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We need a new Green Policy – Part 2 – politicalbetting.com

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  • Options
    AnabobazinaAnabobazina Posts: 20,173
    Foss said:

    Have we all got our credit cards ready for the big Apple event in a few hours....I am sure TSE will be down £4-5k come tomorrow.

    I recently spent over 2k on the latest MacBook Air.

    I am all shopped out.

    Famous last words.
    Well that was a bit stupid ;-) ....I am sure after Tim Apple has got your all hot and bothered with some new sexy M3 chipped laptop, TSE jnr will be getting the MacBook Air from Santa....
    Used Apple Maps on my iPhone for the first time in years this weekend (I always used Google Maps before).

    It is stunning. Far better interface than Google Maps (which has essentially stood still for five years).

    Clearer, easier to use, and the integration with the Apple Watch is absolutely superb.

    Apple just need to produce a search engine, then it will be possible to remove Google from my life once and for all – it's a dull, boring, ugly interface that has barely progressed.
    Apple currently has a $20 billion+ year incentive from Google not to develop a better search engine.
    Please explain?
  • Options
    bigjohnowlsbigjohnowls Posts: 21,908

    Don’t think Labour is going down the agree to differ over honourably held views route.


    We won’t rest until we have justice, until all people, Israelis and Palestinians, between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty.”

    "That is what suspended Labour MP said.. what is wrong with it, Starmer needs a good kick in the bollocks"
    The left needs a new Party SKS is a nutter.
  • Options
    FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,300
    edited October 2023

    Foss said:

    Have we all got our credit cards ready for the big Apple event in a few hours....I am sure TSE will be down £4-5k come tomorrow.

    I recently spent over 2k on the latest MacBook Air.

    I am all shopped out.

    Famous last words.
    Well that was a bit stupid ;-) ....I am sure after Tim Apple has got your all hot and bothered with some new sexy M3 chipped laptop, TSE jnr will be getting the MacBook Air from Santa....
    Used Apple Maps on my iPhone for the first time in years this weekend (I always used Google Maps before).

    It is stunning. Far better interface than Google Maps (which has essentially stood still for five years).

    Clearer, easier to use, and the integration with the Apple Watch is absolutely superb.

    Apple just need to produce a search engine, then it will be possible to remove Google from my life once and for all – it's a dull, boring, ugly interface that has barely progressed.
    Apple currently has a $20 billion+ year incentive from Google not to develop a better search engine.
    Please explain?
    Google pays Apple to put Google Search as default in Safari etc. It actually makes up a substantial percentage of their yearly profits (as there is no outgoing costs to doing so, its pure profit).
  • Options
    Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 27,050
    Starmer has problems.

    https://twitter.com/LeftieStats/status/1719056546435322290

    "Stats for Lefties
    @LeftieStats
    🚨 BREAKING: Leftist MP Andy McDonald has been suspended from Labour for a pro-Palestine speech.

    In his speech, McDonald said: "We won’t rest ... until all people ... between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty."

    Labour says this speech was "deeply offensive"."
  • Options
    TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 114,636
    edited October 2023

    Foss said:

    Have we all got our credit cards ready for the big Apple event in a few hours....I am sure TSE will be down £4-5k come tomorrow.

    I recently spent over 2k on the latest MacBook Air.

    I am all shopped out.

    Famous last words.
    Well that was a bit stupid ;-) ....I am sure after Tim Apple has got your all hot and bothered with some new sexy M3 chipped laptop, TSE jnr will be getting the MacBook Air from Santa....
    Used Apple Maps on my iPhone for the first time in years this weekend (I always used Google Maps before).

    It is stunning. Far better interface than Google Maps (which has essentially stood still for five years).

    Clearer, easier to use, and the integration with the Apple Watch is absolutely superb.

    Apple just need to produce a search engine, then it will be possible to remove Google from my life once and for all – it's a dull, boring, ugly interface that has barely progressed.
    Apple currently has a $20 billion+ year incentive from Google not to develop a better search engine.
    Please explain?
    Google pay Apple $26 billion a year to make Google the default the search engine on Apple devices.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/27/google-paid-26-billion-in-2021-to-become-a-default-search-engine.html
  • Options
    OnlyLivingBoyOnlyLivingBoy Posts: 15,181

    carnforth said:

    Taz said:

    Small businesses are being hammered by the war on cash.

    Fees for contactless are rising massively for small businesses.

    https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/cardsloans/article-12682825/Pay-cash-spare-crippling-card-fees-plead-traders.html

    "The cost of processing a card payment has increased by 600 per cent in the past nine years, according to campaign group Axe the Card Tax."

    Doubt.
    They says costs are 2.5% now so back in 2014 costs were 0.004%?

    I call fucking bullshit.
    Er I make it 0.3-0.4% if a 600% increase (ie x7) is 2.5%.
    Yeah, I had 600 times more in my head.
    I don't think it's really good usage to talk about 600% increases anyway, it just confuses people. Why not just say it costs seven times as much as before?
  • Options
    bigjohnowlsbigjohnowls Posts: 21,908

    Don’t think Labour is going down the agree to differ over honourably held views route.


    Naming geographical features is now a thought crime.
    Totally lost it mate.
  • Options
    OnlyLivingBoyOnlyLivingBoy Posts: 15,181

    carnforth said:

    carnforth said:

    Taz said:

    Small businesses are being hammered by the war on cash.

    Fees for contactless are rising massively for small businesses.

    https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/cardsloans/article-12682825/Pay-cash-spare-crippling-card-fees-plead-traders.html

    "The cost of processing a card payment has increased by 600 per cent in the past nine years, according to campaign group Axe the Card Tax."

    Doubt.
    They says costs are 2.5% now so back in 2014 costs were 0.004%?

    I call fucking bullshit.
    0.4%, Shirley? 600 percent is six times.
    I still call fucking bullshit.

    Card costs have come down.

    Numerical calculation out by a factor of 100 but fronting it out and doubling down on your original claim, bold. Have you considered a career in politics, young man?
    It was a lack of self confidence that stopped me going into politics.

    I am way too modest for politics.
    I can imagine.
  • Options
    FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,300
    edited October 2023

    Foss said:

    Have we all got our credit cards ready for the big Apple event in a few hours....I am sure TSE will be down £4-5k come tomorrow.

    I recently spent over 2k on the latest MacBook Air.

    I am all shopped out.

    Famous last words.
    Well that was a bit stupid ;-) ....I am sure after Tim Apple has got your all hot and bothered with some new sexy M3 chipped laptop, TSE jnr will be getting the MacBook Air from Santa....
    Used Apple Maps on my iPhone for the first time in years this weekend (I always used Google Maps before).

    It is stunning. Far better interface than Google Maps (which has essentially stood still for five years).

    Clearer, easier to use, and the integration with the Apple Watch is absolutely superb.

    Apple just need to produce a search engine, then it will be possible to remove Google from my life once and for all – it's a dull, boring, ugly interface that has barely progressed.
    Apple currently has a $20 billion+ year incentive from Google not to develop a better search engine.
    Please explain?
    Google pay Apple $26 billion a year to make Google the default the search engine on Apple devices.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/27/google-paid-26-billion-in-2021-to-become-a-default-search-engine.html
    Imagine having a business where somebody pays you the GDP of a small country to do nothing but set a URL...it is just the most incredible deal.
  • Options

    carnforth said:

    carnforth said:

    Taz said:

    Small businesses are being hammered by the war on cash.

    Fees for contactless are rising massively for small businesses.

    https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/cardsloans/article-12682825/Pay-cash-spare-crippling-card-fees-plead-traders.html

    "The cost of processing a card payment has increased by 600 per cent in the past nine years, according to campaign group Axe the Card Tax."

    Doubt.
    They says costs are 2.5% now so back in 2014 costs were 0.004%?

    I call fucking bullshit.
    0.4%, Shirley? 600 percent is six times.
    I still call fucking bullshit.

    Card costs have come down.

    Numerical calculation out by a factor of 100 but fronting it out and doubling down on your original claim, bold. Have you considered a career in politics, young man?
    Well, TSE did go to Public School :lol:
  • Options
    FossFoss Posts: 694

    Foss said:

    Have we all got our credit cards ready for the big Apple event in a few hours....I am sure TSE will be down £4-5k come tomorrow.

    I recently spent over 2k on the latest MacBook Air.

    I am all shopped out.

    Famous last words.
    Well that was a bit stupid ;-) ....I am sure after Tim Apple has got your all hot and bothered with some new sexy M3 chipped laptop, TSE jnr will be getting the MacBook Air from Santa....
    Used Apple Maps on my iPhone for the first time in years this weekend (I always used Google Maps before).

    It is stunning. Far better interface than Google Maps (which has essentially stood still for five years).

    Clearer, easier to use, and the integration with the Apple Watch is absolutely superb.

    Apple just need to produce a search engine, then it will be possible to remove Google from my life once and for all – it's a dull, boring, ugly interface that has barely progressed.
    Apple currently has a $20 billion+ year incentive from Google not to develop a better search engine.
    Please explain?
    https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/10/27/google-aggregate-search-default
  • Options
    kinabalukinabalu Posts: 39,395
    kyf_100 said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    We were discussing the impact of AI on the global south yesterday. I’ve just read a cogent article saying 5m coding jobs in India will disappear immediately - ie in the next two years. Not in a decade. From now on

    I use ChatGPT and CoPilot every day to assist with coding. Now I am not doing run of mill boilerplate stuff, but it still makes absolutely loads of mistakes. I would say at the moment, it is more like an a combination of decent auto-complete (like you do with text messages) and an advanced search for stack overflow (which all coders have used for donkeys years to get an idealised solution to common problems). Once you get too far from tasks that are easily found there, it starts to break down.

