..Labour have blown it, spectacularly. There were tough decisions to make, and the public accepted that, but the woeful incompetence of Reeves means the narrative has been set for a parliament.
The bleating over WFA and Waspis suggests the public don't accept government spending decisions that result in less money being spent. They don't like tax rises either as shown by the NI fallout.
Sure Labour havent been great at explaining why, but there are few signs the public is accepting of fiscal realities. We prefer to be lied to and get angry and disappointed about it instead.
All three examples, of course, were post-election U-turns. Put them in the manifesto and Starmer maybe gets a majority of "only" 80-100, and much less post-election blowback.
Prediction-wise there will be a technological development in 2025, (if it has not already happened in 2024 (or even 2023)) which will be so epochal we will look back on it and think “that’s when human life changed forever, that’s when our universe was over-turned”
However we might not realise until 2026. Or 2027, at a stretch
Unless you can pinpoint what you think it might be, that's just a silly prediction.
"Something massive will happen, but we won't know for years!!!!"
What was the last technological development that was world-changing, that occurred in just a year?
(2025 is the 200th anniversary of the Stockton and Darlington Railway; arguably (and they will argue...) the first passenger railway in the world. I'd argue that was the start of an epochal change to the world. Perhaps the biggest, as it changed the entire way society formed itself.)
Ok. I hope the mods will forgive me as it’s Christmas
I have to leave the site anyway for a few days to drive to Cornwall and see fam and friends for chrimble - so they don’t have to ban me
Here goes. I believe we have reached Artificial General Intelligence. A few days ago OpenAI launched ChatGPTo3. It performs better than 98% of Phd candidates in MULTIPLE domains - ie it is smarter than 99.996% of humanity. It is “the 175th best coder in the world”. It passed the Arc AGI test - a test so hard it was thought it would take until 2030 for any AI to have a chance, a test that was contrived - in part - as a skeptical challenge to show AI could never equal or surpass the best humans
Perhaps more importantly, in my own secondary field of writing I have seen - in the last year - AI going from “pretty good” at editing and writing to “OMFG that’s professionally good” - this is in one year
We are now on the exponential bit of the AI curve. GPTo3 came 3 months after GPTo1. The speed of progress is actually accelerating. Human inertia being what it is, this may take some time to impact, but if you have a job which involves a screen and cognition, you should expect your job to disappear within 5 years, or less
Here’s a graph to represent what has just happened
Prediction-wise there will be a technological development in 2025, (if it has not already happened in 2024 (or even 2023)) which will be so epochal we will look back on it and think “that’s when human life changed forever, that’s when our universe was over-turned”
However we might not realise until 2026. Or 2027, at a stretch
Unless you can pinpoint what you think it might be, that's just a silly prediction.
"Something massive will happen, but we won't know for years!!!!"
What was the last technological development that was world-changing, that occurred in just a year?
(2025 is the 200th anniversary of the Stockton and Darlington Railway; arguably (and they will argue...) the first passenger railway in the world. I'd argue that was the start of an epochal change to the world. Perhaps the biggest, as it changed the entire way society formed itself.)
Ok. I hope the mods will forgive me as it’s Christmas
I have to leave the site anyway for a few days to drive to Cornwall and see fam and friends for chrimble - so they don’t have to ban me
Here goes. I believe we have reached Artificial General Intelligence. A few days ago OpenAI launched ChatGPTo3. It performs better than 98% of Phd candidates in MULTIPLE domains - ie it is smarter than 99.996% of humanity. It is “the 175th best coder in the world”. It passed the Arc AGI test - a test so hard it was thought it would take until 2030 for any AI to have a chance, a test that was contrived - in part - as a skeptical challenge to show AI could never equal or surpass the best humans
Perhaps more importantly, in my own secondary field of writing I have seen - in the last year - AI going from “pretty good” at editing and writing to “OMFG that’s professionally good” - this is in one year
We are now on the exponential bit of the AI curve. GPTo3 came 3 months after GPTo1. The speed of progress is actually accelerating. Human inertia being what it is, this may take some time to impact, but if you have a job which involves a screen and cognition, you should expect your job to disappear within 5 years, or less
Here’s a graph to represent what has just happened
(Snip)
Yes, and I believe many such claims are b/s.
It literally passed the Arc AGI test
Also, three weeks ago I lost one of my main flint knapping jobs - to AI. It is now personally impacting
Look away, if you prefer
Yes, and I believe many such claims are b/s.
The current ML/AI tech is good. Good enough to fool many. But is it actually intelligence, let alone an AGI?
I'd argue the many stupid mistakes they make prove otherwise.
1. Humans make mistakes endlessly
2. The “hallucination” problem - and it is a problem - is disappearing very fast
“I was making more when I worked at the B&M up the road,” he says. But after paying council tax and bills, he was taking home less.
If you work you're expected to pay taxes and bills and have benefits withdrawn on top. If you don't work, you get full benefits and your bills paid.
People who don't work are acting rationally. People who only work 16 hours are acting rationally too.
Don't blame people who are being rational. Blame the system.
It's not a 'system', it's the actual law.
No monies are being paid unless they fall within the scope of the various Social Security Acts. The last major change was IDS's Universal Credit and even now that has not been fully implemented. So if you want a variation from the legislative framework you can't expect any changes for at least a decade.
....or you could increase wages allowing people to 'benefit' from working.
Wages have been increased repeatedly since Universal Credit was introduced yet the problem isn't getting any better, because the problem remains that when people's wages go up they don't get to keep the extra they've earned, so they don't bother working any more.
The issue isn't the level wages are set at, its the existence of the taper and the level it is set at. Nobody should be on a net tax rate of over 50% but the poorest in society are taxed effectively at 55% on top of National Insurance and Income Tax etc - it is insane.
Real tax rates of close to 100% and we wonder why people don't bother working. We wouldn't tax the richest in society at that rate, so why do we expect the poorest in society on minimum wage to actually bother working at all, or more than 16 hours, if they're not going to keep any extra that they earn?
To be fair the Coalition did take the lowest earners out of income tax. It isn't in Labour's interest to go much further as the more voters rely on welfare the more likely they are to vote Labour while the more they earn their income from the private sector or private savings the more likely they are to vote Conservative
..Labour have blown it, spectacularly. There were tough decisions to make, and the public accepted that, but the woeful incompetence of Reeves means the narrative has been set for a parliament.
The bleating over WFA and Waspis suggests the public don't accept government spending decisions that result in less money being spent. They don't like tax rises either as shown by the NI fallout.
Sure Labour havent been great at explaining why, but there are few signs the public is accepting of fiscal realities. We prefer to be lied to and get angry and disappointed about it instead.
What bleating over WASPI women? Most btl even in the guardian don't seem in favour of compensating them.
In addition a fair amount of comments on WFA have agreed in principle but have argued the cut off point was the issue.
I have to wonder what universe Rachel Reeves is on saying that October's Budget would "deliver sustainable long-term growth, putting more money in people's pockets".
She jacked up National Insurance, the worst possible tax, whacking up taxes on employment so that people working for a living get less money in their pockets while leaving those with unearned incomes unaffected.
It was wrong when Gordon Brown did it, it was wrong when Rishi Sunak (as Chancellor) did it, and its wrong when Reeves does it.
We should be seeking to abolish National Insurance and equalise taxes between earned and unearned incomes, not whack it up and whacking it up is the opposite of creating growth.
No we should be ringfencing National Insurance for JSA, the state pension and some healthcare costs as it was set up to fund
..Labour have blown it, spectacularly. There were tough decisions to make, and the public accepted that, but the woeful incompetence of Reeves means the narrative has been set for a parliament.
The bleating over WFA and Waspis suggests the public don't accept government spending decisions that result in less money being spent. They don't like tax rises either as shown by the NI fallout.
Sure Labour havent been great at explaining why, but there are few signs the public is accepting of fiscal realities. We prefer to be lied to and get angry and disappointed about it instead.
Actually I think it’s more nuanced than that, because I think what Labour are seeing now is partly the result of an inability to confront the fiscal realities when they were in opposition.
If they were running on a platform to stabilise the public finances for long term prosperity and growth, and therefore having to make difficult decisions on tax and spend, they should have had the confidence to say that. The problem was that they at least gave the impression that they wouldn’t be doing these unpopular policies, then had to tie themselves in knots over black holes and what counts as working people in the first few months of government to justify why they didn’t say it at the GE. I am hardly surprised that people feel duped and let down.
Labour got 33% of the vote. What would they have got had they promised both tax rises and spending cuts whilst the Tories were promising neither? I'll give a clue. It is much less than 33%.
https://starfightersspace.com/ Starfighters Space operates an active fleet of F-104 Starfighters and is the only commercial company in the world with the capability to fly at MACH 2 while launching payloads into space. ..
I believe the high accident rate for Starfighters in West German service mainly involved low level flying, so as long as they keep them in the Stratosphere...
Saw or rather heard one doing a flyover at an airshow when I was very young, amazing noise.
I was buzzed by one over Hadrian's Wall a long time ago. That J79 makes quite the sound.
..Labour have blown it, spectacularly. There were tough decisions to make, and the public accepted that, but the woeful incompetence of Reeves means the narrative has been set for a parliament.
The bleating over WFA and Waspis suggests the public don't accept government spending decisions that result in less money being spent. They don't like tax rises either as shown by the NI fallout.
Sure Labour havent been great at explaining why, but there are few signs the public is accepting of fiscal realities. We prefer to be lied to and get angry and disappointed about it instead.
“I want better services for me, paid for by higher taxes for everyone except me.” Until it is explained in one syllable words that it’s not possible, people will believe it is, and will vote for whichever idiot proposes it.
But, now I think of it, the Labour base would clearly view Streeting as being on the Right, so I'd probably want 16/1 or 18/1
Something like that.
I don’t think Streeting will be the next leader, unless there is a coronation, which I doubt.
If Starmer fails, the party will look leftwards, similar to how the Tory Party looked to the candidate of the right when they held their contests.
Depends if Streeting polls as the only leader who might retain Labour's majority or not.
On the Tory Party of the last 5 leaders only 2 were the more rightwing of the final 2, Boris and Truss, while the other rightwingers in the last 2 ie Jenrick, Leadsom and Davis were defeated. Truss ended up being replaced by Sunak before she could even fight a general election.
Whereas of the last 3 Labour leaders 2 were the more leftwing of the last 2 ie Ed Miliband and Corbyn and Starmer the only moderate, though even he is more of a Brownite than Blairite whereas Streeting is more true New Labour
On TSE's suggestion in the header - what exactly does "enter" mean? If 2024Q4 and 2025Q1 are both negative did we "enter" recession only in 2024? Or does it mean "to have a recession recognised" which would allow for 2024Q3/4 (I think there's another update due for Q3?)
Well let's hope not but it has to be a material possibility, not just for us but for many of our peers too. I think the "recession or not" question is a bit overdone. A sluggish economy is still a sluggish economy even if it avoids two negative quarters in a row. The difference between -0.1% and +0.1% is not actually that meaningful. But let's hope not anyway.
“The figures also imply that living standards worsened in the year to July to September, with GDP per head falling by 0.2pc rather than remaining flat as initially believed. “
Genuinely the worst government ever
Fourth worst. After Truss then Johnson then Cameron II but ahead of May.
“I was making more when I worked at the B&M up the road,” he says. But after paying council tax and bills, he was taking home less.
If you work you're expected to pay taxes and bills and have benefits withdrawn on top. If you don't work, you get full benefits and your bills paid.
People who don't work are acting rationally. People who only work 16 hours are acting rationally too.
Don't blame people who are being rational. Blame the system.
It's not a 'system', it's the actual law.
No monies are being paid unless they fall within the scope of the various Social Security Acts. The last major change was IDS's Universal Credit and even now that has not been fully implemented. So if you want a variation from the legislative framework you can't expect any changes for at least a decade.
....or you could increase wages allowing people to 'benefit' from working.
Wages have been increased repeatedly since Universal Credit was introduced yet the problem isn't getting any better, because the problem remains that when people's wages go up they don't get to keep the extra they've earned, so they don't bother working any more.
The issue isn't the level wages are set at, its the existence of the taper and the level it is set at. Nobody should be on a net tax rate of over 50% but the poorest in society are taxed effectively at 55% on top of National Insurance and Income Tax etc - it is insane.
Real tax rates of close to 100% and we wonder why people don't bother working. We wouldn't tax the richest in society at that rate, so why do we expect the poorest in society on minimum wage to actually bother working at all, or more than 16 hours, if they're not going to keep any extra that they earn?
To be fair the Coalition did take the lowest earners out of income tax. It isn't in Labour's interest to go much further as the more voters rely on welfare the more likely they are to vote Labour while the more they earn their income from the private sector or private savings the more likely they are to vote Conservative
Doesn't, ATM, look like many people are likely to vote Conservative, wherever they get their income from!
OKC is slightly waspish mode this morning.
However, it's a very pleasant morning here, if a little chilly. So Good Morning everyone!
..Labour have blown it, spectacularly. There were tough decisions to make, and the public accepted that, but the woeful incompetence of Reeves means the narrative has been set for a parliament.
The bleating over WFA and Waspis suggests the public don't accept government spending decisions that result in less money being spent. They don't like tax rises either as shown by the NI fallout.
Sure Labour havent been great at explaining why, but there are few signs the public is accepting of fiscal realities. We prefer to be lied to and get angry and disappointed about it instead.
Actually I think it’s more nuanced than that, because I think what Labour are seeing now is partly the result of an inability to confront the fiscal realities when they were in opposition.
If they were running on a platform to stabilise the public finances for long term prosperity and growth, and therefore having to make difficult decisions on tax and spend, they should have had the confidence to say that. The problem was that they at least gave the impression that they wouldn’t be doing these unpopular policies, then had to tie themselves in knots over black holes and what counts as working people in the first few months of government to justify why they didn’t say it at the GE. I am hardly surprised that people feel duped and let down.
Labour got 33% of the vote. What would they have got had they promised both tax rises and spending cuts whilst the Tories were promising neither? I'll give a clue. It is much less than 33%.
What Labour are discovering is you cannot just obfuscate because you’re scared of the enemy, win power and then work out what you’re going to do/let down your voters.
This argument, that if Labour had just said what they were going to do it would have lost them the election and therefore they had to be untruthful, is exactly the problem with modern politics. The Tories were clapped out and discredited. Take the fight to them. Win the argument. They had the ammunition.
Huthaifa @Shack_Rat Elon reinstating the Twitter account of the Saudi ex-Muslim attacker, after quietly deleting all the tweets in which he expressed support for figures like Geert Wilders, Israel, and the AfD—as if no one would notice—is absolutely insane. 2:00 am · 23 Dec 2024
Well let's hope not but it has to be a material possibility, not just for us but for many of our peers too. I think the "recession or not" question is a bit overdone. A sluggish economy is still a sluggish economy even if it avoids two negative quarters in a row. The difference between -0.1% and +0.1% is not actually that meaningful. But let's hope not anyway.
Politicians really should switch their focus onto health and happiness rather than the economy.
Firstly as they are both more important. And secondly they are far easier for the government to make shift changes on.
US Constitution to be amended so that Elon Musk can succeed Trump as president.
Not happening in 2025, it would take too long. In fact given the referendums required I don't think it could happen before 2027.
I'll also file under 'not happening' because he's so controversial. He wouldn't get 38 states to endorse. Of course, if they take the Herdson option that may not be a problem.
A likelier bet for me is Vance to be president in 2025. Trump's old, clearly not well, under a lot of stress (even now his legal problems haven't gone away although they've been somewhat ameliorated) and moreover has twice been targeted for assassination. There are several routes I can see to Vance suddenly stepping up.
This would be very bad news given Vance is as nasty as Trump and considerably brighter and more mentally stable, making him much more dangerous. But it's a realistic chance.
He's at 11/4 to be the next President I think, not sure if there's a specific market on 2025.
Vance is actually more sensible than Trump as well as more intelligent and more of a traditional conservative and indeed once compared Trump to Hitler.
He could well be the Sunak to Trump's Johnson and Musk's Cummings
..Labour have blown it, spectacularly. There were tough decisions to make, and the public accepted that, but the woeful incompetence of Reeves means the narrative has been set for a parliament.
The bleating over WFA and Waspis suggests the public don't accept government spending decisions that result in less money being spent. They don't like tax rises either as shown by the NI fallout.
Sure Labour havent been great at explaining why, but there are few signs the public is accepting of fiscal realities. We prefer to be lied to and get angry and disappointed about it instead.
“I want better services for me, paid for by higher taxes for everyone except me.” Until it is explained in one syllable words that it’s not possible, people will believe it is, and will vote for whichever idiot proposes it.
Is spending £20bn on carbon capture 'better services for me'?* Is sending £100bn to the Bank of England to burn 'better services for me'? Is the civil service at its least effective and most overmanned in history 'better services for me'? Is tens of billions on migrant hotels 'better services for me'?
I think the public are quite justified in being annoyed with taxes going up while the Government continues to be crap and waste money.
..Labour have blown it, spectacularly. There were tough decisions to make, and the public accepted that, but the woeful incompetence of Reeves means the narrative has been set for a parliament.
The bleating over WFA and Waspis suggests the public don't accept government spending decisions that result in less money being spent. They don't like tax rises either as shown by the NI fallout.
Sure Labour havent been great at explaining why, but there are few signs the public is accepting of fiscal realities. We prefer to be lied to and get angry and disappointed about it instead.
All three examples, of course, were post-election U-turns. Put them in the manifesto and Starmer maybe gets a majority of "only" 80-100, and much less post-election blowback.
