Make your suggestions – politicalbetting.com
Comments
-
To be fair to Johnson (why?) the circumstances at that time were totally exceptionalFishing said:
Only because GDP collection was paused during the Black Death..TheScreamingEagles said:
Boris Johnson’s government, elected in December 2019, saw the biggest ever GDP fall ever recorded in 2020.Nigelb said:
You think they'll beat this second year run ?Leon said:
“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. “Taz said:U.K. GDP for third quarter downgraded to zero as reported by GMB.
I presume they mean GDP growth.
The Reeves effect in action but it’s all the Tories fault. Darren Jones seems a plausible chap. Could he replace Reeves ?
Also.
https://news.sky.com/story/uk-economy-heading-for-worst-of-all-worlds-cbi-warns-as-businesses-expect-fall-in-activity-13279012
Genuinely the worst government ever
1980 Q1: −1.7%
1980 Q2: −2.0%
1980 Q3: −0.2%
1980 Q4: −1.0%
1981 Q1: −0.3%0 -
I enjoyed the link to the West Wing with interlaced comments by Presidents or those close to Presidents yesterday. Harry Truman desegregating the US army when he was warned it would cost him the election because it was "more important" stood out, as did Carter's response to the Iranian hostage taking.Driver said:
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".numbertwelve said:
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.noneoftheabove said:
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%.numbertwelve said:
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.noneoftheabove said:
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.Razedabode said:..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.
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.
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.
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.
Being honest with the populace is extremely hazardous for politicians and it tends to be very much a last resort. The problem is exacerbated by them destroying the last vestiges of their credibility before they even try it. Labour won because they opposed Tory "cuts" (at a time when public spending was increasing unsustainably) and did not feel capable of delivery necessary cuts themselves. The result is public spending growing even more unsustainably now killing the last traces of growth. We are in a bad place and it is getting worse.1 -
The first disappointment cycle was back in the 1970s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winterFeersumEnjineeya said:
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.MaxPB said:
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.Leon said:
Yes. The analogy is pretty good. Using ELO is cleverPulpstar said:
Surely one thing is true, once AI achieves "general intelligence" it very very quickly becomes better than humans can possibly be ?Leon said: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
🥂🎅💥
The top chess programs are ranked over 3,000 ELO; way above any human.
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 years0 -
If I was your age in your job I would fiercely believe what you believe, because accepting what I’m saying means your career is going to end within 5-7 years or less. But it is nonetheless the caseMaxPB said:
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.Leon said:
Look at the graph I posted. No one believes what you’re sayingMaxPB said:
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.Leon said:
Yes. The analogy is pretty good. Using ELO is cleverPulpstar said:
Surely one thing is true, once AI achieves "general intelligence" it very very quickly becomes better than humans can possibly be ?Leon said: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
🥂🎅💥
The top chess programs are ranked over 3,000 ELO; way above any human.
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 years0 -
And followed by the fastest growth we've ever seen.Fishing said:
Only because GDP collection was paused during the Black Death..TheScreamingEagles said:
Boris Johnson’s government, elected in December 2019, saw the biggest ever GDP fall ever recorded in 2020.Nigelb said:
You think they'll beat this second year run ?Leon said:
“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. “Taz said:U.K. GDP for third quarter downgraded to zero as reported by GMB.
I presume they mean GDP growth.
The Reeves effect in action but it’s all the Tories fault. Darren Jones seems a plausible chap. Could he replace Reeves ?
Also.
https://news.sky.com/story/uk-economy-heading-for-worst-of-all-worlds-cbi-warns-as-businesses-expect-fall-in-activity-13279012
Genuinely the worst government ever
1980 Q1: −1.7%
1980 Q2: −2.0%
1980 Q3: −0.2%
1980 Q4: −1.0%
1981 Q1: −0.3%0 -
Even Owen Jones is having a go at the government for talking down the economy, raising the worst of all taxes having backed themselves into a corner.
https://x.com/owenjonesjourno/status/18711288736831037470 -
On a more cheerful note, I am halfway to getting a visa for Myanmar. Instead of being rejected outright, they are asking for absurd documents in PDF. I have never got this far before
*airpunch*2 -
If that happens I'll be quite glad, retire to Italy and farm tomatoes for the rest of my days.Leon said:
If I was your age in your job I would fiercely believe what you believe, because accepting what I’m saying means your career is going to end within 5-7 years or less. But it is nonetheless the caseMaxPB said:
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.Leon said:
Look at the graph I posted. No one believes what you’re sayingMaxPB said:
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.Leon said:
Yes. The analogy is pretty good. Using ELO is cleverPulpstar said:
Surely one thing is true, once AI achieves "general intelligence" it very very quickly becomes better than humans can possibly be ?Leon said: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
🥂🎅💥
The top chess programs are ranked over 3,000 ELO; way above any human.
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 years2 -
There's a clear bias in media coverage (including social media) to negative coverage - it's more interesting to read that candidate X is disgraceful/useless/treacherous than that they're reasonably OK, and media are ultimately about getting readers. Harris's mistake, in retrospect, was to have a generally positive campaign without many clear winners. That doesn't get the vote out. The conclusion that the Democrats should have picked more centrist candidates misses the point - you need to be exciting enough and negative enough to get the vote out (cf. Corbyn - but arguably he wasn't negatuve enough), without being so radical that yiou actually put people off (cf. Corbyn).FF43 said:
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.ydoethur said:
He didn't beat her that comfortably. The electoral college magnified his vote margin. Admittedly, he did better than in 2016 or 2020.Taz said:
Yet she was such a shit candidate he beat her comfortably.ydoethur said:
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.Taz said:
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.ydoethur said:
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.Morris_Dancer said:Yes.
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:
Podbean: https://undercutters.podbean.com/e/undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield-battle/
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/05TYpdrVsQObsCpTLZnsNV
Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/b...cast-undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield-battle
Transcript: https://morrisf1.blogspot.com/2024/12/undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield.html
Even if he doesn't, endlessly tweeting about them in all caps is going to unnerve businesses.
It’s the reason why I’d have preferred the hapless Harris.
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.
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 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.3 -
Good man!MaxPB said:
If that happens I'll be quite glad, retire to Italy and farm tomatoes for the rest of my days.Leon said:
If I was your age in your job I would fiercely believe what you believe, because accepting what I’m saying means your career is going to end within 5-7 years or less. But it is nonetheless the caseMaxPB said:
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.Leon said:
Look at the graph I posted. No one believes what you’re sayingMaxPB said:
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.Leon said:
Yes. The analogy is pretty good. Using ELO is cleverPulpstar said:
Surely one thing is true, once AI achieves "general intelligence" it very very quickly becomes better than humans can possibly be ?Leon said: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
🥂🎅💥
The top chess programs are ranked over 3,000 ELO; way above any human.
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 do understand the fear and loathing of AI. But it is coming for us all. It’s ironic that I’m probably one of the first PBers to lose actual work to it (tho I think Nick “threesome” Palmer confessed his translation work is getting devoured (and it is, the job is disappearing))
Personally I might go live on a Cambodian island and write really average sonnets about coral0 -
We should give Kim Jong Un a try, given his dad scored 38 under par in his first round of golf, I suspect his chess ELO may well be in the 4000s.Pulpstar said:
Surely one thing is true, once AI achieves "general intelligence" it very very quickly becomes better than humans can possibly be ?Leon said: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
🥂🎅💥
The top chess programs are ranked over 3,000 ELO; way above any human.0 -
FWIW I thought Harris was a good candidate but she was facing into a howling gale of frustration and negativity that has swept away pretty much every incumbent government in the western world who have had to face the electorate.NickPalmer said:
There's a clear bias in media coverage (including social media) to negative coverage - it's more interesting to read that candidate X is disgraceful/useless/treacherous than that they're reasonably OK, and media are ultimately about getting readers. Harris's mistake, in retrospect, was to have a generally positive campaign without many clear winners. That doesn't get the vote out. The conclusion that the Democrats should have picked more centrist candidates misses the point - you need to be exciting enough and negative enough to get the vote out (cf. Corbyn - but arguably he wasn't negatuve enough), without being so radical that yiou actually put people off (cf. Corbyn).FF43 said:
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.ydoethur said:
He didn't beat her that comfortably. The electoral college magnified his vote margin. Admittedly, he did better than in 2016 or 2020.Taz said:
Yet she was such a shit candidate he beat her comfortably.ydoethur said:
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.Taz said:
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.ydoethur said:
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.Morris_Dancer said:Yes.
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:
Podbean: https://undercutters.podbean.com/e/undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield-battle/
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/05TYpdrVsQObsCpTLZnsNV
Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/b...cast-undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield-battle
Transcript: https://morrisf1.blogspot.com/2024/12/undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield.html
Even if he doesn't, endlessly tweeting about them in all caps is going to unnerve businesses.
It’s the reason why I’d have preferred the hapless Harris.
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.
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 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.
Her negative point was supposed to be abortion and the threat to women's rights more generally. It really didn't work because although Harris did well with women (if not as well as she expected) it made her do even worse amongst men and there was no net gain. But the candidate that could win what was effectively re-election after the last 4 years simply did not exist.2 -
I'm on the other side of it, currently inundated with job contacts which I'm politely declining while I take 6-12 months out.Leon said:
Good man!MaxPB said:
If that happens I'll be quite glad, retire to Italy and farm tomatoes for the rest of my days.Leon said:
If I was your age in your job I would fiercely believe what you believe, because accepting what I’m saying means your career is going to end within 5-7 years or less. But it is nonetheless the caseMaxPB said:
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.Leon said:
Look at the graph I posted. No one believes what you’re sayingMaxPB said:
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.Leon said:
Yes. The analogy is pretty good. Using ELO is cleverPulpstar said:
Surely one thing is true, once AI achieves "general intelligence" it very very quickly becomes better than humans can possibly be ?Leon said: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
🥂🎅💥
The top chess programs are ranked over 3,000 ELO; way above any human.
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 do understand the fear and loathing of AI. But it is coming for us all. It’s ironic that I’m probably one of the first PBers to lose actual work to it (tho I think Nick “threesome” Palmer confessed his translation work is getting devoured (and it is, the job is disappearing))
Personally I might go live on a Cambodian island and write really average sonnets about coral1 -
Someone has just dipped into their drafts from this time last year (or the year before, or the year before etc) and changed some dates, hasn't he?Leon said: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
Given your interests and enthusiasms can you think of any recent year when you wouldn't have made that prediction?
Not that I disagree, by the way.0 -
Yeah, as much as I would like to be wrong I struggle to see liberal democracy surviving the combination of demographics, AI, surveillance technology and globalisation. Any one of those on its own is challenging, all four are going to lead to autocracies at best.FF43 said:
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.ydoethur said:
He didn't beat her that comfortably. The electoral college magnified his vote margin. Admittedly, he did better than in 2016 or 2020.Taz said:
Yet she was such a shit candidate he beat her comfortably.ydoethur said:
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.Taz said:
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.ydoethur said:
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.Morris_Dancer said:Yes.
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:
Podbean: https://undercutters.podbean.com/e/undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield-battle/
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/05TYpdrVsQObsCpTLZnsNV
Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/b...cast-undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield-battle
Transcript: https://morrisf1.blogspot.com/2024/12/undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield.html
Even if he doesn't, endlessly tweeting about them in all caps is going to unnerve businesses.
It’s the reason why I’d have preferred the hapless Harris.
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.
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 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.0 -
I'm going to make a more bold and measurable prediction: we'll see you back on this site (ban 🔨 excepting of course) at some point in the next three days.Leon said:
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 changeLeon said:
Ok. I hope the mods will forgive me as it’s ChristmasJosiasJessop said:
Unless you can pinpoint what you think it might be, that's just a silly prediction.Leon said: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
"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 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
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
ETA: As an insurance wager, in case I'm wrong, Merry Christmas. Despite being a proto-fascist that I will eventually have to disembowel with a rusty machete, I have enjoyed sparring with you this year.0 -
For what it's worth, my work fell off a cliff this year, mostly down to AI.
