Slightly disappointing that the Rapture appears to have gone AWOL again.
Oh, was it [supposed to be] today?
I thought so on the basis of previous posts here. Though would be funny if I'd got it wrong and it did subsequently turn up tomorrow.
How will I recognise the Rapture?
I always just assumed one would know it when they saw it. Purple and orange skies, lava, agonised wailing, existential dread, California sliding into the sea. The usual, really.
I suppose the leader of the free world hectoring the UN about the hoax of climate change may or may not be some sort of subtler sign, tbf.
Not a chance Labour have added a point. Have they been furiously fiddling with their methodology again?
I dunno. When Goodwin posts a FON poll which has Labour on circa 15% with RefCon on 50% it has to be gold standard, and on every one of the two dozen times it gets posted. Labour or the LDs grab an MoE point and for you right wingers the methodology must be faulty.
Goodwin hasn't altered his past-vote weighting recently because of reasons.
Ive been entertaining myself with the shortest first class steps from Jimmy Anderson to WG Grace in first class cricket so im going to bore you with it
Jimmy played with Alec Stewart Who played with and against Ian Botham who played with Brian Close (Somerset 1976) who played against Bob Wyatt (MCC vs Yorkshire 1949) who played with Wilfred Rhodes (Gower xi vs touring Australians 1930) who's first test was WG Graces last test
I think that's the shortest route between the Goats
Very good!
It would be interesting to do a political Kevin Bacon on this
"X was in a Cabinet with X who was in a Cabinet with Gladastone/Disraeli/Pitt/Wellington"
Identifying big leaps is key to that. Obviously Churchill will be a key leap he gets you to Asquith and then Gladstone, the route back to Churchill goes through Ken Clarke I guess and somene In The 1980s cabinet that gets us to the pre 1966 cabinet?
Hailsham might be a player in this.
Yes just looked at that! Clarke Hailsham Eden Churchill Asquith Gladstone
And Clarke retired from the Cabinet in 2014, so anyone who was in both Brown's and Starmer's cabinet will do to bring it up to now.
(Actually, that looks harder than it feels it ought to be. Cooper, EdM and Hilary Benn... is that it?)
Ive been entertaining myself with the shortest first class steps from Jimmy Anderson to WG Grace in first class cricket so im going to bore you with it
Jimmy played with Alec Stewart Who played with and against Ian Botham who played with Brian Close (Somerset 1976) who played against Bob Wyatt (MCC vs Yorkshire 1949) who played with Wilfred Rhodes (Gower xi vs touring Australians 1930) who's first test was WG Graces last test
I think that's the shortest route between the Goats
Very good!
It would be interesting to do a political Kevin Bacon on this
"X was in a Cabinet with X who was in a Cabinet with Gladastone/Disraeli/Pitt/Wellington"
Identifying big leaps is key to that. Obviously Churchill will be a key leap he gets you to Asquith and then Gladstone, the route back to Churchill goes through Ken Clarke I guess and somene In The 1980s cabinet that gets us to the pre 1966 cabinet?
Hailsham might be a player in this.
Yes just looked at that! Clarke Hailsham Eden Churchill Asquith Gladstone
Gladstone gets us to Peel and then Lord Liverpool and Pitt the Younger and the loss of America
Not a chance Labour have added a point. Have they been furiously fiddling with their methodology again?
I dunno. When Goodwin posts a FON poll which has Labour on circa 15% with RefCon on 50% it has to be gold standard, and on every one of the two dozen times it gets posted. Labour or the LDs grab an MoE point and for you right wingers the methodology must be faulty.
Goodwin hasn't altered his past-vote weighting recently because of reasons.
Slightly disappointing that the Rapture appears to have gone AWOL again.
Oh, was it [supposed to be] today?
I thought so on the basis of previous posts here. Though would be funny if I'd got it wrong and it did subsequently turn up tomorrow.
How will I recognise the Rapture?
I always just assumed one would know it when they saw it. Purple and orange skies, lava, agonised wailing, existential dread, California sliding into the sea. The usual, really.
I suppose the leader of the free world hectoring the UN about the hoax of climate change may or may not be some sort of subtler sign, tbf.
Well the M1 was bad today. Signs said "accident" ... but they would, wouldn't they.
Hmmm. The current File on 4 Investigates is somewhat incendiary...
Definitely thrown the Home Office under the bus.
NHS appointments at the opposite ends of the country for asylum hotel residents (taxi, £300 each way) because they were registered elsewhere and then moved.
WTF?
It was Conservative policy to slow down the asylum processing and it'd be no surprise if moving them around was also policy. End result, they've developed ties in the UK, had kids, become seriously ill, so even if they're then not granted asylum it's harder to return them.
Ive been entertaining myself with the shortest first class steps from Jimmy Anderson to WG Grace in first class cricket so im going to bore you with it
Jimmy played with Alec Stewart Who played with and against Ian Botham who played with Brian Close (Somerset 1976) who played against Bob Wyatt (MCC vs Yorkshire 1949) who played with Wilfred Rhodes (Gower xi vs touring Australians 1930) who's first test was WG Graces last test
I think that's the shortest route between the Goats
Very good!
It would be interesting to do a political Kevin Bacon on this
"X was in a Cabinet with X who was in a Cabinet with Gladastone/Disraeli/Pitt/Wellington"
Identifying big leaps is key to that. Obviously Churchill will be a key leap he gets you to Asquith and then Gladstone, the route back to Churchill goes through Ken Clarke I guess and somene In The 1980s cabinet that gets us to the pre 1966 cabinet?
1. Quintin Hogg, Baron Hailsham of St Marylebone (Conservative) Span: 59 years (1928–1987) First: Attorney General (1928–1929) Last: Lord Chancellor (1979–1987) He held multiple senior roles, including Lord Chancellor three times, across governments from Baldwin to Thatcher. 2. William Ewart Gladstone (Liberal) Span: 53 years (1841–1894) First: Vice-President of the Board of Trade (1841–1843) Last: Prime Minister (1892–1894) Gladstone served in four Liberal governments as PM and in key economic and foreign roles, shaping Victorian reforms. 3. Winston Churchill (Conservative/Liberal) Span: 47 years (1908–1955) First: President of the Board of Trade (1908–1910) Last: Prime Minister (1951–1955) Churchill’s career spanned trade, home affairs, war leadership, and premierships during both world wars. 4. Arthur James Balfour (Conservative) Span: 42 years (1887–1929) First: Chief Secretary for Ireland (1887–1891) Last: Lord President of the Council (1925–1929) Balfour was PM (1902–1905), Foreign Secretary during WWI, and key in early 20th-century diplomacy. 5. Spencer Compton Cavendish, 8th Duke of Devonshire (Liberal Unionist) Span: 35 years (1868–1903) First: Postmaster General (1868–1871) Last: Lord President of the Council (1895–1903) He led Liberal Unionists, served in war and colonial offices, and was a major figure in late Victorian politics.
It was Hailshams father who was Attorey General in the 20s
Been busy for a few hours and miss a Trump as PM post. Appreciate @TSE rightly associating the fascist with the shire - better than that other golf course elsewhere.
Time to fight the slide towards Trump-style fascism. Well said Ed Davey.
Davey, who am undecided as to whether he is the greatest statesman alive or a bit of a plonker, absolutely nailed Farage to the Trump-Putin axis of evil for all to see. Hats off for that at least.
Well, I'm fairly sure he's not the greatest statesman alive. Although, come to mention it, the bar is rather lower than in the past.
Ive been entertaining myself with the shortest first class steps from Jimmy Anderson to WG Grace in first class cricket so im going to bore you with it
Jimmy played with Alec Stewart Who played with and against Ian Botham who played with Brian Close (Somerset 1976) who played against Bob Wyatt (MCC vs Yorkshire 1949) who played with Wilfred Rhodes (Gower xi vs touring Australians 1930) who's first test was WG Graces last test
I think that's the shortest route between the Goats
Very good!
It would be interesting to do a political Kevin Bacon on this
"X was in a Cabinet with X who was in a Cabinet with Gladastone/Disraeli/Pitt/Wellington"
Identifying big leaps is key to that. Obviously Churchill will be a key leap he gets you to Asquith and then Gladstone, the route back to Churchill goes through Ken Clarke I guess and somene In The 1980s cabinet that gets us to the pre 1966 cabinet?
1. Quintin Hogg, Baron Hailsham of St Marylebone (Conservative) Span: 59 years (1928–1987) First: Attorney General (1928–1929) Last: Lord Chancellor (1979–1987) He held multiple senior roles, including Lord Chancellor three times, across governments from Baldwin to Thatcher. 2. William Ewart Gladstone (Liberal) Span: 53 years (1841–1894) First: Vice-President of the Board of Trade (1841–1843) Last: Prime Minister (1892–1894) Gladstone served in four Liberal governments as PM and in key economic and foreign roles, shaping Victorian reforms. 3. Winston Churchill (Conservative/Liberal) Span: 47 years (1908–1955) First: President of the Board of Trade (1908–1910) Last: Prime Minister (1951–1955) Churchill’s career spanned trade, home affairs, war leadership, and premierships during both world wars. 4. Arthur James Balfour (Conservative) Span: 42 years (1887–1929) First: Chief Secretary for Ireland (1887–1891) Last: Lord President of the Council (1925–1929) Balfour was PM (1902–1905), Foreign Secretary during WWI, and key in early 20th-century diplomacy. 5. Spencer Compton Cavendish, 8th Duke of Devonshire (Liberal Unionist) Span: 35 years (1868–1903) First: Postmaster General (1868–1871) Last: Lord President of the Council (1895–1903) He led Liberal Unionists, served in war and colonial offices, and was a major figure in late Victorian politics.
It was Hailshams father who was Attorey General in the 20s
Ive been entertaining myself with the shortest first class steps from Jimmy Anderson to WG Grace in first class cricket so im going to bore you with it
Jimmy played with Alec Stewart Who played with and against Ian Botham who played with Brian Close (Somerset 1976) who played against Bob Wyatt (MCC vs Yorkshire 1949) who played with Wilfred Rhodes (Gower xi vs touring Australians 1930) who's first test was WG Graces last test
I think that's the shortest route between the Goats
Very good!
It would be interesting to do a political Kevin Bacon on this
"X was in a Cabinet with X who was in a Cabinet with Gladastone/Disraeli/Pitt/Wellington"
Identifying big leaps is key to that. Obviously Churchill will be a key leap he gets you to Asquith and then Gladstone, the route back to Churchill goes through Ken Clarke I guess and somene In The 1980s cabinet that gets us to the pre 1966 cabinet?
1. Quintin Hogg, Baron Hailsham of St Marylebone (Conservative) Span: 59 years (1928–1987) First: Attorney General (1928–1929) Last: Lord Chancellor (1979–1987) He held multiple senior roles, including Lord Chancellor three times, across governments from Baldwin to Thatcher. 2. William Ewart Gladstone (Liberal) Span: 53 years (1841–1894) First: Vice-President of the Board of Trade (1841–1843) Last: Prime Minister (1892–1894) Gladstone served in four Liberal governments as PM and in key economic and foreign roles, shaping Victorian reforms. 3. Winston Churchill (Conservative/Liberal) Span: 47 years (1908–1955) First: President of the Board of Trade (1908–1910) Last: Prime Minister (1951–1955) Churchill’s career spanned trade, home affairs, war leadership, and premierships during both world wars. 4. Arthur James Balfour (Conservative) Span: 42 years (1887–1929) First: Chief Secretary for Ireland (1887–1891) Last: Lord President of the Council (1925–1929) Balfour was PM (1902–1905), Foreign Secretary during WWI, and key in early 20th-century diplomacy. 5. Spencer Compton Cavendish, 8th Duke of Devonshire (Liberal Unionist) Span: 35 years (1868–1903) First: Postmaster General (1868–1871) Last: Lord President of the Council (1895–1903) He led Liberal Unionists, served in war and colonial offices, and was a major figure in late Victorian politics.