The scale of the Labour majority is a freak of circumstance.
As others have argued - Labour needed to rule out income and NI increases to win the election. The mistake they’ve made are 1) not calling out that they weren’t affordable when NI was cut 2023/24 and not finding an excuse to backtrack now when there was 4 years for Labour to deliver during which time people would have forgetten
..Labour have blown it, spectacularly. There were tough decisions to make, and the public accepted that, but the woeful incompetence of Reeves means the narrative has been set for a parliament.
The bleating over WFA and Waspis suggests the public don't accept government spending decisions that result in less money being spent. They don't like tax rises either as shown by the NI fallout.
Sure Labour havent been great at explaining why, but there are few signs the public is accepting of fiscal realities. We prefer to be lied to and get angry and disappointed about it instead.
“I want better services for me, paid for by higher taxes for everyone except me.” Until it is explained in one syllable words that it’s not possible, people will believe it is, and will vote for whichever idiot proposes it.
Even one syllable words might not be enough when there are people are willing to shout "it's all a scam, the money is there, lying on the street, but They don't want you to know about it."
Well let's hope not but it has to be a material possibility, not just for us but for many of our peers too. I think the "recession or not" question is a bit overdone. A sluggish economy is still a sluggish economy even if it avoids two negative quarters in a row. The difference between -0.1% and +0.1% is not actually that meaningful. But let's hope not anyway.
Politicians really should switch their focus onto health and happiness rather than the economy.
Firstly as they are both more important. And secondly they are far easier for the government to make shift changes on.
It's very hard for politicians to grow tge economy (or to grow it sustainably, anyway). But quite easy, as Reeves is demonstrating, to strangle growth.
@Eabhal I remember we had a chat around GDP data being revised up or down and I had a feeling it would go down. Well it certainly looks as though my feeling on it was correct. I think Q4 comes in negative and so does Q12025. On a per capita basis I think we're looking at around a 1% drop in GDP before things start improving. People are going to feel poorer because of the government and they will get the blame.
..Labour have blown it, spectacularly. There were tough decisions to make, and the public accepted that, but the woeful incompetence of Reeves means the narrative has been set for a parliament.
The bleating over WFA and Waspis suggests the public don't accept government spending decisions that result in less money being spent. They don't like tax rises either as shown by the NI fallout.
Sure Labour havent been great at explaining why, but there are few signs the public is accepting of fiscal realities. We prefer to be lied to and get angry and disappointed about it instead.
Actually I think it’s more nuanced than that, because I think what Labour are seeing now is partly the result of an inability to confront the fiscal realities when they were in opposition.
If they were running on a platform to stabilise the public finances for long term prosperity and growth, and therefore having to make difficult decisions on tax and spend, they should have had the confidence to say that. The problem was that they at least gave the impression that they wouldn’t be doing these unpopular policies, then had to tie themselves in knots over black holes and what counts as working people in the first few months of government to justify why they didn’t say it at the GE. I am hardly surprised that people feel duped and let down.
Labour got 33% of the vote. What would they have got had they promised both tax rises and spending cuts whilst the Tories were promising neither? I'll give a clue. It is much less than 33%.
What Labour are discovering is you cannot just obfuscate because you’re scared of the enemy, win power and then work out what you’re going to do/let down your voters.
This argument, that if Labour had just said what they were going to do it would have lost them the election and therefore they had to be untruthful, is exactly the problem with modern politics. The Tories were clapped out and discredited. Take the fight to them. Win the argument. They had the ammunition.
Modern politics is a reflection of modern voters and poor demographics. Impatient and unrealistic forever comparing to the previous generations with better demographics. The state of the political parties is a symptom not the disease.
Bit gloomy but Labour have another Budget not that far away. If they haven't learned that just smacking the private sector then blowing money on the carbon capture crap (which even if you really want green spending is a poor idea) then things will just get worse.
But something that's better, ahem, is the second episode of my new F1 podcast, which focuses on the midfield battle:
Come on then. How do you decarbonise cement and lime production or waste incinerators without carbon capture?
You don't. You offshore it to countries with inferior regulation then claim you've decarbonised the economy.
On a more serious note, waste incinerators are more numerous than they were but they're hardly building them faster than wind turbines. If you really want to encourage more green stuff than alongside more renewable energy production things like better internet accessibility will help people to work without needing to travel.
I'd want to know precisely how much cement and lime production we actually do. Carbon capture getting £22bn in difficult economic times, when we have a a higher Defence target but have only decommissioned ships and such lately, does not seem terribly sensible.
Allowing uncontrolled climate change is even less sensible.
Oh, and I agree that renewables (plus storage to make them dispatchable) is a better approach than CCGTs with CCS for power generation. But DESNZ has different ideas.
And the £22 billion is spread over 15 years or more - the up front CAPEX comes from the private sector. BP and their partners have already signed £5 billion worth of contracts.
The real problem with the UK climate change debate is not with the science or the techniques. It's that there isn't a general belief in the UK that CO2 emissions are going to reduce either bigly enough or at all globally. And that is the only figure that counts.
That scepticism has a firm and solid basis.
So it isn't possible to generate the sort of communal enthusiasm willing to undergo change, inconvenience and cost - and there may be other downsides - for the sake of something that deep down we think won't work because of the nature of planet earth's politics.
Politically this will do Reform no harm. It didn't do Trump much damage.
https://eciu.net/media/press-releases/2024/election-poll-voters-for-all-parties-committed-to-net-zero notes: “Overall, three-quarters (76%) who said they were likely to vote in the local elections support the UK Government’s target to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, with 69% of the public as a whole also backing it. Support for the target easily outweighed opposition among voters of every party, including Reform UK which, while publicly opposing the target, has more than half (52%) of its voters supportive of net zero.”
So, I don’t think the polling entirely supports your contention.
https://starfightersspace.com/ Starfighters Space operates an active fleet of F-104 Starfighters and is the only commercial company in the world with the capability to fly at MACH 2 while launching payloads into space. ..
Nice bit of condensation over the wing in that film, too.
Though not as crazy as the idea to use an old cargo boat instead.
Huthaifa @Shack_Rat Elon reinstating the Twitter account of the Saudi ex-Muslim attacker, after quietly deleting all the tweets in which he expressed support for figures like Geert Wilders, Israel, and the AfD—as if no one would notice—is absolutely insane. 2:00 am · 23 Dec 2024
If you pay $50bn to be able to rewrite the truth you may as well use it to the fullest extent.
US Constitution to be amended so that Elon Musk can succeed Trump as president.
Not happening in 2025, it would take too long. In fact given the referendums required I don't think it could happen before 2027.
I'll also file under 'not happening' because he's so controversial. He wouldn't get 38 states to endorse. Of course, if they take the Herdson option that may not be a problem.
A likelier bet for me is Vance to be president in 2025. Trump's old, clearly not well, under a lot of stress (even now his legal problems haven't gone away although they've been somewhat ameliorated) and moreover has twice been targeted for assassination. There are several routes I can see to Vance suddenly stepping up.
This would be very bad news given Vance is as nasty as Trump and considerably brighter and more mentally stable, making him much more dangerous. But it's a realistic chance.
He's at 11/4 to be the next President I think, not sure if there's a specific market on 2025.
Vance is actually more sensible than Trump as well as more intelligent and more of a traditional conservative and indeed once compared Trump to Hitler.
He could well be the Sunak to Trump's Johnson and Musk's Cummings
Is being Sunak to be recommended? Unless it means that in 2029 the Dems are going to win everything up to and including Oklahoma and Utah. And the Greens California.
Huthaifa @Shack_Rat Elon reinstating the Twitter account of the Saudi ex-Muslim attacker, after quietly deleting all the tweets in which he expressed support for figures like Geert Wilders, Israel, and the AfD—as if no one would notice—is absolutely insane. 2:00 am · 23 Dec 2024
Weird things happened to that guy’s Twitter account quite soon after the slaughter BUT this is true for the social media of many criminals - esp terror attackers. Often it’s done by the cops
..Labour have blown it, spectacularly. There were tough decisions to make, and the public accepted that, but the woeful incompetence of Reeves means the narrative has been set for a parliament.
The bleating over WFA and Waspis suggests the public don't accept government spending decisions that result in less money being spent. They don't like tax rises either as shown by the NI fallout.
Sure Labour havent been great at explaining why, but there are few signs the public is accepting of fiscal realities. We prefer to be lied to and get angry and disappointed about it instead.
Actually I think it’s more nuanced than that, because I think what Labour are seeing now is partly the result of an inability to confront the fiscal realities when they were in opposition.
If they were running on a platform to stabilise the public finances for long term prosperity and growth, and therefore having to make difficult decisions on tax and spend, they should have had the confidence to say that. The problem was that they at least gave the impression that they wouldn’t be doing these unpopular policies, then had to tie themselves in knots over black holes and what counts as working people in the first few months of government to justify why they didn’t say it at the GE. I am hardly surprised that people feel duped and let down.
Labour got 33% of the vote. What would they have got had they promised both tax rises and spending cuts whilst the Tories were promising neither? I'll give a clue. It is much less than 33%.
What Labour are discovering is you cannot just obfuscate because you’re scared of the enemy, win power and then work out what you’re going to do/let down your voters.
This argument, that if Labour had just said what they were going to do it would have lost them the election and therefore they had to be untruthful, is exactly the problem with modern politics. The Tories were clapped out and discredited. Take the fight to them. Win the argument. They had the ammunition.
The really frustrating thing about this is that some of us were warning about this for the last couple of years before the election, and kept getting howled down by people who "knew better".
Bit gloomy but Labour have another Budget not that far away. If they haven't learned that just smacking the private sector then blowing money on the carbon capture crap (which even if you really want green spending is a poor idea) then things will just get worse.
But something that's better, ahem, is the second episode of my new F1 podcast, which focuses on the midfield battle:
Bit gloomy but Labour have another Budget not that far away. If they haven't learned that just smacking the private sector then blowing money on the carbon capture crap (which even if you really want green spending is a poor idea) then things will just get worse.
But something that's better, ahem, is the second episode of my new F1 podcast, which focuses on the midfield battle:
Come on then. How do you decarbonise cement and lime production or waste incinerators without carbon capture?
You don't. You offshore it to countries with inferior regulation then claim you've decarbonised the economy.
On a more serious note, waste incinerators are more numerous than they were but they're hardly building them faster than wind turbines. If you really want to encourage more green stuff than alongside more renewable energy production things like better internet accessibility will help people to work without needing to travel.
I'd want to know precisely how much cement and lime production we actually do. Carbon capture getting £22bn in difficult economic times, when we have a a higher Defence target but have only decommissioned ships and such lately, does not seem terribly sensible.
Allowing uncontrolled climate change is even less sensible.
Oh, and I agree that renewables (plus storage to make them dispatchable) is a better approach than CCGTs with CCS for power generation. But DESNZ has different ideas.
And the £22 billion is spread over 15 years or more - the up front CAPEX comes from the private sector. BP and their partners have already signed £5 billion worth of contracts.
The real problem with the UK climate change debate is not with the science or the techniques. It's that there isn't a general belief in the UK that CO2 emissions are going to reduce either bigly enough or at all globally. And that is the only figure that counts.
That scepticism has a firm and solid basis.
So it isn't possible to generate the sort of communal enthusiasm willing to undergo change, inconvenience and cost - and there may be other downsides - for the sake of something that deep down we think won't work because of the nature of planet earth's politics.
Politically this will do Reform no harm. It didn't do Trump much damage.
US Constitution to be amended so that Elon Musk can succeed Trump as president.
Not happening in 2025, it would take too long. In fact given the referendums required I don't think it could happen before 2027.
I'll also file under 'not happening' because he's so controversial. He wouldn't get 38 states to endorse. Of course, if they take the Herdson option that may not be a problem.
A likelier bet for me is Vance to be president in 2025. Trump's old, clearly not well, under a lot of stress (even now his legal problems haven't gone away although they've been somewhat ameliorated) and moreover has twice been targeted for assassination. There are several routes I can see to Vance suddenly stepping up.
This would be very bad news given Vance is as nasty as Trump and considerably brighter and more mentally stable, making him much more dangerous. But it's a realistic chance.
He's at 11/4 to be the next President I think, not sure if there's a specific market on 2025.
Vance is actually more sensible than Trump as well as more intelligent and more of a traditional conservative and indeed once compared Trump to Hitler.
He could well be the Sunak to Trump's Johnson and Musk's Cummings
Is being Sunak to be recommended? Unless it means that in 2029 the Dems are going to win everything up to and including Oklahoma and Utah. And the Greens California.
On that scenario Trumpite loyalists would also leave the GOP and form their own Trumpite Maga Reform style party
..Labour have blown it, spectacularly. There were tough decisions to make, and the public accepted that, but the woeful incompetence of Reeves means the narrative has been set for a parliament.
The bleating over WFA and Waspis suggests the public don't accept government spending decisions that result in less money being spent. They don't like tax rises either as shown by the NI fallout.
Sure Labour havent been great at explaining why, but there are few signs the public is accepting of fiscal realities. We prefer to be lied to and get angry and disappointed about it instead.
All three examples, of course, were post-election U-turns. Put them in the manifesto and Starmer maybe gets a majority of "only" 80-100, and much less post-election blowback.
The scale of the Labour majority is a freak of circumstance.
As others have argued - Labour needed to rule out income and NI increases to win the election
Sorry, I just don't believe that. The British people wanted the Tories out. Labour were the only vehicle for that. They had won the election before the end of 2022 - the only thing to decide after that was the scale of the win.
Prediction-wise there will be a technological development in 2025, (if it has not already happened in 2024 (or even 2023)) which will be so epochal we will look back on it and think “that’s when human life changed forever, that’s when our universe was over-turned”
However we might not realise until 2026. Or 2027, at a stretch
Unless you can pinpoint what you think it might be, that's just a silly prediction.
"Something massive will happen, but we won't know for years!!!!"
What was the last technological development that was world-changing, that occurred in just a year?
(2025 is the 200th anniversary of the Stockton and Darlington Railway; arguably (and they will argue...) the first passenger railway in the world. I'd argue that was the start of an epochal change to the world. Perhaps the biggest, as it changed the entire way society formed itself.)
I’d argue that the modern canal era (late 18th century onward) was the start of the Industrial Revolution.
I wouldn't strongly argue against that. But:
*) There was no 'big-bang' event at the start of the canals; the Bridgewater Canal was not greatly acknowledged at the time, or even nowadays. Whereas AIUI a fair few people at the time acknowledged that the S&D was something different. The Liverpool and Manchester five years later, even more so.
*) The changes the canals started were minor and very gradual. Whereas passenger railways changed so much about how, and where, we lived, in just a few decades. As a minor example, they made suburbia possible.
Life was different before the industrial revolution compared to afterwards. But what was *the* starting point of the industrial revolution? The first canals? Arkwright's first mills? Lombe's mill in Derby? Newcomen's atmospheric engine?
Yet we can point at the opening of the S&D (or if you ware so minded, the L&M), and say "Yes, that's the point that the world changed."
It’s when you see the tunnels - factory brick lined. It’s the scale of the thing.
True, at the time it wasn’t seen as a revolution. But the canals made bulk transport vastly cheaper and reliable to the point of timetables. Which in turn fed the nascent factories.
Prediction-wise there will be a technological development in 2025, (if it has not already happened in 2024 (or even 2023)) which will be so epochal we will look back on it and think “that’s when human life changed forever, that’s when our universe was over-turned”
However we might not realise until 2026. Or 2027, at a stretch
“I was making more when I worked at the B&M up the road,” he says. But after paying council tax and bills, he was taking home less.
If you work you're expected to pay taxes and bills and have benefits withdrawn on top. If you don't work, you get full benefits and your bills paid.
People who don't work are acting rationally. People who only work 16 hours are acting rationally too.
Don't blame people who are being rational. Blame the system.
It's not a 'system', it's the actual law.
No monies are being paid unless they fall within the scope of the various Social Security Acts. The last major change was IDS's Universal Credit and even now that has not been fully implemented. So if you want a variation from the legislative framework you can't expect any changes for at least a decade.
....or you could increase wages allowing people to 'benefit' from working.
Wages have been increased repeatedly since Universal Credit was introduced yet the problem isn't getting any better, because the problem remains that when people's wages go up they don't get to keep the extra they've earned, so they don't bother working any more.
The issue isn't the level wages are set at, its the existence of the taper and the level it is set at. Nobody should be on a net tax rate of over 50% but the poorest in society are taxed effectively at 55% on top of National Insurance and Income Tax etc - it is insane.
Real tax rates of close to 100% and we wonder why people don't bother working. We wouldn't tax the richest in society at that rate, so why do we expect the poorest in society on minimum wage to actually bother working at all, or more than 16 hours, if they're not going to keep any extra that they earn?
To be fair the Coalition did take the lowest earners out of income tax. It isn't in Labour's interest to go much further as the more voters rely on welfare the more likely they are to vote Labour while the more they earn their income from the private sector or private savings the more likely they are to vote Conservative
Doesn't, ATM, look like many people are likely to vote Conservative, wherever they get their income from!
OKC is slightly waspish mode this morning.
However, it's a very pleasant morning here, if a little chilly. So Good Morning everyone!
Prediction-wise there will be a technological development in 2025, (if it has not already happened in 2024 (or even 2023)) which will be so epochal we will look back on it and think “that’s when human life changed forever, that’s when our universe was over-turned”
However we might not realise until 2026. Or 2027, at a stretch
Unless you can pinpoint what you think it might be, that's just a silly prediction.
"Something massive will happen, but we won't know for years!!!!"