Went from being excessively busy around Christmas 2023 to having very little luck finding anything so far after losing two long term clients in the first half of 2024.
And, if I can play my violin a moment, I don't have quite the mountain of wealth to just retire that some here do. On the plus side, I'm not destitute either but the situation isn't great and hasn't been for a while.
One of the reasons behind me starting the Undercutters podcast, as well as hopefully turning it into a side gig down the line, is that I can just crack on with it without AI eating it, and without having to beat 100-200+ other people applying for something.
https://undercutters.podbean.com/3 -
That doesn't necessarily mean it's intelligent.Leon said:
AI literally just took one of my (cognitive) jobs. How much clearer can it get?FeersumEnjineeya said:
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.MaxPB said:
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.Leon said:
Yes. The analogy is pretty good. Using ELO is cleverPulpstar said:
Surely one thing is true, once AI achieves "general intelligence" it very very quickly becomes better than humans can possibly be ?Leon said: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
🥂🎅💥
The top chess programs are ranked over 3,000 ELO; way above any human.
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 years0 -
I'd add social media to that list too. In days gone by, the effort of achieving publication tended to weed out the crazier notions. Now, though, every nutter has a voice, and the combined racket of the loons threatens to drown out the quieter voices of reason.noneoftheabove said:
Yeah, as much as I would like to be wrong I struggle to see liberal democracy surviving the combination of demographics, AI, surveillance technology and globalisation. Any one of those on its own is challenging, all four are going to lead to autocracies at best.FF43 said:
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.ydoethur said:
He didn't beat her that comfortably. The electoral college magnified his vote margin. Admittedly, he did better than in 2016 or 2020.Taz said:
Yet she was such a shit candidate he beat her comfortably.ydoethur said:
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.Taz said:
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.ydoethur said:
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.Morris_Dancer said:Yes.
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:
Podbean: https://undercutters.podbean.com/e/undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield-battle/
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/05TYpdrVsQObsCpTLZnsNV
Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/b...cast-undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield-battle
Transcript: https://morrisf1.blogspot.com/2024/12/undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield.html
Even if he doesn't, endlessly tweeting about them in all caps is going to unnerve businesses.
It’s the reason why I’d have preferred the hapless Harris.
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.
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 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.5 -
Tomorrow belongs to XiCasino_Royale said:
Shenzhen88.Shecorns88 said: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.0 -
I don't know enough about Java, but in translation the AI will get 90% right and will get 10% wrong in a mostly predictable way - typically confusing positives to negatives and vice versa due to word order or complex sentences. However, there are still about 3-5% errors that are unpredictable - e.g. a whole clause simply ignored. That has made translation for the EU into a win-win for both EU and translators - the pay is down by 25%, productivity is up by perhaps 60%, and the prospect of eliminiating the human element entirely is very low, because the consequences of overlooking a mistake are potentially huge.FeersumEnjineeya said:
In summary:Malmesbury said:
In the coding world - the fiddling of the benchmarks is mildly amusing.bondegezou said:
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.JosiasJessop said:
Yes, and I believe many such claims are b/s.Leon said:
It literally passed the Arc AGI testJosiasJessop said:
Yes, and I believe many such claims are b/s.Leon said:
Ok. I hope the mods will forgive me as it’s ChristmasJosiasJessop said:
Unless you can pinpoint what you think it might be, that's just a silly prediction.Leon said: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
"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 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)
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
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.
“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.
For casual translation, though - getting the sense of a piece with 90% accuracy - the need for human intervention has more or less disappeared. Curiously, the number of people doing serious translation where a mistake is a Big Deal seems to have dropped - I'm given first refusal on Danish to English translation by several agencies, and even German to English seems to have demand exceeding supply.2 -
In all honesty - you can believe me or not - it’s probably happening even faster than I expected. And I’m a ridiculously over-excitable hyperbolistmaxh said:
Someone has just dipped into their drafts from this time last year (or the year before, or the year before etc) and changed some dates, hasn't he?Leon said: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
Given your interests and enthusiasms can you think of any recent year when you wouldn't have made that prediction?
Not that I disagree, by the way.
o3 coming three months after o1, and arriving in the same month as Gemini 2 and the same week as Veo2, is insane0 -
I think I can one-up you on that. I have in an old passport a (sadly unused) North Korean visa.Leon said:On a more cheerful note, I am halfway to getting a visa for Myanmar. Instead of being rejected outright, they are asking for absurd documents in PDF. I have never got this far before
*airpunch*0 -
Reeves is in, shall we say, a somewhat unenviable position right now.
The position she’s having to try and spin is that the budget will generate growth and not hit people’s pay packets. This is a very difficult sell, to put it mildly.
The economy has flatlined and the Trump tariffs are looming, along with a difficult decision needed soon on increased defence spending.
And in a clear example of the “insanity is doing the same thing” quote, she stood in front of the CBI and told promised she wasn’t coming back for more tax rises.
I don’t think Starmer can lose her in 2025 in the same way Truss couldn’t afford to lose Kwarteng. But it surely is going to be a bumpy ride.2 -
Agreed. People are becoming increasingly warm and fuzzy about the concept of dictatorship. But how the freak did this come about? It's got to be that the two world wars, communism and all that are just slipping away from the collective memory. I can't think of any other explanation.noneoftheabove said:
Yeah, as much as I would like to be wrong I struggle to see liberal democracy surviving the combination of demographics, AI, surveillance technology and globalisation. Any one of those on its own is challenging, all four are going to lead to autocracies at best.FF43 said:
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.ydoethur said:
He didn't beat her that comfortably. The electoral college magnified his vote margin. Admittedly, he did better than in 2016 or 2020.Taz said:
Yet she was such a shit candidate he beat her comfortably.ydoethur said:
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.Taz said:
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.ydoethur said:
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.Morris_Dancer said:Yes.
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:
Podbean: https://undercutters.podbean.com/e/undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield-battle/
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/05TYpdrVsQObsCpTLZnsNV
Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/b...cast-undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield-battle
Transcript: https://morrisf1.blogspot.com/2024/12/undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield.html
Even if he doesn't, endlessly tweeting about them in all caps is going to unnerve businesses.
It’s the reason why I’d have preferred the hapless Harris.
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.
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 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.1 -
Mr. Enjineeya, your post reminds me of an AI-related video I watched by Kyle... Hill (not sure of the surname). Essentially, he reckons closed communities like Discord servers could replace open social media as places where humans actually engage with each other rather than bots, and that we could end up with tech giants owning real world offices where people confirm they're real to register certain accounts.FeersumEnjineeya said:
I'd add social media to that list too. In days gone by, the effort of achieving publication tended to weed out the crazier notions. Now, though, every nutter has a voice, and the combined racket of the loons threatens to drown out the quieter voices of reason.noneoftheabove said:
Yeah, as much as I would like to be wrong I struggle to see liberal democracy surviving the combination of demographics, AI, surveillance technology and globalisation. Any one of those on its own is challenging, all four are going to lead to autocracies at best.FF43 said:
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.ydoethur said:
He didn't beat her that comfortably. The electoral college magnified his vote margin. Admittedly, he did better than in 2016 or 2020.Taz said:
Yet she was such a shit candidate he beat her comfortably.ydoethur said:
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.Taz said:
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.ydoethur said:
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.Morris_Dancer said:Yes.
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:
Podbean: https://undercutters.podbean.com/e/undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield-battle/
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/05TYpdrVsQObsCpTLZnsNV
Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/b...cast-undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield-battle
Transcript: https://morrisf1.blogspot.com/2024/12/undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield.html
Even if he doesn't, endlessly tweeting about them in all caps is going to unnerve businesses.
It’s the reason why I’d have preferred the hapless Harris.
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.
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 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.0 -
Heres a betTaz said:
Tomorrow belongs to XiCasino_Royale said:
Shenzhen88.Shecorns88 said: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.
Who gets a full State Visit first?
Trump-Musk
Xi
I hope it's Xi - he has far more to offer the UK and we have far less to fear from him and far more to gain!0 -
Very off-topic: I've just spent an hour wrapping Christmas presents whilst watching episodes of "The Mary Whitehouse Experience" from thirty years ago.
It's still quite funny. Though Punt and Dennis are still doing the same sort of routines on radio nowadays...2 -
Big_G_NorthWales said:
Good morning
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
Sadly Sky, like BBC and ITN are no longer impartial sources
That has been crystal clear since July 5th if not before.
Sky and ITN Owners dictate the political line and sadly the presenters go with it, some with far more glee than others.
Until or Unless Starmer SACKS the BBC Governer General and Head of News we will have to endure the rabid bile of Kuenssberg and Mason, whilst being eternally grateful for the occasional imput from the genuinely impartial Derbyshire and Young.
Then there is GB News a rag bag of Fascists that Herr Goebels would be proud of....0 -
Because of the ongoing collapse in solar panel prices, exporting solar generated energy isn’t going to make sense.OldKingCole said:
Well, they've got plenty!turbotubbs said:
If they are bright they will farm sunlight.Malmesbury said:
I’ve long advocated EVs for decoupling the economy from oil. One missed recession would pay for that.Eabhal said:
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.bondegezou said:
80% of the UK public are concerned about climate change: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/desnz-public-attitudes-tracker-spring-2024/desnz-public-attitudes-tracker-net-zero-and-climate-change-spring-2024-ukalgarkirk said:
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.SandyRentool said:
Allowing uncontrolled climate change is even less sensible.Morris_Dancer said:
You don't. You offshore it to countries with inferior regulation then claim you've decarbonised the economy.SandyRentool said:
Come on then. How do you decarbonise cement and lime production or waste incinerators without carbon capture?Morris_Dancer said:Yes.
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:
Podbean: https://undercutters.podbean.com/e/undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield-battle/
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/05TYpdrVsQObsCpTLZnsNV
Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/b...cast-undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield-battle
Transcript: https://morrisf1.blogspot.com/2024/12/undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield.html
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.
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.
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.
(PBers might disagree with that but that's the impression people have after the Ukraine fiasco).
Net zero is a bonus.
The Saudis can go back to farming sand.
While the power electronics cost a noticeable amount, you will need the same amount of them, even if you need 5x the number of solar panels.
So Saudi will have little advantage over simply filling a field, here, with panels.
Where it will benefit Saudi, is in running their local desalination. Without which, the carrying capacity of Saudi Arabia drops, quite dramatically.1 -
I remember an advert a few years back - for Vodafone I think - that said something along the lines of 'why wait for what you want when you can have it NOW'.Stark_Dawning said:
Agreed. People are becoming increasingly warm and fuzzy about the concept of dictatorship. But how the freak did this come about? It's got to be that the two world wars, communism and all that are just slipping away from the collective memory. I can't think of any other explanation.noneoftheabove said:
Yeah, as much as I would like to be wrong I struggle to see liberal democracy surviving the combination of demographics, AI, surveillance technology and globalisation. Any one of those on its own is challenging, all four are going to lead to autocracies at best.FF43 said:
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.ydoethur said:
He didn't beat her that comfortably. The electoral college magnified his vote margin. Admittedly, he did better than in 2016 or 2020.Taz said:
Yet she was such a shit candidate he beat her comfortably.ydoethur said:
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.Taz said:
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.ydoethur said:
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.Morris_Dancer said:Yes.
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:
Podbean: https://undercutters.podbean.com/e/undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield-battle/
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/05TYpdrVsQObsCpTLZnsNV
Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/b...cast-undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield-battle
Transcript: https://morrisf1.blogspot.com/2024/12/undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield.html
Even if he doesn't, endlessly tweeting about them in all caps is going to unnerve businesses.
It’s the reason why I’d have preferred the hapless Harris.
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.
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 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.
Late-stage capitalism, combined with social media as Feersum says, has trained us all into wanting what we want right now, with little effort but a heavy dose of narcissism.
The messy compromises of democracy don't sit well with that.0 -
She is a phoney, and like so many of her Labour colleagues (Starmer included) has not the first understanding of how business works, and the importance of business understanding in knowing how to create growth.numbertwelve said:Reeves is in, shall we say, a somewhat unenviable position right now.