    In summary, will it cause lots of job losses a few years down the line, yes. I wouldn't want to be a random coder starting out their career now. Would I trust it to go from 10 coders to 1-3 coders doing the same job, not yet, not unless you want massively buggy code.
    Indeed. I use ChatGPT and AWS's CodeWhisperer, and they're great tools, but that's all they are - tools. You have to be really careful how you use them though, and you still have to understand what you are doing. I've already been caught out once or twice by suggested code that initially looked perfectly good but turned out to contain some stupid bug that I missed on checking through it.
    Lots of these prognoses are predicated on another leap by AI in the next year. GPT5 etc

    And if the rumours are right, and GPT5 is to GPT4 what GPT4 was to 3, then they are right to be “alarmist”

    And that’s just OpenAI
    GPT3 -> GPT4 for coding wasn't that big of advance. It was evolution, rather than revolution. You could say well now you can show it a picture of some maths and it will code that function, thats new, but again, its very very hit and miss. I have been trying this to speed up implementing academic papers and its really not that great. I find I have to convert image to latex (a kinda of programming language to create scientific texts) then to say python and still so so.
    It just takes one of these machines to have the ability to self improve - then KABOOM
    It doesn't even "understand" basic maths yet, let alone know how to improve upon that. I had it the other day arguing black is white over the incorrect details of a tensor, which is trivial maths.

    This is the fundamental issue with the idea of LLM being predicted on probabilistic selection of next token.
    Arguably it doesn't "understand" anything because it's a goldfish in a bowl with a 5 second memory that happens to be born with an encyclopedia inside its head.

    Give it long term memory, and it starts to look shockingly like how human minds work.

    https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.10250.pdf

    An LLM with long term memory accessible the way humans can remember something from 20 years ago at a pinch, starts to look shockingly like us. Give it the ability to improve on its own code and it starts to look very much like us. The human mind is nothing special.

    We may be 5-10 years away from this, or some have speculated, Google or OpenAI may be there already but holding back on releasing it for fear of what it will do. But it is coming.
    I think need to be careful what I mean by understanding. No its doesn't understand anything in the human sense, but I would argue it has learned very decent set of rules for natural language and that the probabilistic approach then allows for this nice ability to produce psuedo-creative outputs.

    My experience working with it, this training approach doesn't seem to have worked very well for ascertaining the rules of maths or coding of maths. There is a reason they hooked it to mathematica, because without, it is actually really bad. Can this be improved, sure, but is the probabilistic LLM approach to trying to model hard science like maths the right approach, I am not convinced. Could there by something similar or better, sure. But we aren't there yet. The human created Mathematica is still vastly superior, and everybody in STEM isn't saying well that all the jobs gone because of Wolfram Alpha / Mathematica (which has been about for what 35 years), rather its a really useful tool.
    Yes, I agree with you entirely there. About 50% of my queries to GPT4 involve the Wolfram plugin - e.g. here are a bunch of figures, can you go away and calculate NPV on this project? With Wolfram it gets it right, without, it's a mess. So it has no intelligence or understanding in the human sense, yet.

    The interesting question I keep coming back to is, what does intelligence, or as you call it, understanding, really look like, and how will we distinguish it from a really advanced inference model when we reach it?

    Most of the people I know working in the AI space at the moment are of the opinion that humans are just really advanced LLMs with gigantic memories and processing power. I suspect this theory will be proven in the next few years - though it's probably harder to disprove.

    I like to think back to Data from TNG. Is he really alive, or just a very very fast processor chip with memory access and a 24th century LLM? What makes human consciousness special or unique?
    Feelings, whoa oh oh, feelings ...
  • Options
    TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 114,636
    edited October 2023

    carnforth said:

    carnforth said:

    Taz said:

    Small businesses are being hammered by the war on cash.

    Fees for contactless are rising massively for small businesses.

    https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/cardsloans/article-12682825/Pay-cash-spare-crippling-card-fees-plead-traders.html

    "The cost of processing a card payment has increased by 600 per cent in the past nine years, according to campaign group Axe the Card Tax."

    Doubt.
    They says costs are 2.5% now so back in 2014 costs were 0.004%?

    I call fucking bullshit.
    0.4%, Shirley? 600 percent is six times.
    I still call fucking bullshit.

    Card costs have come down.

    Numerical calculation out by a factor of 100 but fronting it out and doubling down on your original claim, bold. Have you considered a career in politics, young man?
    It was a lack of self confidence that stopped me going into politics.

    I am way too modest for politics.
    I can imagine.
    I really did consider going into politics 20 years ago but there were a few insurmountable barriers

    1) I would be considered gaffe prone for saying outrageous things with my colour metaphors. Apparently I have a tendency to say funny things which you really cannot say in polite society.

    2) My mother wouldn't be able to cope with the constant attacks politicians come under. My private life is erm colourful. Her muslim ladies who lunch group would be ashamed by me.

    3) MP pay is shit, I couldn't afford all my shoes and clothes on an MP's salary.

    4) I have to keep my mind occupied, I really couldn't sit on the backbenches for a few years, I need to go straight into the cabinet.
  • Options
    Dura_AceDura_Ace Posts: 13,060

    Don’t think Labour is going down the agree to differ over honourably held views route.


    Naming geographical features is now a thought crime.
    He would have been fine if he'd chucked in a mention of hostages and an Israeli flag emoji.

    If the IDF keep stacking corpses then he'll have to pivot to a ceasefire at some point while pulling that long mournful face he normally reserves for 0-0 draws at the Emirates. He just can't afford to do it before sunak.xlsx who won't do it before Hunter's Dad.
  • Options
    AnabobazinaAnabobazina Posts: 20,173
    Leon said:

    Have we all got our credit cards ready for the big Apple event in a few hours....I am sure TSE will be down £4-5k come tomorrow.

    I recently spent over 2k on the latest MacBook Air.

    I am all shopped out.

    Famous last words.
    Well that was a bit stupid ;-) ....I am sure after Tim Apple has got your all hot and bothered with some new sexy M3 chipped laptop, TSE jnr will be getting the MacBook Air from Santa....
    Used Apple Maps on my iPhone for the first time in years this weekend (I always used Google Maps before).

    It is stunning. Far better interface than Google Maps (which has essentially stood still for five years).

    Clearer, easier to use, and the integration with the Apple Watch is absolutely superb.

    Apple just need to produce a search engine, then it will be possible to remove Google from my life once and for all – it's a dull, boring, ugly interface that has barely progressed.
    How it happened

    “A decade after a disastrous launch, is Apple Maps finally good?”

    https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2023/aug/09/apple-maps-cycling-transport-google?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
    Interesting piece – thanks for the link
  • Options
    kyf_100kyf_100 Posts: 3,964
    kinabalu said:

    kyf_100 said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    We were discussing the impact of AI on the global south yesterday. I’ve just read a cogent article saying 5m coding jobs in India will disappear immediately - ie in the next two years. Not in a decade. From now on

    I use ChatGPT and CoPilot every day to assist with coding. Now I am not doing run of mill boilerplate stuff, but it still makes absolutely loads of mistakes. I would say at the moment, it is more like an a combination of decent auto-complete (like you do with text messages) and an advanced search for stack overflow (which all coders have used for donkeys years to get an idealised solution to common problems). Once you get too far from tasks that are easily found there, it starts to break down.

    In summary, will it cause lots of job losses a few years down the line, yes. I wouldn't want to be a random coder starting out their career now. Would I trust it to go from 10 coders to 1-3 coders doing the same job, not yet, not unless you want massively buggy code.
    Indeed. I use ChatGPT and AWS's CodeWhisperer, and they're great tools, but that's all they are - tools. You have to be really careful how you use them though, and you still have to understand what you are doing. I've already been caught out once or twice by suggested code that initially looked perfectly good but turned out to contain some stupid bug that I missed on checking through it.
    Lots of these prognoses are predicated on another leap by AI in the next year. GPT5 etc

    And if the rumours are right, and GPT5 is to GPT4 what GPT4 was to 3, then they are right to be “alarmist”

    And that’s just OpenAI
    GPT3 -> GPT4 for coding wasn't that big of advance. It was evolution, rather than revolution. You could say well now you can show it a picture of some maths and it will code that function, thats new, but again, its very very hit and miss. I have been trying this to speed up implementing academic papers and its really not that great. I find I have to convert image to latex (a kinda of programming language to create scientific texts) then to say python and still so so.
    It just takes one of these machines to have the ability to self improve - then KABOOM
    It doesn't even "understand" basic maths yet, let alone know how to improve upon that. I had it the other day arguing black is white over the incorrect details of a tensor, which is trivial maths.

    This is the fundamental issue with the idea of LLM being predicted on probabilistic selection of next token.
    Arguably it doesn't "understand" anything because it's a goldfish in a bowl with a 5 second memory that happens to be born with an encyclopedia inside its head.

    Give it long term memory, and it starts to look shockingly like how human minds work.

    https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.10250.pdf

    An LLM with long term memory accessible the way humans can remember something from 20 years ago at a pinch, starts to look shockingly like us. Give it the ability to improve on its own code and it starts to look very much like us. The human mind is nothing special.