What was the last technological development that was world-changing, that occurred in just a year?
(2025 is the 200th anniversary of the Stockton and Darlington Railway; arguably (and they will argue...) the first passenger railway in the world. I'd argue that was the start of an epochal change to the world. Perhaps the biggest, as it changed the entire way society formed itself.)
Ok. I hope the mods will forgive me as it’s Christmas
I have to leave the site anyway for a few days to drive to Cornwall and see fam and friends for chrimble - so they don’t have to ban me
Here goes. I believe we have reached Artificial General Intelligence. A few days ago OpenAI launched ChatGPTo3. It performs better than 98% of Phd candidates in MULTIPLE domains - ie it is smarter than 99.996% of humanity. It is “the 175th best coder in the world”. It passed the Arc AGI test - a test so hard it was thought it would take until 2030 for any AI to have a chance, a test that was contrived - in part - as a skeptical challenge to show AI could never equal or surpass the best humans
Perhaps more importantly, in my own secondary field of writing I have seen - in the last year - AI going from “pretty good” at editing and writing to “OMFG that’s professionally good” - this is in one year
We are now on the exponential bit of the AI curve. GPTo3 came 3 months after GPTo1. The speed of progress is actually accelerating. Human inertia being what it is, this may take some time to impact, but if you have a job which involves a screen and cognition, you should expect your job to disappear within 5 years, or less
Here’s a graph to represent what has just happened
(Snip)
Yes, and I believe many such claims are b/s.
It literally passed the Arc AGI test
Also, three weeks ago I lost one of my main flint knapping jobs - to AI. It is now personally impacting
Look away, if you prefer
Yes, and I believe many such claims are b/s.
The current ML/AI tech is good. Good enough to fool many. But is it actually intelligence, let alone an AGI?
I'd argue the many stupid mistakes they make prove otherwise.
Had some good news in the last week of work: we’ve won a £1M grant for a project on medical AI. There are many great and wonderful things we can do with AI in healthcare. But, no, we are not near to AGI.
Bit gloomy but Labour have another Budget not that far away. If they haven't learned that just smacking the private sector then blowing money on the carbon capture crap (which even if you really want green spending is a poor idea) then things will just get worse.
But something that's better, ahem, is the second episode of my new F1 podcast, which focuses on the midfield battle:
Trump in power in America will cause several major economic shocks as well, assuming he enacts some of the policies he's been talking about.
Even if he doesn't, endlessly tweeting about them in all caps is going to unnerve businesses.
Yup. I hope he is talking about tariffs to get a deal. But his rhetoric will drive behavioural change just as labours did when coming to,office.
It’s the reason why I’d have preferred the hapless Harris.
Well, it's one reason, remembering this is a man who in 2017 tweeted so many military threats to North Korea even Putin urged him to cool it down before he provoked a nuclear war.
There are others. Harris isn't a criminal, or a sex offender, or a failed President, or a serial liar, or a traitor, or 78.
Yet she was such a shit candidate he beat her comfortably.
He didn't beat her that comfortably. The electoral college magnified his vote margin. Admittedly, he did better than in 2016 or 2020.
The more interesting and alarming question is why, knowing all these things, enough Americans still voted for him to put him back in the White House (leaving aside the efforts of the courts and Musk to put their thumb on the scales on his behalf). If the Democrats have any sense they will start their inquest there. They probably won't, but they should.
It will probably be blame the voters stuff. They are sinners who will repent.
I get the impression many people saw the NY court case as political especially after some statements from the DA.
The NY charges were blatantly political - misdemaenours bootstrapped into felonies to get around the statute of limitations by a partisan DA. Not that he didn't do them, but if he weren't Donald Trump, or even if he were pre-political Donald Trump, he'd never have been charged for them. Like Joe Biden's son and those firearms charges. It's a crying shame that the worst case was the only one that reached a verdict.
The Florida documents charges, the Georgia election interference cases and the DC Jan 6th cases against weren't political, in that he'd probably have been charged for them whoever he was, but unfortunately for prosecutors the first had the most pro-Trump judge imaginable, the second got sidetracked with some irrelevant rubbish about the DA's sex life and the third was in effect destroyed by the bizarre and terrible immunity ruling from the Supreme Court.
So Trump lives to fight another day, doubtless to the detriment of America and the world.
The Georgia election interference cases were the ones that actually really mattered, but no, the Dems knew better...
Process State
He could have been charged for Jan 6 stuff.
Pick a criminal act, get some witnesses, charge him.
But having x years of enquiries is the way to go, apparently.
Bit gloomy but Labour have another Budget not that far away. If they haven't learned that just smacking the private sector then blowing money on the carbon capture crap (which even if you really want green spending is a poor idea) then things will just get worse.
But something that's better, ahem, is the second episode of my new F1 podcast, which focuses on the midfield battle:
Come on then. How do you decarbonise cement and lime production or waste incinerators without carbon capture?
You don't. You offshore it to countries with inferior regulation then claim you've decarbonised the economy.
On a more serious note, waste incinerators are more numerous than they were but they're hardly building them faster than wind turbines. If you really want to encourage more green stuff than alongside more renewable energy production things like better internet accessibility will help people to work without needing to travel.
I'd want to know precisely how much cement and lime production we actually do. Carbon capture getting £22bn in difficult economic times, when we have a a higher Defence target but have only decommissioned ships and such lately, does not seem terribly sensible.
Allowing uncontrolled climate change is even less sensible.
Oh, and I agree that renewables (plus storage to make them dispatchable) is a better approach than CCGTs with CCS for power generation. But DESNZ has different ideas.
And the £22 billion is spread over 15 years or more - the up front CAPEX comes from the private sector. BP and their partners have already signed £5 billion worth of contracts.
The real problem with the UK climate change debate is not with the science or the techniques. It's that there isn't a general belief in the UK that CO2 emissions are going to reduce either bigly enough or at all globally. And that is the only figure that counts.
That scepticism has a firm and solid basis.
So it isn't possible to generate the sort of communal enthusiasm willing to undergo change, inconvenience and cost - and there may be other downsides - for the sake of something that deep down we think won't work because of the nature of planet earth's politics.
Politically this will do Reform no harm. It didn't do Trump much damage.
https://eciu.net/media/press-releases/2024/election-poll-voters-for-all-parties-committed-to-net-zero notes: “Overall, three-quarters (76%) who said they were likely to vote in the local elections support the UK Government’s target to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, with 69% of the public as a whole also backing it. Support for the target easily outweighed opposition among voters of every party, including Reform UK which, while publicly opposing the target, has more than half (52%) of its voters supportive of net zero.”
So, I don’t think the polling entirely supports your contention.
Yep. And polling shows that people associate renewables with cheap, clean UK energy that means we won't be exposed to fossil fuel markets like we have in the past.
(PBers might disagree with that but that's the impression people have after the Ukraine fiasco).
'The UK economy had zero growth between July and September, revised official figures show.
The revised data comes after a series of disappointing figures including inflation rising at its fastest pace for eight months, and the economy unexpectedly shrinking in October.
One of the UK's leading business groups, the CBI said its latest company survey suggested "the economy is headed for the worst of all worlds".
Chancellor Rachel Reeves said the challenge to fix the economy "after 15 years of neglect is huge", while shadow chancellor Mel Stride said Monday's figures showed "growth has tanked on Labour's watch".
Firms have warned that measures announced in October's Budget including a rise in employer national insurance and a higher minimum wage could push them into raising prices and reducing the number of new jobs they create.' https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c78631e4gygo
Bit gloomy but Labour have another Budget not that far away. If they haven't learned that just smacking the private sector then blowing money on the carbon capture crap (which even if you really want green spending is a poor idea) then things will just get worse.
But something that's better, ahem, is the second episode of my new F1 podcast, which focuses on the midfield battle:
Come on then. How do you decarbonise cement and lime production or waste incinerators without carbon capture?
You don't. You offshore it to countries with inferior regulation then claim you've decarbonised the economy.
On a more serious note, waste incinerators are more numerous than they were but they're hardly building them faster than wind turbines. If you really want to encourage more green stuff than alongside more renewable energy production things like better internet accessibility will help people to work without needing to travel.
I'd want to know precisely how much cement and lime production we actually do. Carbon capture getting £22bn in difficult economic times, when we have a a higher Defence target but have only decommissioned ships and such lately, does not seem terribly sensible.
Allowing uncontrolled climate change is even less sensible.
Oh, and I agree that renewables (plus storage to make them dispatchable) is a better approach than CCGTs with CCS for power generation. But DESNZ has different ideas.
And the £22 billion is spread over 15 years or more - the up front CAPEX comes from the private sector. BP and their partners have already signed £5 billion worth of contracts.
The real problem with the UK climate change debate is not with the science or the techniques. It's that there isn't a general belief in the UK that CO2 emissions are going to reduce either bigly enough or at all globally. And that is the only figure that counts.
That scepticism has a firm and solid basis.
So it isn't possible to generate the sort of communal enthusiasm willing to undergo change, inconvenience and cost - and there may be other downsides - for the sake of something that deep down we think won't work because of the nature of planet earth's politics.
Politically this will do Reform no harm. It didn't do Trump much damage.
https://eciu.net/media/press-releases/2024/election-poll-voters-for-all-parties-committed-to-net-zero notes: “Overall, three-quarters (76%) who said they were likely to vote in the local elections support the UK Government’s target to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, with 69% of the public as a whole also backing it. Support for the target easily outweighed opposition among voters of every party, including Reform UK which, while publicly opposing the target, has more than half (52%) of its voters supportive of net zero.”
So, I don’t think the polling entirely supports your contention.
Ask them if they still support it if it means higher fuel and heating bills for them if fossil fuels are scrapped too quickly without enough renewables and nuclear energy sources in place to replace them
Bit gloomy but Labour have another Budget not that far away. If they haven't learned that just smacking the private sector then blowing money on the carbon capture crap (which even if you really want green spending is a poor idea) then things will just get worse.
But something that's better, ahem, is the second episode of my new F1 podcast, which focuses on the midfield battle:
One last remark on AI and the OpenAI announcements
1. Remember that other companies - esp Google, and to a lesser extent X - are CATCHING UP
2. Remember that robotics is now joining the same exponential surge
3. Think about this: GPTo3 is the “175th best coder” in the world. By ELO ranking (yes, adapted from chess) there is one - just one - coder at OpenAI better than o3 itself. So why don’t they get a bunch of o3’s to work on o3 itself? That would be the world’s best coding team. o3 would rapidly improve, then even more rapidly improve, then explode
That would and will be the recursive self improvement path to Artificial SUPER Intelligence. As predicted by some sci-fi writers years ago
It is now coming true. I think that deserves a Festive
Bit gloomy but Labour have another Budget not that far away. If they haven't learned that just smacking the private sector then blowing money on the carbon capture crap (which even if you really want green spending is a poor idea) then things will just get worse.
But something that's better, ahem, is the second episode of my new F1 podcast, which focuses on the midfield battle:
Come on then. How do you decarbonise cement and lime production or waste incinerators without carbon capture?
You don't. You offshore it to countries with inferior regulation then claim you've decarbonised the economy.
On a more serious note, waste incinerators are more numerous than they were but they're hardly building them faster than wind turbines. If you really want to encourage more green stuff than alongside more renewable energy production things like better internet accessibility will help people to work without needing to travel.
I'd want to know precisely how much cement and lime production we actually do. Carbon capture getting £22bn in difficult economic times, when we have a a higher Defence target but have only decommissioned ships and such lately, does not seem terribly sensible.
Allowing uncontrolled climate change is even less sensible.
Oh, and I agree that renewables (plus storage to make them dispatchable) is a better approach than CCGTs with CCS for power generation. But DESNZ has different ideas.
And the £22 billion is spread over 15 years or more - the up front CAPEX comes from the private sector. BP and their partners have already signed £5 billion worth of contracts.
The real problem with the UK climate change debate is not with the science or the techniques. It's that there isn't a general belief in the UK that CO2 emissions are going to reduce either bigly enough or at all globally. And that is the only figure that counts.
That scepticism has a firm and solid basis.
So it isn't possible to generate the sort of communal enthusiasm willing to undergo change, inconvenience and cost - and there may be other downsides - for the sake of something that deep down we think won't work because of the nature of planet earth's politics.
Politically this will do Reform no harm. It didn't do Trump much damage.
https://eciu.net/media/press-releases/2024/election-poll-voters-for-all-parties-committed-to-net-zero notes: “Overall, three-quarters (76%) who said they were likely to vote in the local elections support the UK Government’s target to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, with 69% of the public as a whole also backing it. Support for the target easily outweighed opposition among voters of every party, including Reform UK which, while publicly opposing the target, has more than half (52%) of its voters supportive of net zero.”
So, I don’t think the polling entirely supports your contention.
Ask them if they still support it if it means higher fuel and heating bills for them if fossil fuels are scrapped too quickly without enough renewables and nuclear energy sources in place to replace them
Because that would be a fair and balanced opinion poll question. Why not ask people if they support cheaper energy if it means their house being swept into the sea.
Prediction-wise there will be a technological development in 2025, (if it has not already happened in 2024 (or even 2023)) which will be so epochal we will look back on it and think “that’s when human life changed forever, that’s when our universe was over-turned”
However we might not realise until 2026. Or 2027, at a stretch
Unless you can pinpoint what you think it might be, that's just a silly prediction.
"Something massive will happen, but we won't know for years!!!!"
What was the last technological development that was world-changing, that occurred in just a year?
(2025 is the 200th anniversary of the Stockton and Darlington Railway; arguably (and they will argue...) the first passenger railway in the world. I'd argue that was the start of an epochal change to the world. Perhaps the biggest, as it changed the entire way society formed itself.)
Ok. I hope the mods will forgive me as it’s Christmas
I have to leave the site anyway for a few days to drive to Cornwall and see fam and friends for chrimble - so they don’t have to ban me
Here goes. I believe we have reached Artificial General Intelligence. A few days ago OpenAI launched ChatGPTo3. It performs better than 98% of Phd candidates in MULTIPLE domains - ie it is smarter than 99.996% of humanity. It is “the 175th best coder in the world”. It passed the Arc AGI test - a test so hard it was thought it would take until 2030 for any AI to have a chance, a test that was contrived - in part - as a skeptical challenge to show AI could never equal or surpass the best humans
Perhaps more importantly, in my own secondary field of writing I have seen - in the last year - AI going from “pretty good” at editing and writing to “OMFG that’s professionally good” - this is in one year
We are now on the exponential bit of the AI curve. GPTo3 came 3 months after GPTo1. The speed of progress is actually accelerating. Human inertia being what it is, this may take some time to impact, but if you have a job which involves a screen and cognition, you should expect your job to disappear within 5 years, or less
Here’s a graph to represent what has just happened
(Snip)
Yes, and I believe many such claims are b/s.
It literally passed the Arc AGI test
Also, three weeks ago I lost one of my main flint knapping jobs - to AI. It is now personally impacting
Look away, if you prefer
Yes, and I believe many such claims are b/s.
The current ML/AI tech is good. Good enough to fool many. But is it actually intelligence, let alone an AGI?
I'd argue the many stupid mistakes they make prove otherwise.
Had some good news in the last week of work: we’ve won a £1M grant for a project on medical AI. There are many great and wonderful things we can do with AI in healthcare. But, no, we are not near to AGI.
In the coding world - the fiddling of the benchmarks is mildly amusing.
“AI” is used as a code completion tool. The whole “95% of code written by” thing is also funny. Nearly that high a percentage of code is written by the autocomplete tools already.
Consider a simple bean class in Java - you write the names of a dozen parameters (say). The types are autocompleted from a letter or two, with a keyboard shortcut. Then the getters, setters, constructors, equals, hashCode, toString and Builder are auto-generated with a click. And formatted to look nice.
Class is probably 3 figures of lines. Human partially wrote a dozen. No “AI” involved.
“AI” adds a layer on that, but that simply pushes the up the level of “boiler plate” coding.
Bit gloomy but Labour have another Budget not that far away. If they haven't learned that just smacking the private sector then blowing money on the carbon capture crap (which even if you really want green spending is a poor idea) then things will just get worse.
But something that's better, ahem, is the second episode of my new F1 podcast, which focuses on the midfield battle:
Come on then. How do you decarbonise cement and lime production or waste incinerators without carbon capture?
You don't. You offshore it to countries with inferior regulation then claim you've decarbonised the economy.
On a more serious note, waste incinerators are more numerous than they were but they're hardly building them faster than wind turbines. If you really want to encourage more green stuff than alongside more renewable energy production things like better internet accessibility will help people to work without needing to travel.
I'd want to know precisely how much cement and lime production we actually do. Carbon capture getting £22bn in difficult economic times, when we have a a higher Defence target but have only decommissioned ships and such lately, does not seem terribly sensible.
Allowing uncontrolled climate change is even less sensible.
Oh, and I agree that renewables (plus storage to make them dispatchable) is a better approach than CCGTs with CCS for power generation. But DESNZ has different ideas.
And the £22 billion is spread over 15 years or more - the up front CAPEX comes from the private sector. BP and their partners have already signed £5 billion worth of contracts.
The real problem with the UK climate change debate is not with the science or the techniques. It's that there isn't a general belief in the UK that CO2 emissions are going to reduce either bigly enough or at all globally. And that is the only figure that counts.
That scepticism has a firm and solid basis.
So it isn't possible to generate the sort of communal enthusiasm willing to undergo change, inconvenience and cost - and there may be other downsides - for the sake of something that deep down we think won't work because of the nature of planet earth's politics.