The position she’s having to try and spin is that the budget will generate growth and not hit people’s pay packets. This is a very difficult sell, to put it mildly.
The economy has flatlined and the Trump tariffs are looming, along with a difficult decision needed soon on increased defence spending.
And in a clear example of the “insanity is doing the same thing” quote, she stood in front of the CBI and told promised she wasn’t coming back for more tax rises.
I don’t think Starmer can lose her in 2025 in the same way Truss couldn’t afford to lose Kwarteng. But it surely is going to be a bumpy ride.
Blair and Brown were sensible enough to get advice on these areas. The toolmaker son and the Customer Complaints Manager don't seem to have the first idea.5 -
Do you have any views on Modi? Perhaps we need to get Xi on side in an Axis of Civilisation against the populists?Shecorns88 said:
Heres a betTaz said:
Tomorrow belongs to XiCasino_Royale said:
Shenzhen88.Shecorns88 said: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.
Who gets a full State Visit first?
Trump-Musk
Xi
I hope it's Xi - he has far more to offer the UK and we have far less to fear from him and far more to gain!0 -
Demographics = The age of continuous fairly smooth good growth is goneStark_Dawning said:
Agreed. People are becoming increasingly warm and fuzzy about the concept of dictatorship. But how the freak did this come about? It's got to be that the two world wars, communism and all that are just slipping away from the collective memory. I can't think of any other explanation.noneoftheabove said:
Yeah, as much as I would like to be wrong I struggle to see liberal democracy surviving the combination of demographics, AI, surveillance technology and globalisation. Any one of those on its own is challenging, all four are going to lead to autocracies at best.FF43 said:
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.ydoethur said:
He didn't beat her that comfortably. The electoral college magnified his vote margin. Admittedly, he did better than in 2016 or 2020.Taz said:
Yet she was such a shit candidate he beat her comfortably.ydoethur said:
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.Taz said:
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.ydoethur said:
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.Morris_Dancer said:Yes.
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:
Podbean: https://undercutters.podbean.com/e/undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield-battle/
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/05TYpdrVsQObsCpTLZnsNV
Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/b...cast-undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield-battle
Transcript: https://morrisf1.blogspot.com/2024/12/undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield.html
Even if he doesn't, endlessly tweeting about them in all caps is going to unnerve businesses.
It’s the reason why I’d have preferred the hapless Harris.
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.
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 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.
Globalisation = The gap between the democratic rich world and the rest is disappearing
Voters don't want to vote for anyone accepting either of the above truths.
Add in AI and surveillance tech and the power of the autocratic state and the global billionaire elite is ever strengthening.
There is no big mystery here.1 -
We discussed Goebbels yesterday. Odd you make a typo from a Nazi name. He had a half Jewish mistress and five kids. So the song about having no testicles certainly was not true, I bet the songwriter feels like a real twit.Shecorns88 said:Big_G_NorthWales said:Good morning
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
Sadly Sky, like BBC and ITN are no longer impartial sources
That has been crystal clear since July 5th if not before.
Sky and ITN Owners dictate the political line and sadly the presenters go with it, some with far more glee than others.
Until or Unless Starmer SACKS the BBC Governer General and Head of News we will have to endure the rabid bile of Kuenssberg and Mason, whilst being eternally grateful for the occasional imput from the genuinely impartial Derbyshire and Young.
Then there is GB News a rag bag of Fascists that Herr Goebels would be proud of....0 -
NickPalmer said:
I don't know enough about Java, but in translation the AI will get 90% right and will get 10% wrong in a mostly predictable way - typically confusing positives to negatives and vice versa due to word order or complex sentences. However, there are still about 3-5% errors that are unpredictable - e.g. a whole clause simply ignored. That has made translation for the EU into a win-win for both EU and translators - the pay is down by 25%, productivity is up by perhaps 60%, and the prospect of eliminiating the human element entirely is very low, because the consequences of overlooking a mistake are potentially huge.FeersumEnjineeya said:
In summary:Malmesbury said:
In the coding world - the fiddling of the benchmarks is mildly amusing.bondegezou said:
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.JosiasJessop said:
Yes, and I believe many such claims are b/s.Leon said:
It literally passed the Arc AGI testJosiasJessop said:
Yes, and I believe many such claims are b/s.Leon said:
Ok. I hope the mods will forgive me as it’s ChristmasJosiasJessop said:
Unless you can pinpoint what you think it might be, that's just a silly prediction.Leon said: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
"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 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)
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
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.
“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.
For casual translation, though - getting the sense of a piece with 90% accuracy - the need for human intervention has more or less disappeared. Curiously, the number of people doing serious translation where a mistake is a Big Deal seems to have dropped - I'm given first refusal on Danish to English translation by several agencies, and even German to English seems to have demand exceeding supply.
Yes.NickPalmer said:
I don't know enough about Java, but in translation the AI will get 90% right and will get 10% wrong in a mostly predictable way - typically confusing positives to negatives and vice versa due to word order or complex sentences. However, there are still about 3-5% errors that are unpredictable - e.g. a whole clause simply ignored. That has made translation for the EU into a win-win for both EU and translators - the pay is down by 25%, productivity is up by perhaps 60%, and the prospect of eliminiating the human element entirely is very low, because the consequences of overlooking a mistake are potentially huge.FeersumEnjineeya said:
In summary:Malmesbury said:
In the coding world - the fiddling of the benchmarks is mildly amusing.bondegezou said:
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.JosiasJessop said:
Yes, and I believe many such claims are b/s.Leon said:
It literally passed the Arc AGI testJosiasJessop said:
Yes, and I believe many such claims are b/s.Leon said:
Ok. I hope the mods will forgive me as it’s ChristmasJosiasJessop said:
Unless you can pinpoint what you think it might be, that's just a silly prediction.Leon said: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
"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 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)
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
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.
“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.
For casual translation, though - getting the sense of a piece with 90% accuracy - the need for human intervention has more or less disappeared. Curiously, the number of people doing serious translation where a mistake is a Big Deal seems to have dropped - I'm given first refusal on Danish to English translation by several agencies, and even German to English seems to have demand exceeding supply.
What “AI” does is create something close to what you want. For fairly straight forward tasks.
So it can do huge amounts of shovel work, but the results need checking and reworking to be useful, in coding. And getting AI to write both the code and the tests has been proven to be insane.0 -
You fear it because you don't understand it. Don't worry, your anxiety is nothing new and completely understandable. It is the commonly felt terror of change experienced by the ignorant and stupid throughout millennia.Leon said:
Good man!MaxPB said:
If that happens I'll be quite glad, retire to Italy and farm tomatoes for the rest of my days.Leon said:
If I was your age in your job I would fiercely believe what you believe, because accepting what I’m saying means your career is going to end within 5-7 years or less. But it is nonetheless the caseMaxPB said:
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.Leon said:
Look at the graph I posted. No one believes what you’re sayingMaxPB said:
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.Leon said:
Yes. The analogy is pretty good. Using ELO is cleverPulpstar said:
Surely one thing is true, once AI achieves "general intelligence" it very very quickly becomes better than humans can possibly be ?Leon said: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
🥂🎅💥
The top chess programs are ranked over 3,000 ELO; way above any human.
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 do understand the fear and loathing of AI. But it is coming for us all. It’s ironic that I’m probably one of the first PBers to lose actual work to it (tho I think Nick “threesome” Palmer confessed his translation work is getting devoured (and it is, the job is disappearing))
Personally I might go live on a Cambodian island and write really average sonnets about coral0 -
Nope. Once you start ringfencing things Govt becomes impossible to manage.HYUFD said:
No we should be ringfencing National Insurance for JSA, the state pension and some healthcare costs as it was set up to fundBartholomewRoberts said: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.3 -
That's interesting. I spent quite a few years doing German to English translation of technical documents before returning to software development about four years ago. I'd assumed that, since then, AI would have improved machine translation to the extent that far fewer translators would be needed. So I'm rather surprised that demand for German to English still seems to be holding up, though perhaps less so for more structured, technical topics?NickPalmer said:
I don't know enough about Java, but in translation the AI will get 90% right and will get 10% wrong in a mostly predictable way - typically confusing positives to negatives and vice versa due to word order or complex sentences. However, there are still about 3-5% errors that are unpredictable - e.g. a whole clause simply ignored. That has made translation for the EU into a win-win for both EU and translators - the pay is down by 25%, productivity is up by perhaps 60%, and the prospect of eliminiating the human element entirely is very low, because the consequences of overlooking a mistake are potentially huge.FeersumEnjineeya said:
In summary:Malmesbury said:
In the coding world - the fiddling of the benchmarks is mildly amusing.bondegezou said:
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.JosiasJessop said:
Yes, and I believe many such claims are b/s.Leon said:
It literally passed the Arc AGI testJosiasJessop said:
Yes, and I believe many such claims are b/s.Leon said:
Ok. I hope the mods will forgive me as it’s ChristmasJosiasJessop said:
Unless you can pinpoint what you think it might be, that's just a silly prediction.Leon said: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
"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 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)
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
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.
“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.
For casual translation, though - getting the sense of a piece with 90% accuracy - the need for human intervention has more or less disappeared. Curiously, the number of people doing serious translation where a mistake is a Big Deal seems to have dropped - I'm given first refusal on Danish to English translation by several agencies, and even German to English seems to have demand exceeding supply.0 -
1
-
Just finished reading Mr. Fear's Mina the Elder PDF: https://1drv.ms/b/s!ApCloHjkv6JKt1N8CDdSQm06S7LC?e=vFjg68
Interesting stuff. Luckily my fading memories of Sharpe provides a little bit of context but pretty much everything on Mina was new to me. I'm not sure if word count/space available permitted, but a little more detail on the victories would have been a good addition. Liked the context for both the Pyrrhic victory against him suffered and enrichment of officers in the 19th century.3 -
The RSS probably need some new shorts - perhaps we could do a deal on low priced footer bags?williamglenn said:
Do you have any views on Modi? Perhaps we need to get Xi on side in an Axis of Civilisation against the populists?Shecorns88 said:
Heres a betTaz said:
Tomorrow belongs to XiCasino_Royale said:
Shenzhen88.Shecorns88 said: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.
Who gets a full State Visit first?
Trump-Musk
Xi
I hope it's Xi - he has far more to offer the UK and we have far less to fear from him and far more to gain!
‘The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you're someone. You hear them shouting "Heil, Spode!" and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: "Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?”’2 -
And that's BEFORE the budget kicks in.HYUFD said:'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
Hard to see how the UK can avoid recession in 2025?1 -
I’ll cut Marr some slack. He didn’t know Rachel was going to tax everyone’s jobs at that point.Taz said:Things that age badly
https://x.com/bbcquestiontime/status/1809307747466276896?s=611 -
Useful AnecdoteNickPalmer said:
I don't know enough about Java, but in translation the AI will get 90% right and will get 10% wrong in a mostly predictable way - typically confusing positives to negatives and vice versa due to word order or complex sentences. However, there are still about 3-5% errors that are unpredictable - e.g. a whole clause simply ignored. That has made translation for the EU into a win-win for both EU and translators - the pay is down by 25%, productivity is up by perhaps 60%, and the prospect of eliminiating the human element entirely is very low, because the consequences of overlooking a mistake are potentially huge.FeersumEnjineeya said:
In summary:Malmesbury said:
In the coding world - the fiddling of the benchmarks is mildly amusing.bondegezou said:
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.JosiasJessop said:
Yes, and I believe many such claims are b/s.Leon said:
It literally passed the Arc AGI testJosiasJessop said:
Yes, and I believe many such claims are b/s.Leon said:
Ok. I hope the mods will forgive me as it’s ChristmasJosiasJessop said:
Unless you can pinpoint what you think it might be, that's just a silly prediction.Leon said: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
"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 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)
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
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.
“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.
For casual translation, though - getting the sense of a piece with 90% accuracy - the need for human intervention has more or less disappeared. Curiously, the number of people doing serious translation where a mistake is a Big Deal seems to have dropped - I'm given first refusal on Danish to English translation by several agencies, and even German to English seems to have demand exceeding supply.