It was Hailshams father who was Attorey General in the 20s
Ive been entertaining myself with the shortest first class steps from Jimmy Anderson to WG Grace in first class cricket so im going to bore you with it
Jimmy played with Alec Stewart Who played with and against Ian Botham who played with Brian Close (Somerset 1976) who played against Bob Wyatt (MCC vs Yorkshire 1949) who played with Wilfred Rhodes (Gower xi vs touring Australians 1930) who's first test was WG Graces last test
I think that's the shortest route between the Goats
Very good!
It would be interesting to do a political Kevin Bacon on this
"X was in a Cabinet with X who was in a Cabinet with Gladastone/Disraeli/Pitt/Wellington"
Identifying big leaps is key to that. Obviously Churchill will be a key leap he gets you to Asquith and then Gladstone, the route back to Churchill goes through Ken Clarke I guess and somene In The 1980s cabinet that gets us to the pre 1966 cabinet?
Hailsham might be a player in this.
Hailsham was in cabinet until 1987 but didn't join it until 1956.
If we're looking for large leaps, Gladstone served with Palmerston, who served with Sidmouth and Liverpool, who served with Pitt. That carries us from 1781 to 1896 in four bounds.
"Nasa has said it hopes to send astronauts on a trip around the Moon as soon as February to prepare for landing there as early as 2027.... The Artemis II mission is the second launch of the Artemis programme, whose aim is to land astronauts and eventually establish a long-term presence on the lunar surface."
Cool! I hope it'll be a safe mission.
Well, it's first time out for the life support system. It's never flown in space before.
It's the first time out for this version of the heat shield. The spacecraft will be flying an adjusted trajectory to see if that mitigates the high and uneven erosion of the heat shield on the previous test flight.
There's a whole bunch of other firsts as well.
It'll still be safer than Starship will be for many years...
We shall see
Firstly, there are lots and lots of piccies of SH/SS with damage and exploding.
Secondly, be careful not to give the impression you want a crewed SLS mission to fail, just because you're on Team SS.
Thirdly, I really don't see SS being man-rated for earth landings in the near future. Do you?
A way to go yet, but ay least Musk is getting on with it. One of the good things about his other rocket - Falcon is it's done so many missions the crash odds are a statistical reality rather than a computer model extrapolation
Musk is a bit of a hero in terms of his space efforts. He's advancing knowledge at a similar rate to that which NASA did in the 1960s. I think its about the finest commitment to the future of humanity ever made by an individual. In which light I can forgive him for quite a lot.
I wholeheartedly agree. The prior poster further up has an irritatingly childish attitude to Musk and the achievement of his companies.
I admire what SpaceX has done, but SH/SS is nowhere near where Musk promised in terms of time and capability. Tesla has not delivered what it promised wrt self-driving - nowhere near.
And as for Musk himself: there is little positive to be said about him personally. You just need to look at what he said to Tommy's march to see some evidence of that.
I do not have a 'childish' attitude towards Musk. I have an realistic attitude.
To be fair "entrepreneur being optimistic about timelines" is not exactly front page news.
The thing I would be most critical about is just how thin Musk has allowed himself to be spread, and that is impacting all his business decisions. He's got Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter/xAI, politics, the Boring Company, and probably half a dozen other things. His inattention to Tesla has led him to being behind Chinese vendors, while getting far too excited about the Cybertruck (which is now selling less than -not very successful- Ford Lightning).
Of his various ventures, the only one I'm genuinely excited by right now is SpaceX.
Tesla robotics is pretty far advanced - probably the best in America, but behind the Chinese
Grok is good
Boston Dynamics robots are a generation ahead of Tesla's.
Grok is good. But so is Anthropic, ChatGPT, and DeepSeek. And Llama and Kimi (one of the other new Chinese models) aren't bad either.
Ive been entertaining myself with the shortest first class steps from Jimmy Anderson to WG Grace in first class cricket so im going to bore you with it
Jimmy played with Alec Stewart Who played with and against Ian Botham who played with Brian Close (Somerset 1976) who played against Bob Wyatt (MCC vs Yorkshire 1949) who played with Wilfred Rhodes (Gower xi vs touring Australians 1930) who's first test was WG Graces last test
I think that's the shortest route between the Goats
Very good!
It would be interesting to do a political Kevin Bacon on this
"X was in a Cabinet with X who was in a Cabinet with Gladastone/Disraeli/Pitt/Wellington"
Identifying big leaps is key to that. Obviously Churchill will be a key leap he gets you to Asquith and then Gladstone, the route back to Churchill goes through Ken Clarke I guess and somene In The 1980s cabinet that gets us to the pre 1966 cabinet?
Hailsham might be a player in this.
Hailsham was in cabinet until 1987 but didn't join it until 1956.
If we're looking for large leaps, Gladstone served with Palmerston, who served with Sidmouth and Liverpool, who served with Pitt. That carries us from 1781 to 1896 in four bounds.
I guess I should be delighted that Trump says Ukraine can win back all their territory from Russia, but he doesn't seem to be willing to do anything new to help the process along.
I guess I should be delighted that Trump says Ukraine can win back all their territory from Russia, but he doesn't seem to be willing to do anything new to help the process along.
Ive been entertaining myself with the shortest first class steps from Jimmy Anderson to WG Grace in first class cricket so im going to bore you with it
Jimmy played with Alec Stewart Who played with and against Ian Botham who played with Brian Close (Somerset 1976) who played against Bob Wyatt (MCC vs Yorkshire 1949) who played with Wilfred Rhodes (Gower xi vs touring Australians 1930) who's first test was WG Graces last test
I think that's the shortest route between the Goats
Very good!
It would be interesting to do a political Kevin Bacon on this
"X was in a Cabinet with X who was in a Cabinet with Gladastone/Disraeli/Pitt/Wellington"
Identifying big leaps is key to that. Obviously Churchill will be a key leap he gets you to Asquith and then Gladstone, the route back to Churchill goes through Ken Clarke I guess and somene In The 1980s cabinet that gets us to the pre 1966 cabinet?
Gladstone also had an enormously long political career, a minister in 1841, still prime minister in 1894!
So you could probably get back to the 18th century fairly quickly
Jeremy Corbyn joined the Labour Party in 1965 - a year before we won the World Cup - and he's still an MP today. Amazing to contemplate such longevity. He's probably been to more political meetings than anybody in history.
Ive been entertaining myself with the shortest first class steps from Jimmy Anderson to WG Grace in first class cricket so im going to bore you with it
Jimmy played with Alec Stewart Who played with and against Ian Botham who played with Brian Close (Somerset 1976) who played against Bob Wyatt (MCC vs Yorkshire 1949) who played with Wilfred Rhodes (Gower xi vs touring Australians 1930) who's first test was WG Graces last test
I think that's the shortest route between the Goats
Very good!
It would be interesting to do a political Kevin Bacon on this
"X was in a Cabinet with X who was in a Cabinet with Gladastone/Disraeli/Pitt/Wellington"
Identifying big leaps is key to that. Obviously Churchill will be a key leap he gets you to Asquith and then Gladstone, the route back to Churchill goes through Ken Clarke I guess and somene In The 1980s cabinet that gets us to the pre 1966 cabinet?
Hailsham might be a player in this.
Hailsham was in cabinet until 1987 but didn't join it until 1956.
If we're looking for large leaps, Gladstone served with Palmerston, who served with Sidmouth and Liverpool, who served with Pitt. That carries us from 1781 to 1896 in four bounds.
"Nasa has said it hopes to send astronauts on a trip around the Moon as soon as February to prepare for landing there as early as 2027.... The Artemis II mission is the second launch of the Artemis programme, whose aim is to land astronauts and eventually establish a long-term presence on the lunar surface."
Cool! I hope it'll be a safe mission.
Well, it's first time out for the life support system. It's never flown in space before.
It's the first time out for this version of the heat shield. The spacecraft will be flying an adjusted trajectory to see if that mitigates the high and uneven erosion of the heat shield on the previous test flight.
There's a whole bunch of other firsts as well.
It'll still be safer than Starship will be for many years...
We shall see
Firstly, there are lots and lots of piccies of SH/SS with damage and exploding.
Secondly, be careful not to give the impression you want a crewed SLS mission to fail, just because you're on Team SS.
Thirdly, I really don't see SS being man-rated for earth landings in the near future. Do you?
A way to go yet, but ay least Musk is getting on with it. One of the good things about his other rocket - Falcon is it's done so many missions the crash odds are a statistical reality rather than a computer model extrapolation
Musk is a bit of a hero in terms of his space efforts. He's advancing knowledge at a similar rate to that which NASA did in the 1960s. I think its about the finest commitment to the future of humanity ever made by an individual. In which light I can forgive him for quite a lot.
I wholeheartedly agree. The prior poster further up has an irritatingly childish attitude to Musk and the achievement of his companies.
I admire what SpaceX has done, but SH/SS is nowhere near where Musk promised in terms of time and capability. Tesla has not delivered what it promised wrt self-driving - nowhere near.
And as for Musk himself: there is little positive to be said about him personally. You just need to look at what he said to Tommy's march to see some evidence of that.
I do not have a 'childish' attitude towards Musk. I have an realistic attitude.
To be fair "entrepreneur being optimistic about timelines" is not exactly front page news.
The thing I would be most critical about is just how thin Musk has allowed himself to be spread, and that is impacting all his business decisions. He's got Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter/xAI, politics, the Boring Company, and probably half a dozen other things. His inattention to Tesla has led him to being behind Chinese vendors, while getting far too excited about the Cybertruck (which is now selling less than -not very successful- Ford Lightning).
Of his various ventures, the only one I'm genuinely excited by right now is SpaceX.
Tesla robotics is pretty far advanced - probably the best in America, but behind the Chinese
Grok is good
The top guy at Tesla robotics left last week for Meta. I presume he got one of those comedy sized cheques from Zuckerberg.
xAI speed of going from zero to catching up with the rest is very impressive. Meta haven't managed that.
Ive been entertaining myself with the shortest first class steps from Jimmy Anderson to WG Grace in first class cricket so im going to bore you with it
Jimmy played with Alec Stewart Who played with and against Ian Botham who played with Brian Close (Somerset 1976) who played against Bob Wyatt (MCC vs Yorkshire 1949) who played with Wilfred Rhodes (Gower xi vs touring Australians 1930) who's first test was WG Graces last test
I think that's the shortest route between the Goats
Very good!
It would be interesting to do a political Kevin Bacon on this
"X was in a Cabinet with X who was in a Cabinet with Gladastone/Disraeli/Pitt/Wellington"
Identifying big leaps is key to that. Obviously Churchill will be a key leap he gets you to Asquith and then Gladstone, the route back to Churchill goes through Ken Clarke I guess and somene In The 1980s cabinet that gets us to the pre 1966 cabinet?
Hailsham might be a player in this.
Hailsham was in cabinet until 1987 but didn't join it until 1956.
If we're looking for large leaps, Gladstone served with Palmerston, who served with Sidmouth and Liverpool, who served with Pitt. That carries us from 1781 to 1896 in four bounds.
You can also go Gladstone Peel Liverpool Pitt
And from Pitt Granville Leveson-Gower marquess of Stratford Thomas Pelham-Holles Duke of Newcastle Robert Walpole
"Nasa has said it hopes to send astronauts on a trip around the Moon as soon as February to prepare for landing there as early as 2027.... The Artemis II mission is the second launch of the Artemis programme, whose aim is to land astronauts and eventually establish a long-term presence on the lunar surface."