Politically this will do Reform no harm. It didn't do Trump much damage.
https://eciu.net/media/press-releases/2024/election-poll-voters-for-all-parties-committed-to-net-zero notes: “Overall, three-quarters (76%) who said they were likely to vote in the local elections support the UK Government’s target to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, with 69% of the public as a whole also backing it. Support for the target easily outweighed opposition among voters of every party, including Reform UK which, while publicly opposing the target, has more than half (52%) of its voters supportive of net zero.”
So, I don’t think the polling entirely supports your contention.
Ask them if they still support it if it means higher fuel and heating bills for them if fossil fuels are scrapped too quickly without enough renewables and nuclear energy sources in place to replace them
I don’t think loaded questions are a sensible way to do polling, but, of course, opinion can change if people see high costs to themselves.
@Eabhal I remember we had a chat around GDP data being revised up or down and I had a feeling it would go down. Well it certainly looks as though my feeling on it was correct. I think Q4 comes in negative and so does Q12025. On a per capita basis I think we're looking at around a 1% drop in GDP before things start improving. People are going to feel poorer because of the government and they will get the blame.
Yes, fair enough. Though they have also revised down the growth achieved by Sunak in Q2 (again), and it looks like they were optimistic throughout with their initial forecasts with the exception of Q1 '24.
I don't think any of this really means much. UK growth has bobbing around 0 for the last two years, so unless we really do nosedive into a recession then it's more of the same.
One last remark on AI and the OpenAI announcements
1. Remember that other companies - esp Google, and to a lesser extent X - are CATCHING UP
2. Remember that robotics is now joining the same exponential surge
3. Think about this: GPTo3 is the “175th best coder” in the world. By ELO ranking (yes, adapted from chess) there is one - just one - coder at OpenAI better than o3 itself. So why don’t they get a bunch of o3’s to work on o3 itself? That would be the world’s best coding team. o3 would rapidly improve, then even more rapidly improve, then explode
That would and will be the recursive self improvement path to Artificial SUPER Intelligence. As predicted by some sci-fi writers years ago
It is now coming true. I think that deserves a Festive
BRACE
Right, now coffee, Cornwall, Christmas
🥂🎅💥
Mr. Leon, you're referring to the singularity, which is a popular sci-fi thing.
As were wireless mobile communication devices, filters to alter appearance (used in DS9 and now available for Twitch streamers), and conversing with a computer programme.
We'll see how this pans out but the possibilities are substantial. Not just the dystopian world-ending one, but also the use of AI in weapons technology and for offensive actions (military, espionage, economic). Things could get very messy. Potentially.
Prediction-wise there will be a technological development in 2025, (if it has not already happened in 2024 (or even 2023)) which will be so epochal we will look back on it and think “that’s when human life changed forever, that’s when our universe was over-turned”
However we might not realise until 2026. Or 2027, at a stretch
Unless you can pinpoint what you think it might be, that's just a silly prediction.
"Something massive will happen, but we won't know for years!!!!"
What was the last technological development that was world-changing, that occurred in just a year?
(2025 is the 200th anniversary of the Stockton and Darlington Railway; arguably (and they will argue...) the first passenger railway in the world. I'd argue that was the start of an epochal change to the world. Perhaps the biggest, as it changed the entire way society formed itself.)
I’d argue that the modern canal era (late 18th century onward) was the start of the Industrial Revolution.
I wouldn't strongly argue against that. But:
*) There was no 'big-bang' event at the start of the canals; the Bridgewater Canal was not greatly acknowledged at the time, or even nowadays. Whereas AIUI a fair few people at the time acknowledged that the S&D was something different. The Liverpool and Manchester five years later, even more so.
*) The changes the canals started were minor and very gradual. Whereas passenger railways changed so much about how, and where, we lived, in just a few decades. As a minor example, they made suburbia possible.
Life was different before the industrial revolution compared to afterwards. But what was *the* starting point of the industrial revolution? The first canals? Arkwright's first mills? Lombe's mill in Derby? Newcomen's atmospheric engine?
Yet we can point at the opening of the S&D (or if you ware so minded, the L&M), and say "Yes, that's the point that the world changed."
The dawn of trainspotting. And bashing. And yellow-penning lines. And complaining that the train is late. A momentous point in human history.
US Constitution to be amended so that Elon Musk can succeed Trump as president.
Not happening in 2025, it would take too long. In fact given the referendums required I don't think it could happen before 2027.
I'll also file under 'not happening' because he's so controversial. He wouldn't get 38 states to endorse. Of course, if they take the Herdson option that may not be a problem.
A likelier bet for me is Vance to be president in 2025. Trump's old, clearly not well, under a lot of stress (even now his legal problems haven't gone away although they've been somewhat ameliorated) and moreover has twice been targeted for assassination. There are several routes I can see to Vance suddenly stepping up.
This would be very bad news given Vance is as nasty as Trump and considerably brighter and more mentally stable, making him much more dangerous. But it's a realistic chance.
He's at 11/4 to be the next President I think, not sure if there's a specific market on 2025.
Vance is actually more sensible than Trump as well as more intelligent and more of a traditional conservative and indeed once compared Trump to Hitler.
He could well be the Sunak to Trump's Johnson and Musk's Cummings
Is being Sunak to be recommended? Unless it means that in 2029 the Dems are going to win everything up to and including Oklahoma and Utah. And the Greens California.
On that scenario Trumpite loyalists would also leave the GOP and form their own Trumpite Maga Reform style party
And the genuine Republicans could go back to being the party of Lincoln?
One last remark on AI and the OpenAI announcements
1. Remember that other companies - esp Google, and to a lesser extent X - are CATCHING UP
2. Remember that robotics is now joining the same exponential surge
3. Think about this: GPTo3 is the “175th best coder” in the world. By ELO ranking (yes, adapted from chess) there is one - just one - coder at OpenAI better than o3 itself. So why don’t they get a bunch of o3’s to work on o3 itself? That would be the world’s best coding team. o3 would rapidly improve, then even more rapidly improve, then explode
That would and will be the recursive self improvement path to Artificial SUPER Intelligence. As predicted by some sci-fi writers years ago
It is now coming true. I think that deserves a Festive
BRACE
Right, now coffee, Cornwall, Christmas
🥂🎅💥
Surely one thing is true, once AI achieves "general intelligence" it very very quickly becomes better than humans can possibly be ?
The top chess programs are ranked over 3,000 ELO; way above any human.
Unlikely to apply to anyone here, but those with young children should read this warning about water beads if unaware they can expand dramatically in size: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwy3llg78ygo
Prediction-wise there will be a technological development in 2025, (if it has not already happened in 2024 (or even 2023)) which will be so epochal we will look back on it and think “that’s when human life changed forever, that’s when our universe was over-turned”
However we might not realise until 2026. Or 2027, at a stretch
Unless you can pinpoint what you think it might be, that's just a silly prediction.
"Something massive will happen, but we won't know for years!!!!"
What was the last technological development that was world-changing, that occurred in just a year?
(2025 is the 200th anniversary of the Stockton and Darlington Railway; arguably (and they will argue...) the first passenger railway in the world. I'd argue that was the start of an epochal change to the world. Perhaps the biggest, as it changed the entire way society formed itself.)
I’d argue that the modern canal era (late 18th century onward) was the start of the Industrial Revolution.
I wouldn't strongly argue against that. But:
*) There was no 'big-bang' event at the start of the canals; the Bridgewater Canal was not greatly acknowledged at the time, or even nowadays. Whereas AIUI a fair few people at the time acknowledged that the S&D was something different. The Liverpool and Manchester five years later, even more so.
*) The changes the canals started were minor and very gradual. Whereas passenger railways changed so much about how, and where, we lived, in just a few decades. As a minor example, they made suburbia possible.
Life was different before the industrial revolution compared to afterwards. But what was *the* starting point of the industrial revolution? The first canals? Arkwright's first mills? Lombe's mill in Derby? Newcomen's atmospheric engine?
Yet we can point at the opening of the S&D (or if you ware so minded, the L&M), and say "Yes, that's the point that the world changed."
The dawn of trainspotting. And bashing. And yellow-penning lines. And complaining that the train is late. A momentous point in human history.
The foundation of Ian Allan publishing of lists of locomotives?
One last remark on AI and the OpenAI announcements
1. Remember that other companies - esp Google, and to a lesser extent X - are CATCHING UP
2. Remember that robotics is now joining the same exponential surge
3. Think about this: GPTo3 is the “175th best coder” in the world. By ELO ranking (yes, adapted from chess) there is one - just one - coder at OpenAI better than o3 itself. So why don’t they get a bunch of o3’s to work on o3 itself? That would be the world’s best coding team. o3 would rapidly improve, then even more rapidly improve, then explode
That would and will be the recursive self improvement path to Artificial SUPER Intelligence. As predicted by some sci-fi writers years ago
It is now coming true. I think that deserves a Festive
BRACE
Right, now coffee, Cornwall, Christmas
🥂🎅💥
Surely one thing is true, once AI achieves "general intelligence" it very very quickly becomes better than humans can possibly be ?
The top chess programs are ranked over 3,000 ELO; way above any human.
It might become a game of capture the flag. Can we turn off the AI before the AI can turn off mankind?
Bit gloomy but Labour have another Budget not that far away. If they haven't learned that just smacking the private sector then blowing money on the carbon capture crap (which even if you really want green spending is a poor idea) then things will just get worse.
But something that's better, ahem, is the second episode of my new F1 podcast, which focuses on the midfield battle:
Come on then. How do you decarbonise cement and lime production or waste incinerators without carbon capture?
You don't. You offshore it to countries with inferior regulation then claim you've decarbonised the economy.
On a more serious note, waste incinerators are more numerous than they were but they're hardly building them faster than wind turbines. If you really want to encourage more green stuff than alongside more renewable energy production things like better internet accessibility will help people to work without needing to travel.
I'd want to know precisely how much cement and lime production we actually do. Carbon capture getting £22bn in difficult economic times, when we have a a higher Defence target but have only decommissioned ships and such lately, does not seem terribly sensible.
Allowing uncontrolled climate change is even less sensible.
Oh, and I agree that renewables (plus storage to make them dispatchable) is a better approach than CCGTs with CCS for power generation. But DESNZ has different ideas.
And the £22 billion is spread over 15 years or more - the up front CAPEX comes from the private sector. BP and their partners have already signed £5 billion worth of contracts.
The real problem with the UK climate change debate is not with the science or the techniques. It's that there isn't a general belief in the UK that CO2 emissions are going to reduce either bigly enough or at all globally. And that is the only figure that counts.
That scepticism has a firm and solid basis.
So it isn't possible to generate the sort of communal enthusiasm willing to undergo change, inconvenience and cost - and there may be other downsides - for the sake of something that deep down we think won't work because of the nature of planet earth's politics.
Politically this will do Reform no harm. It didn't do Trump much damage.
https://eciu.net/media/press-releases/2024/election-poll-voters-for-all-parties-committed-to-net-zero notes: “Overall, three-quarters (76%) who said they were likely to vote in the local elections support the UK Government’s target to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, with 69% of the public as a whole also backing it. Support for the target easily outweighed opposition among voters of every party, including Reform UK which, while publicly opposing the target, has more than half (52%) of its voters supportive of net zero.”
So, I don’t think the polling entirely supports your contention.
Yep. And polling shows that people associate renewables with cheap, clean UK energy that means we won't be exposed to fossil fuel markets like we have in the past.
(PBers might disagree with that but that's the impression people have after the Ukraine fiasco).
I’ve long advocated EVs for decoupling the economy from oil. One missed recession would pay for that.
Huthaifa @Shack_Rat Elon reinstating the Twitter account of the Saudi ex-Muslim attacker, after quietly deleting all the tweets in which he expressed support for figures like Geert Wilders, Israel, and the AfD—as if no one would notice—is absolutely insane. 2:00 am · 23 Dec 2024
Weird things happened to that guy’s Twitter account quite soon after the slaughter BUT this is true for the social media of many criminals - esp terror attackers. Often it’s done by the cops
Just imagine your reaction if pre-Musk twitter had deleted references to jihadi groups after a someone carried out a terrorist attack. You'd be losing your mind.
..Labour have blown it, spectacularly. There were tough decisions to make, and the public accepted that, but the woeful incompetence of Reeves means the narrative has been set for a parliament.
The bleating over WFA and Waspis suggests the public don't accept government spending decisions that result in less money being spent. They don't like tax rises either as shown by the NI fallout.
Sure Labour havent been great at explaining why, but there are few signs the public is accepting of fiscal realities. We prefer to be lied to and get angry and disappointed about it instead.
Compare the silence about the increase in student tuition fees with the WFA/waspi tantrums.
I do wonder if groups with nothing better to do than complain get excessive daytime media attention.
Follow Economic news coming out of Russia this past week are one more remarkable than the other: * The Central Bank is expected to raise the interest rate to 23% this Friday (now it is 21%) * The construction industry is in crisis mode, which is not surprising given the interest rates and labor shortages
Prediction-wise there will be a technological development in 2025, (if it has not already happened in 2024 (or even 2023)) which will be so epochal we will look back on it and think “that’s when human life changed forever, that’s when our universe was over-turned”
However we might not realise until 2026. Or 2027, at a stretch
Unless you can pinpoint what you think it might be, that's just a silly prediction.
"Something massive will happen, but we won't know for years!!!!"
What was the last technological development that was world-changing, that occurred in just a year?
(2025 is the 200th anniversary of the Stockton and Darlington Railway; arguably (and they will argue...) the first passenger railway in the world. I'd argue that was the start of an epochal change to the world. Perhaps the biggest, as it changed the entire way society formed itself.)
I’d argue that the modern canal era (late 18th century onward) was the start of the Industrial Revolution.
I wouldn't strongly argue against that. But:
*) There was no 'big-bang' event at the start of the canals; the Bridgewater Canal was not greatly acknowledged at the time, or even nowadays. Whereas AIUI a fair few people at the time acknowledged that the S&D was something different. The Liverpool and Manchester five years later, even more so.
*) The changes the canals started were minor and very gradual. Whereas passenger railways changed so much about how, and where, we lived, in just a few decades. As a minor example, they made suburbia possible.
Life was different before the industrial revolution compared to afterwards. But what was *the* starting point of the industrial revolution? The first canals? Arkwright's first mills? Lombe's mill in Derby? Newcomen's atmospheric engine?
Yet we can point at the opening of the S&D (or if you ware so minded, the L&M), and say "Yes, that's the point that the world changed."
The dawn of trainspotting. And bashing. And yellow-penning lines. And complaining that the train is late. A momentous point in human history.
The foundation of Ian Allan publishing of lists of locomotives?
One last remark on AI and the OpenAI announcements
1. Remember that other companies - esp Google, and to a lesser extent X - are CATCHING UP
2. Remember that robotics is now joining the same exponential surge
3. Think about this: GPTo3 is the “175th best coder” in the world. By ELO ranking (yes, adapted from chess) there is one - just one - coder at OpenAI better than o3 itself. So why don’t they get a bunch of o3’s to work on o3 itself? That would be the world’s best coding team. o3 would rapidly improve, then even more rapidly improve, then explode
That would and will be the recursive self improvement path to Artificial SUPER Intelligence. As predicted by some sci-fi writers years ago
It is now coming true. I think that deserves a Festive
BRACE
Right, now coffee, Cornwall, Christmas
🥂🎅💥
Surely one thing is true, once AI achieves "general intelligence" it very very quickly becomes better than humans can possibly be ?
The top chess programs are ranked over 3,000 ELO; way above any human.
Yes. The analogy is pretty good. Using ELO is clever
In this last year I have watched AI go from writing “pretty good articles about flint knapping but lol you can tell it’s AI why does it keep saying “delve”’ to “*stunned silence* fuck, was that done by AI? That’s genuinely good”
That’s in one year. In one tiny niche. Writing about flint sex toys. Good enough for me to lose a consultancy job
And we are on an exponential curve. So in a way whether it’s AGI or not doesn’t matter. There will always be some twat saying “but look it can’t cook a Mexican breakfast while patting a Labrador so it’s not AGI”. The dim and the fearful will always move the goalposts
Fact is AI will surge past human capabilities and likely soar away in the coming months and years
Prediction-wise there will be a technological development in 2025, (if it has not already happened in 2024 (or even 2023)) which will be so epochal we will look back on it and think “that’s when human life changed forever, that’s when our universe was over-turned”
However we might not realise until 2026. Or 2027, at a stretch
Unless you can pinpoint what you think it might be, that's just a silly prediction.
"Something massive will happen, but we won't know for years!!!!"
What was the last technological development that was world-changing, that occurred in just a year?
(2025 is the 200th anniversary of the Stockton and Darlington Railway; arguably (and they will argue...) the first passenger railway in the world. I'd argue that was the start of an epochal change to the world. Perhaps the biggest, as it changed the entire way society formed itself.)
I’d argue that the modern canal era (late 18th century onward) was the start of the Industrial Revolution.
I wouldn't strongly argue against that. But:
*) There was no 'big-bang' event at the start of the canals; the Bridgewater Canal was not greatly acknowledged at the time, or even nowadays. Whereas AIUI a fair few people at the time acknowledged that the S&D was something different. The Liverpool and Manchester five years later, even more so.
*) The changes the canals started were minor and very gradual. Whereas passenger railways changed so much about how, and where, we lived, in just a few decades. As a minor example, they made suburbia possible.
Life was different before the industrial revolution compared to afterwards. But what was *the* starting point of the industrial revolution? The first canals? Arkwright's first mills? Lombe's mill in Derby? Newcomen's atmospheric engine?