Useful Data:
“AI threatens to decimate the translation profession, according to a new survey by a British union.
Almost four in ten translators (36%) said they’ve already lost work due to generative AI. Nearly half of them (43%) said the tech has decreased their income.
They fear far worse is to come. Over three-quarters of translators (77%) believe GenAI will negatively impact future income from their creative work.”
https://thenextweb.com/news/translators-losing-work-ai-machine-translation0 -
I agree. A successful scare campaign and proof that there's one born every minute. But I would hazard a guess that the polling will start to move in the opposite direction, if it hasn't already started.Eabhal said:
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.bondegezou said:
80% of the UK public are concerned about climate change: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/desnz-public-attitudes-tracker-spring-2024/desnz-public-attitudes-tracker-net-zero-and-climate-change-spring-2024-ukalgarkirk said:
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.SandyRentool said:
Allowing uncontrolled climate change is even less sensible.Morris_Dancer said:
You don't. You offshore it to countries with inferior regulation then claim you've decarbonised the economy.SandyRentool said:
Come on then. How do you decarbonise cement and lime production or waste incinerators without carbon capture?Morris_Dancer said:Yes.
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:
Podbean: https://undercutters.podbean.com/e/undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield-battle/
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/05TYpdrVsQObsCpTLZnsNV
Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/b...cast-undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield-battle
Transcript: https://morrisf1.blogspot.com/2024/12/undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield.html
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.
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.
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.
(PBers might disagree with that but that's the impression people have after the Ukraine fiasco).1 -
Good morning everyone.
Have we come out of yesterday's COVID rabbit hole? Good if so
Cold here, but my neighbour's kids are back from University. One has started a PhD on innovative wound dressings at de Montfort Uni, which is good news - an area where incremental progress makes a massive difference over time.
I'd re-recommend the Radio 4 Doc on Musk:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0026jt9
The guy seems unhinged. What sort of dad responds to his child coming out as Trans by saying 'She is dead to me; killed by the woke mind-virus.' That's obscene, just on a level of being human.
Contrast to recent comments from our own @Leon on his own children - which however much we dispute with Leon have been great.0 -
Nothing that has been said today and before can be disputed, and many Labour supporters, including many Labour back benches, are extremely worried about their party and leadershipShecorns88 said:Big_G_NorthWales said:Good morning
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
Sadly Sky, like BBC and ITN are no longer impartial sources
That has been crystal clear since July 5th if not before.
Sky and ITN Owners dictate the political line and sadly the presenters go with it, some with far more glee than others.
Until or Unless Starmer SACKS the BBC Governer General and Head of News we will have to endure the rabid bile of Kuenssberg and Mason, whilst being eternally grateful for the occasional imput from the genuinely impartial Derbyshire and Young.
Then there is GB News a rag bag of Fascists that Herr Goebels would be proud of....
Remarkably, you now seem to think China will come to Labour's rescue and whilst making absurd claims about your opponents you now side with a communist state
Never mind, blame the messengers and compare GB news to fascists and ridiculous comments about the BBC if you feel it helps Labour's cause0 -
I think Column 88 favours our being part of an Axis of Autocracy, ranged against the world’s remaining democracies.williamglenn said:
Do you have any views on Modi? Perhaps we need to get Xi on side in an Axis of Civilisation against the populists?Shecorns88 said:
Heres a betTaz said:
Tomorrow belongs to XiCasino_Royale said:
Shenzhen88.Shecorns88 said: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.
Who gets a full State Visit first?
Trump-Musk
Xi
I hope it's Xi - he has far more to offer the UK and we have far less to fear from him and far more to gain!0 -
Thanks. I’d happily have written far more, but I was limited to 2,500 words.Morris_Dancer said:Just finished reading Mr. Fear's Mina the Elder PDF: https://1drv.ms/b/s!ApCloHjkv6JKt1N8CDdSQm06S7LC?e=vFjg68
Interesting stuff. Luckily my fading memories of Sharpe provides a little bit of context but pretty much everything on Mina was new to me. I'm not sure if word count/space available permitted, but a little more detail on the victories would have been a good addition. Liked the context for both the Pyrrhic victory against him suffered and enrichment of officers in the 19th century.1 -
It is easier to accelerate from 10 mph than 70 mph.MaxPB said:
And followed by the fastest growth we've ever seen.Fishing said:
Only because GDP collection was paused during the Black Death..TheScreamingEagles said:
Boris Johnson’s government, elected in December 2019, saw the biggest ever GDP fall ever recorded in 2020.Nigelb said:
You think they'll beat this second year run ?Leon said:
“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. “Taz said:U.K. GDP for third quarter downgraded to zero as reported by GMB.
I presume they mean GDP growth.
The Reeves effect in action but it’s all the Tories fault. Darren Jones seems a plausible chap. Could he replace Reeves ?
Also.
https://news.sky.com/story/uk-economy-heading-for-worst-of-all-worlds-cbi-warns-as-businesses-expect-fall-in-activity-13279012
Genuinely the worst government ever
1980 Q1: −1.7%
1980 Q2: −2.0%
1980 Q3: −0.2%
1980 Q4: −1.0%
1981 Q1: −0.3%0 -
On the header, I might go for a market on who are going to be candidates for Reform, but it might be time-barred for practicality.
I'm guessing that there may be one somewhere already for the next (after the Leeanderthal Man iirc) Tory to jump ship and cross the floor, and for ex-Tory MPs to do the same (harder to define, that's for Ladbrokes, but I can see the Black Belt Barrister doing it - he's headed out of his tree *).
Could we have a market on when the next Tory MP will defect?
* I also need another term for rabbit hole.0 -
Ah, that's fair enough. I've occasionally run into the word count ceiling myself and it can be pretty annoying having to skim over, axe, or simplify material.Sean_F said:
Thanks. I’d happily have written far more, but I was limited to 2,500 words.Morris_Dancer said:Just finished reading Mr. Fear's Mina the Elder PDF: https://1drv.ms/b/s!ApCloHjkv6JKt1N8CDdSQm06S7LC?e=vFjg68
Interesting stuff. Luckily my fading memories of Sharpe provides a little bit of context but pretty much everything on Mina was new to me. I'm not sure if word count/space available permitted, but a little more detail on the victories would have been a good addition. Liked the context for both the Pyrrhic victory against him suffered and enrichment of officers in the 19th century.0 -
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/23/joe-biden-death-row-inmate-sentences-commuted-clemency
But guided by my conscience and my experience as a public defender, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, vice-president, and now President, I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level.
So why not commute all 40 federal death sentences? I think it's very odd to support the death penalty depending on motivation.1 -
They won't export the leccy. They'll export the green ammonia they make from the electrolytic hydrogen produced using the solar power.Malmesbury said:
Because of the ongoing collapse in solar panel prices, exporting solar generated energy isn’t going to make sense.OldKingCole said:
Well, they've got plenty!turbotubbs said:
If they are bright they will farm sunlight.Malmesbury said:
I’ve long advocated EVs for decoupling the economy from oil. One missed recession would pay for that.Eabhal said:
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.bondegezou said:
80% of the UK public are concerned about climate change: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/desnz-public-attitudes-tracker-spring-2024/desnz-public-attitudes-tracker-net-zero-and-climate-change-spring-2024-ukalgarkirk said:
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.SandyRentool said:
Allowing uncontrolled climate change is even less sensible.Morris_Dancer said:
You don't. You offshore it to countries with inferior regulation then claim you've decarbonised the economy.SandyRentool said:
Come on then. How do you decarbonise cement and lime production or waste incinerators without carbon capture?Morris_Dancer said:Yes.
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:
Podbean: https://undercutters.podbean.com/e/undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield-battle/
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/05TYpdrVsQObsCpTLZnsNV
Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/b...cast-undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield-battle
Transcript: https://morrisf1.blogspot.com/2024/12/undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield.html
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.
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.
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.
(PBers might disagree with that but that's the impression people have after the Ukraine fiasco).
Net zero is a bonus.
The Saudis can go back to farming sand.
While the power electronics cost a noticeable amount, you will need the same amount of them, even if you need 5x the number of solar panels.
So Saudi will have little advantage over simply filling a field, here, with panels.
Where it will benefit Saudi, is in running their local desalination. Without which, the carrying capacity of Saudi Arabia drops, quite dramatically.
There's a new facility proposed at Immingham to import green ammonia.0 -
Agreed on Musk. One tangential thought I just had regarding his donation to Reform combined with his ramping of AfD: I wonder Musk will render Farage unelectable?MattW said:Good morning everyone.
Have we come out of yesterday's COVID rabbit hole? Good if so
Cold here, but my neighbour's kids are back from University. One has started a PhD on innovative wound dressings at de Montfort Uni, which is good news - an area where incremental progress makes a massive difference over time.
I'd re-recommend the Radio 4 Doc on Musk:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0026jt9
The guy seems unhinged. What sort of dad responds to his child coming out as Trans by saying 'She is dead to me; killed by the woke mind-virus.' That's obscene, just on a level of being human.
Contrast to recent comments from our own @Leon on his own children - which however much we dispute with Leon have been great.
For all that I disagree with him, I don't think Farage is really that extreme at present. He's just a populist parody of a right-wing Tory in my view. At the moment I can see him becoming PM on the same wave of inane jocularity Johnson rode, and probably governing in much the same way.
Musk, on the other hand, seems to have gone off the deep end politically. If he bankrolls Reform, will it just drive them off the deep end too? For all our faults, us Brits have tended to be quite good thus far at not electing despots.
Counterpoint: Leon and others rightly warn that we underestimate either Farage or Musk at our peril. Joined forces, they're a pretty scary prospect.1 -
The same applies - why create a new dependency on their clown show, when it will cost virtually the same here?SandyRentool said:
They won't export the leccy. They'll export the green ammonia they make from the electrolytic hydrogen produced using the solar power.Malmesbury said:
Because of the ongoing collapse in solar panel prices, exporting solar generated energy isn’t going to make sense.OldKingCole said:
Well, they've got plenty!turbotubbs said:
If they are bright they will farm sunlight.Malmesbury said:
I’ve long advocated EVs for decoupling the economy from oil. One missed recession would pay for that.Eabhal said:
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.bondegezou said:
80% of the UK public are concerned about climate change: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/desnz-public-attitudes-tracker-spring-2024/desnz-public-attitudes-tracker-net-zero-and-climate-change-spring-2024-ukalgarkirk said:
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.SandyRentool said:
Allowing uncontrolled climate change is even less sensible.Morris_Dancer said:
You don't. You offshore it to countries with inferior regulation then claim you've decarbonised the economy.SandyRentool said:
Come on then. How do you decarbonise cement and lime production or waste incinerators without carbon capture?Morris_Dancer said:Yes.
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:
Podbean: https://undercutters.podbean.com/e/undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield-battle/
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/05TYpdrVsQObsCpTLZnsNV
Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/b...cast-undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield-battle
Transcript: https://morrisf1.blogspot.com/2024/12/undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield.html
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.
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.
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.
(PBers might disagree with that but that's the impression people have after the Ukraine fiasco).
Net zero is a bonus.
The Saudis can go back to farming sand.
While the power electronics cost a noticeable amount, you will need the same amount of them, even if you need 5x the number of solar panels.
So Saudi will have little advantage over simply filling a field, here, with panels.
Where it will benefit Saudi, is in running their local desalination. Without which, the carrying capacity of Saudi Arabia drops, quite dramatically.
There's a new facility proposed at Immingham to import green ammonia.
Transport costs will dominate for such material.0 -
Anyway, I think that's it from me this year, have a good Christmas and New Year everyone!9
-
In 2020 nominal GDP declined 5.8% YOY vs 2019. The BoE publishes GDP data for England back to 1270 -- nominal GDP fell by 35.48% in the 1349 black death outbreak and by almost 50% in real terms. Falls of more than 5.8% have taken place on more than 100 occasions.Fishing said:
Only because GDP collection was paused during the Black Death..TheScreamingEagles said:
Boris Johnson’s government, elected in December 2019, saw the biggest ever GDP fall ever recorded in 2020.Nigelb said:
You think they'll beat this second year run ?Leon said:
“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. “Taz said:U.K. GDP for third quarter downgraded to zero as reported by GMB.