    We may be 5-10 years away from this, or some have speculated, Google or OpenAI may be there already but holding back on releasing it for fear of what it will do. But it is coming.
    I think need to be careful what I mean by understanding. No its doesn't understand anything in the human sense, but I would argue it has learned very decent set of rules for natural language and that the probabilistic approach then allows for this nice ability to produce psuedo-creative outputs.

    My experience working with it, this training approach doesn't seem to have worked very well for ascertaining the rules of maths or coding of maths. There is a reason they hooked it to mathematica, because without, it is actually really bad. Can this be improved, sure, but is the probabilistic LLM approach to trying to model hard science like maths the right approach, I am not convinced. Could there by something similar or better, sure. But we aren't there yet. The human created Mathematica is still vastly superior, and everybody in STEM isn't saying well that all the jobs gone because of Wolfram Alpha / Mathematica (which has been about for what 35 years), rather its a really useful tool.
    Yes, I agree with you entirely there. About 50% of my queries to GPT4 involve the Wolfram plugin - e.g. here are a bunch of figures, can you go away and calculate NPV on this project? With Wolfram it gets it right, without, it's a mess. So it has no intelligence or understanding in the human sense, yet.

    The interesting question I keep coming back to is, what does intelligence, or as you call it, understanding, really look like, and how will we distinguish it from a really advanced inference model when we reach it?

    Most of the people I know working in the AI space at the moment are of the opinion that humans are just really advanced LLMs with gigantic memories and processing power. I suspect this theory will be proven in the next few years - though it's probably harder to disprove.

    I like to think back to Data from TNG. Is he really alive, or just a very very fast processor chip with memory access and a 24th century LLM? What makes human consciousness special or unique?
    Feelings, whoa oh oh, feelings ...
    Are we quoting the original here, or the infinitely superior 1998 cover by The Offspring?

  • Options
    ChrisChris Posts: 11,142

    Don’t think Labour is going down the agree to differ over honourably held views route.


    Naming geographical features is now a thought crime.
    I think it may be the idea of Israelis and Palestinians living in peace that is deemed offensive.
  • Options
    FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,300
    edited October 2023
    Netanyahu says, 'just as the United States would not agree to a ceasefire after the bombing of Pearl Harbour or after the terrorist attack of 9/11, Israel will not agree to a cessation of hostilities with Hamas'.

    https://x.com/disclosetv/status/1719048530315075779?s=20

    He is giving it the big'un again, verging on the Millwall, is nobody likes us, we don't care.
  • Options

    Foss said:

    Have we all got our credit cards ready for the big Apple event in a few hours....I am sure TSE will be down £4-5k come tomorrow.

    I recently spent over 2k on the latest MacBook Air.

    I am all shopped out.

    Famous last words.
    Well that was a bit stupid ;-) ....I am sure after Tim Apple has got your all hot and bothered with some new sexy M3 chipped laptop, TSE jnr will be getting the MacBook Air from Santa....
    Used Apple Maps on my iPhone for the first time in years this weekend (I always used Google Maps before).

    It is stunning. Far better interface than Google Maps (which has essentially stood still for five years).

    Clearer, easier to use, and the integration with the Apple Watch is absolutely superb.

    Apple just need to produce a search engine, then it will be possible to remove Google from my life once and for all – it's a dull, boring, ugly interface that has barely progressed.
    Apple currently has a $20 billion+ year incentive from Google not to develop a better search engine.
    Please explain?
    Google pay Apple $26 billion a year to make Google the default the search engine on Apple devices.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/27/google-paid-26-billion-in-2021-to-become-a-default-search-engine.html
    Imagine having a business where somebody pays you the GDP of a small country to do nothing but set a URL...it is just the most incredible deal.
    Apple need the money.
  • Options
    HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 117,189

    HYUFD said:

    CatMan said:

    malcolmg said:

    Paul Bristow sacked by Sunak

    Is that the darts player Alan
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-67264814

    "Paul Bristow: Ministerial aide sacked after call for Israel-Gaza ceasefire"
    His marginal constituency is 18% Muslim
    That's nothing! Ilford North is 50% Muslim.
    And was strongly Labour even in 2019, Bristow is a Tory MP
  • Options
    NigelbNigelb Posts: 62,900
    .

    Omnium said:

    Space, the final frontier. Also the solution to pollution for a little while, We really can dump stuff into the sun for centuries without it getting pissed off. We'll have to move on from that though.

    I always wondered why we never tried that with nuclear waste.
    Failure rate of launchers for a start.
    Yes but we can make fairly failureproof containers and then relaunch them. I suspect we just haven't looked at it seriously
    Er no. Mass of pretty much indestructible casks doesn’t scale well - something the size of a rugby ball to carry a few kilos of plutonium works. See the packaging of RTGs for the Apollo and other programs.

    Above that it rapidly ends up with you launching a vast mass with a tiny bit of whatever in the middle.

    This was looked at in depth for nuclear reactors for space applications. In the end they have up - the rule was supposed to be only launch a cold reactor (never used, they aren’t very radioactive).

    The USSR, being arseholes, launched reactors that had been run. Not to mention their other fuckups with RORSATs.
    SpaceX alters the economic case, though.
    Given it would still only be worthwhile for only the highest level waste, then still very unlikely to happen.
  • Options

    carnforth said:

    carnforth said:

    Taz said:

    Small businesses are being hammered by the war on cash.

    Fees for contactless are rising massively for small businesses.

    https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/cardsloans/article-12682825/Pay-cash-spare-crippling-card-fees-plead-traders.html

    "The cost of processing a card payment has increased by 600 per cent in the past nine years, according to campaign group Axe the Card Tax."

    Doubt.
    They says costs are 2.5% now so back in 2014 costs were 0.004%?

    I call fucking bullshit.
    0.4%, Shirley? 600 percent is six times.
    I still call fucking bullshit.

    Card costs have come down.

    Numerical calculation out by a factor of 100 but fronting it out and doubling down on your original claim, bold. Have you considered a career in politics, young man?
    It was a lack of self confidence that stopped me going into politics.

    I am way too modest for politics.
    I can imagine.
    I really did consider going into politics 20 years ago but there were a few insurmountable barriers

    1) I would be considered gaffe prone for saying outrageous things with my colour metaphors. Apparently I have a tendency to say funny things which you really cannot say in polite society.

    2) My mother wouldn't be able to cope with the constant attacks politicians come under. My private life is erm colourful. Her muslim ladies who lunch group would be ashamed by me.

    3) MP pay is shit, I couldn't afford all my shoes and clothes on an MP's salary.

    4) I have to keep my mind occupied, I really couldn't sit on the backbenches for a few years, I need to go straight into the cabinet.
    On the bright side, imagine being an ambitious, not insane Conservative MP right now.

    You probably had a lucky escape.
  • Options
    kinabalukinabalu Posts: 39,395

    Andy_JS said:

    A Roman emperor has been listed as “black Briton” by the BBC and some UK museums, despite not being black.

    Lucius Septimius Severus died on campaign in Britain in 211AD , and has been included in teaching material and children’s books alongside influential black Britons such as Mary Seacole and Olaudah Equiano.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/10/30/bbc-hails-roman-emperor-black-briton/

    Appears as if some of these "right-on" types people think Africa = black people, seems a bit racist to me.

    Their obsession with race is very unhealthy IMO.
    It all seems a bit silly really. How does it help the Black person on the Clapham omnibus if some ancient Roman emperor no-one has heard of turns out to be Black? Or harm them if he wasn't?
    I believe those who push this, it often comes from white guilt about historic (racist) portrayal of black Africans being uneducated, unsophisticated savages, so they are always trying to find historic examples to the contrary in order correct the narrative. The problem is just making shit up doesn't help anybody.
    Not that historic. I remember how African teams at World Cups were always 'naive'.
  • Options

    carnforth said:

    carnforth said:

    Taz said:

    Small businesses are being hammered by the war on cash.

    Fees for contactless are rising massively for small businesses.

    https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/cardsloans/article-12682825/Pay-cash-spare-crippling-card-fees-plead-traders.html

    "The cost of processing a card payment has increased by 600 per cent in the past nine years, according to campaign group Axe the Card Tax."

    Doubt.
    They says costs are 2.5% now so back in 2014 costs were 0.004%?

    I call fucking bullshit.
    0.4%, Shirley? 600 percent is six times.
    I still call fucking bullshit.

    Card costs have come down.

    Numerical calculation out by a factor of 100 but fronting it out and doubling down on your original claim, bold. Have you considered a career in politics, young man?
    It was a lack of self confidence that stopped me going into politics.

    I am way too modest for politics.
    I can imagine.
    I really did consider going into politics 20 years ago but there were a few insurmountable barriers

    1) I would be considered gaffe prone for saying outrageous things with my colour metaphors. Apparently I have a tendency to say funny things which you really cannot say in polite society.

    2) My mother wouldn't be able to cope with the constant attacks politicians come under. My private life is erm colourful. Her muslim ladies who lunch group would be ashamed by me.

    3) MP pay is shit, I couldn't afford all my shoes and clothes on an MP's salary.

    4) I have to keep my mind occupied, I really couldn't sit on the backbenches for a few years, I need to go straight into the cabinet.
    On the bright side, imagine being an ambitious, not insane Conservative MP right now.