Yet we can point at the opening of the S&D (or if you ware so minded, the L&M), and say "Yes, that's the point that the world changed."
The dawn of trainspotting. And bashing. And yellow-penning lines. And complaining that the train is late. A momentous point in human history.
The foundation of Ian Allan publishing of lists of locomotives?
Contents of the first edition:
1
Strictly speaking, they should begin with long lists of horses ...
The revised GDP figures for April to June down to 0.4% proved what many informed sources believed which was the "gangbusters" increase in Q1 was a statistical freak and persuaded Sunak to cut and run for early July.
The July to September figure PRE budget in October cannot be attributed as Mel Stride is trying to do to anyone other than the fallout from the disasterous Tory Government and one othe factor very conveniently ignored "the Farage Riots" when large swathes of major Cities and Towns were "no go" areas for 2-3 key weeks in the height of summer and the School holidays.
Labour have made mistakes in over egging the gloom and Reeves first budget will only be seen in a true light I would suggest in 2 or 3 years time as being the Foundation setter she suggests or not!
The first positive outcomes of the Labour October Budget will start to filter through from April.
The biggest fear is the Gilts market, almost wholly being impacted by turmoil in USA and Germany which will impact on 5-10 year UK yields at a time when the UK market had actually read, considered and reacted to the October UK Budget and largely discounted any negative reaction back to pre-October levels before Trumps reelection and now fears over that and Elections in Germany and turmoil and France.
Hopefully the investment that Labour obtained of over 60bn, the much anticiapted trip to Beijing, which will hopefully generate billions more and new more open relationship with China will offset the shit show likely to hit Washington from mid January
I would hope for Growth of 1.5% in 2025, rising to 2.5% in 2026 and some genuine hopes of a sustained and positive period afrer that.
As for the "R" word.....quite simply they can and will cause mischief, they can and will orchestrate civil disobedience and I have no doubt that by the summer of 2028 both America, Europe and the UK will look upon Farage / Trump and Musk and their ilk with the complete and utter disdain and horror that they deserve. Either Reform or the Tories are going to implode and the Tories only hope I would suggest is to ditch tgeir right wing and useless Leader and to form a new Tory Party in the mould of Major / Clarke / Heath....outward looking and eminently sensible conservatives with a small c. At that point they do become a genuine threat to Labour.
Starmer must hold his nerve, and I believe he will.
@Eabhal I remember we had a chat around GDP data being revised up or down and I had a feeling it would go down. Well it certainly looks as though my feeling on it was correct. I think Q4 comes in negative and so does Q12025. On a per capita basis I think we're looking at around a 1% drop in GDP before things start improving. People are going to feel poorer because of the government and they will get the blame.
Yes, fair enough. Though they have also revised down the growth achieved by Sunak in Q2 (again), and it looks like they were optimistic throughout with their initial forecasts with the exception of Q1 '24.
I don't think any of this really means much. UK growth has bobbing around 0 for the last two years, so unless we really do nosedive into a recession then it's more of the same.
The problem with bobbing around zero growth is that the population is rising by over 1% per year so to stand still we need the economy to grow at over 1% annually. I don't currently see where that growth comes from. The OECD has projected 1.7% for next year but I really struggle to see how that is achieved even with a huge spending increase in the public sector. I'd be surprised if we managed over 0.5% growth next year and anywhere close to positive per capita growth.
Prediction-wise there will be a technological development in 2025, (if it has not already happened in 2024 (or even 2023)) which will be so epochal we will look back on it and think “that’s when human life changed forever, that’s when our universe was over-turned”
However we might not realise until 2026. Or 2027, at a stretch
Unless you can pinpoint what you think it might be, that's just a silly prediction.
"Something massive will happen, but we won't know for years!!!!"
What was the last technological development that was world-changing, that occurred in just a year?
(2025 is the 200th anniversary of the Stockton and Darlington Railway; arguably (and they will argue...) the first passenger railway in the world. I'd argue that was the start of an epochal change to the world. Perhaps the biggest, as it changed the entire way society formed itself.)
Ok. I hope the mods will forgive me as it’s Christmas
I have to leave the site anyway for a few days to drive to Cornwall and see fam and friends for chrimble - so they don’t have to ban me
Here goes. I believe we have reached Artificial General Intelligence. A few days ago OpenAI launched ChatGPTo3. It performs better than 98% of Phd candidates in MULTIPLE domains - ie it is smarter than 99.996% of humanity. It is “the 175th best coder in the world”. It passed the Arc AGI test - a test so hard it was thought it would take until 2030 for any AI to have a chance, a test that was contrived - in part - as a skeptical challenge to show AI could never equal or surpass the best humans
Perhaps more importantly, in my own secondary field of writing I have seen - in the last year - AI going from “pretty good” at editing and writing to “OMFG that’s professionally good” - this is in one year
We are now on the exponential bit of the AI curve. GPTo3 came 3 months after GPTo1. The speed of progress is actually accelerating. Human inertia being what it is, this may take some time to impact, but if you have a job which involves a screen and cognition, you should expect your job to disappear within 5 years, or less
Here’s a graph to represent what has just happened
(Snip)
Yes, and I believe many such claims are b/s.
It literally passed the Arc AGI test
Also, three weeks ago I lost one of my main flint knapping jobs - to AI. It is now personally impacting
Look away, if you prefer
Yes, and I believe many such claims are b/s.
The current ML/AI tech is good. Good enough to fool many. But is it actually intelligence, let alone an AGI?
I'd argue the many stupid mistakes they make prove otherwise.
Had some good news in the last week of work: we’ve won a £1M grant for a project on medical AI. There are many great and wonderful things we can do with AI in healthcare. But, no, we are not near to AGI.
In the coding world - the fiddling of the benchmarks is mildly amusing.
“AI” is used as a code completion tool. The whole “95% of code written by” thing is also funny. Nearly that high a percentage of code is written by the autocomplete tools already.
Consider a simple bean class in Java - you write the names of a dozen parameters (say). The types are autocompleted from a letter or two, with a keyboard shortcut. Then the getters, setters, constructors, equals, hashCode, toString and Builder are auto-generated with a click. And formatted to look nice.
Class is probably 3 figures of lines. Human partially wrote a dozen. No “AI” involved.
“AI” adds a layer on that, but that simply pushes the up the level of “boiler plate” coding.
One last remark on AI and the OpenAI announcements
1. Remember that other companies - esp Google, and to a lesser extent X - are CATCHING UP
2. Remember that robotics is now joining the same exponential surge
3. Think about this: GPTo3 is the “175th best coder” in the world. By ELO ranking (yes, adapted from chess) there is one - just one - coder at OpenAI better than o3 itself. So why don’t they get a bunch of o3’s to work on o3 itself? That would be the world’s best coding team. o3 would rapidly improve, then even more rapidly improve, then explode
That would and will be the recursive self improvement path to Artificial SUPER Intelligence. As predicted by some sci-fi writers years ago
It is now coming true. I think that deserves a Festive
BRACE
Right, now coffee, Cornwall, Christmas
🥂🎅💥
Surely one thing is true, once AI achieves "general intelligence" it very very quickly becomes better than humans can possibly be ?
The top chess programs are ranked over 3,000 ELO; way above any human.
Yes. The analogy is pretty good. Using ELO is clever
In this last year I have watched AI go from writing “pretty good articles about flint knapping but lol you can tell it’s AI why does it keep saying “delve”’ to “*stunned silence* fuck, was that done by AI? That’s genuinely good”
That’s in one year. In one tiny niche. Writing about flint sex toys. Good enough for me to lose a consultancy job
And we are on an exponential curve. So in a way whether it’s AGI or not doesn’t matter. There will always be some twat saying “but look it can’t cook a Mexican breakfast while patting a Labrador so it’s not AGI”. The dim and the fearful will always move the goalposts
Fact is AI will surge past human capabilities and likely soar away in the coming months and years
I don't think we're on the exponential part of the curve any longer. We're very much in the last 20% of delivery which will take much longer to achieve than the previous 80% we've had in the last 3-4 years.
..Labour have blown it, spectacularly. There were tough decisions to make, and the public accepted that, but the woeful incompetence of Reeves means the narrative has been set for a parliament.
The bleating over WFA and Waspis suggests the public don't accept government spending decisions that result in less money being spent. They don't like tax rises either as shown by the NI fallout.
Sure Labour havent been great at explaining why, but there are few signs the public is accepting of fiscal realities. We prefer to be lied to and get angry and disappointed about it instead.
Compare the silence about the increase in student tuition fees with the WFA/waspi tantrums.
I do wonder if groups with nothing better to do than complain get excessive daytime media attention.
..Labour have blown it, spectacularly. There were tough decisions to make, and the public accepted that, but the woeful incompetence of Reeves means the narrative has been set for a parliament.
The bleating over WFA and Waspis suggests the public don't accept government spending decisions that result in less money being spent. They don't like tax rises either as shown by the NI fallout.
Sure Labour havent been great at explaining why, but there are few signs the public is accepting of fiscal realities. We prefer to be lied to and get angry and disappointed about it instead.
Compare the silence about the increase in student tuition fees with the WFA/waspi tantrums.
I do wonder if groups with nothing better to do than complain get excessive daytime media attention.
More that 100% of the student union leadership are trying to get into position for a career in the Labour Party. Attacking a Labour government will not help you get selected for a safe seat.
One last remark on AI and the OpenAI announcements
1. Remember that other companies - esp Google, and to a lesser extent X - are CATCHING UP
2. Remember that robotics is now joining the same exponential surge
3. Think about this: GPTo3 is the “175th best coder” in the world. By ELO ranking (yes, adapted from chess) there is one - just one - coder at OpenAI better than o3 itself. So why don’t they get a bunch of o3’s to work on o3 itself? That would be the world’s best coding team. o3 would rapidly improve, then even more rapidly improve, then explode
That would and will be the recursive self improvement path to Artificial SUPER Intelligence. As predicted by some sci-fi writers years ago
It is now coming true. I think that deserves a Festive
BRACE
Right, now coffee, Cornwall, Christmas
🥂🎅💥
Surely one thing is true, once AI achieves "general intelligence" it very very quickly becomes better than humans can possibly be ?
The top chess programs are ranked over 3,000 ELO; way above any human.
Chess programs are now so damn efficient that if your name isn’t Magnus or Hikaru you’re likely getting beaten by a phone app.
Bit gloomy but Labour have another Budget not that far away. If they haven't learned that just smacking the private sector then blowing money on the carbon capture crap (which even if you really want green spending is a poor idea) then things will just get worse.
But something that's better, ahem, is the second episode of my new F1 podcast, which focuses on the midfield battle:
Come on then. How do you decarbonise cement and lime production or waste incinerators without carbon capture?
You don't. You offshore it to countries with inferior regulation then claim you've decarbonised the economy.
On a more serious note, waste incinerators are more numerous than they were but they're hardly building them faster than wind turbines. If you really want to encourage more green stuff than alongside more renewable energy production things like better internet accessibility will help people to work without needing to travel.
I'd want to know precisely how much cement and lime production we actually do. Carbon capture getting £22bn in difficult economic times, when we have a a higher Defence target but have only decommissioned ships and such lately, does not seem terribly sensible.
Allowing uncontrolled climate change is even less sensible.
Oh, and I agree that renewables (plus storage to make them dispatchable) is a better approach than CCGTs with CCS for power generation. But DESNZ has different ideas.
And the £22 billion is spread over 15 years or more - the up front CAPEX comes from the private sector. BP and their partners have already signed £5 billion worth of contracts.
The real problem with the UK climate change debate is not with the science or the techniques. It's that there isn't a general belief in the UK that CO2 emissions are going to reduce either bigly enough or at all globally. And that is the only figure that counts.
That scepticism has a firm and solid basis.
So it isn't possible to generate the sort of communal enthusiasm willing to undergo change, inconvenience and cost - and there may be other downsides - for the sake of something that deep down we think won't work because of the nature of planet earth's politics.
Politically this will do Reform no harm. It didn't do Trump much damage.
https://eciu.net/media/press-releases/2024/election-poll-voters-for-all-parties-committed-to-net-zero notes: “Overall, three-quarters (76%) who said they were likely to vote in the local elections support the UK Government’s target to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, with 69% of the public as a whole also backing it. Support for the target easily outweighed opposition among voters of every party, including Reform UK which, while publicly opposing the target, has more than half (52%) of its voters supportive of net zero.”
So, I don’t think the polling entirely supports your contention.
Yep. And polling shows that people associate renewables with cheap, clean UK energy that means we won't be exposed to fossil fuel markets like we have in the past.
(PBers might disagree with that but that's the impression people have after the Ukraine fiasco).
I’ve long advocated EVs for decoupling the economy from oil. One missed recession would pay for that.
One last remark on AI and the OpenAI announcements
1. Remember that other companies - esp Google, and to a lesser extent X - are CATCHING UP
2. Remember that robotics is now joining the same exponential surge
3. Think about this: GPTo3 is the “175th best coder” in the world. By ELO ranking (yes, adapted from chess) there is one - just one - coder at OpenAI better than o3 itself. So why don’t they get a bunch of o3’s to work on o3 itself? That would be the world’s best coding team. o3 would rapidly improve, then even more rapidly improve, then explode
That would and will be the recursive self improvement path to Artificial SUPER Intelligence. As predicted by some sci-fi writers years ago
It is now coming true. I think that deserves a Festive
BRACE
Right, now coffee, Cornwall, Christmas
🥂🎅💥
Surely one thing is true, once AI achieves "general intelligence" it very very quickly becomes better than humans can possibly be ?
The top chess programs are ranked over 3,000 ELO; way above any human.
Yes. The analogy is pretty good. Using ELO is clever
In this last year I have watched AI go from writing “pretty good articles about flint knapping but lol you can tell it’s AI why does it keep saying “delve”’ to “*stunned silence* fuck, was that done by AI? That’s genuinely good”
That’s in one year. In one tiny niche. Writing about flint sex toys. Good enough for me to lose a consultancy job
And we are on an exponential curve. So in a way whether it’s AGI or not doesn’t matter. There will always be some twat saying “but look it can’t cook a Mexican breakfast while patting a Labrador so it’s not AGI”. The dim and the fearful will always move the goalposts
Fact is AI will surge past human capabilities and likely soar away in the coming months and years
I don't think we're on the exponential part of the curve any longer. We're very much in the last 20% of delivery which will take much longer to achieve than the previous 80% we've had in the last 3-4 years.
I expect it's good enough, or soon will be to give an actual "plan for growth" if you stuck all the economic factors of the UK economy into it. Whether politicians would like what it outputs as the most likely fiscal/monetary policy to stimulate growth and make everyone richer I very much doubt. It'd probably tell us to abolish the NHS, benefits and the state pension entirely.
The revised GDP figures for April to June down to 0.4% proved what many informed sources believed which was the "gangbusters" increase in Q1 was a statistical freak and persuaded Sunak to cut and run for early July.
The July to September figure PRE budget in October cannot be attributed as Mel Stride is trying to do to anyone other than the fallout from the disasterous Tory Government and one othe factor very conveniently ignored "the Farage Riots" when large swathes of major Cities and Towns were "no go" areas for 2-3 key weeks in the height of summer and the School holidays.
Labour have made mistakes in over egging the gloom and Reeves first budget will only be seen in a true light I would suggest in 2 or 3 years time as being the Foundation setter she suggests or not!
The first positive outcomes of the Labour October Budget will start to filter through from April.
The biggest fear is the Gilts market, almost wholly being impacted by turmoil in USA and Germany which will impact on 5-10 year UK yields at a time when the UK market had actually read, considered and reacted to the October UK Budget and largely discounted any negative reaction back to pre-October levels before Trumps reelection and now fears over that and Elections in Germany and turmoil and France.
Hopefully the investment that Labour obtained of over 60bn, the much anticiapted trip to Beijing, which will hopefully generate billions more and new more open relationship with China will offset the shit show likely to hit Washington from mid January
I would hope for Growth of 1.5% in 2025, rising to 2.5% in 2026 and some genuine hopes of a sustained and positive period afrer that.
As for the "R" word.....quite simply they can and will cause mischief, they can and will orchestrate civil disobedience and I have no doubt that by the summer of 2028 both America, Europe and the UK will look upon Farage / Trump and Musk and their ilk with the complete and utter disdain and horror that they deserve. Either Reform or the Tories are going to implode and the Tories only hope I would suggest is to ditch tgeir right wing and useless Leader and to form a new Tory Party in the mould of Major / Clarke / Heath....outward looking and eminently sensible conservatives with a small c. At that point they do become a genuine threat to Labour.
Starmer must hold his nerve, and I believe he will.
One last remark on AI and the OpenAI announcements
1. Remember that other companies - esp Google, and to a lesser extent X - are CATCHING UP
2. Remember that robotics is now joining the same exponential surge
3. Think about this: GPTo3 is the “175th best coder” in the world. By ELO ranking (yes, adapted from chess) there is one - just one - coder at OpenAI better than o3 itself. So why don’t they get a bunch of o3’s to work on o3 itself? That would be the world’s best coding team. o3 would rapidly improve, then even more rapidly improve, then explode
That would and will be the recursive self improvement path to Artificial SUPER Intelligence. As predicted by some sci-fi writers years ago
It is now coming true. I think that deserves a Festive
BRACE
Right, now coffee, Cornwall, Christmas
🥂🎅💥
Surely one thing is true, once AI achieves "general intelligence" it very very quickly becomes better than humans can possibly be ?
The top chess programs are ranked over 3,000 ELO; way above any human.