I presume they mean GDP growth.
The Reeves effect in action but it’s all the Tories fault. Darren Jones seems a plausible chap. Could he replace Reeves ?
Also.
https://news.sky.com/story/uk-economy-heading-for-worst-of-all-worlds-cbi-warns-as-businesses-expect-fall-in-activity-13279012
Genuinely the worst government ever
1980 Q1: −1.7%
1980 Q2: −2.0%
1980 Q3: −0.2%
1980 Q4: −1.0%
1981 Q1: −0.3%0 -
Very forward-thinking of the majority of British people to be shit at foreign languages.Leon said:
Useful AnecdoteNickPalmer said:
I don't know enough about Java, but in translation the AI will get 90% right and will get 10% wrong in a mostly predictable way - typically confusing positives to negatives and vice versa due to word order or complex sentences. However, there are still about 3-5% errors that are unpredictable - e.g. a whole clause simply ignored. That has made translation for the EU into a win-win for both EU and translators - the pay is down by 25%, productivity is up by perhaps 60%, and the prospect of eliminiating the human element entirely is very low, because the consequences of overlooking a mistake are potentially huge.FeersumEnjineeya said:
In summary:Malmesbury said:
In the coding world - the fiddling of the benchmarks is mildly amusing.bondegezou said:
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.JosiasJessop said:
Yes, and I believe many such claims are b/s.Leon said:
It literally passed the Arc AGI testJosiasJessop said:
Yes, and I believe many such claims are b/s.Leon said:
Ok. I hope the mods will forgive me as it’s ChristmasJosiasJessop said:
Unless you can pinpoint what you think it might be, that's just a silly prediction.Leon said: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
"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 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)
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
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.
“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.
For casual translation, though - getting the sense of a piece with 90% accuracy - the need for human intervention has more or less disappeared. Curiously, the number of people doing serious translation where a mistake is a Big Deal seems to have dropped - I'm given first refusal on Danish to English translation by several agencies, and even German to English seems to have demand exceeding supply.
Useful Data:
“AI threatens to decimate the translation profession, according to a new survey by a British union.
Almost four in ten translators (36%) said they’ve already lost work due to generative AI. Nearly half of them (43%) said the tech has decreased their income.
They fear far worse is to come. Over three-quarters of translators (77%) believe GenAI will negatively impact future income from their creative work.”
https://thenextweb.com/news/translators-losing-work-ai-machine-translation0 -
Some of my work is translated into German, so I know a few German translators. They say there is still work, but because of AI, pay is way down, and they expect the work to disappear almost entirely soon (a few bespoke premium niches will endure; they may even become BETTER paid)FeersumEnjineeya said:
That's interesting. I spent quite a few years doing German to English translation of technical documents before returning to software development about four years ago. I'd assumed that, since then, AI would have improved machine translation to the extent that far fewer translators would be needed. So I'm rather surprised that demand for German to English still seems to be holding up, though perhaps less so for more structured, technical topics?NickPalmer said:
I don't know enough about Java, but in translation the AI will get 90% right and will get 10% wrong in a mostly predictable way - typically confusing positives to negatives and vice versa due to word order or complex sentences. However, there are still about 3-5% errors that are unpredictable - e.g. a whole clause simply ignored. That has made translation for the EU into a win-win for both EU and translators - the pay is down by 25%, productivity is up by perhaps 60%, and the prospect of eliminiating the human element entirely is very low, because the consequences of overlooking a mistake are potentially huge.FeersumEnjineeya said:
In summary:Malmesbury said:
In the coding world - the fiddling of the benchmarks is mildly amusing.bondegezou said:
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.JosiasJessop said:
Yes, and I believe many such claims are b/s.Leon said:
It literally passed the Arc AGI testJosiasJessop said:
Yes, and I believe many such claims are b/s.Leon said:
Ok. I hope the mods will forgive me as it’s ChristmasJosiasJessop said:
Unless you can pinpoint what you think it might be, that's just a silly prediction.Leon said: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
"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 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)
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
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.
“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.
For casual translation, though - getting the sense of a piece with 90% accuracy - the need for human intervention has more or less disappeared. Curiously, the number of people doing serious translation where a mistake is a Big Deal seems to have dropped - I'm given first refusal on Danish to English translation by several agencies, and even German to English seems to have demand exceeding supply.
If we are doing anecdote, here’s mine, from
my industry. A year ago if you asked AI to write a long 2000 word article about “flint knapping in European history” you’d have got something just about grammatical, and with interesting facts (and some made up facts), but also turgid, verbose, dull, obviously AI
In other words, impressive - but only in the way a dog walking, hind legs, impressive etc
Now? If you are good at prompting, you can - in about 5-10 minutes - get a good article, nicely crafted, with a definite arc from thesis to conclusion. Either few or usually zero errors. It’s still a bit generic, so it needs a good human writer to add a spark and a polish, the work of 20 minutes
So what took 3 hours at least (and probably a whole day) now takes 30 minutes. The result of this will be that ten good writers will be replaced by one good writer who is also a skilled prompter. And this - as I say - is ALREADY HAPPENING2 -
Shecorns88 said:
Heres a betTaz said:
Tomorrow belongs to XiCasino_Royale said:
Shenzhen88.Shecorns88 said: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
Who gets a full State Visit first?
Trump-Musk
Xi
I hope it's Xi - he has far more to offer the UK and we have far less to fear from him and far more to gain!
It will have to be Trump if SKS can get him to come.Shecorns88 said:
Heres a betTaz said:
Tomorrow belongs to XiCasino_Royale said:
Shenzhen88.Shecorns88 said: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.
Who gets a full State Visit first?
Trump-Musk
Xi
I hope it's Xi - he has far more to offer the UK and we have far less to fear from him and far more to gain!
Outside chance of Macron as the baleful swansong of radical centrist Europe.
No chance of Xi, and it would cause domestic ructions for Modi who has occasion to drape himself in the banner of anti-imperialism from time to time.
Fash Karen from Italy would tick a lot of boxes. European but a right wing shitbag. Close defense partner but slightly Ukro-skeptical.0 -
I have experimented with ai a little in copywriting. Apart from writing in an incredibly repetitive style which it can't change, it has (as one would expect) a complete inability to add value to the information you give it. Tell it a car is red and ask for half a page, and it will produce half a page of annoyingly repetitive filler text but it will only impart that the car is red. One may as well just put the unvarnished prompt information out there in public - it will be a lot quicker and less annoying to read.Leon said:
If I was your age in your job I would fiercely believe what you believe, because accepting what I’m saying means your career is going to end within 5-7 years or less. But it is nonetheless the caseMaxPB said:
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.Leon said:
Look at the graph I posted. No one believes what you’re sayingMaxPB said:
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.Leon said:
Yes. The analogy is pretty good. Using ELO is cleverPulpstar said:
Surely one thing is true, once AI achieves "general intelligence" it very very quickly becomes better than humans can possibly be ?Leon said: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
🥂🎅💥
The top chess programs are ranked over 3,000 ELO; way above any human.
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
By the same token, is ai in totality giving us any more than we're putting in? We put in vast computing power and it's producing answers of varying quality - wrapped in the flash and bang of a message-like interface and the ability to fill a screen with words very quickly. We keep being told it will reach sentience any minute now, but we were being told that in the early days of ChatGPT.0 -
Seriously, if you’re young and fancy a career in writing, give up. Unless you focus on memoir or war reportage, something AI might never do, it’s done. It’s over. There won’t be a career0
-
Same to you. Here's to a great 2025.MaxPB said:Anyway, I think that's it from me this year, have a good Christmas and New Year everyone!
1 -
On translation, I am currently reading a novel translated from Swedish into English.
However, it has been translated into American English. There should have been a warning on the cover.
Top tip: Reading books that have been translated into English is usually a good bet, as they have been deemed good enough to be worth translating. The novel I finished last week had been translated from Italian.1 -
I am intrigued by this notion. I have access to the newest paid ChatGPT and it's utterly shite at writing. I suppose you must have access to far better models.Leon said:Seriously, if you’re young and fancy a career in writing, give up. Unless you focus on memoir or war reportage, something AI might never do, it’s done. It’s over. There won’t be a career
0 -
I personally know this to be wrong. I personally know editors that have replaced writers with AI and no one has noticed (apart from the disgruntled writers)Luckyguy1983 said:
I have experimented with ai a little in copywriting. Apart from writing in an incredibly repetitive style which it can't change, it has (as one would expect) a complete inability to add value to the information you give it. Tell it a car is red and ask for half a page, and it will produce half a page of annoyingly repetitive filler text but it will only impart that the car is red. One may as well just put the unvarnished prompt information out there in public - it will be a lot quicker and less annoying to read.Leon said:
If I was your age in your job I would fiercely believe what you believe, because accepting what I’m saying means your career is going to end within 5-7 years or less. But it is nonetheless the caseMaxPB said:
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.Leon said:
Look at the graph I posted. No one believes what you’re sayingMaxPB said:
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.Leon said:
Yes. The analogy is pretty good. Using ELO is cleverPulpstar said:
Surely one thing is true, once AI achieves "general intelligence" it very very quickly becomes better than humans can possibly be ?Leon said: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
🥂🎅💥
The top chess programs are ranked over 3,000 ELO; way above any human.
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
By the same token, is ai in totality giving us any more than we're putting in? We put in vast computing power and it's producing answers of varying quality - wrapped in the flash and bang of a message-like interface and the ability to fill a screen with words very quickly. We keep being told it will reach sentience any minute now, but we were being told that in the early days of ChatGPT.0 -
Is that just because the writers it replaced weren't very good to start with?Leon said:
I personally know this to be wrong. I personally know editors that have replaced writers with AI and no one has noticed (apart from the disgruntled writers)Luckyguy1983 said:
I have experimented with ai a little in copywriting. Apart from writing in an incredibly repetitive style which it can't change, it has (as one would expect) a complete inability to add value to the information you give it. Tell it a car is red and ask for half a page, and it will produce half a page of annoyingly repetitive filler text but it will only impart that the car is red. One may as well just put the unvarnished prompt information out there in public - it will be a lot quicker and less annoying to read.Leon said:
If I was your age in your job I would fiercely believe what you believe, because accepting what I’m saying means your career is going to end within 5-7 years or less. But it is nonetheless the caseMaxPB said:
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.Leon said:
Look at the graph I posted. No one believes what you’re sayingMaxPB said:
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.Leon said:
Yes. The analogy is pretty good. Using ELO is cleverPulpstar said:
Surely one thing is true, once AI achieves "general intelligence" it very very quickly becomes better than humans can possibly be ?Leon said: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
🥂🎅💥
The top chess programs are ranked over 3,000 ELO; way above any human.
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
By the same token, is ai in totality giving us any more than we're putting in? We put in vast computing power and it's producing answers of varying quality - wrapped in the flash and bang of a message-like interface and the ability to fill a screen with words very quickly. We keep being told it will reach sentience any minute now, but we were being told that in the early days of ChatGPT.0 -
All professional translators nowadays use machine translation - now AI enhanced - to increase their output.Leon said:
Useful AnecdoteNickPalmer said:
I don't know enough about Java, but in translation the AI will get 90% right and will get 10% wrong in a mostly predictable way - typically confusing positives to negatives and vice versa due to word order or complex sentences. However, there are still about 3-5% errors that are unpredictable - e.g. a whole clause simply ignored. That has made translation for the EU into a win-win for both EU and translators - the pay is down by 25%, productivity is up by perhaps 60%, and the prospect of eliminiating the human element entirely is very low, because the consequences of overlooking a mistake are potentially huge.FeersumEnjineeya said:
In summary:Malmesbury said:
In the coding world - the fiddling of the benchmarks is mildly amusing.bondegezou said:
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.JosiasJessop said:
Yes, and I believe many such claims are b/s.Leon said:
It literally passed the Arc AGI testJosiasJessop said:
Yes, and I believe many such claims are b/s.Leon said:
Ok. I hope the mods will forgive me as it’s ChristmasJosiasJessop said:
Unless you can pinpoint what you think it might be, that's just a silly prediction.Leon said: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
"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 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)
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
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.