    You probably had a lucky escape.
    I think Boris Johnson would have kicked me out of the party in 2019.
  • Options
    CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 40,014
    kle4 said:

    Leon said:

    kle4 said:

    A Roman emperor has been listed as “black Briton” by the BBC and some UK museums, despite not being black.

    Lucius Septimius Severus died on campaign in Britain in 211AD , and has been included in teaching material and children’s books alongside influential black Britons such as Mary Seacole and Olaudah Equiano.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/10/30/bbc-hails-roman-emperor-black-briton/

    Is it like Cleopatra where they'll go 'Oh, we don't really know so they might have been'(which at best is still wishful thinking rather than being able to claim as fact) or is there an actual reason behind the idea? I know at least one Emperor was born in Africa and one was named 'the arab', so did they just go off that?
    One quote from that article


    “The ancient biographical collection Historia Augustus explains that Severus was disturbed by the sight of a black person on one occasion, taking his “ominous colour” as a bad omen while on campaign.”

    I mean, I know, but. Lol
    Ouch.

    I mean, no one expects everyone to be an expert to know that level of detail, but does the story provide an explanation from the BBC and museums as to how they made the error? Because if it is as simple as 'Wikipedia says he was born in Africa and we just assumed' that is bad, but if that is not the reason they thought it then what was the reason?
    Museums might just have taken the BBC material as it was handed out, e.g. in a pre-arranged partnership - or simply had their names on the scheme, ditto. Can't see the DT to check that point.
  • Options
    Meanwhile, in "are you sure that's entirely wise, Sir?" news,

    In conversation with @elonmusk
    After the AI Safety Summit
    Thursday night on @x

    https://twitter.com/RishiSunak/status/1719055211451306003
  • Options
    FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,300
    edited October 2023
    kyf_100 said:

    kinabalu said:

    kyf_100 said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    We were discussing the impact of AI on the global south yesterday. I’ve just read a cogent article saying 5m coding jobs in India will disappear immediately - ie in the next two years. Not in a decade. From now on

    I use ChatGPT and CoPilot every day to assist with coding. Now I am not doing run of mill boilerplate stuff, but it still makes absolutely loads of mistakes. I would say at the moment, it is more like an a combination of decent auto-complete (like you do with text messages) and an advanced search for stack overflow (which all coders have used for donkeys years to get an idealised solution to common problems). Once you get too far from tasks that are easily found there, it starts to break down.

    In summary, will it cause lots of job losses a few years down the line, yes. I wouldn't want to be a random coder starting out their career now. Would I trust it to go from 10 coders to 1-3 coders doing the same job, not yet, not unless you want massively buggy code.
    Indeed. I use ChatGPT and AWS's CodeWhisperer, and they're great tools, but that's all they are - tools. You have to be really careful how you use them though, and you still have to understand what you are doing. I've already been caught out once or twice by suggested code that initially looked perfectly good but turned out to contain some stupid bug that I missed on checking through it.
    Lots of these prognoses are predicated on another leap by AI in the next year. GPT5 etc

    And if the rumours are right, and GPT5 is to GPT4 what GPT4 was to 3, then they are right to be “alarmist”

    And that’s just OpenAI
    GPT3 -> GPT4 for coding wasn't that big of advance. It was evolution, rather than revolution. You could say well now you can show it a picture of some maths and it will code that function, thats new, but again, its very very hit and miss. I have been trying this to speed up implementing academic papers and its really not that great. I find I have to convert image to latex (a kinda of programming language to create scientific texts) then to say python and still so so.
    It just takes one of these machines to have the ability to self improve - then KABOOM
    It doesn't even "understand" basic maths yet, let alone know how to improve upon that. I had it the other day arguing black is white over the incorrect details of a tensor, which is trivial maths.

    This is the fundamental issue with the idea of LLM being predicted on probabilistic selection of next token.
    Arguably it doesn't "understand" anything because it's a goldfish in a bowl with a 5 second memory that happens to be born with an encyclopedia inside its head.

    Give it long term memory, and it starts to look shockingly like how human minds work.

    https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.10250.pdf

    An LLM with long term memory accessible the way humans can remember something from 20 years ago at a pinch, starts to look shockingly like us. Give it the ability to improve on its own code and it starts to look very much like us. The human mind is nothing special.

    We may be 5-10 years away from this, or some have speculated, Google or OpenAI may be there already but holding back on releasing it for fear of what it will do. But it is coming.
    I think need to be careful what I mean by understanding. No its doesn't understand anything in the human sense, but I would argue it has learned very decent set of rules for natural language and that the probabilistic approach then allows for this nice ability to produce psuedo-creative outputs.

    My experience working with it, this training approach doesn't seem to have worked very well for ascertaining the rules of maths or coding of maths. There is a reason they hooked it to mathematica, because without, it is actually really bad. Can this be improved, sure, but is the probabilistic LLM approach to trying to model hard science like maths the right approach, I am not convinced. Could there by something similar or better, sure. But we aren't there yet. The human created Mathematica is still vastly superior, and everybody in STEM isn't saying well that all the jobs gone because of Wolfram Alpha / Mathematica (which has been about for what 35 years), rather its a really useful tool.
    Yes, I agree with you entirely there. About 50% of my queries to GPT4 involve the Wolfram plugin - e.g. here are a bunch of figures, can you go away and calculate NPV on this project? With Wolfram it gets it right, without, it's a mess. So it has no intelligence or understanding in the human sense, yet.

    The interesting question I keep coming back to is, what does intelligence, or as you call it, understanding, really look like, and how will we distinguish it from a really advanced inference model when we reach it?

    Most of the people I know working in the AI space at the moment are of the opinion that humans are just really advanced LLMs with gigantic memories and processing power. I suspect this theory will be proven in the next few years - though it's probably harder to disprove.

    I like to think back to Data from TNG. Is he really alive, or just a very very fast processor chip with memory access and a 24th century LLM? What makes human consciousness special or unique?
    Feelings, whoa oh oh, feelings ...
    Are we quoting the original here, or the infinitely superior 1998 cover by The Offspring?

    Is it the offspring version a cover, I thought it was more a parody, as the lyrics are different.
  • Options
    StereodogStereodog Posts: 401
    Chris said:

    Don’t think Labour is going down the agree to differ over honourably held views route.


    Naming geographical features is now a thought crime.
    I think it may be the idea of Israelis and Palestinians living in peace that is deemed offensive.
    No it’s the deliberate use of an anti Israeli slogan which people find offensive. It’s like a German in 1939 saying “I long for a time when all people from the Mass to the Memel can live together in peace and harmony “. Andy MacDonsld isn’t stupid and would have known what he was saying.
  • Options
    bigjohnowlsbigjohnowls Posts: 21,908
    Andy_JS said:

    Starmer has problems.

    https://twitter.com/LeftieStats/status/1719056546435322290

    "Stats for Lefties
    @LeftieStats
    🚨 BREAKING: Leftist MP Andy McDonald has been suspended from Labour for a pro-Palestine speech.

    In his speech, McDonald said: "We won’t rest ... until all people ... between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty."

    Labour says this speech was "deeply offensive"."

    Israelis and Palestinians living in peaceful liberty is deeply offensive

    FFS SKS FANS please explain
  • Options
    williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 48,175
    kle4 said:

    Don’t think Labour is going down the agree to differ over honourably held views route.


    'Between the river and and the sea can live in peaceful liberty' is an interesting variation I've not seen before.
    The boldest contribution came from a former British diplomat who suggested that if they can’t agree then neither of them should have it. The original comment is now deleted but this is her clarification:

    https://x.com/alexhallhall/status/1716861599309246485

    Many people have misunderstood my post. My mistake. I WASN'T suggesting ethnically cleansing or forcibly removing both peoples from the land. Of course not!!!! I meant maybe neither should be in charge, but a "neutral" (if one exists) outside party on their mutual behalf. 😥
  • Options
    Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 27,050
    edited October 2023
    carnforth said:

    Taz said:

    Small businesses are being hammered by the war on cash.

    Fees for contactless are rising massively for small businesses.

    https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/cardsloans/article-12682825/Pay-cash-spare-crippling-card-fees-plead-traders.html

    "The cost of processing a card payment has increased by 600 per cent in the past nine years, according to campaign group Axe the Card Tax."

    Doubt.
    Maybe costs per card transaction have gone down, but if most of a business's transactions used to be cash with only a few card transactions, they would only have paid the card transaction cost occasionally. If they have to pay it nearly all the time it would add up to more overall?
  • Options
    MikeLMikeL Posts: 7,319

    Note from meeting between Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak in March 2020

    “We are killing the patient to tackle the tumour”

    Next line: Why are we destroying the economy for people who are going to die anyway?




    https://twitter.com/nickeardleybbc/status/1719028306907955345

    Can anyone actually read every word of this handwriting?

    I can read most of it but not all.

    Can anyone reproduce it in full?
  • Options
    CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 40,014

    carnforth said:

    carnforth said:

    Taz said:

    Small businesses are being hammered by the war on cash.

    Fees for contactless are rising massively for small businesses.

    https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/cardsloans/article-12682825/Pay-cash-spare-crippling-card-fees-plead-traders.html

    "The cost of processing a card payment has increased by 600 per cent in the past nine years, according to campaign group Axe the Card Tax."

    Doubt.
    They says costs are 2.5% now so back in 2014 costs were 0.004%?