Yes. The analogy is pretty good. Using ELO is clever
In this last year I have watched AI go from writing “pretty good articles about flint knapping but lol you can tell it’s AI why does it keep saying “delve”’ to “*stunned silence* fuck, was that done by AI? That’s genuinely good”
That’s in one year. In one tiny niche. Writing about flint sex toys. Good enough for me to lose a consultancy job
And we are on an exponential curve. So in a way whether it’s AGI or not doesn’t matter. There will always be some twat saying “but look it can’t cook a Mexican breakfast while patting a Labrador so it’s not AGI”. The dim and the fearful will always move the goalposts
Fact is AI will surge past human capabilities and likely soar away in the coming months and years
I don't think we're on the exponential part of the curve any longer. We're very much in the last 20% of delivery which will take much longer to achieve than the previous 80% we've had in the last 3-4 years.
I've tried Copilot about ten times for IT related matters. On two occasions it gave a useful response; the other eight responses were completely non-useful. Has anyone else achieved a better success ratio?
'The UK economy had zero growth between July and September, revised official figures show.
The revised data comes after a series of disappointing figures including inflation rising at its fastest pace for eight months, and the economy unexpectedly shrinking in October.
One of the UK's leading business groups, the CBI said its latest company survey suggested "the economy is headed for the worst of all worlds".
Chancellor Rachel Reeves said the challenge to fix the economy "after 15 years of neglect is huge", while shadow chancellor Mel Stride said Monday's figures showed "growth has tanked on Labour's watch".
Firms have warned that measures announced in October's Budget including a rise in employer national insurance and a higher minimum wage could push them into raising prices and reducing the number of new jobs they create.' https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c78631e4gygo
Labour have single-handedly contrive a recession. And, unlike Liz Truss, they aren't going anywhere.
The revised GDP figures for April to June down to 0.4% proved what many informed sources believed which was the "gangbusters" increase in Q1 was a statistical freak and persuaded Sunak to cut and run for early July.
The July to September figure PRE budget in October cannot be attributed as Mel Stride is trying to do to anyone other than the fallout from the disasterous Tory Government and one othe factor very conveniently ignored "the Farage Riots" when large swathes of major Cities and Towns were "no go" areas for 2-3 key weeks in the height of summer and the School holidays.
Labour have made mistakes in over egging the gloom and Reeves first budget will only be seen in a true light I would suggest in 2 or 3 years time as being the Foundation setter she suggests or not!
The first positive outcomes of the Labour October Budget will start to filter through from April.
The biggest fear is the Gilts market, almost wholly being impacted by turmoil in USA and Germany which will impact on 5-10 year UK yields at a time when the UK market had actually read, considered and reacted to the October UK Budget and largely discounted any negative reaction back to pre-October levels before Trumps reelection and now fears over that and Elections in Germany and turmoil and France.
Hopefully the investment that Labour obtained of over 60bn, the much anticiapted trip to Beijing, which will hopefully generate billions more and new more open relationship with China will offset the shit show likely to hit Washington from mid January
I would hope for Growth of 1.5% in 2025, rising to 2.5% in 2026 and some genuine hopes of a sustained and positive period afrer that.
As for the "R" word.....quite simply they can and will cause mischief, they can and will orchestrate civil disobedience and I have no doubt that by the summer of 2028 both America, Europe and the UK will look upon Farage / Trump and Musk and their ilk with the complete and utter disdain and horror that they deserve. Either Reform or the Tories are going to implode and the Tories only hope I would suggest is to ditch tgeir right wing and useless Leader and to form a new Tory Party in the mould of Major / Clarke / Heath....outward looking and eminently sensible conservatives with a small c. At that point they do become a genuine threat to Labour.
Starmer must hold his nerve, and I believe he will.
That's cute.
What "positive outcomes" from the Budget?
The Budget jacked up National Insurance which will cut pay packets and mean people have less to spend. That's the opposite of positive, or growth.
One last remark on AI and the OpenAI announcements
1. Remember that other companies - esp Google, and to a lesser extent X - are CATCHING UP
2. Remember that robotics is now joining the same exponential surge
3. Think about this: GPTo3 is the “175th best coder” in the world. By ELO ranking (yes, adapted from chess) there is one - just one - coder at OpenAI better than o3 itself. So why don’t they get a bunch of o3’s to work on o3 itself? That would be the world’s best coding team. o3 would rapidly improve, then even more rapidly improve, then explode
That would and will be the recursive self improvement path to Artificial SUPER Intelligence. As predicted by some sci-fi writers years ago
It is now coming true. I think that deserves a Festive
BRACE
Right, now coffee, Cornwall, Christmas
🥂🎅💥
Surely one thing is true, once AI achieves "general intelligence" it very very quickly becomes better than humans can possibly be ?
The top chess programs are ranked over 3,000 ELO; way above any human.
Yes. The analogy is pretty good. Using ELO is clever
In this last year I have watched AI go from writing “pretty good articles about flint knapping but lol you can tell it’s AI why does it keep saying “delve”’ to “*stunned silence* fuck, was that done by AI? That’s genuinely good”
That’s in one year. In one tiny niche. Writing about flint sex toys. Good enough for me to lose a consultancy job
And we are on an exponential curve. So in a way whether it’s AGI or not doesn’t matter. There will always be some twat saying “but look it can’t cook a Mexican breakfast while patting a Labrador so it’s not AGI”. The dim and the fearful will always move the goalposts
Fact is AI will surge past human capabilities and likely soar away in the coming months and years
I don't think we're on the exponential part of the curve any longer. We're very much in the last 20% of delivery which will take much longer to achieve than the previous 80% we've had in the last 3-4 years.
We've been through all this before. Remember the hype about expert systems a few decades ago? They were also going to replace humans, until they didn't. While generative AI is obviously a qualitative leap ahead of these systems, it is still not and is unlikely to ever be truly intelligent. That will require at least one more paradigm jump.
Follow Economic news coming out of Russia this past week are one more remarkable than the other: * The Central Bank is expected to raise the interest rate to 23% this Friday (now it is 21%) * The construction industry is in crisis mode, which is not surprising given the interest rates and labor shortages
The Russian economy appears to be right on the brink of a total collapse into hyperinflation.
It’s one of these things that happens very slowly until it happens very quickly, and the momentum is starting to take over.
Yet another oil refinery being taken out by ATACMS and the new drone missiles yesterday won’t’ have helped them in any positive way, nor will Ukraine annoucement of the colusure of the pipelines through their territory from 1st January. That will leave Putin’s only source of hard currency his cheap black-market O&G sales to India and China.
Follow Economic news coming out of Russia this past week are one more remarkable than the other: * The Central Bank is expected to raise the interest rate to 23% this Friday (now it is 21%) * The construction industry is in crisis mode, which is not surprising given the interest rates and labor shortages
You mean conscripting people and sending them into a meat grinder, while causing others to flee conscription, is counterproductive for the labour market.
My prediction, although it is subjective, but it is, I don't think Trump will be as bad as many of us fear. This might be wishful thinking on my part.
Why? Well I have a similar view to Paul Merton who described the cabinet as a 'conclave of bozos'. I think there will be a lot of smoke and lots to be outraged about but nothing material will happen for the most part due to incompetence.
Take the Panama canal stuff. Huge distraction, but is he really going to invade. I guess the worry is he might, but I think the most likely outcome is nothing will happen. I suspect tariffs will just turn into a mess and not really anything like what he threatens. My big concern is Ukraine because nothing happening for them is bad news, but more recently Trump's messages on this have also been more confused.
Bit gloomy but Labour have another Budget not that far away. If they haven't learned that just smacking the private sector then blowing money on the carbon capture crap (which even if you really want green spending is a poor idea) then things will just get worse.
But something that's better, ahem, is the second episode of my new F1 podcast, which focuses on the midfield battle:
Trump in power in America will cause several major economic shocks as well, assuming he enacts some of the policies he's been talking about.
Even if he doesn't, endlessly tweeting about them in all caps is going to unnerve businesses.
Yup. I hope he is talking about tariffs to get a deal. But his rhetoric will drive behavioural change just as labours did when coming to,office.
It’s the reason why I’d have preferred the hapless Harris.
Well, it's one reason, remembering this is a man who in 2017 tweeted so many military threats to North Korea even Putin urged him to cool it down before he provoked a nuclear war.
There are others. Harris isn't a criminal, or a sex offender, or a failed President, or a serial liar, or a traitor, or 78.
Yet she was such a shit candidate he beat her comfortably.
He didn't beat her that comfortably. The electoral college magnified his vote margin. Admittedly, he did better than in 2016 or 2020.
The more interesting and alarming question is why, knowing all these things, enough Americans still voted for him to put him back in the White House (leaving aside the efforts of the courts and Musk to put their thumb on the scales on his behalf). If the Democrats have any sense they will start their inquest there. They probably won't, but they should.
The worrying thing for those who believe in liberal democracy is that Harris wasn't a bad candidate. Undoubtedly mistakes were made - probably also on the Republican side but nobody talks about those because they won. But Harris had a clear and positive message. Whatever else you might say about Trump he's never pretended to be anything he's not. He also had a clear message of utter cynicism.
The fact is more Americans preferred the despot to the democrat in a clear choice. To claim it was the fault of a bad campaign or the wrong candidate is to be in denial.
Bit gloomy but Labour have another Budget not that far away. If they haven't learned that just smacking the private sector then blowing money on the carbon capture crap (which even if you really want green spending is a poor idea) then things will just get worse.
But something that's better, ahem, is the second episode of my new F1 podcast, which focuses on the midfield battle:
Come on then. How do you decarbonise cement and lime production or waste incinerators without carbon capture?
You don't. You offshore it to countries with inferior regulation then claim you've decarbonised the economy.
On a more serious note, waste incinerators are more numerous than they were but they're hardly building them faster than wind turbines. If you really want to encourage more green stuff than alongside more renewable energy production things like better internet accessibility will help people to work without needing to travel.
I'd want to know precisely how much cement and lime production we actually do. Carbon capture getting £22bn in difficult economic times, when we have a a higher Defence target but have only decommissioned ships and such lately, does not seem terribly sensible.
Allowing uncontrolled climate change is even less sensible.
Oh, and I agree that renewables (plus storage to make them dispatchable) is a better approach than CCGTs with CCS for power generation. But DESNZ has different ideas.
And the £22 billion is spread over 15 years or more - the up front CAPEX comes from the private sector. BP and their partners have already signed £5 billion worth of contracts.
The real problem with the UK climate change debate is not with the science or the techniques. It's that there isn't a general belief in the UK that CO2 emissions are going to reduce either bigly enough or at all globally. And that is the only figure that counts.
That scepticism has a firm and solid basis.
So it isn't possible to generate the sort of communal enthusiasm willing to undergo change, inconvenience and cost - and there may be other downsides - for the sake of something that deep down we think won't work because of the nature of planet earth's politics.
Politically this will do Reform no harm. It didn't do Trump much damage.
https://eciu.net/media/press-releases/2024/election-poll-voters-for-all-parties-committed-to-net-zero notes: “Overall, three-quarters (76%) who said they were likely to vote in the local elections support the UK Government’s target to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, with 69% of the public as a whole also backing it. Support for the target easily outweighed opposition among voters of every party, including Reform UK which, while publicly opposing the target, has more than half (52%) of its voters supportive of net zero.”
So, I don’t think the polling entirely supports your contention.
Yep. And polling shows that people associate renewables with cheap, clean UK energy that means we won't be exposed to fossil fuel markets like we have in the past.
(PBers might disagree with that but that's the impression people have after the Ukraine fiasco).
I’ve long advocated EVs for decoupling the economy from oil. One missed recession would pay for that.
..Labour have blown it, spectacularly. There were tough decisions to make, and the public accepted that, but the woeful incompetence of Reeves means the narrative has been set for a parliament.
The bleating over WFA and Waspis suggests the public don't accept government spending decisions that result in less money being spent. They don't like tax rises either as shown by the NI fallout.
Sure Labour havent been great at explaining why, but there are few signs the public is accepting of fiscal realities. We prefer to be lied to and get angry and disappointed about it instead.
Compare the silence about the increase in student tuition fees with the WFA/waspi tantrums.
I do wonder if groups with nothing better to do than complain get excessive daytime media attention.
Which is why picking out a number of specific groups was a really bad idea.
They’d have been better off financially and politically if they’d just said sorry, income tax needs to go up 2% to pay for the mess the last lot left, and dealt with everyone being a little bit annoyed.
One last remark on AI and the OpenAI announcements
1. Remember that other companies - esp Google, and to a lesser extent X - are CATCHING UP
2. Remember that robotics is now joining the same exponential surge
3. Think about this: GPTo3 is the “175th best coder” in the world. By ELO ranking (yes, adapted from chess) there is one - just one - coder at OpenAI better than o3 itself. So why don’t they get a bunch of o3’s to work on o3 itself? That would be the world’s best coding team. o3 would rapidly improve, then even more rapidly improve, then explode
That would and will be the recursive self improvement path to Artificial SUPER Intelligence. As predicted by some sci-fi writers years ago
It is now coming true. I think that deserves a Festive
BRACE
Right, now coffee, Cornwall, Christmas
🥂🎅💥
Surely one thing is true, once AI achieves "general intelligence" it very very quickly becomes better than humans can possibly be ?
The top chess programs are ranked over 3,000 ELO; way above any human.
Yes. The analogy is pretty good. Using ELO is clever
In this last year I have watched AI go from writing “pretty good articles about flint knapping but lol you can tell it’s AI why does it keep saying “delve”’ to “*stunned silence* fuck, was that done by AI? That’s genuinely good”
That’s in one year. In one tiny niche. Writing about flint sex toys. Good enough for me to lose a consultancy job
And we are on an exponential curve. So in a way whether it’s AGI or not doesn’t matter. There will always be some twat saying “but look it can’t cook a Mexican breakfast while patting a Labrador so it’s not AGI”. The dim and the fearful will always move the goalposts
Fact is AI will surge past human capabilities and likely soar away in the coming months and years
I don't think we're on the exponential part of the curve any longer. We're very much in the last 20% of delivery which will take much longer to achieve than the previous 80% we've had in the last 3-4 years.
I've tried Copilot about ten times for IT related matters. On two occasions it gave a useful response; the other eight responses were completely non-useful. Has anyone else achieved a better success ratio?
It's something of a learning curve. I'm finding it increasingly useful as I come to understand more the sort of areas in which it can be useful. It's great for boilerplate, though it does make annoyingly sneaky mistakes sometimes. It's not so good at explaining concepts, frequently directly contradicting itself from one response to the next.
One last remark on AI and the OpenAI announcements
1. Remember that other companies - esp Google, and to a lesser extent X - are CATCHING UP
2. Remember that robotics is now joining the same exponential surge
3. Think about this: GPTo3 is the “175th best coder” in the world. By ELO ranking (yes, adapted from chess) there is one - just one - coder at OpenAI better than o3 itself. So why don’t they get a bunch of o3’s to work on o3 itself? That would be the world’s best coding team. o3 would rapidly improve, then even more rapidly improve, then explode
That would and will be the recursive self improvement path to Artificial SUPER Intelligence. As predicted by some sci-fi writers years ago
It is now coming true. I think that deserves a Festive
BRACE
Right, now coffee, Cornwall, Christmas
🥂🎅💥
Surely one thing is true, once AI achieves "general intelligence" it very very quickly becomes better than humans can possibly be ?
The top chess programs are ranked over 3,000 ELO; way above any human.
Yes. The analogy is pretty good. Using ELO is clever
In this last year I have watched AI go from writing “pretty good articles about flint knapping but lol you can tell it’s AI why does it keep saying “delve”’ to “*stunned silence* fuck, was that done by AI? That’s genuinely good”
That’s in one year. In one tiny niche. Writing about flint sex toys. Good enough for me to lose a consultancy job
And we are on an exponential curve. So in a way whether it’s AGI or not doesn’t matter. There will always be some twat saying “but look it can’t cook a Mexican breakfast while patting a Labrador so it’s not AGI”. The dim and the fearful will always move the goalposts
Fact is AI will surge past human capabilities and likely soar away in the coming months and years
I don't think we're on the exponential part of the curve any longer. We're very much in the last 20% of delivery which will take much longer to achieve than the previous 80% we've had in the last 3-4 years.
Look at the graph I posted. No one believes what you’re saying
One last remark on AI and the OpenAI announcements
1. Remember that other companies - esp Google, and to a lesser extent X - are CATCHING UP
2. Remember that robotics is now joining the same exponential surge
3. Think about this: GPTo3 is the “175th best coder” in the world. By ELO ranking (yes, adapted from chess) there is one - just one - coder at OpenAI better than o3 itself. So why don’t they get a bunch of o3’s to work on o3 itself? That would be the world’s best coding team. o3 would rapidly improve, then even more rapidly improve, then explode
That would and will be the recursive self improvement path to Artificial SUPER Intelligence. As predicted by some sci-fi writers years ago
It is now coming true. I think that deserves a Festive
BRACE
Right, now coffee, Cornwall, Christmas
🥂🎅💥
Surely one thing is true, once AI achieves "general intelligence" it very very quickly becomes better than humans can possibly be ?
The top chess programs are ranked over 3,000 ELO; way above any human.