Cool! I hope it'll be a safe mission.
Well, it's first time out for the life support system. It's never flown in space before.
It's the first time out for this version of the heat shield. The spacecraft will be flying an adjusted trajectory to see if that mitigates the high and uneven erosion of the heat shield on the previous test flight.
There's a whole bunch of other firsts as well.
It'll still be safer than Starship will be for many years...
We shall see
Firstly, there are lots and lots of piccies of SH/SS with damage and exploding.
Secondly, be careful not to give the impression you want a crewed SLS mission to fail, just because you're on Team SS.
Thirdly, I really don't see SS being man-rated for earth landings in the near future. Do you?
A way to go yet, but ay least Musk is getting on with it. One of the good things about his other rocket - Falcon is it's done so many missions the crash odds are a statistical reality rather than a computer model extrapolation
Musk is a bit of a hero in terms of his space efforts. He's advancing knowledge at a similar rate to that which NASA did in the 1960s. I think its about the finest commitment to the future of humanity ever made by an individual. In which light I can forgive him for quite a lot.
I wholeheartedly agree. The prior poster further up has an irritatingly childish attitude to Musk and the achievement of his companies.
I admire what SpaceX has done, but SH/SS is nowhere near where Musk promised in terms of time and capability. Tesla has not delivered what it promised wrt self-driving - nowhere near.
And as for Musk himself: there is little positive to be said about him personally. You just need to look at what he said to Tommy's march to see some evidence of that.
I do not have a 'childish' attitude towards Musk. I have an realistic attitude.
To be fair "entrepreneur being optimistic about timelines" is not exactly front page news.
The thing I would be most critical about is just how thin Musk has allowed himself to be spread, and that is impacting all his business decisions. He's got Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter/xAI, politics, the Boring Company, and probably half a dozen other things. His inattention to Tesla has led him to being behind Chinese vendors, while getting far too excited about the Cybertruck (which is now selling less than -not very successful- Ford Lightning).
Of his various ventures, the only one I'm genuinely excited by right now is SpaceX.
Tesla robotics is pretty far advanced - probably the best in America, but behind the Chinese
Grok is good
Boston Dynamics robots are a generation ahead of Tesla's.
Grok is good. But so is Anthropic, ChatGPT, and DeepSeek. And Llama and Kimi (one of the other new Chinese models) aren't bad either.
The Google Gemini models are very good too.
What we haven't seen with LLMs is one company running away with it, like happened with cellphones, etc., and therefore dominating returns. In fact, if anything, the top tiers seem to be converging, and then you have a bunch of really interesting companies around the edge like Groq and Perplexity.
Ive been entertaining myself with the shortest first class steps from Jimmy Anderson to WG Grace in first class cricket so im going to bore you with it
Jimmy played with Alec Stewart Who played with and against Ian Botham who played with Brian Close (Somerset 1976) who played against Bob Wyatt (MCC vs Yorkshire 1949) who played with Wilfred Rhodes (Gower xi vs touring Australians 1930) who's first test was WG Graces last test
I think that's the shortest route between the Goats
Very good!
It would be interesting to do a political Kevin Bacon on this
"X was in a Cabinet with X who was in a Cabinet with Gladastone/Disraeli/Pitt/Wellington"
Identifying big leaps is key to that. Obviously Churchill will be a key leap he gets you to Asquith and then Gladstone, the route back to Churchill goes through Ken Clarke I guess and somene In The 1980s cabinet that gets us to the pre 1966 cabinet?
Gladstone also had an enormously long political career, a minister in 1841, still prime minister in 1894!
So you could probably get back to the 18th century fairly quickly
In the US, Averell Harriman had a similarly long lived career.
Ive been entertaining myself with the shortest first class steps from Jimmy Anderson to WG Grace in first class cricket so im going to bore you with it
Jimmy played with Alec Stewart Who played with and against Ian Botham who played with Brian Close (Somerset 1976) who played against Bob Wyatt (MCC vs Yorkshire 1949) who played with Wilfred Rhodes (Gower xi vs touring Australians 1930) who's first test was WG Graces last test
I think that's the shortest route between the Goats
Very good!
It would be interesting to do a political Kevin Bacon on this
"X was in a Cabinet with X who was in a Cabinet with Gladastone/Disraeli/Pitt/Wellington"
Identifying big leaps is key to that. Obviously Churchill will be a key leap he gets you to Asquith and then Gladstone, the route back to Churchill goes through Ken Clarke I guess and somene In The 1980s cabinet that gets us to the pre 1966 cabinet?
Gladstone also had an enormously long political career, a minister in 1841, still prime minister in 1894!
So you could probably get back to the 18th century fairly quickly
Jeremy Corbyn joined the Labour Party in 1965 - a year before we won the World Cup - and he's still an MP today. Amazing to contemplate such longevity. He's probably been to more political meetings than anybody in history.
"He's probably been to more political meetings than anybody in history."
"Nasa has said it hopes to send astronauts on a trip around the Moon as soon as February to prepare for landing there as early as 2027.... The Artemis II mission is the second launch of the Artemis programme, whose aim is to land astronauts and eventually establish a long-term presence on the lunar surface."
Cool! I hope it'll be a safe mission.
Well, it's first time out for the life support system. It's never flown in space before.
It's the first time out for this version of the heat shield. The spacecraft will be flying an adjusted trajectory to see if that mitigates the high and uneven erosion of the heat shield on the previous test flight.
There's a whole bunch of other firsts as well.
It'll still be safer than Starship will be for many years...
We shall see
Firstly, there are lots and lots of piccies of SH/SS with damage and exploding.
Secondly, be careful not to give the impression you want a crewed SLS mission to fail, just because you're on Team SS.
Thirdly, I really don't see SS being man-rated for earth landings in the near future. Do you?
A way to go yet, but ay least Musk is getting on with it. One of the good things about his other rocket - Falcon is it's done so many missions the crash odds are a statistical reality rather than a computer model extrapolation
Musk is a bit of a hero in terms of his space efforts. He's advancing knowledge at a similar rate to that which NASA did in the 1960s. I think its about the finest commitment to the future of humanity ever made by an individual. In which light I can forgive him for quite a lot.
I wholeheartedly agree. The prior poster further up has an irritatingly childish attitude to Musk and the achievement of his companies.
I admire what SpaceX has done, but SH/SS is nowhere near where Musk promised in terms of time and capability. Tesla has not delivered what it promised wrt self-driving - nowhere near.
And as for Musk himself: there is little positive to be said about him personally. You just need to look at what he said to Tommy's march to see some evidence of that.
I do not have a 'childish' attitude towards Musk. I have an realistic attitude.
To be fair "entrepreneur being optimistic about timelines" is not exactly front page news.
The thing I would be most critical about is just how thin Musk has allowed himself to be spread, and that is impacting all his business decisions. He's got Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter/xAI, politics, the Boring Company, and probably half a dozen other things. His inattention to Tesla has led him to being behind Chinese vendors, while getting far too excited about the Cybertruck (which is now selling less than -not very successful- Ford Lightning).
Of his various ventures, the only one I'm genuinely excited by right now is SpaceX.
Tesla robotics is pretty far advanced - probably the best in America, but behind the Chinese
Grok is good
The top guy at Tesla robotics left last week for Meta. I presume he got one of those comedy sized cheques from Zuckerberg.
xAI speed of going from zero to catching up with the rest is very impressive. Meta haven't managed that.
LLaMa - the Meta AI - is pretty decent.
They are behind. I have been told by people in the know that Zuckerberg has been giving them hell for quite a while about why can't they match the other labs. He is constantly on their case about what scores their models are benchmarking.
That led to comedy sized cheques offers to talent of which I think was it 2 at least lasted less than a month before quitting. xAI have been impressive in what they have achieved with a much smaller team than the rest.
I guess I should be delighted that Trump says Ukraine can win back all their territory from Russia, but he doesn't seem to be willing to do anything new to help the process along.
It's casual musing commentary rather than signal of policy change imo.
My publisher has just fired everyone, citing a 30% year-on-year decline in sales of non-fiction technical books. Just a data point for the AI folks! I have seen this in Amazon sales too.
Ive been entertaining myself with the shortest first class steps from Jimmy Anderson to WG Grace in first class cricket so im going to bore you with it
Jimmy played with Alec Stewart Who played with and against Ian Botham who played with Brian Close (Somerset 1976) who played against Bob Wyatt (MCC vs Yorkshire 1949) who played with Wilfred Rhodes (Gower xi vs touring Australians 1930) who's first test was WG Graces last test
I think that's the shortest route between the Goats
Very good!
It would be interesting to do a political Kevin Bacon on this
"X was in a Cabinet with X who was in a Cabinet with Gladastone/Disraeli/Pitt/Wellington"
Identifying big leaps is key to that. Obviously Churchill will be a key leap he gets you to Asquith and then Gladstone, the route back to Churchill goes through Ken Clarke I guess and somene In The 1980s cabinet that gets us to the pre 1966 cabinet?
Gladstone also had an enormously long political career, a minister in 1841, still prime minister in 1894!
So you could probably get back to the 18th century fairly quickly
In the US, Averell Harriman had a similarly long lived career.
I guess I should be delighted that Trump says Ukraine can win back all their territory from Russia, but he doesn't seem to be willing to do anything new to help the process along.
It's casual musing commentary rather than signal of policy change imo.
Yep. By the time he works out how an escalator works he'll be back to backing Putin all the way.
"Nasa has said it hopes to send astronauts on a trip around the Moon as soon as February to prepare for landing there as early as 2027.... The Artemis II mission is the second launch of the Artemis programme, whose aim is to land astronauts and eventually establish a long-term presence on the lunar surface."
Cool! I hope it'll be a safe mission.
Well, it's first time out for the life support system. It's never flown in space before.
It's the first time out for this version of the heat shield. The spacecraft will be flying an adjusted trajectory to see if that mitigates the high and uneven erosion of the heat shield on the previous test flight.
There's a whole bunch of other firsts as well.
It'll still be safer than Starship will be for many years...
We shall see
Firstly, there are lots and lots of piccies of SH/SS with damage and exploding.
Secondly, be careful not to give the impression you want a crewed SLS mission to fail, just because you're on Team SS.
Thirdly, I really don't see SS being man-rated for earth landings in the near future. Do you?
A way to go yet, but ay least Musk is getting on with it. One of the good things about his other rocket - Falcon is it's done so many missions the crash odds are a statistical reality rather than a computer model extrapolation
Musk is a bit of a hero in terms of his space efforts. He's advancing knowledge at a similar rate to that which NASA did in the 1960s. I think its about the finest commitment to the future of humanity ever made by an individual. In which light I can forgive him for quite a lot.
I wholeheartedly agree. The prior poster further up has an irritatingly childish attitude to Musk and the achievement of his companies.
I admire what SpaceX has done, but SH/SS is nowhere near where Musk promised in terms of time and capability. Tesla has not delivered what it promised wrt self-driving - nowhere near.
And as for Musk himself: there is little positive to be said about him personally. You just need to look at what he said to Tommy's march to see some evidence of that.
I do not have a 'childish' attitude towards Musk. I have an realistic attitude.
To be fair "entrepreneur being optimistic about timelines" is not exactly front page news.
The thing I would be most critical about is just how thin Musk has allowed himself to be spread, and that is impacting all his business decisions. He's got Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter/xAI, politics, the Boring Company, and probably half a dozen other things. His inattention to Tesla has led him to being behind Chinese vendors, while getting far too excited about the Cybertruck (which is now selling less than -not very successful- Ford Lightning).
Of his various ventures, the only one I'm genuinely excited by right now is SpaceX.