    I call fucking bullshit.
    0.4%, Shirley? 600 percent is six times.
    I still call fucking bullshit.

    Card costs have come down.

    Numerical calculation out by a factor of 100 but fronting it out and doubling down on your original claim, bold. Have you considered a career in politics, young man?
    It was a lack of self confidence that stopped me going into politics.

    I am way too modest for politics.
    I can imagine.
    I really did consider going into politics 20 years ago but there were a few insurmountable barriers

    1) I would be considered gaffe prone for saying outrageous things with my colour metaphors. Apparently I have a tendency to say funny things which you really cannot say in polite society.

    2) My mother wouldn't be able to cope with the constant attacks politicians come under. My private life is erm colourful. Her muslim ladies who lunch group would be ashamed by me.

    3) MP pay is shit, I couldn't afford all my shoes and clothes on an MP's salary.

    4) I have to keep my mind occupied, I really couldn't sit on the backbenches for a few years, I need to go straight into the cabinet.
    On the bright side, imagine being an ambitious, not insane Conservative MP right now.

    You probably had a lucky escape.
    I think Boris Johnson would have kicked me out of the party in 2019.
    You could have become a LD and needed to take a great interest in sheep and colourful wellies.
  • Options
    JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 39,134
    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    We were discussing the impact of AI on the global south yesterday. I’ve just read a cogent article saying 5m coding jobs in India will disappear immediately - ie in the next two years. Not in a decade. From now on

    I use ChatGPT and CoPilot every day to assist with coding. Now I am not doing run of mill boilerplate stuff, but it still makes absolutely loads of mistakes. I would say at the moment, it is more like an a combination of decent auto-complete (like you do with text messages) and an advanced search for stack overflow (which all coders have used for donkeys years to get an idealised solution to common problems). Once you get too far from tasks that are easily found there, it starts to break down.

    In summary, will it cause lots of job losses a few years down the line, yes. I wouldn't want to be a random coder starting out their career now. Would I trust it to go from 10 coders to 1-3 coders doing the same job, not yet, not unless you want massively buggy code.
    Indeed. I use ChatGPT and AWS's CodeWhisperer, and they're great tools, but that's all they are - tools. You have to be really careful how you use them though, and you still have to understand what you are doing. I've already been caught out once or twice by suggested code that initially looked perfectly good but turned out to contain some stupid bug that I missed on checking through it.
    Lots of these prognoses are predicated on another leap by AI in the next year. GPT5 etc

    And if the rumours are right, and GPT5 is to GPT4 what GPT4 was to 3, then they are right to be “alarmist”

    And that’s just OpenAI
    GPT3 -> GPT4 for coding wasn't that big of advance. It was evolution, rather than revolution. You could say well now you can show it a picture of some maths and it will code that function, thats new, but again, its very very hit and miss. I have been trying this to speed up implementing academic papers and its really not that great. I find I have to convert image to latex (a kinda of programming language to create scientific texts) then to say python and still so so.
    It just takes one of these machines to have the ability to self improve - then KABOOM
    It doesn't even "understand" basic maths yet, let alone know how to improve upon that. I had it the other day arguing black is white over the incorrect details of a tensor, which is trivial maths.

    This is the fundamental issue with the idea of LLM being predicted on probabilistic selection of next token.
    Arguably it doesn't "understand" anything because it's a goldfish in a bowl with a 5 second memory that happens to be born with an encyclopedia inside its head.

    Give it long term memory, and it starts to look shockingly like how human minds work.

    https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.10250.pdf

    An LLM with long term memory accessible the way humans can remember something from 20 years ago at a pinch, starts to look shockingly like us. Give it the ability to improve on its own code and it starts to look very much like us. The human mind is nothing special.

    We may be 5-10 years away from this, or some have speculated, Google or OpenAI may be there already but holding back on releasing it for fear of what it will do. But it is coming.
    ... or the LLM approach is fundamentally flawed, and whilst good at imitating intelligence, will not be able to approach true intelligence or AGI.
  • Options
    Carnyx said:

    carnforth said:

    carnforth said:

    Taz said:

    Small businesses are being hammered by the war on cash.

    Fees for contactless are rising massively for small businesses.

    https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/cardsloans/article-12682825/Pay-cash-spare-crippling-card-fees-plead-traders.html

    "The cost of processing a card payment has increased by 600 per cent in the past nine years, according to campaign group Axe the Card Tax."

    Doubt.
    They says costs are 2.5% now so back in 2014 costs were 0.004%?

    I call fucking bullshit.
    0.4%, Shirley? 600 percent is six times.
    I still call fucking bullshit.

    Card costs have come down.

    Numerical calculation out by a factor of 100 but fronting it out and doubling down on your original claim, bold. Have you considered a career in politics, young man?
    It was a lack of self confidence that stopped me going into politics.

    I am way too modest for politics.
    I can imagine.
    I really did consider going into politics 20 years ago but there were a few insurmountable barriers

    1) I would be considered gaffe prone for saying outrageous things with my colour metaphors. Apparently I have a tendency to say funny things which you really cannot say in polite society.

    2) My mother wouldn't be able to cope with the constant attacks politicians come under. My private life is erm colourful. Her muslim ladies who lunch group would be ashamed by me.

    3) MP pay is shit, I couldn't afford all my shoes and clothes on an MP's salary.

    4) I have to keep my mind occupied, I really couldn't sit on the backbenches for a few years, I need to go straight into the cabinet.
    On the bright side, imagine being an ambitious, not insane Conservative MP right now.

    You probably had a lucky escape.
    I think Boris Johnson would have kicked me out of the party in 2019.
    You could have become a LD and needed to take a great interest in sheep and colourful wellies.
    I am a Tory, I would not have joined another party.
  • Options
    CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 40,014
    edited October 2023
    MikeL said:

    Note from meeting between Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak in March 2020

    “We are killing the patient to tackle the tumour”

    Next line: Why are we destroying the economy for people who are going to die anyway?




    https://twitter.com/nickeardleybbc/status/1719028306907955345

    Can anyone actually read every word of this handwriting?

    I can read most of it but not all.

    Can anyone reproduce it in full?
    Try

    large ppt [proportion?] who will die -
    - Bed blockers

    PM - three month battle plan to win

    [arrow] what is this / defeat the virus. testing
    interrelate with etc.

  • Options
    kinabalukinabalu Posts: 39,395
    Leon said:

    Note from meeting between Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak in March 2020

    “We are killing the patient to tackle the tumour”

    Next line: Why are we destroying the economy for people who are going to die anyway?




    https://twitter.com/nickeardleybbc/status/1719028306907955345

    Boris has been an idiot when it comes to many things, eg party gate, Carrie, etc, but in this he was totally right. Would we rather not have a PM asking these pointed, direct questions, when we are about to lockdown the entire country, and saddle us all with a trillion quid of debt?

    So he said it bluntly. Even better. Make the point
    Seemed to be out of his depth though. Just saying stuff for the sake of it and having to be humoured. We've all met people like that.
  • Options
    kle4kle4 Posts: 92,079

    kle4 said:

    Don’t think Labour is going down the agree to differ over honourably held views route.


    'Between the river and and the sea can live in peaceful liberty' is an interesting variation I've not seen before.
    The boldest contribution came from a former British diplomat who suggested that if they can’t agree then neither of them should have it. The original comment is now deleted but this is her clarification:

    https://x.com/alexhallhall/status/1716861599309246485

    Many people have misunderstood my post. My mistake. I WASN'T suggesting ethnically cleansing or forcibly removing both peoples from the land. Of course not!!!! I meant maybe neither should be in charge, but a "neutral" (if one exists) outside party on their mutual behalf. 😥
    Wouldn't that just be (benign) colonialism?!
  • Options
    FossFoss Posts: 694
    edited October 2023

    kle4 said:

    Don’t think Labour is going down the agree to differ over honourably held views route.


    'Between the river and and the sea can live in peaceful liberty' is an interesting variation I've not seen before.
    The boldest contribution came from a former British diplomat who suggested that if they can’t agree then neither of them should have it. The original comment is now deleted but this is her clarification:

    https://x.com/alexhallhall/status/1716861599309246485

    Many people have misunderstood my post. My mistake. I WASN'T suggesting ethnically cleansing or forcibly removing both peoples from the land. Of course not!!!! I meant maybe neither should be in charge, but a "neutral" (if one exists) outside party on their mutual behalf. 😥

    Perhaps the PB brains trust could solve the Middle East and our upthread nuclear waste discussion at the same time...
  • Options
    CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 40,014

    Carnyx said:

    carnforth said:

    carnforth said:

    Taz said:

    Small businesses are being hammered by the war on cash.

    Fees for contactless are rising massively for small businesses.

    https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/cardsloans/article-12682825/Pay-cash-spare-crippling-card-fees-plead-traders.html

    "The cost of processing a card payment has increased by 600 per cent in the past nine years, according to campaign group Axe the Card Tax."

    Doubt.
    They says costs are 2.5% now so back in 2014 costs were 0.004%?

    I call fucking bullshit.
    0.4%, Shirley? 600 percent is six times.
    I still call fucking bullshit.

    Card costs have come down.

    Numerical calculation out by a factor of 100 but fronting it out and doubling down on your original claim, bold. Have you considered a career in politics, young man?
    It was a lack of self confidence that stopped me going into politics.