“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.
For casual translation, though - getting the sense of a piece with 90% accuracy - the need for human intervention has more or less disappeared. Curiously, the number of people doing serious translation where a mistake is a Big Deal seems to have dropped - I'm given first refusal on Danish to English translation by several agencies, and even German to English seems to have demand exceeding supply.
Useful Data:
“AI threatens to decimate the translation profession, according to a new survey by a British union.
Almost four in ten translators (36%) said they’ve already lost work due to generative AI. Nearly half of them (43%) said the tech has decreased their income.
They fear far worse is to come. Over three-quarters of translators (77%) believe GenAI will negatively impact future income from their creative work.”
https://thenextweb.com/news/translators-losing-work-ai-machine-translation
So whilst rates per 100 words translated have not kept up with inflation, translators are often earning more.
The raw machine translation is corrected for the many minor errors and not infrequent major errors. And is then molded into a readable text in the target language. This can cut time spent by tens of percent.
The number of translators employed since the onset of neural machine translation in 2016 has increased quite significantly. This should not be a surprise, given the cost of translating a 1000 words has gone down.
Btw Large Language Models, by their very way they function, are very poor at translating between languages with scant examples available: say Japanese to Basque. Here, human translators toil on unaided by AI.
Likewise, AI remains really poor at dealing with figurative and literary language and also, ironically, highly technical texts. Much quicker for human translators to do all the work themselves, rather than slogging through the dire output churned out by AI.
Several family members are professional translators. I speak several languages, but have not done translation work for 20 years or so.0 -
And to you!MaxPB said:Anyway, I think that's it from me this year, have a good Christmas and New Year everyone!
See you online in 2025.
Another quiet year no doubt...0 -
What’s the point in my lying about the death of my profession? Seriously? I like attention but I don’t like it that muchLuckyguy1983 said:
I am intrigued by this notion. I have access to the newest paid ChatGPT and it's utterly shite at writing. I suppose you must have access to far better models.Leon said:Seriously, if you’re young and fancy a career in writing, give up. Unless you focus on memoir or war reportage, something AI might never do, it’s done. It’s over. There won’t be a career
Imparting this news does not make me happy. Quite the fucking opposite. I hate it (even if I find the underlying tech exciting). But it is happening and it is futile if not dangerous to deny it0 -
.
The fact is, most swing voters didn't buy the "democracy v despotism" dichotomy.FF43 said:
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.ydoethur said:
He didn't beat her that comfortably. The electoral college magnified his vote margin. Admittedly, he did better than in 2016 or 2020.Taz said:
Yet she was such a shit candidate he beat her comfortably.ydoethur said:
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.Taz said:
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.ydoethur said:
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.Morris_Dancer said:Yes.
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:
Podbean: https://undercutters.podbean.com/e/undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield-battle/
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/05TYpdrVsQObsCpTLZnsNV
Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/b...cast-undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield-battle
Transcript: https://morrisf1.blogspot.com/2024/12/undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield.html
Even if he doesn't, endlessly tweeting about them in all caps is going to unnerve businesses.
It’s the reason why I’d have preferred the hapless Harris.
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.
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 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.0 -
The joke about someone not having read their own book will take on a new level when the ghostwriter is a machine.Leon said:
I personally know this to be wrong. I personally know editors that have replaced writers with AI and no one has noticed (apart from the disgruntled writers)Luckyguy1983 said:
I have experimented with ai a little in copywriting. Apart from writing in an incredibly repetitive style which it can't change, it has (as one would expect) a complete inability to add value to the information you give it. Tell it a car is red and ask for half a page, and it will produce half a page of annoyingly repetitive filler text but it will only impart that the car is red. One may as well just put the unvarnished prompt information out there in public - it will be a lot quicker and less annoying to read.Leon said:
If I was your age in your job I would fiercely believe what you believe, because accepting what I’m saying means your career is going to end within 5-7 years or less. But it is nonetheless the caseMaxPB said:
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.Leon said:
Look at the graph I posted. No one believes what you’re sayingMaxPB said:
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.Leon said:
Yes. The analogy is pretty good. Using ELO is cleverPulpstar said:
Surely one thing is true, once AI achieves "general intelligence" it very very quickly becomes better than humans can possibly be ?Leon said: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
🥂🎅💥
The top chess programs are ranked over 3,000 ELO; way above any human.
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
By the same token, is ai in totality giving us any more than we're putting in? We put in vast computing power and it's producing answers of varying quality - wrapped in the flash and bang of a message-like interface and the ability to fill a screen with words very quickly. We keep being told it will reach sentience any minute now, but we were being told that in the early days of ChatGPT.0 -
Agreed. And Labour likely won't get another similar chance for decades. A tragic missed opportunity.eek said:
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.Driver said:
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.eek said:
The scale of the Labour majority is a freak of circumstance.Driver said:
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.noneoftheabove said:
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.Razedabode said:..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.
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.
As others have argued - Labour needed to rule out income and NI increases to win the election
Problem is that without tax increases we are stuck in austerity0 -
AnecdoteCJohn said:
All professional translators nowadays use machine translation - now AI enhanced - to increase their output.Leon said:
Useful AnecdoteNickPalmer said:
I don't know enough about Java, but in translation the AI will get 90% right and will get 10% wrong in a mostly predictable way - typically confusing positives to negatives and vice versa due to word order or complex sentences. However, there are still about 3-5% errors that are unpredictable - e.g. a whole clause simply ignored. That has made translation for the EU into a win-win for both EU and translators - the pay is down by 25%, productivity is up by perhaps 60%, and the prospect of eliminiating the human element entirely is very low, because the consequences of overlooking a mistake are potentially huge.FeersumEnjineeya said:
In summary:Malmesbury said:
In the coding world - the fiddling of the benchmarks is mildly amusing.bondegezou said:
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.JosiasJessop said:
Yes, and I believe many such claims are b/s.Leon said:
It literally passed the Arc AGI testJosiasJessop said:
Yes, and I believe many such claims are b/s.Leon said:
Ok. I hope the mods will forgive me as it’s ChristmasJosiasJessop said:
Unless you can pinpoint what you think it might be, that's just a silly prediction.Leon said: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
"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 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)
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
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.
“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.
For casual translation, though - getting the sense of a piece with 90% accuracy - the need for human intervention has more or less disappeared. Curiously, the number of people doing serious translation where a mistake is a Big Deal seems to have dropped - I'm given first refusal on Danish to English translation by several agencies, and even German to English seems to have demand exceeding supply.
Useful Data:
“AI threatens to decimate the translation profession, according to a new survey by a British union.
Almost four in ten translators (36%) said they’ve already lost work due to generative AI. Nearly half of them (43%) said the tech has decreased their income.
They fear far worse is to come. Over three-quarters of translators (77%) believe GenAI will negatively impact future income from their creative work.”
https://thenextweb.com/news/translators-losing-work-ai-machine-translation
So whilst rates per 100 words translated have not kept up with inflation, translators are often earning more.
The raw machine translation is corrected for the many minor errors and not infrequent major errors. And is then molded into a readable text in the target language. This can cut time spent by tens of percent.
The number of translators employed since the onset of neural machine translation in 2016 has increased quite significantly. This should not be a surprise, given the cost of translating a 1000 words has gone down.
Btw Large Language Models, by their very way they function, are very poor at translating between languages with scant examples available: say Japanese to Basque. Here, human translators toil on unaided by AI.
Likewise, AI remains really poor at dealing with figurative and literary language and also, ironically, highly technical texts. Much quicker for human translators to do all the work themselves, rather than slogging through the dire output churned out by AI.
Several family members are professional translators. I speak several languages, but have not done translation work for 20 years or so.
V
Data
https://www.freelanceinformer.com/news/freelance-translators-face-existential-crisis-amid-ai-boom-should-they-adapt-or-make-a-career-change/
Freelance Translators Face Existential Crisis Amid AI Boom: Should They Adapt Or Make A Career Change?
Half of all freelance linguists have considered abandoning their profession due to the rapid advancements in AI translation tools, according to a report conducted by industry news outlet Slator.
The survey, which polled 260 linguists, revealed that more than half of freelance translators experienced a decline in requests for their services over the past year. AI was cited as the primary culprit behind this trend, with the majority believing the impact will intensify over the next five years. The data further showed one in five freelance translators and interpreters are actively seeking new jobs.0 -
I heard quite an interesting counterpoint (on one of the Rest is Politics episodes) suggesting that we need a broadened tax base at modest levels, on the basis that the current tilted-to-the-highest-income version one is fragile and unstable.HYUFD said:
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 ConservativeBartholomewRoberts said:
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.Battlebus said:
It's not a 'system', it's the actual law.BartholomewRoberts said:
This is why:Taz said:A cheery read in the New Statesman. Why are 13,000:people in Dover too Ill to work.
Unsurprisingly the Current govt has been gifted this legacy from the previous clowns.
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/society/2024/12/dover-sick-town-of-england
“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.
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.
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?
That is reversing the years of "taking people completely out of income tax at the lower end" propaganda / practice.
I can see the benefit, but I'd apply it more to a reimagined IHT system along Swiss lines.0 -
What I've written isn't an anecdote; it's data.0
-
It already is in part. You cannot get JSA without sufficient NI contributions now and nor can you get the state pension without enough NI contributions or creditssquareroot2 said:
Nope. Once you start ringfencing things Govt becomes impossible to manage.HYUFD said:
No we should be ringfencing National Insurance for JSA, the state pension and some healthcare costs as it was set up to fundBartholomewRoberts said: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.0 -
I do wonder if you actually believe the drivel you write on here or if you are just seeing how far down the lunatic hole you can go before we all just start laughing at you.Shecorns88 said:Big_G_NorthWales said:Good morning
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
Sadly Sky, like BBC and ITN are no longer impartial sources
That has been crystal clear since July 5th if not before.
Sky and ITN Owners dictate the political line and sadly the presenters go with it, some with far more glee than others.
Until or Unless Starmer SACKS the BBC Governer General and Head of News we will have to endure the rabid bile of Kuenssberg and Mason, whilst being eternally grateful for the occasional imput from the genuinely impartial Derbyshire and Young.
Then there is GB News a rag bag of Fascists that Herr Goebels would be proud of....0 -
Well hopefully Air Products know what they are doing.Malmesbury said:
The same applies - why create a new dependency on their clown show, when it will cost virtually the same here?SandyRentool said:
They won't export the leccy. They'll export the green ammonia they make from the electrolytic hydrogen produced using the solar power.Malmesbury said:
Because of the ongoing collapse in solar panel prices, exporting solar generated energy isn’t going to make sense.OldKingCole said:
Well, they've got plenty!turbotubbs said:
If they are bright they will farm sunlight.Malmesbury said:
I’ve long advocated EVs for decoupling the economy from oil. One missed recession would pay for that.Eabhal said:
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.bondegezou said:
80% of the UK public are concerned about climate change: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/desnz-public-attitudes-tracker-spring-2024/desnz-public-attitudes-tracker-net-zero-and-climate-change-spring-2024-ukalgarkirk said:
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.SandyRentool said:
Allowing uncontrolled climate change is even less sensible.Morris_Dancer said:
You don't. You offshore it to countries with inferior regulation then claim you've decarbonised the economy.SandyRentool said:
Come on then. How do you decarbonise cement and lime production or waste incinerators without carbon capture?Morris_Dancer said:Yes.
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:
Podbean: https://undercutters.podbean.com/e/undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield-battle/
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/05TYpdrVsQObsCpTLZnsNV
Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/b...cast-undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield-battle
Transcript: https://morrisf1.blogspot.com/2024/12/undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield.html
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.
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.
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.
(PBers might disagree with that but that's the impression people have after the Ukraine fiasco).
Net zero is a bonus.