Tesla robotics is pretty far advanced - probably the best in America, but behind the Chinese
Grok is good
The top guy at Tesla robotics left last week for Meta. I presume he got one of those comedy sized cheques from Zuckerberg.
xAI speed of going from zero to catching up with the rest is very impressive. Meta haven't managed that.
LLaMa - the Meta AI - is pretty decent.
They are behind. I have been told by people in the know that Zuckerberg has been giving them hell for quite a while about why can't they match the other labs. He is constantly on their case about what scores their models are benchmarking.
The LLaMA 3 coding model is probably second only to Anthropic, albeit the gap is quite large. (And Kimi K2 is really snapping at their heels.)
I agree they're behind on the more generalist stuff. But on the other hand, I can run LLaMA 3 on Groq and get something 400 tokens per second.
Ive been entertaining myself with the shortest first class steps from Jimmy Anderson to WG Grace in first class cricket so im going to bore you with it
Jimmy played with Alec Stewart Who played with and against Ian Botham who played with Brian Close (Somerset 1976) who played against Bob Wyatt (MCC vs Yorkshire 1949) who played with Wilfred Rhodes (Gower xi vs touring Australians 1930) who's first test was WG Graces last test
I think that's the shortest route between the Goats
Very good!
It would be interesting to do a political Kevin Bacon on this
"X was in a Cabinet with X who was in a Cabinet with Gladastone/Disraeli/Pitt/Wellington"
Identifying big leaps is key to that. Obviously Churchill will be a key leap he gets you to Asquith and then Gladstone, the route back to Churchill goes through Ken Clarke I guess and somene In The 1980s cabinet that gets us to the pre 1966 cabinet?
Gladstone also had an enormously long political career, a minister in 1841, still prime minister in 1894!
So you could probably get back to the 18th century fairly quickly
In the US, Averell Harriman had a similarly long lived career.
Is Davey's niche now to be the caller-out-in-chief-of-Reform and Trump and their varied collections of nut-jobbery, filling the gap that both Mr Starmer and Ms Badenoch are shying away from?
"Nasa has said it hopes to send astronauts on a trip around the Moon as soon as February to prepare for landing there as early as 2027.... The Artemis II mission is the second launch of the Artemis programme, whose aim is to land astronauts and eventually establish a long-term presence on the lunar surface."
Cool! I hope it'll be a safe mission.
Well, it's first time out for the life support system. It's never flown in space before.
It's the first time out for this version of the heat shield. The spacecraft will be flying an adjusted trajectory to see if that mitigates the high and uneven erosion of the heat shield on the previous test flight.
There's a whole bunch of other firsts as well.
It'll still be safer than Starship will be for many years...
We shall see
Firstly, there are lots and lots of piccies of SH/SS with damage and exploding.
Secondly, be careful not to give the impression you want a crewed SLS mission to fail, just because you're on Team SS.
Thirdly, I really don't see SS being man-rated for earth landings in the near future. Do you?
A way to go yet, but ay least Musk is getting on with it. One of the good things about his other rocket - Falcon is it's done so many missions the crash odds are a statistical reality rather than a computer model extrapolation
Musk is a bit of a hero in terms of his space efforts. He's advancing knowledge at a similar rate to that which NASA did in the 1960s. I think its about the finest commitment to the future of humanity ever made by an individual. In which light I can forgive him for quite a lot.
I wholeheartedly agree. The prior poster further up has an irritatingly childish attitude to Musk and the achievement of his companies.
I admire what SpaceX has done, but SH/SS is nowhere near where Musk promised in terms of time and capability. Tesla has not delivered what it promised wrt self-driving - nowhere near.
And as for Musk himself: there is little positive to be said about him personally. You just need to look at what he said to Tommy's march to see some evidence of that.
I do not have a 'childish' attitude towards Musk. I have an realistic attitude.
To be fair "entrepreneur being optimistic about timelines" is not exactly front page news.
The thing I would be most critical about is just how thin Musk has allowed himself to be spread, and that is impacting all his business decisions. He's got Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter/xAI, politics, the Boring Company, and probably half a dozen other things. His inattention to Tesla has led him to being behind Chinese vendors, while getting far too excited about the Cybertruck (which is now selling less than -not very successful- Ford Lightning).
Of his various ventures, the only one I'm genuinely excited by right now is SpaceX.
Tesla robotics is pretty far advanced - probably the best in America, but behind the Chinese
Grok is good
The top guy at Tesla robotics left last week for Meta. I presume he got one of those comedy sized cheques from Zuckerberg.
xAI speed of going from zero to catching up with the rest is very impressive. Meta haven't managed that.
LLaMa - the Meta AI - is pretty decent.
They are behind. I have been told by people in the know that Zuckerberg has been giving them hell for quite a while about why can't they match the other labs. He is constantly on their case about what scores their models are benchmarking.
The LLaMA 3 coding model is probably second only to Anthropic, albeit the gap is quite large. (And Kimi K2 is really snapping at their heels.)
I agree they're behind on the more generalist stuff. But on the other hand, I can run LLaMA 3 on Groq and get something 400 tokens per second.
"Nasa has said it hopes to send astronauts on a trip around the Moon as soon as February to prepare for landing there as early as 2027.... The Artemis II mission is the second launch of the Artemis programme, whose aim is to land astronauts and eventually establish a long-term presence on the lunar surface."
Cool! I hope it'll be a safe mission.
Well, it's first time out for the life support system. It's never flown in space before.
It's the first time out for this version of the heat shield. The spacecraft will be flying an adjusted trajectory to see if that mitigates the high and uneven erosion of the heat shield on the previous test flight.
There's a whole bunch of other firsts as well.
It'll still be safer than Starship will be for many years...
We shall see
Firstly, there are lots and lots of piccies of SH/SS with damage and exploding.
Secondly, be careful not to give the impression you want a crewed SLS mission to fail, just because you're on Team SS.
Thirdly, I really don't see SS being man-rated for earth landings in the near future. Do you?
A way to go yet, but ay least Musk is getting on with it. One of the good things about his other rocket - Falcon is it's done so many missions the crash odds are a statistical reality rather than a computer model extrapolation
Musk is a bit of a hero in terms of his space efforts. He's advancing knowledge at a similar rate to that which NASA did in the 1960s. I think its about the finest commitment to the future of humanity ever made by an individual. In which light I can forgive him for quite a lot.
I wholeheartedly agree. The prior poster further up has an irritatingly childish attitude to Musk and the achievement of his companies.
I admire what SpaceX has done, but SH/SS is nowhere near where Musk promised in terms of time and capability. Tesla has not delivered what it promised wrt self-driving - nowhere near.
And as for Musk himself: there is little positive to be said about him personally. You just need to look at what he said to Tommy's march to see some evidence of that.
I do not have a 'childish' attitude towards Musk. I have an realistic attitude.
To be fair "entrepreneur being optimistic about timelines" is not exactly front page news.
The thing I would be most critical about is just how thin Musk has allowed himself to be spread, and that is impacting all his business decisions. He's got Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter/xAI, politics, the Boring Company, and probably half a dozen other things. His inattention to Tesla has led him to being behind Chinese vendors, while getting far too excited about the Cybertruck (which is now selling less than -not very successful- Ford Lightning).
Of his various ventures, the only one I'm genuinely excited by right now is SpaceX.
Tesla robotics is pretty far advanced - probably the best in America, but behind the Chinese
Grok is good
The top guy at Tesla robotics left last week for Meta. I presume he got one of those comedy sized cheques from Zuckerberg.
xAI speed of going from zero to catching up with the rest is very impressive. Meta haven't managed that.
LLaMa - the Meta AI - is pretty decent.
They are behind. I have been told by people in the know that Zuckerberg has been giving them hell for quite a while about why can't they match the other labs. He is constantly on their case about what scores their models are benchmarking.
The LLaMA 3 coding model is probably second only to Anthropic, albeit the gap is quite large. (And Kimi K2 is really snapping at their heels.)
I agree they're behind on the more generalist stuff. But on the other hand, I can run LLaMA 3 on Groq and get something 400 tokens per second.
That isn't true. OpenAI Codex, Gemini, xAI and Claude lead them by a significant margin.
He's FINALLY seeing that backing Ukraine is his way to land a Nobel Peace Prize...
Or alternatively, he's doing what he's always done and saying whatever he thinks the audience he's trying to pitch to wants to hear.
Are you sure he is that sophisticated? Just seemed like 56 minutes of rambling old bollocks to me.
Interestingly on R4 PM the 56 minute speech was condensed down to a few incredibly impressive minutes. The edit was so good Trump sounded very credible. Evan and his guests then earnestly discussed the contents of the edit.
While those who sat through it thought he's completely gaga.
"Nasa has said it hopes to send astronauts on a trip around the Moon as soon as February to prepare for landing there as early as 2027.... The Artemis II mission is the second launch of the Artemis programme, whose aim is to land astronauts and eventually establish a long-term presence on the lunar surface."
Cool! I hope it'll be a safe mission.
Well, it's first time out for the life support system. It's never flown in space before.
It's the first time out for this version of the heat shield. The spacecraft will be flying an adjusted trajectory to see if that mitigates the high and uneven erosion of the heat shield on the previous test flight.
There's a whole bunch of other firsts as well.
It'll still be safer than Starship will be for many years...
We shall see
Firstly, there are lots and lots of piccies of SH/SS with damage and exploding.
Secondly, be careful not to give the impression you want a crewed SLS mission to fail, just because you're on Team SS.
Thirdly, I really don't see SS being man-rated for earth landings in the near future. Do you?
A way to go yet, but ay least Musk is getting on with it. One of the good things about his other rocket - Falcon is it's done so many missions the crash odds are a statistical reality rather than a computer model extrapolation
Musk is a bit of a hero in terms of his space efforts. He's advancing knowledge at a similar rate to that which NASA did in the 1960s. I think its about the finest commitment to the future of humanity ever made by an individual. In which light I can forgive him for quite a lot.
I wholeheartedly agree. The prior poster further up has an irritatingly childish attitude to Musk and the achievement of his companies.
I admire what SpaceX has done, but SH/SS is nowhere near where Musk promised in terms of time and capability. Tesla has not delivered what it promised wrt self-driving - nowhere near.
And as for Musk himself: there is little positive to be said about him personally. You just need to look at what he said to Tommy's march to see some evidence of that.
I do not have a 'childish' attitude towards Musk. I have an realistic attitude.
To be fair "entrepreneur being optimistic about timelines" is not exactly front page news.
The thing I would be most critical about is just how thin Musk has allowed himself to be spread, and that is impacting all his business decisions. He's got Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter/xAI, politics, the Boring Company, and probably half a dozen other things. His inattention to Tesla has led him to being behind Chinese vendors, while getting far too excited about the Cybertruck (which is now selling less than -not very successful- Ford Lightning).
Of his various ventures, the only one I'm genuinely excited by right now is SpaceX.
Tesla robotics is pretty far advanced - probably the best in America, but behind the Chinese
Grok is good
The top guy at Tesla robotics left last week for Meta. I presume he got one of those comedy sized cheques from Zuckerberg.
xAI speed of going from zero to catching up with the rest is very impressive. Meta haven't managed that.
LLaMa - the Meta AI - is pretty decent.
They are behind. I have been told by people in the know that Zuckerberg has been giving them hell for quite a while about why can't they match the other labs. He is constantly on their case about what scores their models are benchmarking.
The LLaMA 3 coding model is probably second only to Anthropic, albeit the gap is quite large. (And Kimi K2 is really snapping at their heels.)
I agree they're behind on the more generalist stuff. But on the other hand, I can run LLaMA 3 on Groq and get something 400 tokens per second.
You know, I'm rather out of date - I hadn't realised how many other LLMs had gotten past LLaMA in the coding benchmarks of late.