    I am way too modest for politics.
    I can imagine.
    I really did consider going into politics 20 years ago but there were a few insurmountable barriers

    1) I would be considered gaffe prone for saying outrageous things with my colour metaphors. Apparently I have a tendency to say funny things which you really cannot say in polite society.

    2) My mother wouldn't be able to cope with the constant attacks politicians come under. My private life is erm colourful. Her muslim ladies who lunch group would be ashamed by me.

    3) MP pay is shit, I couldn't afford all my shoes and clothes on an MP's salary.

    4) I have to keep my mind occupied, I really couldn't sit on the backbenches for a few years, I need to go straight into the cabinet.
    On the bright side, imagine being an ambitious, not insane Conservative MP right now.

    You probably had a lucky escape.
    I think Boris Johnson would have kicked me out of the party in 2019.
    You could have become a LD and needed to take a great interest in sheep and colourful wellies.
    I am a Tory, I would not have joined another party.
    Not even an orange booker LD? Okay, fair enough!
  • Options
    kinabalukinabalu Posts: 39,395
    kyf_100 said:

    kinabalu said:

    kyf_100 said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    We were discussing the impact of AI on the global south yesterday. I’ve just read a cogent article saying 5m coding jobs in India will disappear immediately - ie in the next two years. Not in a decade. From now on

    I use ChatGPT and CoPilot every day to assist with coding. Now I am not doing run of mill boilerplate stuff, but it still makes absolutely loads of mistakes. I would say at the moment, it is more like an a combination of decent auto-complete (like you do with text messages) and an advanced search for stack overflow (which all coders have used for donkeys years to get an idealised solution to common problems). Once you get too far from tasks that are easily found there, it starts to break down.

    In summary, will it cause lots of job losses a few years down the line, yes. I wouldn't want to be a random coder starting out their career now. Would I trust it to go from 10 coders to 1-3 coders doing the same job, not yet, not unless you want massively buggy code.
    Indeed. I use ChatGPT and AWS's CodeWhisperer, and they're great tools, but that's all they are - tools. You have to be really careful how you use them though, and you still have to understand what you are doing. I've already been caught out once or twice by suggested code that initially looked perfectly good but turned out to contain some stupid bug that I missed on checking through it.
    Lots of these prognoses are predicated on another leap by AI in the next year. GPT5 etc

    And if the rumours are right, and GPT5 is to GPT4 what GPT4 was to 3, then they are right to be “alarmist”

    And that’s just OpenAI
    GPT3 -> GPT4 for coding wasn't that big of advance. It was evolution, rather than revolution. You could say well now you can show it a picture of some maths and it will code that function, thats new, but again, its very very hit and miss. I have been trying this to speed up implementing academic papers and its really not that great. I find I have to convert image to latex (a kinda of programming language to create scientific texts) then to say python and still so so.
    It just takes one of these machines to have the ability to self improve - then KABOOM
    It doesn't even "understand" basic maths yet, let alone know how to improve upon that. I had it the other day arguing black is white over the incorrect details of a tensor, which is trivial maths.

    This is the fundamental issue with the idea of LLM being predicted on probabilistic selection of next token.
    Arguably it doesn't "understand" anything because it's a goldfish in a bowl with a 5 second memory that happens to be born with an encyclopedia inside its head.

    Give it long term memory, and it starts to look shockingly like how human minds work.

    https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.10250.pdf

    An LLM with long term memory accessible the way humans can remember something from 20 years ago at a pinch, starts to look shockingly like us. Give it the ability to improve on its own code and it starts to look very much like us. The human mind is nothing special.

    We may be 5-10 years away from this, or some have speculated, Google or OpenAI may be there already but holding back on releasing it for fear of what it will do. But it is coming.
    I think need to be careful what I mean by understanding. No its doesn't understand anything in the human sense, but I would argue it has learned very decent set of rules for natural language and that the probabilistic approach then allows for this nice ability to produce psuedo-creative outputs.

    My experience working with it, this training approach doesn't seem to have worked very well for ascertaining the rules of maths or coding of maths. There is a reason they hooked it to mathematica, because without, it is actually really bad. Can this be improved, sure, but is the probabilistic LLM approach to trying to model hard science like maths the right approach, I am not convinced. Could there by something similar or better, sure. But we aren't there yet. The human created Mathematica is still vastly superior, and everybody in STEM isn't saying well that all the jobs gone because of Wolfram Alpha / Mathematica (which has been about for what 35 years), rather its a really useful tool.
    Yes, I agree with you entirely there. About 50% of my queries to GPT4 involve the Wolfram plugin - e.g. here are a bunch of figures, can you go away and calculate NPV on this project? With Wolfram it gets it right, without, it's a mess. So it has no intelligence or understanding in the human sense, yet.

    The interesting question I keep coming back to is, what does intelligence, or as you call it, understanding, really look like, and how will we distinguish it from a really advanced inference model when we reach it?

    Most of the people I know working in the AI space at the moment are of the opinion that humans are just really advanced LLMs with gigantic memories and processing power. I suspect this theory will be proven in the next few years - though it's probably harder to disprove.

    I like to think back to Data from TNG. Is he really alive, or just a very very fast processor chip with memory access and a 24th century LLM? What makes human consciousness special or unique?
    Feelings, whoa oh oh, feelings ...
    Are we quoting the original here, or the infinitely superior 1998 cover by The Offspring?
    Ah I only know the original.
  • Options
    Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 55,694
    Pulpstar said:

    HYUFD said:

    148grss said:

    That a good list, thanks Mr Brooke. I'd also add the need to ensure as much energy independence as possible is vital.

    But... why not do both? D the list above *and* move towards net zero?

    Oh. and first. If this thread survives...

    I doubt we have the money. But if the investment side is handled correctly some of the projects will meet your goal of doing two things in tandem.
    I never understand the "we don't have the money" argument when it comes to the environment. If we don't invest in a green future there will not be a future. Also, money isn't real! So, if a government with control over its own currency (like the UK) decides it wants to shift its economy to go big on green (in a similar manner as "wartime" economies shift) then we could do that. Would it change a lot of things, yes - but not necessarily negatively. It's just that the British political consensus is that government shouldn't be allowed to do things that could possibly make the world a better place. That we're behind even the US on this (who are investing huge amounts into green infrastructure) is telling about the myopic nature of British political foresight.
    How do you interpret this chart?

    image
    We are already leading the pack on reducing emissions anyway
    The UK is the most improved, but not the best. France still has the lowest emissions per capita in the G7.
    Does France have new nuclear projects going to Judicial Review ?

    https://www.leighday.co.uk/news/news/2023-news/campaigners-win-permission-to-appeal-against-sizewell-c-nuclear-power-station-ruling/
    This sort of bullshit is what massively slows down new infrastructure in this country.
  • Options
    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    carnforth said:

    carnforth said:

    Taz said:

    Small businesses are being hammered by the war on cash.

    Fees for contactless are rising massively for small businesses.

    https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/cardsloans/article-12682825/Pay-cash-spare-crippling-card-fees-plead-traders.html

    "The cost of processing a card payment has increased by 600 per cent in the past nine years, according to campaign group Axe the Card Tax."

    Doubt.
    They says costs are 2.5% now so back in 2014 costs were 0.004%?

    I call fucking bullshit.
    0.4%, Shirley? 600 percent is six times.
    I still call fucking bullshit.

    Card costs have come down.

    Numerical calculation out by a factor of 100 but fronting it out and doubling down on your original claim, bold. Have you considered a career in politics, young man?
    It was a lack of self confidence that stopped me going into politics.

    I am way too modest for politics.
    I can imagine.
    I really did consider going into politics 20 years ago but there were a few insurmountable barriers

    1) I would be considered gaffe prone for saying outrageous things with my colour metaphors. Apparently I have a tendency to say funny things which you really cannot say in polite society.

    2) My mother wouldn't be able to cope with the constant attacks politicians come under. My private life is erm colourful. Her muslim ladies who lunch group would be ashamed by me.

    3) MP pay is shit, I couldn't afford all my shoes and clothes on an MP's salary.

    4) I have to keep my mind occupied, I really couldn't sit on the backbenches for a few years, I need to go straight into the cabinet.
    On the bright side, imagine being an ambitious, not insane Conservative MP right now.

    You probably had a lucky escape.
    I think Boris Johnson would have kicked me out of the party in 2019.
    You could have become a LD and needed to take a great interest in sheep and colourful wellies.
    I am a Tory, I would not have joined another party.
    Not even an orange booker LD? Okay, fair enough!
    I am a fiscal Thatcherite.

    I haven't changed, the Tory party has.
  • Options
    kle4kle4 Posts: 92,079
    edited October 2023
    MikeL said:

    Note from meeting between Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak in March 2020

    “We are killing the patient to tackle the tumour”

    Next line: Why are we destroying the economy for people who are going to die anyway?




    https://twitter.com/nickeardleybbc/status/1719028306907955345

    Can anyone actually read every word of this handwriting?

    I can read most of it but not all.

    Can anyone reproduce it in full?
    "We're killing the patient to tackle the tumour"

    Large ppl [I think this is 'large ppl' eg people? edit - carnyx may be right about being proportion]who will die - why are we destroying the economy for people who will die anyway soon

    Bed blockers

    PM - there month battleplan to win

    What is this/ defeat the virus. testing. interrelate[?] with etc. [Testing may be intended to be after 'with']
  • Options
    ydoethurydoethur Posts: 67,477
    edited October 2023
    Carnyx said:

    MikeL said:

    Note from meeting between Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak in March 2020

    “We are killing the patient to tackle the tumour”

    Next line: Why are we destroying the economy for people who are going to die anyway?




    https://twitter.com/nickeardleybbc/status/1719028306907955345

    Can anyone actually read every word of this handwriting?

