a fine actor.
https://x.com/sgfmann/status/1836874155410567221
TBF to this guy this was quite early in drone technology, around 2014 or something? (hence the poor quality of the image). It might have been the first time I encountered it
Robinson says he’s staying in NC governor’s race after bombshell CNN report
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4889150-north-carolina-lieutenant-governor-mark-robinson/
..CNN’s story, which went up about a half-hour after Robinson’s video, revealed a wide range of inflammatory comments that he reportedly made on a pornography website’s message board more than 10 years ago, including calling himself a “black NAZI” and wishing for slavery to be reinstated.
The outlet reported that Robinson made these comments between 2008 and 2012, before his political career began, on a website called “Nude Africa.” An account with the username “minisoldr” made the posts, and CNN identified the account as belonging to Robinson through his full name being listed on the account, an email address that Robinson used elsewhere and biographical details that line up with his background.
CNN reported that Robinson often shared his thoughts on various issues like race, gender and abortion on the forum. He wrote while discussing Black Republicans in 2010 “I’m a Black Nazi” and on another occasion that he supported slavery coming back.
“Slavery is not bad. Some people need to be slaves. I wish they would bring it [slavery] back. I would certainly buy a few,” he said.
Robinson also reportedly made posts in 2011 criticizing Martin Luther King Jr. as a “commie bastard” and “worse than a maggot” and in 2012 saying that he would prefer Adolf Hitler to be in charge over “any of the sh-t that’s in Washington.”
CNN reported Robinson made various sexually graphic comments on the pornography website message board, including describing his pornography preferences…