Ive been entertaining myself with the shortest first class steps from Jimmy Anderson to WG Grace in first class cricket so im going to bore you with it
Jimmy played with Alec Stewart Who played with and against Ian Botham who played with Brian Close (Somerset 1976) who played against Bob Wyatt (MCC vs Yorkshire 1949) who played with Wilfred Rhodes (Gower xi vs touring Australians 1930) who's first test was WG Graces last test
I think that's the shortest route between the Goats
Very good!
It would be interesting to do a political Kevin Bacon on this
"X was in a Cabinet with X who was in a Cabinet with Gladastone/Disraeli/Pitt/Wellington"
Identifying big leaps is key to that. Obviously Churchill will be a key leap he gets you to Asquith and then Gladstone, the route back to Churchill goes through Ken Clarke I guess and somene In The 1980s cabinet that gets us to the pre 1966 cabinet?
Hailsham might be a player in this.
Hailsham was in cabinet until 1987 but didn't join it until 1956.
If we're looking for large leaps, Gladstone served with Palmerston, who served with Sidmouth and Liverpool, who served with Pitt. That carries us from 1781 to 1896 in four bounds.
Lord Soames, like Hailsham, spanned Macmillan to Thatcher. However, earlier, he acted as unofficial PM when his father-in--law, Churchill, and Anthony Eden were both simultaneously too ill to function properly. Apparently his bellows of rage could be heard across Whitehall when Mrs T dismissed him from the cabinet. Even she was shaken by the reaction.
"Nasa has said it hopes to send astronauts on a trip around the Moon as soon as February to prepare for landing there as early as 2027.... The Artemis II mission is the second launch of the Artemis programme, whose aim is to land astronauts and eventually establish a long-term presence on the lunar surface."
Cool! I hope it'll be a safe mission.
Well, it's first time out for the life support system. It's never flown in space before.
It's the first time out for this version of the heat shield. The spacecraft will be flying an adjusted trajectory to see if that mitigates the high and uneven erosion of the heat shield on the previous test flight.
There's a whole bunch of other firsts as well.
It'll still be safer than Starship will be for many years...
We shall see
Firstly, there are lots and lots of piccies of SH/SS with damage and exploding.
Secondly, be careful not to give the impression you want a crewed SLS mission to fail, just because you're on Team SS.
Thirdly, I really don't see SS being man-rated for earth landings in the near future. Do you?
A way to go yet, but ay least Musk is getting on with it. One of the good things about his other rocket - Falcon is it's done so many missions the crash odds are a statistical reality rather than a computer model extrapolation
Musk is a bit of a hero in terms of his space efforts. He's advancing knowledge at a similar rate to that which NASA did in the 1960s. I think its about the finest commitment to the future of humanity ever made by an individual. In which light I can forgive him for quite a lot.
I wholeheartedly agree. The prior poster further up has an irritatingly childish attitude to Musk and the achievement of his companies.
I admire what SpaceX has done, but SH/SS is nowhere near where Musk promised in terms of time and capability. Tesla has not delivered what it promised wrt self-driving - nowhere near.
And as for Musk himself: there is little positive to be said about him personally. You just need to look at what he said to Tommy's march to see some evidence of that.
I do not have a 'childish' attitude towards Musk. I have an realistic attitude.
To be fair "entrepreneur being optimistic about timelines" is not exactly front page news.
The thing I would be most critical about is just how thin Musk has allowed himself to be spread, and that is impacting all his business decisions. He's got Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter/xAI, politics, the Boring Company, and probably half a dozen other things. His inattention to Tesla has led him to being behind Chinese vendors, while getting far too excited about the Cybertruck (which is now selling less than -not very successful- Ford Lightning).
Of his various ventures, the only one I'm genuinely excited by right now is SpaceX.
Tesla robotics is pretty far advanced - probably the best in America, but behind the Chinese
Grok is good
The top guy at Tesla robotics left last week for Meta. I presume he got one of those comedy sized cheques from Zuckerberg.
xAI speed of going from zero to catching up with the rest is very impressive. Meta haven't managed that.
LLaMa - the Meta AI - is pretty decent.
They are behind. I have been told by people in the know that Zuckerberg has been giving them hell for quite a while about why can't they match the other labs. He is constantly on their case about what scores their models are benchmarking.
The LLaMA 3 coding model is probably second only to Anthropic, albeit the gap is quite large. (And Kimi K2 is really snapping at their heels.)
I agree they're behind on the more generalist stuff. But on the other hand, I can run LLaMA 3 on Groq and get something 400 tokens per second.
You know, I'm rather out of date - I hadn't realised how many other LLMs had gotten past LLaMA in the coding benchmarks of late.
Yeap. That is why Zuckerberg has been doing his nut, they are a long way behind a lot of people now. They are of course have a good idea the lie of the land before we get public models and benchmarks.
"Nasa has said it hopes to send astronauts on a trip around the Moon as soon as February to prepare for landing there as early as 2027.... The Artemis II mission is the second launch of the Artemis programme, whose aim is to land astronauts and eventually establish a long-term presence on the lunar surface."
Cool! I hope it'll be a safe mission.
Well, it's first time out for the life support system. It's never flown in space before.
It's the first time out for this version of the heat shield. The spacecraft will be flying an adjusted trajectory to see if that mitigates the high and uneven erosion of the heat shield on the previous test flight.
There's a whole bunch of other firsts as well.
It'll still be safer than Starship will be for many years...
We shall see
Firstly, there are lots and lots of piccies of SH/SS with damage and exploding.
Secondly, be careful not to give the impression you want a crewed SLS mission to fail, just because you're on Team SS.
Thirdly, I really don't see SS being man-rated for earth landings in the near future. Do you?
A way to go yet, but ay least Musk is getting on with it. One of the good things about his other rocket - Falcon is it's done so many missions the crash odds are a statistical reality rather than a computer model extrapolation
Musk is a bit of a hero in terms of his space efforts. He's advancing knowledge at a similar rate to that which NASA did in the 1960s. I think its about the finest commitment to the future of humanity ever made by an individual. In which light I can forgive him for quite a lot.
I wholeheartedly agree. The prior poster further up has an irritatingly childish attitude to Musk and the achievement of his companies.
I admire what SpaceX has done, but SH/SS is nowhere near where Musk promised in terms of time and capability. Tesla has not delivered what it promised wrt self-driving - nowhere near.
And as for Musk himself: there is little positive to be said about him personally. You just need to look at what he said to Tommy's march to see some evidence of that.
I do not have a 'childish' attitude towards Musk. I have an realistic attitude.
To be fair "entrepreneur being optimistic about timelines" is not exactly front page news.
The thing I would be most critical about is just how thin Musk has allowed himself to be spread, and that is impacting all his business decisions. He's got Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter/xAI, politics, the Boring Company, and probably half a dozen other things. His inattention to Tesla has led him to being behind Chinese vendors, while getting far too excited about the Cybertruck (which is now selling less than -not very successful- Ford Lightning).
Of his various ventures, the only one I'm genuinely excited by right now is SpaceX.
Tesla robotics is pretty far advanced - probably the best in America, but behind the Chinese
Grok is good
The top guy at Tesla robotics left last week for Meta. I presume he got one of those comedy sized cheques from Zuckerberg.
xAI speed of going from zero to catching up with the rest is very impressive. Meta haven't managed that.
LLaMa - the Meta AI - is pretty decent.
They are behind. I have been told by people in the know that Zuckerberg has been giving them hell for quite a while about why can't they match the other labs. He is constantly on their case about what scores their models are benchmarking.
The LLaMA 3 coding model is probably second only to Anthropic, albeit the gap is quite large. (And Kimi K2 is really snapping at their heels.)
I agree they're behind on the more generalist stuff. But on the other hand, I can run LLaMA 3 on Groq and get something 400 tokens per second.
That isn't true. OpenAI Codex, Gemini, xAI and Claude lead them by a significant margin.
You are right. I am out of date.
Even Mistral has surpassd LLaMA on coding. Qwen and DeepSeek are also both ahead of both LLaMA and xAI:
Can't get LBC in Mid Wales so have 5Live on. The utter drongo on now very, very critical of Davey. He is particularly annoyed that Davey mentioned Farage 30 times and Starmer not once, and that the BBC have given Farage a free ride for the last decade. A young guy, very angry with Davey, who is he?
Drongo is a word I have not heard for a few years.
Common in my youth in Birmingham.
Is it a Brummie word?
There was a punk band called The Drongos
Oh yes - I used it all the time when below the age of about 10.
I can imagine "Attack of the Drongos" being a Goodies' episode that never quite made it to film.
A Fork-Tailed Drongo is a bird which follows herbivores across the Southern African plains catching the insects that feed off it. There is also a Spangled Drongo, a Velvet-Mantled Drongo, a Crested Drongo and a Shining Drongo, which perhaps have a TSE dress sense.
They are also a touch lawyerly, in their getting rid of annoying insects thing, but they also issue fake calls of alarm to scare other birds away, so they get to eat somebody else's dinner.
There's quite the list of names of varieties of drongo.
Ive been entertaining myself with the shortest first class steps from Jimmy Anderson to WG Grace in first class cricket so im going to bore you with it
Jimmy played with Alec Stewart Who played with and against Ian Botham who played with Brian Close (Somerset 1976) who played against Bob Wyatt (MCC vs Yorkshire 1949) who played with Wilfred Rhodes (Gower xi vs touring Australians 1930) who's first test was WG Graces last test
I think that's the shortest route between the Goats
Very good!
It would be interesting to do a political Kevin Bacon on this
"X was in a Cabinet with X who was in a Cabinet with Gladastone/Disraeli/Pitt/Wellington"
Identifying big leaps is key to that. Obviously Churchill will be a key leap he gets you to Asquith and then Gladstone, the route back to Churchill goes through Ken Clarke I guess and somene In The 1980s cabinet that gets us to the pre 1966 cabinet?
Hailsham might be a player in this.
Hailsham was in cabinet until 1987 but didn't join it until 1956.
If we're looking for large leaps, Gladstone served with Palmerston, who served with Sidmouth and Liverpool, who served with Pitt. That carries us from 1781 to 1896 in four bounds.
Ted takes you from 1950 to 2001. That's Attlee to Blair, which bookends quite nicely.
"Nasa has said it hopes to send astronauts on a trip around the Moon as soon as February to prepare for landing there as early as 2027.... The Artemis II mission is the second launch of the Artemis programme, whose aim is to land astronauts and eventually establish a long-term presence on the lunar surface."
Cool! I hope it'll be a safe mission.
Well, it's first time out for the life support system. It's never flown in space before.
It's the first time out for this version of the heat shield. The spacecraft will be flying an adjusted trajectory to see if that mitigates the high and uneven erosion of the heat shield on the previous test flight.
There's a whole bunch of other firsts as well.
It'll still be safer than Starship will be for many years...
We shall see
Firstly, there are lots and lots of piccies of SH/SS with damage and exploding.
Secondly, be careful not to give the impression you want a crewed SLS mission to fail, just because you're on Team SS.
Thirdly, I really don't see SS being man-rated for earth landings in the near future. Do you?
A way to go yet, but ay least Musk is getting on with it. One of the good things about his other rocket - Falcon is it's done so many missions the crash odds are a statistical reality rather than a computer model extrapolation
Musk is a bit of a hero in terms of his space efforts. He's advancing knowledge at a similar rate to that which NASA did in the 1960s. I think its about the finest commitment to the future of humanity ever made by an individual. In which light I can forgive him for quite a lot.
I wholeheartedly agree. The prior poster further up has an irritatingly childish attitude to Musk and the achievement of his companies.
I admire what SpaceX has done, but SH/SS is nowhere near where Musk promised in terms of time and capability. Tesla has not delivered what it promised wrt self-driving - nowhere near.