The Saudis can go back to farming sand.
While the power electronics cost a noticeable amount, you will need the same amount of them, even if you need 5x the number of solar panels.
So Saudi will have little advantage over simply filling a field, here, with panels.
Where it will benefit Saudi, is in running their local desalination. Without which, the carrying capacity of Saudi Arabia drops, quite dramatically.
There's a new facility proposed at Immingham to import green ammonia.
Transport costs will dominate for such material.0 -
I can't see how AI will do anything other than revolutionise some jobs. At the moment I'm between major projects so I've been looking into how it might be used in Project Management, and actually I've been disappointed as there doesn't yet seem to be much real benefit. All the examples of its use have been to generate templates of documents used in management (project plan, risk log) but if you work for any decent consultancy you already start from having all the templates you need. I've seen nothing yet which would make any difference to what I actually do for a living, which is mostly thinking and talking to people.Morris_Dancer said:For what it's worth, my work fell off a cliff this year, mostly down to AI.
Went from being excessively busy around Christmas 2023 to having very little luck finding anything so far after losing two long term clients in the first half of 2024.
And, if I can play my violin a moment, I don't have quite the mountain of wealth to just retire that some here do. On the plus side, I'm not destitute either but the situation isn't great and hasn't been for a while.
One of the reasons behind me starting the Undercutters podcast, as well as hopefully turning it into a side gig down the line, is that I can just crack on with it without AI eating it, and without having to beat 100-200+ other people applying for something.
https://undercutters.podbean.com/
I'd be very interested to know if others in IT/Project Management have been able to get real benefit from AI yet?
(I would like an AI that could manage MS Project for me....)
0 -
I am not sure how AI gets and writes news stories. So breaking news reporting and investigative journalism will probably survive - if people still want it. I doubt it will pay very well, though.Luckyguy1983 said:
I have experimented with ai a little in copywriting. Apart from writing in an incredibly repetitive style which it can't change, it has (as one would expect) a complete inability to add value to the information you give it. Tell it a car is red and ask for half a page, and it will produce half a page of annoyingly repetitive filler text but it will only impart that the car is red. One may as well just put the unvarnished prompt information out there in public - it will be a lot quicker and less annoying to read.Leon said:
If I was your age in your job I would fiercely believe what you believe, because accepting what I’m saying means your career is going to end within 5-7 years or less. But it is nonetheless the caseMaxPB said:
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.Leon said:
Look at the graph I posted. No one believes what you’re sayingMaxPB said:
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.Leon said:
Yes. The analogy is pretty good. Using ELO is cleverPulpstar said:
Surely one thing is true, once AI achieves "general intelligence" it very very quickly becomes better than humans can possibly be ?Leon said: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
🥂🎅💥
The top chess programs are ranked over 3,000 ELO; way above any human.
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
By the same token, is ai in totality giving us any more than we're putting in? We put in vast computing power and it's producing answers of varying quality - wrapped in the flash and bang of a message-like interface and the ability to fill a screen with words very quickly. We keep being told it will reach sentience any minute now, but we were being told that in the early days of ChatGPT.
It seems pretty clear to me that copywriting is just about done for in the age of AI. Maybe 10% of copywriters will survive by turning AI-generated copy into something better. And that is the opportunity that AI does present - humans will always be able to polish it and there will be others who will find lucrative ways to interrogate and manipulate it. Generating prompts is going to become a significant skill.
1 -
My 22 year old granddaughter has written several stories, is an avid reader of books, and describes herself as a 'writer'Leon said:Seriously, if you’re young and fancy a career in writing, give up. Unless you focus on memoir or war reportage, something AI might never do, it’s done. It’s over. There won’t be a career
I will not repeat your comments to her, no matter they could have some truth, as I would not want to upset her dreams and ambitions0 -
I think that's an interesting shift at the edge of USA attitudes, to more pro-life policies. It's quite the reverse ferret on Joe Biden's part, from his stance in 1994:tlg86 said:https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/23/joe-biden-death-row-inmate-sentences-commuted-clemency
But guided by my conscience and my experience as a public defender, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, vice-president, and now President, I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level.
So why not commute all 40 federal death sentences? I think it's very odd to support the death penalty depending on motivation.
As a senator, Biden championed a 1994 crime bill that expanded the federal death penalty to cover 60 new offences. He boasted: “I am the guy who put these death penalties in this bill.” The legislation is now widely seen as having contributed to mass incarceration, particularly affecting Black men, and many of those currently on death row were sentenced under its provisions.
And it will limit one tiny aspect of Trump's possibility for gesture-politics:
Under Trump, more people incarcerated in the federal system were put to death than under the previous 10 presidents combined.0 -
Autocracies have also been falling, see Assad's regime most recently, social media enables revolt much more easily to be co ordinated if people cannot elect their government freely via the ballot boxnoneoftheabove said:
Yeah, as much as I would like to be wrong I struggle to see liberal democracy surviving the combination of demographics, AI, surveillance technology and globalisation. Any one of those on its own is challenging, all four are going to lead to autocracies at best.FF43 said:
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.ydoethur said:
He didn't beat her that comfortably. The electoral college magnified his vote margin. Admittedly, he did better than in 2016 or 2020.Taz said:
Yet she was such a shit candidate he beat her comfortably.ydoethur said:
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.Taz said:
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.ydoethur said:
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.Morris_Dancer said:Yes.
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:
Podbean: https://undercutters.podbean.com/e/undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield-battle/
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/05TYpdrVsQObsCpTLZnsNV
Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/b...cast-undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield-battle
Transcript: https://morrisf1.blogspot.com/2024/12/undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield.html
Even if he doesn't, endlessly tweeting about them in all caps is going to unnerve businesses.
It’s the reason why I’d have preferred the hapless Harris.
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.
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 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.0 -
They were probably shit writers, unless the editor is shit, which is a distinct possibility. Perhaps they were using it already and getting money for old rope.Leon said:
I personally know this to be wrong. I personally know editors that have replaced writers with AI and no one has noticed (apart from the disgruntled writers)Luckyguy1983 said:
I have experimented with ai a little in copywriting. Apart from writing in an incredibly repetitive style which it can't change, it has (as one would expect) a complete inability to add value to the information you give it. Tell it a car is red and ask for half a page, and it will produce half a page of annoyingly repetitive filler text but it will only impart that the car is red. One may as well just put the unvarnished prompt information out there in public - it will be a lot quicker and less annoying to read.Leon said:
If I was your age in your job I would fiercely believe what you believe, because accepting what I’m saying means your career is going to end within 5-7 years or less. But it is nonetheless the caseMaxPB said:
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.Leon said:
Look at the graph I posted. No one believes what you’re sayingMaxPB said:
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.Leon said:
Yes. The analogy is pretty good. Using ELO is cleverPulpstar said:
Surely one thing is true, once AI achieves "general intelligence" it very very quickly becomes better than humans can possibly be ?Leon said: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
🥂🎅💥
The top chess programs are ranked over 3,000 ELO; way above any human.
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
By the same token, is ai in totality giving us any more than we're putting in? We put in vast computing power and it's producing answers of varying quality - wrapped in the flash and bang of a message-like interface and the ability to fill a screen with words very quickly. We keep being told it will reach sentience any minute now, but we were being told that in the early days of ChatGPT.
Read an Amazon listing product text for some brackets or a drill, or a hairdryer. All neatly subtitled into equal sized paragraphs of reasons to buy. You won't get to the end of it without glazing over. Completely unreadable. You'll skip to the reviews, as everyone does now. Because the reviews are real people imparting real information. Ai has made that text useless.
Smart brands are realising this, and personalising things so you know it's a person. A nice one I've come across is this: https://secrid.com/en-gb/miniwallet-saffiano-caramel/ - all writing labelled with a writer, some written by the CEO.0 -
There was a piece on I think From Our Own Correspondent stating that only 25% of Myanmar was under the control of the government/junta, and watermelons (placidly green on the outside, raging red inside) in the army were sending info direct to rebels. Wouldn’t surprise me if it wasn’t the next spot due a bit of Assad-ing.Leon said:On a more cheerful note, I am halfway to getting a visa for Myanmar. Instead of being rejected outright, they are asking for absurd documents in PDF. I have never got this far before
*airpunch*2 -
Large Language Models are not the solution to a series of tasks to which they are not suited.
The fact remains that in the last 8 years since neural machine translation began, the number of human translators has increased markedly. This is due to translation per word becoming cheaper.
0 -
I don't disagree. The reason why EU human translation based on AI first drafts remains robust is that the jump to relying totally on AI for LEGISLATION is scary. For a guide to good places to visit, or anything like that, AI now rules. But if you can be sued for £X million, or simply cause £X million in lossses, if you get legislation wrong, it doesn't seem safe to cut out the human check. Obviously the human isn't perfect either, but human error in translation tends to be different - typically leaving something out, rather than getting it flatly wrong. Having a human step seems a sensible precaution for the forseeable future.Leon said:
Useful AnecdoteNickPalmer said:
I don't know enough about Java, but in translation the AI will get 90% right and will get 10% wrong in a mostly predictable way - typically confusing positives to negatives and vice versa due to word order or complex sentences. However, there are still about 3-5% errors that are unpredictable - e.g. a whole clause simply ignored. That has made translation for the EU into a win-win for both EU and translators - the pay is down by 25%, productivity is up by perhaps 60%, and the prospect of eliminiating the human element entirely is very low, because the consequences of overlooking a mistake are potentially huge.FeersumEnjineeya said:
In summary:Malmesbury said:
In the coding world - the fiddling of the benchmarks is mildly amusing.bondegezou said:
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.JosiasJessop said:
Yes, and I believe many such claims are b/s.Leon said:
It literally passed the Arc AGI testJosiasJessop said:
Yes, and I believe many such claims are b/s.Leon said:
Ok. I hope the mods will forgive me as it’s ChristmasJosiasJessop said:
Unless you can pinpoint what you think it might be, that's just a silly prediction.Leon said: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
"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 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)
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
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.
“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.
For casual translation, though - getting the sense of a piece with 90% accuracy - the need for human intervention has more or less disappeared. Curiously, the number of people doing serious translation where a mistake is a Big Deal seems to have dropped - I'm given first refusal on Danish to English translation by several agencies, and even German to English seems to have demand exceeding supply.
Useful Data:
“AI threatens to decimate the translation profession, according to a new survey by a British union.
Almost four in ten translators (36%) said they’ve already lost work due to generative AI. Nearly half of them (43%) said the tech has decreased their income.
They fear far worse is to come. Over three-quarters of translators (77%) believe GenAI will negatively impact future income from their creative work.”
https://thenextweb.com/news/translators-losing-work-ai-machine-translation
An interesting question is whether AI translation of fiction is likely to be better or worse. I'd think that it will continue to improve and become clearly better than human translation.0 -
I know I am testing the mods’ patience and I know that PB doesn’t like hearing this stuff (few do) so I’ll make this my last AI comment before ChristmasPJH said:
I can't see how AI will do anything other than revolutionise some jobs. At the moment I'm between major projects so I've been looking into how it might be used in Project Management, and actually I've been disappointed as there doesn't yet seem to be much real benefit. All the examples of its use have been to generate templates of documents used in management (project plan, risk log) but if you work for any decent consultancy you already start from having all the templates you need. I've seen nothing yet which would make any difference to what I actually do for a living, which is mostly thinking and talking to people.Morris_Dancer said:For what it's worth, my work fell off a cliff this year, mostly down to AI.
Went from being excessively busy around Christmas 2023 to having very little luck finding anything so far after losing two long term clients in the first half of 2024.
And, if I can play my violin a moment, I don't have quite the mountain of wealth to just retire that some here do. On the plus side, I'm not destitute either but the situation isn't great and hasn't been for a while.
One of the reasons behind me starting the Undercutters podcast, as well as hopefully turning it into a side gig down the line, is that I can just crack on with it without AI eating it, and without having to beat 100-200+ other people applying for something.
https://undercutters.podbean.com/
I'd be very interested to know if others in IT/Project Management have been able to get real benefit from AI yet?