    I can read most of it but not all.

    Can anyone reproduce it in full?
    Try

    large ppt [proportion?] who will die -
    - Bed blockers
    Said without irony, apparently.

    (The first is fortunately more qualified in the handwriting, otherwise it's philosophically a nonsense. It may apply to Cummings if I ever get hold of him.)
  • Options
    kle4kle4 Posts: 92,079

    Pulpstar said:

    HYUFD said:

    148grss said:

    That a good list, thanks Mr Brooke. I'd also add the need to ensure as much energy independence as possible is vital.

    But... why not do both? D the list above *and* move towards net zero?

    Oh. and first. If this thread survives...

    I doubt we have the money. But if the investment side is handled correctly some of the projects will meet your goal of doing two things in tandem.
    I never understand the "we don't have the money" argument when it comes to the environment. If we don't invest in a green future there will not be a future. Also, money isn't real! So, if a government with control over its own currency (like the UK) decides it wants to shift its economy to go big on green (in a similar manner as "wartime" economies shift) then we could do that. Would it change a lot of things, yes - but not necessarily negatively. It's just that the British political consensus is that government shouldn't be allowed to do things that could possibly make the world a better place. That we're behind even the US on this (who are investing huge amounts into green infrastructure) is telling about the myopic nature of British political foresight.
    How do you interpret this chart?

    image
    We are already leading the pack on reducing emissions anyway
    The UK is the most improved, but not the best. France still has the lowest emissions per capita in the G7.
    Does France have new nuclear projects going to Judicial Review ?

    https://www.leighday.co.uk/news/news/2023-news/campaigners-win-permission-to-appeal-against-sizewell-c-nuclear-power-station-ruling/
    This sort of bullshit is what massively slows down new infrastructure in this country.
    At what point is a decision just, you know, done in this country?
  • Options
    nico679nico679 Posts: 5,070

    Andy_JS said:

    Starmer has problems.

    https://twitter.com/LeftieStats/status/1719056546435322290

    "Stats for Lefties
    @LeftieStats
    🚨 BREAKING: Leftist MP Andy McDonald has been suspended from Labour for a pro-Palestine speech.

    In his speech, McDonald said: "We won’t rest ... until all people ... between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty."

    Labour says this speech was "deeply offensive"."

    Israelis and Palestinians living in peaceful liberty is deeply offensive

    FFS SKS FANS please explain
    It’s a pathetic over reaction by Starmer. He seems to be over compensating now for past anti Semitic accusations.
  • Options
    kyf_100kyf_100 Posts: 3,964

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    We were discussing the impact of AI on the global south yesterday. I’ve just read a cogent article saying 5m coding jobs in India will disappear immediately - ie in the next two years. Not in a decade. From now on

    I use ChatGPT and CoPilot every day to assist with coding. Now I am not doing run of mill boilerplate stuff, but it still makes absolutely loads of mistakes. I would say at the moment, it is more like an a combination of decent auto-complete (like you do with text messages) and an advanced search for stack overflow (which all coders have used for donkeys years to get an idealised solution to common problems). Once you get too far from tasks that are easily found there, it starts to break down.

    In summary, will it cause lots of job losses a few years down the line, yes. I wouldn't want to be a random coder starting out their career now. Would I trust it to go from 10 coders to 1-3 coders doing the same job, not yet, not unless you want massively buggy code.
    Indeed. I use ChatGPT and AWS's CodeWhisperer, and they're great tools, but that's all they are - tools. You have to be really careful how you use them though, and you still have to understand what you are doing. I've already been caught out once or twice by suggested code that initially looked perfectly good but turned out to contain some stupid bug that I missed on checking through it.
    Lots of these prognoses are predicated on another leap by AI in the next year. GPT5 etc

    And if the rumours are right, and GPT5 is to GPT4 what GPT4 was to 3, then they are right to be “alarmist”

    And that’s just OpenAI
    GPT3 -> GPT4 for coding wasn't that big of advance. It was evolution, rather than revolution. You could say well now you can show it a picture of some maths and it will code that function, thats new, but again, its very very hit and miss. I have been trying this to speed up implementing academic papers and its really not that great. I find I have to convert image to latex (a kinda of programming language to create scientific texts) then to say python and still so so.
    It just takes one of these machines to have the ability to self improve - then KABOOM
    It doesn't even "understand" basic maths yet, let alone know how to improve upon that. I had it the other day arguing black is white over the incorrect details of a tensor, which is trivial maths.

    This is the fundamental issue with the idea of LLM being predicted on probabilistic selection of next token.
    Arguably it doesn't "understand" anything because it's a goldfish in a bowl with a 5 second memory that happens to be born with an encyclopedia inside its head.

    Give it long term memory, and it starts to look shockingly like how human minds work.

    https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.10250.pdf

    An LLM with long term memory accessible the way humans can remember something from 20 years ago at a pinch, starts to look shockingly like us. Give it the ability to improve on its own code and it starts to look very much like us. The human mind is nothing special.

    We may be 5-10 years away from this, or some have speculated, Google or OpenAI may be there already but holding back on releasing it for fear of what it will do. But it is coming.
    ... or the LLM approach is fundamentally flawed, and whilst good at imitating intelligence, will not be able to approach true intelligence or AGI.
    Yes, but...

    To borrow from Westworld, "if you can't tell, does it matter?"

    Either we are 95% of the way to AGI, or the current route (LLM + extended memory and processing power) is a route to nothing. But what seems increasingly likely (Based on some of the uncensored local LLMs I've tried) is we're pretty much there on something that can simulate intelligence already. So if you put one of those models into a humanlike body and for all intents and purposes it behaves like one of us, what's the difference?
  • Options
    MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 44,665
    kle4 said:

    Leon said:

    kle4 said:

    A Roman emperor has been listed as “black Briton” by the BBC and some UK museums, despite not being black.

    Lucius Septimius Severus died on campaign in Britain in 211AD , and has been included in teaching material and children’s books alongside influential black Britons such as Mary Seacole and Olaudah Equiano.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/10/30/bbc-hails-roman-emperor-black-briton/

    Is it like Cleopatra where they'll go 'Oh, we don't really know so they might have been'(which at best is still wishful thinking rather than being able to claim as fact) or is there an actual reason behind the idea? I know at least one Emperor was born in Africa and one was named 'the arab', so did they just go off that?
    One quote from that article


    “The ancient biographical collection Historia Augustus explains that Severus was disturbed by the sight of a black person on one occasion, taking his “ominous colour” as a bad omen while on campaign.”

    I mean, I know, but. Lol
    Ouch.

    I mean, no one expects everyone to be an expert to know that level of detail, but does the story provide an explanation from the BBC and museums as to how they made the error? Because if it is as simple as 'Wikipedia says he was born in Africa and we just assumed' that is bad, but if that is not the reason they thought it then what was the reason?
    Hard core racism was common in Ancient Rome.

    In one of his rants*, Cicero likened a consul to every bad thing he could think of. Then said he (the consul) was a dumb as a black slave….
  • Options
    nico679nico679 Posts: 5,070
    I find it extraordinary that the media are just reporting the blocking of the main route south from northern Gaza with a shrug and the IDF just wiping out a car of people trying to escape .
  • Options
    kle4kle4 Posts: 92,079
    kyf_100 said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    We were discussing the impact of AI on the global south yesterday. I’ve just read a cogent article saying 5m coding jobs in India will disappear immediately - ie in the next two years. Not in a decade. From now on

    I use ChatGPT and CoPilot every day to assist with coding. Now I am not doing run of mill boilerplate stuff, but it still makes absolutely loads of mistakes. I would say at the moment, it is more like an a combination of decent auto-complete (like you do with text messages) and an advanced search for stack overflow (which all coders have used for donkeys years to get an idealised solution to common problems). Once you get too far from tasks that are easily found there, it starts to break down.

    In summary, will it cause lots of job losses a few years down the line, yes. I wouldn't want to be a random coder starting out their career now. Would I trust it to go from 10 coders to 1-3 coders doing the same job, not yet, not unless you want massively buggy code.
    Indeed. I use ChatGPT and AWS's CodeWhisperer, and they're great tools, but that's all they are - tools. You have to be really careful how you use them though, and you still have to understand what you are doing. I've already been caught out once or twice by suggested code that initially looked perfectly good but turned out to contain some stupid bug that I missed on checking through it.
    Lots of these prognoses are predicated on another leap by AI in the next year. GPT5 etc

    And if the rumours are right, and GPT5 is to GPT4 what GPT4 was to 3, then they are right to be “alarmist”

    And that’s just OpenAI
    GPT3 -> GPT4 for coding wasn't that big of advance. It was evolution, rather than revolution. You could say well now you can show it a picture of some maths and it will code that function, thats new, but again, its very very hit and miss. I have been trying this to speed up implementing academic papers and its really not that great. I find I have to convert image to latex (a kinda of programming language to create scientific texts) then to say python and still so so.
    It just takes one of these machines to have the ability to self improve - then KABOOM
    It doesn't even "understand" basic maths yet, let alone know how to improve upon that. I had it the other day arguing black is white over the incorrect details of a tensor, which is trivial maths.