And as for Musk himself: there is little positive to be said about him personally. You just need to look at what he said to Tommy's march to see some evidence of that.
I do not have a 'childish' attitude towards Musk. I have an realistic attitude.
To be fair "entrepreneur being optimistic about timelines" is not exactly front page news.
The thing I would be most critical about is just how thin Musk has allowed himself to be spread, and that is impacting all his business decisions. He's got Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter/xAI, politics, the Boring Company, and probably half a dozen other things. His inattention to Tesla has led him to being behind Chinese vendors, while getting far too excited about the Cybertruck (which is now selling less than -not very successful- Ford Lightning).
Of his various ventures, the only one I'm genuinely excited by right now is SpaceX.
Tesla robotics is pretty far advanced - probably the best in America, but behind the Chinese
Grok is good
The top guy at Tesla robotics left last week for Meta. I presume he got one of those comedy sized cheques from Zuckerberg.
xAI speed of going from zero to catching up with the rest is very impressive. Meta haven't managed that.
LLaMa - the Meta AI - is pretty decent.
They are behind. I have been told by people in the know that Zuckerberg has been giving them hell for quite a while about why can't they match the other labs. He is constantly on their case about what scores their models are benchmarking.
The LLaMA 3 coding model is probably second only to Anthropic, albeit the gap is quite large. (And Kimi K2 is really snapping at their heels.)
I agree they're behind on the more generalist stuff. But on the other hand, I can run LLaMA 3 on Groq and get something 400 tokens per second.
That isn't true. OpenAI Codex, Gemini, xAI and Claude lead them by a significant margin.
You are right. I am out of date.
Even Mistral has surpassd LLaMA on coding. Qwen and DeepSeek are also both ahead of both LLaMA and xAI:
Even that website is behind. xAI released Grok Code Fast a few days ago, that is not only better but also solves an issue they had with far too many output tokens being produced.
One of the key metrics now is not only quality of the result, but also the number of output tokens it takes to answer queries. As obviously if its produces loads the cost / time of inference is large.
If you can put up with this guys rather arrogant massively overinflated opinion of himself, he runs a service that provides access to all these models from a single site, so he is very much aware of what is "winning" and at what tasks.
"Nasa has said it hopes to send astronauts on a trip around the Moon as soon as February to prepare for landing there as early as 2027.... The Artemis II mission is the second launch of the Artemis programme, whose aim is to land astronauts and eventually establish a long-term presence on the lunar surface."
Cool! I hope it'll be a safe mission.
Well, it's first time out for the life support system. It's never flown in space before.
It's the first time out for this version of the heat shield. The spacecraft will be flying an adjusted trajectory to see if that mitigates the high and uneven erosion of the heat shield on the previous test flight.
There's a whole bunch of other firsts as well.
It'll still be safer than Starship will be for many years...
We shall see
Firstly, there are lots and lots of piccies of SH/SS with damage and exploding.
Secondly, be careful not to give the impression you want a crewed SLS mission to fail, just because you're on Team SS.
Thirdly, I really don't see SS being man-rated for earth landings in the near future. Do you?
A way to go yet, but ay least Musk is getting on with it. One of the good things about his other rocket - Falcon is it's done so many missions the crash odds are a statistical reality rather than a computer model extrapolation
Musk is a bit of a hero in terms of his space efforts. He's advancing knowledge at a similar rate to that which NASA did in the 1960s. I think its about the finest commitment to the future of humanity ever made by an individual. In which light I can forgive him for quite a lot.
I wholeheartedly agree. The prior poster further up has an irritatingly childish attitude to Musk and the achievement of his companies.
I admire what SpaceX has done, but SH/SS is nowhere near where Musk promised in terms of time and capability. Tesla has not delivered what it promised wrt self-driving - nowhere near.
And as for Musk himself: there is little positive to be said about him personally. You just need to look at what he said to Tommy's march to see some evidence of that.
I do not have a 'childish' attitude towards Musk. I have an realistic attitude.
To be fair "entrepreneur being optimistic about timelines" is not exactly front page news.
The thing I would be most critical about is just how thin Musk has allowed himself to be spread, and that is impacting all his business decisions. He's got Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter/xAI, politics, the Boring Company, and probably half a dozen other things. His inattention to Tesla has led him to being behind Chinese vendors, while getting far too excited about the Cybertruck (which is now selling less than -not very successful- Ford Lightning).
Of his various ventures, the only one I'm genuinely excited by right now is SpaceX.
Tesla robotics is pretty far advanced - probably the best in America, but behind the Chinese
Grok is good
The top guy at Tesla robotics left last week for Meta. I presume he got one of those comedy sized cheques from Zuckerberg.
xAI speed of going from zero to catching up with the rest is very impressive. Meta haven't managed that.
LLaMa - the Meta AI - is pretty decent.
They are behind. I have been told by people in the know that Zuckerberg has been giving them hell for quite a while about why can't they match the other labs. He is constantly on their case about what scores their models are benchmarking.
The LLaMA 3 coding model is probably second only to Anthropic, albeit the gap is quite large. (And Kimi K2 is really snapping at their heels.)
I agree they're behind on the more generalist stuff. But on the other hand, I can run LLaMA 3 on Groq and get something 400 tokens per second.
That isn't true. OpenAI Codex, Gemini, xAI and Claude lead them by a significant margin.
You are right. I am out of date.
Even Mistral has surpassd LLaMA on coding. Qwen and DeepSeek are also both ahead of both LLaMA and xAI:
Even that website is behind. xAI released Grok Code Fast a few days ago, that is not only better but also solves an issue they had with far too many output tokens being produced.
The Reddit consensus is that Grok Code Fast is extremely quick, but not as accurate as the Anthropic models. The general view is that you use it to make to real time (simple) changes to your codebase, while you use Claude Opus to make more radical changes.
"Nasa has said it hopes to send astronauts on a trip around the Moon as soon as February to prepare for landing there as early as 2027.... The Artemis II mission is the second launch of the Artemis programme, whose aim is to land astronauts and eventually establish a long-term presence on the lunar surface."
Cool! I hope it'll be a safe mission.
Well, it's first time out for the life support system. It's never flown in space before.
It's the first time out for this version of the heat shield. The spacecraft will be flying an adjusted trajectory to see if that mitigates the high and uneven erosion of the heat shield on the previous test flight.
There's a whole bunch of other firsts as well.
It'll still be safer than Starship will be for many years...
We shall see
Firstly, there are lots and lots of piccies of SH/SS with damage and exploding.
Secondly, be careful not to give the impression you want a crewed SLS mission to fail, just because you're on Team SS.
Thirdly, I really don't see SS being man-rated for earth landings in the near future. Do you?
A way to go yet, but ay least Musk is getting on with it. One of the good things about his other rocket - Falcon is it's done so many missions the crash odds are a statistical reality rather than a computer model extrapolation
Musk is a bit of a hero in terms of his space efforts. He's advancing knowledge at a similar rate to that which NASA did in the 1960s. I think its about the finest commitment to the future of humanity ever made by an individual. In which light I can forgive him for quite a lot.
I wholeheartedly agree. The prior poster further up has an irritatingly childish attitude to Musk and the achievement of his companies.
I admire what SpaceX has done, but SH/SS is nowhere near where Musk promised in terms of time and capability. Tesla has not delivered what it promised wrt self-driving - nowhere near.
And as for Musk himself: there is little positive to be said about him personally. You just need to look at what he said to Tommy's march to see some evidence of that.
I do not have a 'childish' attitude towards Musk. I have an realistic attitude.
To be fair "entrepreneur being optimistic about timelines" is not exactly front page news.
The thing I would be most critical about is just how thin Musk has allowed himself to be spread, and that is impacting all his business decisions. He's got Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter/xAI, politics, the Boring Company, and probably half a dozen other things. His inattention to Tesla has led him to being behind Chinese vendors, while getting far too excited about the Cybertruck (which is now selling less than -not very successful- Ford Lightning).
Of his various ventures, the only one I'm genuinely excited by right now is SpaceX.
Tesla robotics is pretty far advanced - probably the best in America, but behind the Chinese
Grok is good
The top guy at Tesla robotics left last week for Meta. I presume he got one of those comedy sized cheques from Zuckerberg.
xAI speed of going from zero to catching up with the rest is very impressive. Meta haven't managed that.
LLaMa - the Meta AI - is pretty decent.
They are behind. I have been told by people in the know that Zuckerberg has been giving them hell for quite a while about why can't they match the other labs. He is constantly on their case about what scores their models are benchmarking.
The LLaMA 3 coding model is probably second only to Anthropic, albeit the gap is quite large. (And Kimi K2 is really snapping at their heels.)
I agree they're behind on the more generalist stuff. But on the other hand, I can run LLaMA 3 on Groq and get something 400 tokens per second.
That isn't true. OpenAI Codex, Gemini, xAI and Claude lead them by a significant margin.
You are right. I am out of date.
Even Mistral has surpassd LLaMA on coding. Qwen and DeepSeek are also both ahead of both LLaMA and xAI:
Even that website is behind. xAI released Grok Code Fast a few days ago, that is not only better but also solves an issue they had with far too many output tokens being produced.
The Reddit consensus is that Grok Code Fast is extremely quick, but not as accurate as the Anthropic models. The general view is that you use it to make to real time (simple) changes to your codebase, while you use Claude Opus to make more radical changes.
I didn't mean better than Claude (I think that is still acknowledged as the best for coding), but that it is another improvement. The speed at which xAI are turning these models is really impressive.
In my own experience (which is admittedly quite niche), I haven't been blown away by Claude Opus to be honest. The other day I asked ChatGPT5 and Claude to help revise some code and I wouldn't say it was better, what I did is fire the output of one as input to the other and see what improvements they would suggest. I often found that Claude would give a sub-optimal improvement, ChatGPT5 would "fix it", then Claude would slightly over complicate it again, rinse and repeat.
"Nasa has said it hopes to send astronauts on a trip around the Moon as soon as February to prepare for landing there as early as 2027.... The Artemis II mission is the second launch of the Artemis programme, whose aim is to land astronauts and eventually establish a long-term presence on the lunar surface."
Cool! I hope it'll be a safe mission.
Well, it's first time out for the life support system. It's never flown in space before.
It's the first time out for this version of the heat shield. The spacecraft will be flying an adjusted trajectory to see if that mitigates the high and uneven erosion of the heat shield on the previous test flight.
There's a whole bunch of other firsts as well.
It'll still be safer than Starship will be for many years...
We shall see
Firstly, there are lots and lots of piccies of SH/SS with damage and exploding.
Secondly, be careful not to give the impression you want a crewed SLS mission to fail, just because you're on Team SS.
Thirdly, I really don't see SS being man-rated for earth landings in the near future. Do you?
A way to go yet, but ay least Musk is getting on with it. One of the good things about his other rocket - Falcon is it's done so many missions the crash odds are a statistical reality rather than a computer model extrapolation
Musk is a bit of a hero in terms of his space efforts. He's advancing knowledge at a similar rate to that which NASA did in the 1960s. I think its about the finest commitment to the future of humanity ever made by an individual. In which light I can forgive him for quite a lot.
I wholeheartedly agree. The prior poster further up has an irritatingly childish attitude to Musk and the achievement of his companies.
I admire what SpaceX has done, but SH/SS is nowhere near where Musk promised in terms of time and capability. Tesla has not delivered what it promised wrt self-driving - nowhere near.
And as for Musk himself: there is little positive to be said about him personally. You just need to look at what he said to Tommy's march to see some evidence of that.
I do not have a 'childish' attitude towards Musk. I have an realistic attitude.
To be fair "entrepreneur being optimistic about timelines" is not exactly front page news.