Yes. The analogy is pretty good. Using ELO is clever
In this last year I have watched AI go from writing “pretty good articles about flint knapping but lol you can tell it’s AI why does it keep saying “delve”’ to “*stunned silence* fuck, was that done by AI? That’s genuinely good”
That’s in one year. In one tiny niche. Writing about flint sex toys. Good enough for me to lose a consultancy job
And we are on an exponential curve. So in a way whether it’s AGI or not doesn’t matter. There will always be some twat saying “but look it can’t cook a Mexican breakfast while patting a Labrador so it’s not AGI”. The dim and the fearful will always move the goalposts
Fact is AI will surge past human capabilities and likely soar away in the coming months and years
I don't think we're on the exponential part of the curve any longer. We're very much in the last 20% of delivery which will take much longer to achieve than the previous 80% we've had in the last 3-4 years.
We've been through all this before. Remember the hype about expert systems a few decades ago? They were also going to replace humans, until they didn't. While generative AI is obviously a qualitative leap ahead of these systems, it is still not and is unlikely to ever be truly intelligent. That will require at least one more paradigm jump.
AI literally just took one of my (cognitive) jobs. How much clearer can it get?
..Labour have blown it, spectacularly. There were tough decisions to make, and the public accepted that, but the woeful incompetence of Reeves means the narrative has been set for a parliament.
The bleating over WFA and Waspis suggests the public don't accept government spending decisions that result in less money being spent. They don't like tax rises either as shown by the NI fallout.
Sure Labour havent been great at explaining why, but there are few signs the public is accepting of fiscal realities. We prefer to be lied to and get angry and disappointed about it instead.
All three examples, of course, were post-election U-turns. Put them in the manifesto and Starmer maybe gets a majority of "only" 80-100, and much less post-election blowback.
The scale of the Labour majority is a freak of circumstance.
As others have argued - Labour needed to rule out income and NI increases to win the election
Sorry, I just don't believe that. The British people wanted the Tories out. Labour were the only vehicle for that. They had won the election before the end of 2022 - the only thing to decide after that was the scale of the win.
I suspect you are right - the issue is that Labour were/are paranoid that they wouldn’t get elected if they talked about raising taxes.
Problem is that without tax increases we are stuck in austerity
..Labour have blown it, spectacularly. There were tough decisions to make, and the public accepted that, but the woeful incompetence of Reeves means the narrative has been set for a parliament.
The bleating over WFA and Waspis suggests the public don't accept government spending decisions that result in less money being spent. They don't like tax rises either as shown by the NI fallout.
Sure Labour havent been great at explaining why, but there are few signs the public is accepting of fiscal realities. We prefer to be lied to and get angry and disappointed about it instead.
Compare the silence about the increase in student tuition fees with the WFA/waspi tantrums.
I do wonder if groups with nothing better to do than complain get excessive daytime media attention.
Which is why picking out a number of specific groups was a really bad idea.
They’d have been better off financially and politically if they’d just said sorry, income tax needs to go up 2% to pay for the mess the last lot left, and dealt with everyone being a little bit annoyed.
Agree, but a bit of a vicious circle though isn't as they needed to promise it wouldn't to get elected. It would have had to have been a huge 'WOW we knew the last lot left a mess, but had no idea it was as bad as this' and even then they probably wouldn't have got away with it.
Governments like hidden tax rises. Gordon was a master of that eg the pension fund attacks. Interestingly people really know about the Employer 2% NI rise (it will be remembered), but most have forgotten the Employer NI change in threshold. Easier to bring in stuff people don't understand.
One last remark on AI and the OpenAI announcements
1. Remember that other companies - esp Google, and to a lesser extent X - are CATCHING UP
2. Remember that robotics is now joining the same exponential surge
3. Think about this: GPTo3 is the “175th best coder” in the world. By ELO ranking (yes, adapted from chess) there is one - just one - coder at OpenAI better than o3 itself. So why don’t they get a bunch of o3’s to work on o3 itself? That would be the world’s best coding team. o3 would rapidly improve, then even more rapidly improve, then explode
That would and will be the recursive self improvement path to Artificial SUPER Intelligence. As predicted by some sci-fi writers years ago
It is now coming true. I think that deserves a Festive
BRACE
Right, now coffee, Cornwall, Christmas
🥂🎅💥
Surely one thing is true, once AI achieves "general intelligence" it very very quickly becomes better than humans can possibly be ?
The top chess programs are ranked over 3,000 ELO; way above any human.
Yes. The analogy is pretty good. Using ELO is clever
In this last year I have watched AI go from writing “pretty good articles about flint knapping but lol you can tell it’s AI why does it keep saying “delve”’ to “*stunned silence* fuck, was that done by AI? That’s genuinely good”
That’s in one year. In one tiny niche. Writing about flint sex toys. Good enough for me to lose a consultancy job
And we are on an exponential curve. So in a way whether it’s AGI or not doesn’t matter. There will always be some twat saying “but look it can’t cook a Mexican breakfast while patting a Labrador so it’s not AGI”. The dim and the fearful will always move the goalposts
Fact is AI will surge past human capabilities and likely soar away in the coming months and years
I don't think we're on the exponential part of the curve any longer. We're very much in the last 20% of delivery which will take much longer to achieve than the previous 80% we've had in the last 3-4 years.
I've tried Copilot about ten times for IT related matters. On two occasions it gave a useful response; the other eight responses were completely non-useful. Has anyone else achieved a better success ratio?
It's something of a learning curve. I'm finding it increasingly useful as I come to understand more the sort of areas in which it can be useful. It's great for boilerplate, though it does make annoyingly sneaky mistakes sometimes. It's not so good at explaining concepts, frequently directly contradicting itself from one response to the next.
Copilot is great for data science/analytics which sort of makes sense. I've found it useful when writing regression models and slightly more complicated ones too. The key is to have a very well structured source tables, without that I've found copilot to be more miss than hit for my use cases.
Bit gloomy but Labour have another Budget not that far away. If they haven't learned that just smacking the private sector then blowing money on the carbon capture crap (which even if you really want green spending is a poor idea) then things will just get worse.
But something that's better, ahem, is the second episode of my new F1 podcast, which focuses on the midfield battle:
Come on then. How do you decarbonise cement and lime production or waste incinerators without carbon capture?
You don't. You offshore it to countries with inferior regulation then claim you've decarbonised the economy.
On a more serious note, waste incinerators are more numerous than they were but they're hardly building them faster than wind turbines. If you really want to encourage more green stuff than alongside more renewable energy production things like better internet accessibility will help people to work without needing to travel.
I'd want to know precisely how much cement and lime production we actually do. Carbon capture getting £22bn in difficult economic times, when we have a a higher Defence target but have only decommissioned ships and such lately, does not seem terribly sensible.
Allowing uncontrolled climate change is even less sensible.
Oh, and I agree that renewables (plus storage to make them dispatchable) is a better approach than CCGTs with CCS for power generation. But DESNZ has different ideas.
And the £22 billion is spread over 15 years or more - the up front CAPEX comes from the private sector. BP and their partners have already signed £5 billion worth of contracts.
The real problem with the UK climate change debate is not with the science or the techniques. It's that there isn't a general belief in the UK that CO2 emissions are going to reduce either bigly enough or at all globally. And that is the only figure that counts.
That scepticism has a firm and solid basis.
So it isn't possible to generate the sort of communal enthusiasm willing to undergo change, inconvenience and cost - and there may be other downsides - for the sake of something that deep down we think won't work because of the nature of planet earth's politics.
Politically this will do Reform no harm. It didn't do Trump much damage.
https://eciu.net/media/press-releases/2024/election-poll-voters-for-all-parties-committed-to-net-zero notes: “Overall, three-quarters (76%) who said they were likely to vote in the local elections support the UK Government’s target to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, with 69% of the public as a whole also backing it. Support for the target easily outweighed opposition among voters of every party, including Reform UK which, while publicly opposing the target, has more than half (52%) of its voters supportive of net zero.”
So, I don’t think the polling entirely supports your contention.
Yep. And polling shows that people associate renewables with cheap, clean UK energy that means we won't be exposed to fossil fuel markets like we have in the past.
(PBers might disagree with that but that's the impression people have after the Ukraine fiasco).
I’ve long advocated EVs for decoupling the economy from oil. One missed recession would pay for that.
Net zero is a bonus.
The Saudis can go back to farming sand.
If they are bright they will farm sunlight.
it is very bright in the sandpit, and we are indeed farming sunlight.
UAE is expected to be around 90% nuclear and solar by the end of this decade. Why burn the oil when you can sell it?
@Eabhal I remember we had a chat around GDP data being revised up or down and I had a feeling it would go down. Well it certainly looks as though my feeling on it was correct. I think Q4 comes in negative and so does Q12025. On a per capita basis I think we're looking at around a 1% drop in GDP before things start improving. People are going to feel poorer because of the government and they will get the blame.
Yes, fair enough. Though they have also revised down the growth achieved by Sunak in Q2 (again), and it looks like they were optimistic throughout with their initial forecasts with the exception of Q1 '24.
I don't think any of this really means much. UK growth has bobbing around 0 for the last two years, so unless we really do nosedive into a recession then it's more of the same.
The problem with bobbing around zero growth is that the population is rising by over 1% per year so to stand still we need the economy to grow at over 1% annually. I don't currently see where that growth comes from. The OECD has projected 1.7% for next year but I really struggle to see how that is achieved even with a huge spending increase in the public sector. I'd be surprised if we managed over 0.5% growth next year and anywhere close to positive per capita growth.
I think we can say that the October to December figures will announce we are in a recession. So I suspect TSE’s wording makes his bet a loser even though he’s correct - the recession will have started in 2024
And as you say we need significant growth just to stand still and again I can’t see where it’s coming from if the Government isn’t investing in infrastructure
“The figures also imply that living standards worsened in the year to July to September, with GDP per head falling by 0.2pc rather than remaining flat as initially believed. “
Genuinely the worst government ever
You think they'll beat this second year run ? 1980 Q1: −1.7% 1980 Q2: −2.0% 1980 Q3: −0.2% 1980 Q4: −1.0% 1981 Q1: −0.3%
Boris Johnson’s government, elected in December 2019, saw the biggest ever GDP fall ever recorded in 2020.
Only because GDP collection was paused during the Black Death..
One last remark on AI and the OpenAI announcements
1. Remember that other companies - esp Google, and to a lesser extent X - are CATCHING UP
2. Remember that robotics is now joining the same exponential surge
3. Think about this: GPTo3 is the “175th best coder” in the world. By ELO ranking (yes, adapted from chess) there is one - just one - coder at OpenAI better than o3 itself. So why don’t they get a bunch of o3’s to work on o3 itself? That would be the world’s best coding team. o3 would rapidly improve, then even more rapidly improve, then explode
That would and will be the recursive self improvement path to Artificial SUPER Intelligence. As predicted by some sci-fi writers years ago
It is now coming true. I think that deserves a Festive
BRACE
Right, now coffee, Cornwall, Christmas
🥂🎅💥
Surely one thing is true, once AI achieves "general intelligence" it very very quickly becomes better than humans can possibly be ?
The top chess programs are ranked over 3,000 ELO; way above any human.
Yes. The analogy is pretty good. Using ELO is clever
In this last year I have watched AI go from writing “pretty good articles about flint knapping but lol you can tell it’s AI why does it keep saying “delve”’ to “*stunned silence* fuck, was that done by AI? That’s genuinely good”
That’s in one year. In one tiny niche. Writing about flint sex toys. Good enough for me to lose a consultancy job
And we are on an exponential curve. So in a way whether it’s AGI or not doesn’t matter. There will always be some twat saying “but look it can’t cook a Mexican breakfast while patting a Labrador so it’s not AGI”. The dim and the fearful will always move the goalposts
Fact is AI will surge past human capabilities and likely soar away in the coming months and years
I don't think we're on the exponential part of the curve any longer. We're very much in the last 20% of delivery which will take much longer to achieve than the previous 80% we've had in the last 3-4 years.
Look at the graph I posted. No one believes what you’re saying
The issue is compute power, Blackwell doesn't look like a big leap even with the giant chip and while there have been advancements it's nothing like going from the old Google computer vision to midjourney. Those big leaps just aren't available now because we've already achieved them.
One last remark on AI and the OpenAI announcements
1. Remember that other companies - esp Google, and to a lesser extent X - are CATCHING UP
2. Remember that robotics is now joining the same exponential surge
3. Think about this: GPTo3 is the “175th best coder” in the world. By ELO ranking (yes, adapted from chess) there is one - just one - coder at OpenAI better than o3 itself. So why don’t they get a bunch of o3’s to work on o3 itself? That would be the world’s best coding team. o3 would rapidly improve, then even more rapidly improve, then explode
That would and will be the recursive self improvement path to Artificial SUPER Intelligence. As predicted by some sci-fi writers years ago
It is now coming true. I think that deserves a Festive
BRACE
Right, now coffee, Cornwall, Christmas
🥂🎅💥
Surely one thing is true, once AI achieves "general intelligence" it very very quickly becomes better than humans can possibly be ?
The top chess programs are ranked over 3,000 ELO; way above any human.
Yes. The analogy is pretty good. Using ELO is clever
In this last year I have watched AI go from writing “pretty good articles about flint knapping but lol you can tell it’s AI why does it keep saying “delve”’ to “*stunned silence* fuck, was that done by AI? That’s genuinely good”
That’s in one year. In one tiny niche. Writing about flint sex toys. Good enough for me to lose a consultancy job
And we are on an exponential curve. So in a way whether it’s AGI or not doesn’t matter. There will always be some twat saying “but look it can’t cook a Mexican breakfast while patting a Labrador so it’s not AGI”. The dim and the fearful will always move the goalposts
Fact is AI will surge past human capabilities and likely soar away in the coming months and years
I don't think we're on the exponential part of the curve any longer. We're very much in the last 20% of delivery which will take much longer to achieve than the previous 80% we've had in the last 3-4 years.
I've tried Copilot about ten times for IT related matters. On two occasions it gave a useful response; the other eight responses were completely non-useful. Has anyone else achieved a better success ratio?
It's something of a learning curve. I'm finding it increasingly useful as I come to understand more the sort of areas in which it can be useful. It's great for boilerplate, though it does make annoyingly sneaky mistakes sometimes. It's not so good at explaining concepts, frequently directly contradicting itself from one response to the next.
Copilot is great for data science/analytics which sort of makes sense. I've found it useful when writing regression models and slightly more complicated ones too. The key is to have a very well structured source tables, without that I've found copilot to be more miss than hit for my use cases.
It’s been a complete miss in my use cases - sadly they are the ones attached to other MS products that they want to hard sell copilot with
Prediction-wise there will be a technological development in 2025, (if it has not already happened in 2024 (or even 2023)) which will be so epochal we will look back on it and think “that’s when human life changed forever, that’s when our universe was over-turned”
However we might not realise until 2026. Or 2027, at a stretch
Unless you can pinpoint what you think it might be, that's just a silly prediction.
"Something massive will happen, but we won't know for years!!!!"
What was the last technological development that was world-changing, that occurred in just a year?
(2025 is the 200th anniversary of the Stockton and Darlington Railway; arguably (and they will argue...) the first passenger railway in the world. I'd argue that was the start of an epochal change to the world. Perhaps the biggest, as it changed the entire way society formed itself.)
Ok. I hope the mods will forgive me as it’s Christmas
I have to leave the site anyway for a few days to drive to Cornwall and see fam and friends for chrimble - so they don’t have to ban me
Here goes. I believe we have reached Artificial General Intelligence. A few days ago OpenAI launched ChatGPTo3. It performs better than 98% of Phd candidates in MULTIPLE domains - ie it is smarter than 99.996% of humanity. It is “the 175th best coder in the world”. It passed the Arc AGI test - a test so hard it was thought it would take until 2030 for any AI to have a chance, a test that was contrived - in part - as a skeptical challenge to show AI could never equal or surpass the best humans
Perhaps more importantly, in my own secondary field of writing I have seen - in the last year - AI going from “pretty good” at editing and writing to “OMFG that’s professionally good” - this is in one year
We are now on the exponential bit of the AI curve. GPTo3 came 3 months after GPTo1. The speed of progress is actually accelerating. Human inertia being what it is, this may take some time to impact, but if you have a job which involves a screen and cognition, you should expect your job to disappear within 5 years, or less
Here’s a graph to represent what has just happened
I mean, why flag this? It’s happening. Pretending it’s not happening is even madder than ignoring climate change, because it’s coming much faster, it’s even more certain, and it’s - potentially - far more dangerous and/or revolutionary than climate change
The mods can be reassured I’m not going to bang on about it all day coz in an hour or two I have to get in a car and drive to Cornwall
meh it still only as good as what you feed into it, my pet AI still thinks Rishi Sunak is PM and boldly states 'I sometimes generate hypothetical examples or references to illustrate a point. In this case, I created a fictional reference that doesn't actually exist.'
Bit gloomy but Labour have another Budget not that far away. If they haven't learned that just smacking the private sector then blowing money on the carbon capture crap (which even if you really want green spending is a poor idea) then things will just get worse.
But something that's better, ahem, is the second episode of my new F1 podcast, which focuses on the midfield battle:
Come on then. How do you decarbonise cement and lime production or waste incinerators without carbon capture?
You don't. You offshore it to countries with inferior regulation then claim you've decarbonised the economy.
On a more serious note, waste incinerators are more numerous than they were but they're hardly building them faster than wind turbines. If you really want to encourage more green stuff than alongside more renewable energy production things like better internet accessibility will help people to work without needing to travel.
I'd want to know precisely how much cement and lime production we actually do. Carbon capture getting £22bn in difficult economic times, when we have a a higher Defence target but have only decommissioned ships and such lately, does not seem terribly sensible.
Allowing uncontrolled climate change is even less sensible.
Oh, and I agree that renewables (plus storage to make them dispatchable) is a better approach than CCGTs with CCS for power generation. But DESNZ has different ideas.