(I would like an AI that could manage MS Project for me....)
The “best” AIs at the moment are Large Language Models. So it is unsurprising that the first jobs they’re coming for are those most engaged with words and language - writers and translators
But all kinds of AI are coming - agentic etc - and they are brilliant in all cognitive domains and will only get better so ALL cognitive jobs are threatened, and most are surely doomed
Finally, if you’re using the best AIs but still getting shit output I suggest that’s because you’re shit at prompting
On a more cheerful note AI might solve climate change, save the planet, and cure ageing, so it’s not all bad
And on that festive happiness, Merry Christmas to all! xxx 🕺🥂🎅🍾1 -
Google has a brilliant AI podcast tool, I'm afraid. We are starting to use it at one of the places where I do some work. When I first heard it I could not believe how good it was. And it is only going to get better, of course.Morris_Dancer said:For what it's worth, my work fell off a cliff this year, mostly down to AI.
Went from being excessively busy around Christmas 2023 to having very little luck finding anything so far after losing two long term clients in the first half of 2024.
And, if I can play my violin a moment, I don't have quite the mountain of wealth to just retire that some here do. On the plus side, I'm not destitute either but the situation isn't great and hasn't been for a while.
One of the reasons behind me starting the Undercutters podcast, as well as hopefully turning it into a side gig down the line, is that I can just crack on with it without AI eating it, and without having to beat 100-200+ other people applying for something.
https://undercutters.podbean.com/
0 -
williamglenn said:
The joke about someone not having read their own book will take on a new level when the ghostwriter is a machine.Leon said:
I personally know this to be wrong. I personally know editors that have replaced writers with AI and no one has noticed (apart from the disgruntled writers)Luckyguy1983 said:
I have experimented with ai a little in copywriting. Apart from writing in an incredibly repetitive style which it can't change, it has (as one would expect) a complete inability to add value to the information you give it. Tell it a car is red and ask for half a page, and it will produce half a page of annoyingly repetitive filler text but it will only impart that the car is red. One may as well just put the unvarnished prompt information out there in public - it will be a lot quicker and less annoying to read.Leon said:
If I was your age in your job I would fiercely believe what you believe, because accepting what I’m saying means your career is going to end within 5-7 years or less. But it is nonetheless the caseMaxPB said:
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.Leon said:
Look at the graph I posted. No one believes what you’re sayingMaxPB said:
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.Leon said:
Yes. The analogy is pretty good. Using ELO is cleverPulpstar said:
Surely one thing is true, once AI achieves "general intelligence" it very very quickly becomes better than humans can possibly be ?Leon said: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
🥂🎅💥
The top chess programs are ranked over 3,000 ELO; way above any human.
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
By the same token, is ai in totality giving us any more than we're putting in? We put in vast computing power and it's producing answers of varying quality - wrapped in the flash and bang of a message-like interface and the ability to fill a screen with words very quickly. We keep being told it will reach sentience any minute now, but we were being told that in the early days of ChatGPT.williamglenn said:
The joke about someone not having read their own book will take on a new level when the ghostwriter is a machine.Leon said:
I personally know this to be wrong. I personally know editors that have replaced writers with AI and no one has noticed (apart from the disgruntled writers)Luckyguy1983 said:
I have experimented with ai a little in copywriting. Apart from writing in an incredibly repetitive style which it can't change, it has (as one would expect) a complete inability to add value to the information you give it. Tell it a car is red and ask for half a page, and it will produce half a page of annoyingly repetitive filler text but it will only impart that the car is red. One may as well just put the unvarnished prompt information out there in public - it will be a lot quicker and less annoying to read.Leon said:
If I was your age in your job I would fiercely believe what you believe, because accepting what I’m saying means your career is going to end within 5-7 years or less. But it is nonetheless the caseMaxPB said:
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.Leon said:
Look at the graph I posted. No one believes what you’re sayingMaxPB said:
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.Leon said:
Yes. The analogy is pretty good. Using ELO is cleverPulpstar said:
Surely one thing is true, once AI achieves "general intelligence" it very very quickly becomes better than humans can possibly be ?Leon said: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
🥂🎅💥
The top chess programs are ranked over 3,000 ELO; way above any human.
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
By the same token, is ai in totality giving us any more than we're putting in? We put in vast computing power and it's producing answers of varying quality - wrapped in the flash and bang of a message-like interface and the ability to fill a screen with words very quickly. We keep being told it will reach sentience any minute now, but we were being told that in the early days of ChatGPT.
“Many things, Marly, are perpetrated in my name. Aspects of my wealth have become autonomous, by degrees; at times they even war with one another. Rebellion in the fiscal extremities.”williamglenn said:
The joke about someone not having read their own book will take on a new level when the ghostwriter is a machine.Leon said:
I personally know this to be wrong. I personally know editors that have replaced writers with AI and no one has noticed (apart from the disgruntled writers)Luckyguy1983 said:
I have experimented with ai a little in copywriting. Apart from writing in an incredibly repetitive style which it can't change, it has (as one would expect) a complete inability to add value to the information you give it. Tell it a car is red and ask for half a page, and it will produce half a page of annoyingly repetitive filler text but it will only impart that the car is red. One may as well just put the unvarnished prompt information out there in public - it will be a lot quicker and less annoying to read.Leon said:
If I was your age in your job I would fiercely believe what you believe, because accepting what I’m saying means your career is going to end within 5-7 years or less. But it is nonetheless the caseMaxPB said:
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.Leon said:
Look at the graph I posted. No one believes what you’re sayingMaxPB said:
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.Leon said:
Yes. The analogy is pretty good. Using ELO is cleverPulpstar said:
Surely one thing is true, once AI achieves "general intelligence" it very very quickly becomes better than humans can possibly be ?Leon said: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
🥂🎅💥
The top chess programs are ranked over 3,000 ELO; way above any human.
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
By the same token, is ai in totality giving us any more than we're putting in? We put in vast computing power and it's producing answers of varying quality - wrapped in the flash and bang of a message-like interface and the ability to fill a screen with words very quickly. We keep being told it will reach sentience any minute now, but we were being told that in the early days of ChatGPT.0 -
If what you say is true most careers will be gone with a decade, certainly permanent jobs.Leon said:
If I was your age in your job I would fiercely believe what you believe, because accepting what I’m saying means your career is going to end within 5-7 years or less. But it is nonetheless the caseMaxPB said:
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.Leon said:
Look at the graph I posted. No one believes what you’re sayingMaxPB said:
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.Leon said:
Yes. The analogy is pretty good. Using ELO is cleverPulpstar said:
Surely one thing is true, once AI achieves "general intelligence" it very very quickly becomes better than humans can possibly be ?Leon said: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
🥂🎅💥
The top chess programs are ranked over 3,000 ELO; way above any human.
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
Making a UBI funded by a robot tax inevitable if AI leads to mass unemployment0 -
That's essentially what TSMC does - and the Chinese solar panel manufacturers.Malmesbury said:
I’ve long advocated EVs for decoupling the economy from oil. One missed recession would pay for that.Eabhal said:
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.bondegezou said:
80% of the UK public are concerned about climate change: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/desnz-public-attitudes-tracker-spring-2024/desnz-public-attitudes-tracker-net-zero-and-climate-change-spring-2024-ukalgarkirk said:
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.SandyRentool said:
Allowing uncontrolled climate change is even less sensible.Morris_Dancer said:
You don't. You offshore it to countries with inferior regulation then claim you've decarbonised the economy.SandyRentool said:
Come on then. How do you decarbonise cement and lime production or waste incinerators without carbon capture?Morris_Dancer said:Yes.
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:
Podbean: https://undercutters.podbean.com/e/undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield-battle/
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/05TYpdrVsQObsCpTLZnsNV
Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/b...cast-undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield-battle
Transcript: https://morrisf1.blogspot.com/2024/12/undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield.html
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.
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.
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.
(PBers might disagree with that but that's the impression people have after the Ukraine fiasco).
Net zero is a bonus.
The Saudis can go back to farming sand.
Not a bad business.1 -
There will absolutely always be opportunities. She should not give up.Big_G_NorthWales said:
My 22 year old granddaughter has written several stories, is an avid reader of books, and describes herself as a 'writer'Leon said:Seriously, if you’re young and fancy a career in writing, give up. Unless you focus on memoir or war reportage, something AI might never do, it’s done. It’s over. There won’t be a career
I will not repeat your comments to her, no matter they could have some truth, as I would not want to upset her dreams and ambitions
2 -
Harris was a poor candidate, lacked charisma, a coastal liberal elitist, basically John Kerry in a skirt.FF43 said:
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.ydoethur said:
He didn't beat her that comfortably. The electoral college magnified his vote margin. Admittedly, he did better than in 2016 or 2020.Taz said:
Yet she was such a shit candidate he beat her comfortably.ydoethur said:
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.Taz said:
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.ydoethur said:
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.Morris_Dancer said:Yes.
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:
Podbean: https://undercutters.podbean.com/e/undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield-battle/
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/05TYpdrVsQObsCpTLZnsNV
Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/b...cast-undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield-battle
Transcript: https://morrisf1.blogspot.com/2024/12/undercutters-ep2-f1-2024-midfield.html
Even if he doesn't, endlessly tweeting about them in all caps is going to unnerve businesses.
It’s the reason why I’d have preferred the hapless Harris.
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.
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 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.
However on the plus side for the Democrats they won the subsequent midterms and the next presidential election with Obama0 -
Literary translation is incredibly subjective, isn't it? You can see AI providing the first draft and then a human doing the final one, taking it to places that individual alone was capable of imagining. Umberto Eco said the English translation of The Name of the Rose was better than the original in Italian. A human did that.NickPalmer said:
I don't disagree. The reason why EU human translation based on AI first drafts remains robust is that the jump to relying totally on AI for LEGISLATION is scary. For a guide to good places to visit, or anything like that, AI now rules. But if you can be sued for £X million, or simply cause £X million in lossses, if you get legislation wrong, it doesn't seem safe to cut out the human check. Obviously the human isn't perfect either, but human error in translation tends to be different - typically leaving something out, rather than getting it flatly wrong. Having a human step seems a sensible precaution for the forseeable future.Leon said:
Useful AnecdoteNickPalmer said:
I don't know enough about Java, but in translation the AI will get 90% right and will get 10% wrong in a mostly predictable way - typically confusing positives to negatives and vice versa due to word order or complex sentences. However, there are still about 3-5% errors that are unpredictable - e.g. a whole clause simply ignored. That has made translation for the EU into a win-win for both EU and translators - the pay is down by 25%, productivity is up by perhaps 60%, and the prospect of eliminiating the human element entirely is very low, because the consequences of overlooking a mistake are potentially huge.FeersumEnjineeya said:
In summary:Malmesbury said:
In the coding world - the fiddling of the benchmarks is mildly amusing.bondegezou said:
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.JosiasJessop said:
Yes, and I believe many such claims are b/s.Leon said:
It literally passed the Arc AGI testJosiasJessop said:
Yes, and I believe many such claims are b/s.Leon said:
Ok. I hope the mods will forgive me as it’s ChristmasJosiasJessop said:
Unless you can pinpoint what you think it might be, that's just a silly prediction.Leon said: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
"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 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)
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
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.
“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.
For casual translation, though - getting the sense of a piece with 90% accuracy - the need for human intervention has more or less disappeared. Curiously, the number of people doing serious translation where a mistake is a Big Deal seems to have dropped - I'm given first refusal on Danish to English translation by several agencies, and even German to English seems to have demand exceeding supply.
Useful Data:
“AI threatens to decimate the translation profession, according to a new survey by a British union.
Almost four in ten translators (36%) said they’ve already lost work due to generative AI. Nearly half of them (43%) said the tech has decreased their income.
They fear far worse is to come. Over three-quarters of translators (77%) believe GenAI will negatively impact future income from their creative work.”
https://thenextweb.com/news/translators-losing-work-ai-machine-translation
An interesting question is whether AI translation of fiction is likely to be better or worse. I'd think that it will continue to improve and become clearly better than human translation.
1