The thing I would be most critical about is just how thin Musk has allowed himself to be spread, and that is impacting all his business decisions. He's got Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter/xAI, politics, the Boring Company, and probably half a dozen other things. His inattention to Tesla has led him to being behind Chinese vendors, while getting far too excited about the Cybertruck (which is now selling less than -not very successful- Ford Lightning).
Of his various ventures, the only one I'm genuinely excited by right now is SpaceX.
Tesla robotics is pretty far advanced - probably the best in America, but behind the Chinese
Grok is good
The top guy at Tesla robotics left last week for Meta. I presume he got one of those comedy sized cheques from Zuckerberg.
xAI speed of going from zero to catching up with the rest is very impressive. Meta haven't managed that.
LLaMa - the Meta AI - is pretty decent.
They are behind. I have been told by people in the know that Zuckerberg has been giving them hell for quite a while about why can't they match the other labs. He is constantly on their case about what scores their models are benchmarking.
The LLaMA 3 coding model is probably second only to Anthropic, albeit the gap is quite large. (And Kimi K2 is really snapping at their heels.)
I agree they're behind on the more generalist stuff. But on the other hand, I can run LLaMA 3 on Groq and get something 400 tokens per second.
That isn't true. OpenAI Codex, Gemini, xAI and Claude lead them by a significant margin.
You are right. I am out of date.
Even Mistral has surpassd LLaMA on coding. Qwen and DeepSeek are also both ahead of both LLaMA and xAI:
Even that website is behind. xAI released Grok Code Fast a few days ago, that is not only better but also solves an issue they had with far too many output tokens being produced.
One of the key metrics now is not only quality of the result, but also the number of output tokens it takes to answer queries. As obviously if its produces loads the cost / time of inference is large.
If you can put up with this guys rather arrogant massively overinflated opinion of himself, he runs a service that provides access to all these models from a single site, so he is very much aware of what is "winning" and at what tasks.
BREAKING: former Tennessee house speaker Glen Casada has been sentenced to three years in federal prison, one year of probation and a $30,000 fine for his role in a kickback scheme.
Don't know about Truss, who seems to have sell destructed, but it does appear that Starmer is currently the target of an insider sabotage campaign. These recent regular leaks of damaging information don't have an entirely random feel to them.
BREAKING: former Tennessee house speaker Glen Casada has been sentenced to three years in federal prison, one year of probation and a $30,000 fine for his role in a kickback scheme.
If someone at the UN intentionally stopped the escalator as the President and First Lady were stepping on, they need to be fired and investigated immediately.
BREAKING: former Tennessee house speaker Glen Casada has been sentenced to three years in federal prison, one year of probation and a $30,000 fine for his role in a kickback scheme.
If someone at the UN intentionally stopped the escalator as the President and First Lady were stepping on, they need to be fired and investigated immediately.
Ive been entertaining myself with the shortest first class steps from Jimmy Anderson to WG Grace in first class cricket so im going to bore you with it
Jimmy played with Alec Stewart Who played with and against Ian Botham who played with Brian Close (Somerset 1976) who played against Bob Wyatt (MCC vs Yorkshire 1949) who played with Wilfred Rhodes (Gower xi vs touring Australians 1930) who's first test was WG Graces last test
I think that's the shortest route between the Goats
Very good!
It would be interesting to do a political Kevin Bacon on this
"X was in a Cabinet with X who was in a Cabinet with Gladastone/Disraeli/Pitt/Wellington"
Identifying big leaps is key to that. Obviously Churchill will be a key leap he gets you to Asquith and then Gladstone, the route back to Churchill goes through Ken Clarke I guess and somene In The 1980s cabinet that gets us to the pre 1966 cabinet?
Hailsham might be a player in this.
Hailsham could take you from 57 (Macmillan) to 88 (Thatcher)
BREAKING: former Tennessee house speaker Glen Casada has been sentenced to three years in federal prison, one year of probation and a $30,000 fine for his role in a kickback scheme.
If someone at the UN intentionally stopped the escalator as the President and First Lady were stepping on, they need to be fired and investigated immediately.
Ive been entertaining myself with the shortest first class steps from Jimmy Anderson to WG Grace in first class cricket so im going to bore you with it
Jimmy played with Alec Stewart Who played with and against Ian Botham who played with Brian Close (Somerset 1976) who played against Bob Wyatt (MCC vs Yorkshire 1949) who played with Wilfred Rhodes (Gower xi vs touring Australians 1930) who's first test was WG Graces last test
I think that's the shortest route between the Goats
Very good!
It would be interesting to do a political Kevin Bacon on this
"X was in a Cabinet with X who was in a Cabinet with Gladastone/Disraeli/Pitt/Wellington"
Identifying big leaps is key to that. Obviously Churchill will be a key leap he gets you to Asquith and then Gladstone, the route back to Churchill goes through Ken Clarke I guess and somene In The 1980s cabinet that gets us to the pre 1966 cabinet?
1. Quintin Hogg, Baron Hailsham of St Marylebone (Conservative) Span: 59 years (1928–1987) First: Attorney General (1928–1929) Last: Lord Chancellor (1979–1987) He held multiple senior roles, including Lord Chancellor three times, across governments from Baldwin to Thatcher. 2. William Ewart Gladstone (Liberal) Span: 53 years (1841–1894) First: Vice-President of the Board of Trade (1841–1843) Last: Prime Minister (1892–1894) Gladstone served in four Liberal governments as PM and in key economic and foreign roles, shaping Victorian reforms. 3. Winston Churchill (Conservative/Liberal) Span: 47 years (1908–1955) First: President of the Board of Trade (1908–1910) Last: Prime Minister (1951–1955) Churchill’s career spanned trade, home affairs, war leadership, and premierships during both world wars. 4. Arthur James Balfour (Conservative) Span: 42 years (1887–1929) First: Chief Secretary for Ireland (1887–1891) Last: Lord President of the Council (1925–1929) Balfour was PM (1902–1905), Foreign Secretary during WWI, and key in early 20th-century diplomacy. 5. Spencer Compton Cavendish, 8th Duke of Devonshire (Liberal Unionist) Span: 35 years (1868–1903) First: Postmaster General (1868–1871) Last: Lord President of the Council (1895–1903) He led Liberal Unionists, served in war and colonial offices, and was a major figure in late Victorian politics.
You are muddling up Douglas McGarrel Hogg, the first viscount, with Quintin McGarrel Hogg, the second viscount (both were lord chancellor). Douglas McGarrel Hogg (third viscount) was in Major’s cabinet.
Ive been entertaining myself with the shortest first class steps from Jimmy Anderson to WG Grace in first class cricket so im going to bore you with it
Jimmy played with Alec Stewart Who played with and against Ian Botham who played with Brian Close (Somerset 1976) who played against Bob Wyatt (MCC vs Yorkshire 1949) who played with Wilfred Rhodes (Gower xi vs touring Australians 1930) who's first test was WG Graces last test
I think that's the shortest route between the Goats
Very good!
It would be interesting to do a political Kevin Bacon on this
"X was in a Cabinet with X who was in a Cabinet with Gladastone/Disraeli/Pitt/Wellington"
Identifying big leaps is key to that. Obviously Churchill will be a key leap he gets you to Asquith and then Gladstone, the route back to Churchill goes through Ken Clarke I guess and somene In The 1980s cabinet that gets us to the pre 1966 cabinet?
1. Quintin Hogg, Baron Hailsham of St Marylebone (Conservative) Span: 59 years (1928–1987) First: Attorney General (1928–1929) Last: Lord Chancellor (1979–1987) He held multiple senior roles, including Lord Chancellor three times, across governments from Baldwin to Thatcher. 2. William Ewart Gladstone (Liberal) Span: 53 years (1841–1894) First: Vice-President of the Board of Trade (1841–1843) Last: Prime Minister (1892–1894) Gladstone served in four Liberal governments as PM and in key economic and foreign roles, shaping Victorian reforms. 3. Winston Churchill (Conservative/Liberal) Span: 47 years (1908–1955) First: President of the Board of Trade (1908–1910) Last: Prime Minister (1951–1955) Churchill’s career spanned trade, home affairs, war leadership, and premierships during both world wars. 4. Arthur James Balfour (Conservative) Span: 42 years (1887–1929) First: Chief Secretary for Ireland (1887–1891) Last: Lord President of the Council (1925–1929) Balfour was PM (1902–1905), Foreign Secretary during WWI, and key in early 20th-century diplomacy. 5. Spencer Compton Cavendish, 8th Duke of Devonshire (Liberal Unionist) Span: 35 years (1868–1903) First: Postmaster General (1868–1871) Last: Lord President of the Council (1895–1903) He led Liberal Unionists, served in war and colonial offices, and was a major figure in late Victorian politics.
It was Hailshams father who was Attorey General in the 20s
Ive been entertaining myself with the shortest first class steps from Jimmy Anderson to WG Grace in first class cricket so im going to bore you with it
Jimmy played with Alec Stewart Who played with and against Ian Botham who played with Brian Close (Somerset 1976) who played against Bob Wyatt (MCC vs Yorkshire 1949) who played with Wilfred Rhodes (Gower xi vs touring Australians 1930) who's first test was WG Graces last test
I think that's the shortest route between the Goats
Very good!
It would be interesting to do a political Kevin Bacon on this
"X was in a Cabinet with X who was in a Cabinet with Gladastone/Disraeli/Pitt/Wellington"
Identifying big leaps is key to that. Obviously Churchill will be a key leap he gets you to Asquith and then Gladstone, the route back to Churchill goes through Ken Clarke I guess and somene In The 1980s cabinet that gets us to the pre 1966 cabinet?
Hailsham might be a player in this.
Hailsham was in cabinet until 1987 but didn't join it until 1956.
If we're looking for large leaps, Gladstone served with Palmerston, who served with Sidmouth and Liverpool, who served with Pitt. That carries us from 1781 to 1896 in four bounds.
Lord Soames, like Hailsham, spanned Macmillan to Thatcher. However, earlier, he acted as unofficial PM when his father-in--law, Churchill, and Anthony Eden were both simultaneously too ill to function properly. Apparently his bellows of rage could be heard across Whitehall when Mrs T dismissed him from the cabinet. Even she was shaken by the reaction.
My memory of Hailsham, and I was a very young boy at the time was Hogg banging a table with his fist and crying out "anarchy". Presumably a salute to his opinion of the Wilson Government.
The media seem to make out that Morgan McSweeney was some super election strategist that delivered Labours win .
All Starmer had to do in the last election cycle was stand there and not do anything stupid . Bubbles the chimp could have beaten the Tories .
I don’t know why there’s this impression that McSweeney would be a huge loss to No10 . Especially as everything since the election has been a shambles .
The media seem to make out that Morgan McSweeney was some super election strategist that delivered Labours win .
All Starmer had to do in the last election cycle was stand there and not do anything stupid . Bubbles the chimp could have beaten the Tories .
I don’t know why there’s this impression that McSweeney would be a huge loss to No10 . Especially as everything since the election has been a shambles .
I only found out yesterday that ‘It’s Only Love’ by Simply Red was a cover version… anyone know who sang the original?
I didn't know until recently that their first hit Money's Too Tight To Mention is also a cover, with the original by the Valentine Brothers.
100% not a story about the lead singer. But I remember tell of a person who was being 'tax efficient' while also being a vocal (no - 100% not about the singer) Labour supporter. Wandered into their accountants office and the secretary sympathised for their recent near-alter breakup.
"Plenty more fish in the sea! Ahahahahahahaha!" as 100% not that singer walked past into the tax-efficient accountants office.
The media seem to make out that Morgan McSweeney was some super election strategist that delivered Labours win .