And the £22 billion is spread over 15 years or more - the up front CAPEX comes from the private sector. BP and their partners have already signed £5 billion worth of contracts.
The real problem with the UK climate change debate is not with the science or the techniques. It's that there isn't a general belief in the UK that CO2 emissions are going to reduce either bigly enough or at all globally. And that is the only figure that counts.
That scepticism has a firm and solid basis.
So it isn't possible to generate the sort of communal enthusiasm willing to undergo change, inconvenience and cost - and there may be other downsides - for the sake of something that deep down we think won't work because of the nature of planet earth's politics.
Politically this will do Reform no harm. It didn't do Trump much damage.
https://eciu.net/media/press-releases/2024/election-poll-voters-for-all-parties-committed-to-net-zero notes: “Overall, three-quarters (76%) who said they were likely to vote in the local elections support the UK Government’s target to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, with 69% of the public as a whole also backing it. Support for the target easily outweighed opposition among voters of every party, including Reform UK which, while publicly opposing the target, has more than half (52%) of its voters supportive of net zero.”
So, I don’t think the polling entirely supports your contention.
Yep. And polling shows that people associate renewables with cheap, clean UK energy that means we won't be exposed to fossil fuel markets like we have in the past.
(PBers might disagree with that but that's the impression people have after the Ukraine fiasco).
I’ve long advocated EVs for decoupling the economy from oil. One missed recession would pay for that.
Slow start for us this morning and listening to the 10.00am Sky News it was uncompromising for Labour and Reeves anti jobs - anti growth budget
From reasonable first half growth, notwithstanding a reduction from 0.5 to 0.4% for the second quarter, we are now joint bottom of the G7 with Italy
Labour own the economy and had choices and the narrative, but couldn't have made worse choices on either if they had tried
The culminative effect of raising NI and the NLW on employers, together with Rayner's worker's rights proposals, have seen employers recoil and it will be 'working people' who will suffer the job loses and higher interest rates and mortgage rates for much longer
Now, increases in the NLW are to be welcomed but as with wage rises and the triple lock they should not be much more than inflation plus 1%
Starmer attacked Mel Stride and Badenoch at the last PMQs for suggesting the triple lock is unaffordable, making a song and dance how labour will protect it for their full term
This is where politics collides with reality, and of course the triple lock should go
The decision on WASPI women was entirely justified, but the embarrassing hypocrisy of Starmer, Reeves, Rayner, Kendal, Cooper and Streeting actively campaigning for them will live long in the memory
As others have said, it was well known prior to the election that there was a huge deficit and the IFS on multiple occasions publicly warned both parties they were misleading the public
Anyway we are where we are, and as much as Labour supporters try to defend the indefensible this was avoidable with different choices made impossible by the overriding desire to gain office at any cost and failure to level with the public
This has resulted in Labour plunging in the polls and with a moribund conservative party Farage is rocketing in the popularity stakes and the only question, which I have asked before, will Musk's influence and money have an effect on public opinion though a poll yesterday suggested 30% do not object to Musk's donations to Farage
Christmas is at hand and time to have a great family time and then 2025 , January, and then Trump/Musk become the reality
One last remark on AI and the OpenAI announcements
1. Remember that other companies - esp Google, and to a lesser extent X - are CATCHING UP
2. Remember that robotics is now joining the same exponential surge
3. Think about this: GPTo3 is the “175th best coder” in the world. By ELO ranking (yes, adapted from chess) there is one - just one - coder at OpenAI better than o3 itself. So why don’t they get a bunch of o3’s to work on o3 itself? That would be the world’s best coding team. o3 would rapidly improve, then even more rapidly improve, then explode
That would and will be the recursive self improvement path to Artificial SUPER Intelligence. As predicted by some sci-fi writers years ago
It is now coming true. I think that deserves a Festive
BRACE
Right, now coffee, Cornwall, Christmas
🥂🎅💥
Surely one thing is true, once AI achieves "general intelligence" it very very quickly becomes better than humans can possibly be ?
The top chess programs are ranked over 3,000 ELO; way above any human.
Yes. The analogy is pretty good. Using ELO is clever
In this last year I have watched AI go from writing “pretty good articles about flint knapping but lol you can tell it’s AI why does it keep saying “delve”’ to “*stunned silence* fuck, was that done by AI? That’s genuinely good”
That’s in one year. In one tiny niche. Writing about flint sex toys. Good enough for me to lose a consultancy job
And we are on an exponential curve. So in a way whether it’s AGI or not doesn’t matter. There will always be some twat saying “but look it can’t cook a Mexican breakfast while patting a Labrador so it’s not AGI”. The dim and the fearful will always move the goalposts
Fact is AI will surge past human capabilities and likely soar away in the coming months and years
I don't think we're on the exponential part of the curve any longer. We're very much in the last 20% of delivery which will take much longer to achieve than the previous 80% we've had in the last 3-4 years.
I've tried Copilot about ten times for IT related matters. On two occasions it gave a useful response; the other eight responses were completely non-useful. Has anyone else achieved a better success ratio?
It's something of a learning curve. I'm finding it increasingly useful as I come to understand more the sort of areas in which it can be useful. It's great for boilerplate, though it does make annoyingly sneaky mistakes sometimes. It's not so good at explaining concepts, frequently directly contradicting itself from one response to the next.
Copilot is great for data science/analytics which sort of makes sense. I've found it useful when writing regression models and slightly more complicated ones too. The key is to have a very well structured source tables, without that I've found copilot to be more miss than hit for my use cases.
It’s been a complete miss in my use cases - sadly they are the ones attached to other MS products that they want to hard sell copilot with
Give Cursor a go, I've heard it's well ahead of copilot.
Comments
2. The “hallucination” problem - and it is a problem - is disappearing very fast
Oh for such people in these times.
That J79 makes quite the sound.
On the Tory Party of the last 5 leaders only 2 were the more rightwing of the final 2, Boris and Truss, while the other rightwingers in the last 2 ie Jenrick, Leadsom and Davis were defeated. Truss ended up being replaced by Sunak before she could even fight a general election.
Whereas of the last 3 Labour leaders 2 were the more leftwing of the last 2 ie Ed Miliband and Corbyn and Starmer the only moderate, though even he is more of a Brownite than Blairite whereas Streeting is more true New Labour
OKC is slightly waspish mode this morning.
However, it's a very pleasant morning here, if a little chilly. So Good Morning everyone!
This argument, that if Labour had just said what they were going to do it would have lost them the election and therefore they had to be untruthful, is exactly the problem with modern politics. The Tories were clapped out and discredited. Take the fight to them. Win the argument. They had the ammunition.
Huthaifa
@Shack_Rat
Elon reinstating the Twitter account of the Saudi ex-Muslim attacker, after quietly deleting all the tweets in which he expressed support for figures like Geert Wilders, Israel, and the AfD—as if no one would notice—is absolutely insane.
2:00 am · 23 Dec 2024
Firstly as they are both more important. And secondly they are far easier for the government to make shift changes on.
He could well be the Sunak to Trump's Johnson and Musk's Cummings
I think the public are quite justified in being annoyed with taxes going up while the Government continues to be crap and waste money.
As others have argued - Labour needed to rule out income and NI increases to win the election. The mistake they’ve made are 1) not calling out that they weren’t affordable when NI was cut 2023/24 and not finding an excuse to backtrack now when there was 4 years for Labour to deliver during which time people would have forgetten
Which is roughly the state of social media.
https://eciu.net/media/press-releases/2024/election-poll-voters-for-all-parties-committed-to-net-zero notes: “Overall, three-quarters (76%) who said they were likely to vote in the local elections support the UK Government’s target to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, with 69% of the public as a whole also backing it. Support for the target easily outweighed opposition among voters of every party, including Reform UK which, while publicly opposing the target, has more than half (52%) of its voters supportive of net zero.”
So, I don’t think the polling entirely supports your contention.
About 95% of the companies trying to develop new launch systems don’t have a financial or technical case.
The reasons range from blind optimism, though living/learning on other people’s money to outright fraud.
As to which this one is….
Next year, the launch market will be hit by another tidal wave.
However McKinley was assassinated in 1901 the year after his re election which is not a great omen for him
True, at the time it wasn’t seen as a revolution. But the canals made bulk transport vastly cheaper and reliable to the point of timetables. Which in turn fed the nascent factories.
The railways were sold as “canals * X”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_United_Kingdom_general_election
He could have been charged for Jan 6 stuff.
Pick a criminal act, get some witnesses, charge him.
But having x years of enquiries is the way to go, apparently.
(PBers might disagree with that but that's the impression people have after the Ukraine fiasco).
The revised data comes after a series of disappointing figures including inflation rising at its fastest pace for eight months, and the economy unexpectedly shrinking in October.
One of the UK's leading business groups, the CBI said its latest company survey suggested "the economy is headed for the worst of all worlds".
Chancellor Rachel Reeves said the challenge to fix the economy "after 15 years of neglect is huge", while shadow chancellor Mel Stride said Monday's figures showed "growth has tanked on Labour's watch".
Firms have warned that measures announced in October's Budget including a rise in employer national insurance and a higher minimum wage could push them into raising prices and reducing the number of new jobs they create.'
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c78631e4gygo
1. Remember that other companies - esp Google, and to a lesser extent X - are CATCHING UP
2. Remember that robotics is now joining the same exponential surge
3. Think about this: GPTo3 is the “175th best coder” in the world. By ELO ranking (yes, adapted from chess) there is one - just one - coder at OpenAI better than o3 itself. So why don’t they get a bunch of o3’s to work on o3 itself? That would be the world’s best coding team. o3 would rapidly improve, then even more rapidly improve, then explode
That would and will be the recursive self improvement path to Artificial SUPER Intelligence. As predicted by some sci-fi writers years ago
It is now coming true. I think that deserves a Festive
BRACE
Right, now coffee, Cornwall, Christmas
🥂🎅💥
“AI” is used as a code completion tool. The whole “95% of code written by” thing is also funny. Nearly that high a percentage of code is written by the autocomplete tools already.
Consider a simple bean class in Java - you write the names of a dozen parameters (say). The types are autocompleted from a letter or two, with a keyboard shortcut. Then the getters, setters, constructors, equals, hashCode, toString and Builder are auto-generated with a click. And formatted to look nice.
Class is probably 3 figures of lines. Human partially wrote a dozen. No “AI” involved.
“AI” adds a layer on that, but that simply pushes the up the level of “boiler plate” coding.
I don't think any of this really means much. UK growth has bobbing around 0 for the last two years, so unless we really do nosedive into a recession then it's more of the same.
As were wireless mobile communication devices, filters to alter appearance (used in DS9 and now available for Twitch streamers), and conversing with a computer programme.
We'll see how this pans out but the possibilities are substantial. Not just the dystopian world-ending one, but also the use of AI in weapons technology and for offensive actions (military, espionage, economic). Things could get very messy. Potentially.
The top chess programs are ranked over 3,000 ELO; way above any human.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwy3llg78ygo
Cheery thought
Net zero is a bonus.
The Saudis can go back to farming sand.
I do wonder if groups with nothing better to do than complain get excessive daytime media attention.
@efinkel.bsky.social
Follow
Economic news coming out of Russia this past week are one more remarkable than the other:
* The Central Bank is expected to raise the interest rate to 23% this Friday (now it is 21%)
* The construction industry is in crisis mode, which is not surprising given the interest rates and labor shortages
https://bsky.app/profile/efinkel.bsky.social/post/3ldg3dvp3h22b
1
In this last year I have watched AI go from writing “pretty good articles about flint knapping but lol you can tell it’s AI why does it keep saying “delve”’ to “*stunned silence* fuck, was that done by AI? That’s genuinely good”
That’s in one year. In one tiny niche. Writing about flint sex toys. Good enough for me to lose a consultancy job
And we are on an exponential curve. So in a way whether it’s AGI or not doesn’t matter. There will always be some twat saying “but look it can’t cook a Mexican breakfast while patting a Labrador so it’s not AGI”. The dim and the fearful will always move the goalposts
Fact is AI will surge past human capabilities and likely soar away in the coming months and years
The July to September figure PRE budget in October cannot be attributed as Mel Stride is trying to do to anyone other than the fallout from the disasterous Tory Government and one othe factor very conveniently ignored "the Farage Riots" when large swathes of major Cities and Towns were "no go" areas for 2-3 key weeks in the height of summer and the School holidays.
Labour have made mistakes in over egging the gloom and Reeves first budget will only be seen in a true light I would suggest in 2 or 3 years time as being the Foundation setter she suggests or not!
The first positive outcomes of the Labour October Budget will start to filter through from April.
The biggest fear is the Gilts market, almost wholly being impacted by turmoil in USA and Germany which will impact on 5-10 year UK yields at a time when the UK market had actually read, considered and reacted to the October UK Budget and largely discounted any negative reaction back to pre-October levels before Trumps reelection and now fears over that and Elections in Germany and turmoil and France.
Hopefully the investment that Labour obtained of over 60bn, the much anticiapted trip to Beijing, which will hopefully generate billions more and new more open relationship with China will offset the shit show likely to hit Washington from mid January
I would hope for Growth of 1.5% in 2025, rising to 2.5% in 2026 and some genuine hopes of a sustained and positive period afrer that.
As for the "R" word.....quite simply they can and will cause mischief, they can and will orchestrate civil disobedience and I have no doubt that by the summer of 2028 both America, Europe and the UK will look upon Farage / Trump and Musk and their ilk with the complete and utter disdain and horror that they deserve. Either Reform or the Tories are going to implode and the Tories only hope I would suggest is to ditch tgeir right wing and useless Leader and to form a new Tory Party in the mould of Major / Clarke / Heath....outward looking and eminently sensible conservatives with a small c. At that point they do become a genuine threat to Labour.
Starmer must hold his nerve, and I believe he will.
What "positive outcomes" from the Budget?
The Budget jacked up National Insurance which will cut pay packets and mean people have less to spend. That's the opposite of positive, or growth.
It’s one of these things that happens very slowly until it happens very quickly, and the momentum is starting to take over.
Yet another oil refinery being taken out by ATACMS and the new drone missiles yesterday won’t’ have helped them in any positive way, nor will Ukraine annoucement of the colusure of the pipelines through their territory from 1st January. That will leave Putin’s only source of hard currency his cheap black-market O&G sales to India and China.
You mean conscripting people and sending them into a meat grinder, while causing others to flee conscription, is counterproductive for the labour market.
Who could have thought that?
Why? Well I have a similar view to Paul Merton who described the cabinet as a 'conclave of bozos'. I think there will be a lot of smoke and lots to be outraged about but nothing material will happen for the most part due to incompetence.
Take the Panama canal stuff. Huge distraction, but is he really going to invade. I guess the worry is he might, but I think the most likely outcome is nothing will happen. I suspect tariffs will just turn into a mess and not really anything like what he threatens. My big concern is Ukraine because nothing happening for them is bad news, but more recently Trump's messages on this have also been more confused.
The fact is more Americans preferred the despot to the democrat in a clear choice. To claim it was the fault of a bad campaign or the wrong candidate is to be in denial.
They’d have been better off financially and politically if they’d just said sorry, income tax needs to go up 2% to pay for the mess the last lot left, and dealt with everyone being a little bit annoyed.
I note Cineworld's across the country will be showing Die Hard at 19:45pm this evening.
#AmSayingNothing
Problem is that without tax increases we are stuck in austerity
Governments like hidden tax rises. Gordon was a master of that eg the pension fund attacks. Interestingly people really know about the Employer 2% NI rise (it will be remembered), but most have forgotten the Employer NI change in threshold. Easier to bring in stuff people don't understand.
UAE is expected to be around 90% nuclear and solar by the end of this decade. Why burn the oil when you can sell it?
And as you say we need significant growth just to stand still and again I can’t see where it’s coming from if the Government isn’t investing in infrastructure
Slow start for us this morning and listening to the 10.00am Sky News it was uncompromising for Labour and Reeves anti jobs - anti growth budget
From reasonable first half growth, notwithstanding a reduction from 0.5 to 0.4% for the second quarter, we are now joint bottom of the G7 with Italy
Labour own the economy and had choices and the narrative, but couldn't have made worse choices on either if they had tried
The culminative effect of raising NI and the NLW on employers, together with Rayner's worker's rights proposals, have seen employers recoil and it will be 'working people' who will suffer the job loses and higher interest rates and mortgage rates for much longer
Now, increases in the NLW are to be welcomed but as with wage rises and the triple lock they should not be much more than inflation plus 1%
Starmer attacked Mel Stride and Badenoch at the last PMQs for suggesting the triple lock is unaffordable, making a song and dance how labour will protect it for their full term
This is where politics collides with reality, and of course the triple lock should go
The decision on WASPI women was entirely justified, but the embarrassing hypocrisy of Starmer, Reeves, Rayner, Kendal, Cooper and Streeting actively campaigning for them will live long in the memory
As others have said, it was well known prior to the election that there was a huge deficit and the IFS on multiple occasions publicly warned both parties they were misleading the public
Anyway we are where we are, and as much as Labour supporters try to defend the indefensible this was avoidable with different choices made impossible by the overriding desire to gain office at any cost and failure to level with the public
This has resulted in Labour plunging in the polls and with a moribund conservative party Farage is rocketing in the popularity stakes and the only question, which I have asked before, will Musk's influence and money have an effect on public opinion though a poll yesterday suggested 30% do not object to Musk's donations to Farage
Christmas is at hand and time to have a great family time and then 2025 , January, and then Trump/Musk become the reality
No matter happy Christmas everyone