All Starmer had to do in the last election cycle was stand there and not do anything stupid . Bubbles the chimp could have beaten the Tories .
I don’t know why there’s this impression that McSweeney would be a huge loss to No10 . Especially as everything since the election has been a shambles .
Bingo. Master strategist my arse.
Now I'm remembering an old track with William Burroughs :
BREAKING: former Tennessee house speaker Glen Casada has been sentenced to three years in federal prison, one year of probation and a $30,000 fine for his role in a kickback scheme.
If someone at the UN intentionally stopped the escalator as the President and First Lady were stepping on, they need to be fired and investigated immediately.
“I’m very grateful to President Trump. I can’t share the details right now. Trump possesses very important information regarding the situation on the front line” — Zelensky https://x.com/KyivPost/status/1970571340769071335
The media seem to make out that Morgan McSweeney was some super election strategist that delivered Labours win .
All Starmer had to do in the last election cycle was stand there and not do anything stupid . Bubbles the chimp could have beaten the Tories .
I don’t know why there’s this impression that McSweeney would be a huge loss to No10 . Especially as everything since the election has been a shambles .
It would be a tremendous improvement. Better still once there's a replacement for Starmer who increasingly is a lame duck.
Ive been entertaining myself with the shortest first class steps from Jimmy Anderson to WG Grace in first class cricket so im going to bore you with it
Jimmy played with Alec Stewart Who played with and against Ian Botham who played with Brian Close (Somerset 1976) who played against Bob Wyatt (MCC vs Yorkshire 1949) who played with Wilfred Rhodes (Gower xi vs touring Australians 1930) who's first test was WG Graces last test
I think that's the shortest route between the Goats
I think it can be done in 5 steps:
Anderson to Stewart Stewart to Illingworth Illingworth to Fishlock Fishlock to Hobbs Hobbs to Grace.
The weakest link is Illingworth. I think he played alongside Stewart and Fishlock. The others are dead certs.
We’ve moved house and a lot of our possessions are still boxed up - including the Wisdens. I made a move to look at them this evening (purely in the interests of accuracy) but received one of those looks from my wife accompanied by the words “If you’re thinking of doing anything with those boxes, now would be a good time to reconsider”.
The Resolution Foundation should be called “ how Labour can ensure their poll ratings hit single digits “ .
Are your poll rating too high, do you worry you might have become too popular, ring the Resolution Foundation on our special hotline...1-800-Yellow-Vests-Protests....
The Resolution Foundation should be called “ how Labour can ensure their poll ratings hit single digits “ .
Are your poll rating too high, do you worry you might have become too popular, ring the Resolution Foundation on our special hotline...1-800-Yellow-Vests-Protests....
Very funny . We’re going to get an endless stream of these headlines until the budget which is made worse by how late it is .
The Resolution Foundation should be called “ how Labour can ensure their poll ratings hit single digits “ .
Something has to be done given the rise in electric cars. Paying for what you use on the roads seems reasonable. However, it should first be revenue neutral, to avoid being seen as a cash grab.
The Resolution Foundation should be called “ how Labour can ensure their poll ratings hit single digits “ .
Something has to be done given the rise in electric cars. Paying for what you use on the roads seems reasonable. However, it should first be revenue neutral, to avoid being seen as a cash grab.
ID Cards and GPS tracking of every car? I don't think that the cash grab is the issue.
The Resolution Foundation should be called “ how Labour can ensure their poll ratings hit single digits “ .
Something has to be done given the rise in electric cars. Paying for what you use on the roads seems reasonable. However, it should first be revenue neutral, to avoid being seen as a cash grab.
ID Cards and GPS tracking of every car? I don't think that the cash grab is the issue.
The government already knows where you are and where you are going because of your mobile phone.
The Resolution Foundation should be called “ how Labour can ensure their poll ratings hit single digits “ .
Something has to be done given the rise in electric cars. Paying for what you use on the roads seems reasonable. However, it should first be revenue neutral, to avoid being seen as a cash grab.
ID Cards and GPS tracking of every car? I don't think that the cash grab is the issue.
The government already knows where you are and where you are going because of your mobile phone.
Not if it is switched off. Besides, it has to ask someone for that data. (In theory, at least)
The Resolution Foundation should be called “ how Labour can ensure their poll ratings hit single digits “ .
Something has to be done given the rise in electric cars. Paying for what you use on the roads seems reasonable. However, it should first be revenue neutral, to avoid being seen as a cash grab.
ID Cards and GPS tracking of every car? I don't think that the cash grab is the issue.
The government already knows where you are and where you are going because of your mobile phone.
Not if it is switched off. Besides, it has to ask someone for that data. (In theory, at least)
No doubt the same safeguards could be built in to tracking of the car. I just don't buy the privacy argument will be that important to the majority of people who always have their phone on and with them.
The Resolution Foundation should be called “ how Labour can ensure their poll ratings hit single digits “ .
Something has to be done given the rise in electric cars. Paying for what you use on the roads seems reasonable. However, it should first be revenue neutral, to avoid being seen as a cash grab.
ID Cards and GPS tracking of every car? I don't think that the cash grab is the issue.
The government already knows where you are and where you are going because of your mobile phone.
Not if it is switched off. Besides, it has to ask someone for that data. (In theory, at least)
No doubt the same safeguards could be built in to tracking of the car. I just don't buy the privacy argument will be that important to the majority of people who always have their phone on and with them.
For whatever reason people are quite precious about cars. I think it will be seen differently, even though we are already tracked via ANPR.
Mobile phones have to be tracked otherwise they won't work.
"If someone at the UN intentionally stopped the escalator as the President and First Lady were stepping on, they need to be fired and investigated immediately."
Reminds me, a little, of Alice in Wonderland: "Sentence first--verdict afterwards."
Comments
I suppose the leader of the free world hectoring the UN about the hoax of climate change may or may not be some sort of subtler sign, tbf.
(Actually, that looks harder than it feels it ought to be. Cooper, EdM and Hilary Benn... is that it?)
End result, they've developed ties in the UK, had kids, become seriously ill, so even if they're then not granted asylum it's harder to return them.
If we're looking for large leaps, Gladstone served with Palmerston, who served with Sidmouth and Liverpool, who served with Pitt. That carries us from 1781 to 1896 in four bounds.
Grok is good. But so is Anthropic, ChatGPT, and DeepSeek. And Llama and Kimi (one of the other new Chinese models) aren't bad either.
Thomas Pelham-Holles Duke of Newcastle
Robert Walpole
What we haven't seen with LLMs is one company running away with it, like happened with cellphones, etc., and therefore dominating returns. In fact, if anything, the top tiers seem to be converging, and then you have a bunch of really interesting companies around the edge like Groq and Perplexity.
And that's just in the last three months.
That led to comedy sized cheques offers to talent of which I think was it 2 at least lasted less than a month before quitting. xAI have been impressive in what they have achieved with a much smaller team than the rest.
I agree they're behind on the more generalist stuff. But on the other hand, I can run LLaMA 3 on Groq and get something 400 tokens per second.
Is Davey's niche now to be the caller-out-in-chief-of-Reform and Trump and their varied collections of nut-jobbery, filling the gap that both Mr Starmer and Ms Badenoch are shying away from?
Another bit of directed sanewashing.
Apparently his bellows of rage could be heard across Whitehall when Mrs T dismissed him from the cabinet. Even she was shaken by the reaction.
Truss says she was the victim of “deliberate sabotage”. What if she’s right?
By Will Dunn"
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-politics/2025/09/liz-truss-is-still-at-war-with-the-deep-state
Even Mistral has surpassd LLaMA on coding. Qwen and DeepSeek are also both ahead of both LLaMA and xAI:
https://livebench.ai/#/
I can imagine "Attack of the Drongos" being a Goodies' episode that never quite made it to film.
A Fork-Tailed Drongo is a bird which follows herbivores across the Southern African plains catching the insects that feed off it. There is also a Spangled Drongo, a Velvet-Mantled Drongo, a Crested Drongo and a Shining Drongo, which perhaps have a TSE dress sense.
They are also a touch lawyerly, in their getting rid of annoying insects thing, but they also issue fake calls of alarm to scare other birds away, so they get to eat somebody else's dinner.
There's quite the list of names of varieties of drongo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drongo
One of the key metrics now is not only quality of the result, but also the number of output tokens it takes to answer queries. As obviously if its produces loads the cost / time of inference is large.
If you can put up with this guys rather arrogant massively overinflated opinion of himself, he runs a service that provides access to all these models from a single site, so he is very much aware of what is "winning" and at what tasks.
https://www.youtube.com/@t3dotgg/videos
In my own experience (which is admittedly quite niche), I haven't been blown away by Claude Opus to be honest. The other day I asked ChatGPT5 and Claude to help revise some code and I wouldn't say it was better, what I did is fire the output of one as input to the other and see what improvements they would suggest. I often found that Claude would give a sub-optimal improvement, ChatGPT5 would "fix it", then Claude would slightly over complicate it again, rinse and repeat.
Though this could either be the Senate showing unusual spine, or just another whitewash.
SENATE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE LAUNCHING CORRUPTION INVESTIGATION INTO TOM HOMAN.
Committee requests all investigation files, recordings and more.
https://x.com/TheMaineWonk/status/1970479781952008698
These recent regular leaks of damaging information don't have an entirely random feel to them.
Karoline Leavitt
If someone at the UN intentionally stopped the escalator as the President and First Lady were stepping on, they need to be fired and investigated immediately.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-65068125
All Starmer had to do in the last election cycle was stand there and not do anything stupid . Bubbles the chimp could have beaten the Tories .
I don’t know why there’s this impression that McSweeney would be a huge loss to No10 . Especially as everything since the election has been a shambles .
"Plenty more fish in the sea! Ahahahahahahaha!" as 100% not that singer walked past into the tax-efficient accountants office.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9NDxYf122I
Did I Ever Tell You About The Man Who Taught His Asshole To Talk?
“Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk?
His whole abdomen would move up and down, you dig, farting out the words.
It was unlike anything I ever heard.
Bubbly, thick, stagnant sound.
A sound you could smell."
"Trump says Ukraine can win back all of its territory seized by Russia" (£)
https://www.ft.com/content/f36d52e4-29d2-491f-80ad-faa12ecc7845
Ryan Routh plunged pen into his neck as he was found guilty of trying to assassinate then-Republican presidential candidate
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7EtcqvepNI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MntJ4LWT32I
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/09/23/drivers-pay-per-mile-tax-fix-budget-reeves-urged/
“I’m very grateful to President Trump. I can’t share the details right now. Trump possesses very important information regarding the situation on the front line” — Zelensky
https://x.com/KyivPost/status/1970571340769071335
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/09/20/politics/doj-prison-sentence-attempted-kavanaugh-assassin
NOTUS reports that since Trump took office, my section, Public Integrity, went from 36 people investigating public corruption to TWO...
https://x.com/Ryan_Crosswell/status/1970528287236432186
Anderson to Stewart
Stewart to Illingworth
Illingworth to Fishlock
Fishlock to Hobbs
Hobbs to Grace.
The weakest link is Illingworth. I think he played alongside Stewart and Fishlock. The others are dead certs.
We’ve moved house and a lot of our possessions are still boxed up - including the Wisdens. I made a move to look at them this evening (purely in the interests of accuracy) but received one of those looks from my wife accompanied by the words “If you’re thinking of doing anything with those boxes, now would be a good time to reconsider”.
Google it. Or ask ChatGPT.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyU5Xkk6TuE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEv-wgfKAIk
But it's clearly time for a couple of months of jail time to be suspended for 10 years.
Mobile phones have to be tracked otherwise they won't work.
Reminds me, a little, of Alice in Wonderland: "Sentence first--verdict afterwards."