    This is the fundamental issue with the idea of LLM being predicted on probabilistic selection of next token.
    Arguably it doesn't "understand" anything because it's a goldfish in a bowl with a 5 second memory that happens to be born with an encyclopedia inside its head.

    Give it long term memory, and it starts to look shockingly like how human minds work.

    https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.10250.pdf

    An LLM with long term memory accessible the way humans can remember something from 20 years ago at a pinch, starts to look shockingly like us. Give it the ability to improve on its own code and it starts to look very much like us. The human mind is nothing special.

    We may be 5-10 years away from this, or some have speculated, Google or OpenAI may be there already but holding back on releasing it for fear of what it will do. But it is coming.
    ... or the LLM approach is fundamentally flawed, and whilst good at imitating intelligence, will not be able to approach true intelligence or AGI.
    Yes, but...

    To borrow from Westworld, "if you can't tell, does it matter?"

    Either we are 95% of the way to AGI, or the current route (LLM + extended memory and processing power) is a route to nothing. But what seems increasingly likely (Based on some of the uncensored local LLMs I've tried) is we're pretty much there on something that can simulate intelligence already. So if you put one of those models into a humanlike body and for all intents and purposes it behaves like one of us, what's the difference?
    Some philosophical types posit that humans don't really think in a free way either, we just imagine we do after subconscious and chemical processes already determine what we will do.
  • Options
    What a strange way of reporting the facts from the BBC,

    Speaking to German media, Ricarda Louk said she had been told by the Israeli military that a DNA sample taken from part of a skull bone proved to be Shani's. Her body has not yet been found.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-67260093
  • Options
    ChrisChris Posts: 11,142
    edited October 2023
    Stereodog said:

    Chris said:

    Don’t think Labour is going down the agree to differ over honourably held views route.


    Naming geographical features is now a thought crime.
    I think it may be the idea of Israelis and Palestinians living in peace that is deemed offensive.
    No it’s the deliberate use of an anti Israeli slogan which people find offensive. It’s like a German in 1939 saying “I long for a time when all people from the Mass to the Memel can live together in peace and harmony “. Andy MacDonsld isn’t stupid and would have known what he was saying.
    But we've been told here it's offensive because it implies the elimination of Israel and in fact the elimination of all Jews, which is obviously nonsensical as a pretext for disapproving of a wish for Israelis and Palestinians to live together peacefully.

    Don't people even have to give a believable reason for being offended before people are silenced and suspended for being "offensive" these days?
  • Options
    kle4kle4 Posts: 92,079

    kle4 said:

    Leon said:

    kle4 said:

    A Roman emperor has been listed as “black Briton” by the BBC and some UK museums, despite not being black.

    Lucius Septimius Severus died on campaign in Britain in 211AD , and has been included in teaching material and children’s books alongside influential black Britons such as Mary Seacole and Olaudah Equiano.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/10/30/bbc-hails-roman-emperor-black-briton/

    Is it like Cleopatra where they'll go 'Oh, we don't really know so they might have been'(which at best is still wishful thinking rather than being able to claim as fact) or is there an actual reason behind the idea? I know at least one Emperor was born in Africa and one was named 'the arab', so did they just go off that?
    One quote from that article


    “The ancient biographical collection Historia Augustus explains that Severus was disturbed by the sight of a black person on one occasion, taking his “ominous colour” as a bad omen while on campaign.”

    I mean, I know, but. Lol
    Ouch.

    I mean, no one expects everyone to be an expert to know that level of detail, but does the story provide an explanation from the BBC and museums as to how they made the error? Because if it is as simple as 'Wikipedia says he was born in Africa and we just assumed' that is bad, but if that is not the reason they thought it then what was the reason?
    Hard core racism was common in Ancient Rome.

    In one of his rants*, Cicero likened a consul to every bad thing he could think of. Then said he (the consul) was a dumb as a black slave….
    Imperialist conquerors racist? Well, it seems most unusual to me.
  • Options
    carnforthcarnforth Posts: 3,251
    Andy_JS said:

    carnforth said:

    Taz said:

    Small businesses are being hammered by the war on cash.

    Fees for contactless are rising massively for small businesses.

    https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/cardsloans/article-12682825/Pay-cash-spare-crippling-card-fees-plead-traders.html

    "The cost of processing a card payment has increased by 600 per cent in the past nine years, according to campaign group Axe the Card Tax."

    Doubt.
    Maybe costs per card transaction have gone down, but if most of a business's transactions used to be cash with only a few card transactions, they would only have paid the card transaction cost occasionally. If they have to pay it nearly all the time it would add up to more overall?
    That's possible. But that's not a possible meaning of the quoted sentence.
  • Options
    FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,300
    edited October 2023
    Stereodog said:

    Chris said:

    Don’t think Labour is going down the agree to differ over honourably held views route.


    Naming geographical features is now a thought crime.
    I think it may be the idea of Israelis and Palestinians living in peace that is deemed offensive.
    No it’s the deliberate use of an anti Israeli slogan which people find offensive. It’s like a German in 1939 saying “I long for a time when all people from the Mass to the Memel can live together in peace and harmony “. Andy MacDonsld isn’t stupid and would have known what he was saying.
    Its like talking about finding a "final solution"....just don't go there. Its a bit like saying well I never knew black face was offensive, I just came to this halloween party as Jayz, as he is my favourite rapper.
  • Options
    carnforthcarnforth Posts: 3,251

    kle4 said:

    Don’t think Labour is going down the agree to differ over honourably held views route.


    'Between the river and and the sea can live in peaceful liberty' is an interesting variation I've not seen before.
    The boldest contribution came from a former British diplomat who suggested that if they can’t agree then neither of them should have it. The original comment is now deleted but this is her clarification:

    https://x.com/alexhallhall/status/1716861599309246485

    Many people have misunderstood my post. My mistake. I WASN'T suggesting ethnically cleansing or forcibly removing both peoples from the land. Of course not!!!! I meant maybe neither should be in charge, but a "neutral" (if one exists) outside party on their mutual behalf. 😥
    She is delightfully crackers, as befits her name. Not as nutty as certain other ex-ambassadors one might name, but still.
  • Options
    carnforth said:

    Andy_JS said:

    carnforth said:

    Taz said:

    Small businesses are being hammered by the war on cash.

    Fees for contactless are rising massively for small businesses.

    https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/cardsloans/article-12682825/Pay-cash-spare-crippling-card-fees-plead-traders.html

    "The cost of processing a card payment has increased by 600 per cent in the past nine years, according to campaign group Axe the Card Tax."

    Doubt.
    Maybe costs per card transaction have gone down, but if most of a business's transactions used to be cash with only a few card transactions, they would only have paid the card transaction cost occasionally. If they have to pay it nearly all the time it would add up to more overall?
    That's possible. But that's not a possible meaning of the quoted sentence.
    It's not an honest interpretation, sure. But we're talking an article based on a campaign group press release, so honesty isn't necessarily a consideration.
  • Options
    Talking of things you don't want to say....

    Tourist sparks bomb alert in restaurant after mistakenly ordering 'grenade'

    A man was arrested by armed police after confusing the Portuguese words for ‘pomegranate’ and ‘grenade’ when ordering a drink in Lisbon

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/10/30/portugal-tourist-arrest-confuse-pomegranate-grenade-words/
  • Options
    SandyRentoolSandyRentool Posts: 20,756
    On topic, much better than Part 1. But lighting is the energy equivalent of drinking straws. Good PR, but a drop in the ocean.

  • Options
    kyf_100kyf_100 Posts: 3,964
    kle4 said:

    kyf_100 said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    We were discussing the impact of AI on the global south yesterday. I’ve just read a cogent article saying 5m coding jobs in India will disappear immediately - ie in the next two years. Not in a decade. From now on

    I use ChatGPT and CoPilot every day to assist with coding. Now I am not doing run of mill boilerplate stuff, but it still makes absolutely loads of mistakes. I would say at the moment, it is more like an a combination of decent auto-complete (like you do with text messages) and an advanced search for stack overflow (which all coders have used for donkeys years to get an idealised solution to common problems). Once you get too far from tasks that are easily found there, it starts to break down.

    In summary, will it cause lots of job losses a few years down the line, yes. I wouldn't want to be a random coder starting out their career now. Would I trust it to go from 10 coders to 1-3 coders doing the same job, not yet, not unless you want massively buggy code.
    Indeed. I use ChatGPT and AWS's CodeWhisperer, and they're great tools, but that's all they are - tools. You have to be really careful how you use them though, and you still have to understand what you are doing. I've already been caught out once or twice by suggested code that initially looked perfectly good but turned out to contain some stupid bug that I missed on checking through it.
    Lots of these prognoses are predicated on another leap by AI in the next year. GPT5 etc

    And if the rumours are right, and GPT5 is to GPT4 what GPT4 was to 3, then they are right to be “alarmist”

    And that’s just OpenAI
    GPT3 -> GPT4 for coding wasn't that big of advance. It was evolution, rather than revolution. You could say well now you can show it a picture of some maths and it will code that function, thats new, but again, its very very hit and miss. I have been trying this to speed up implementing academic papers and its really not that great. I find I have to convert image to latex (a kinda of programming language to create scientific texts) then to say python and still so so.
    It just takes one of these machines to have the ability to self improve - then KABOOM
    It doesn't even "understand" basic maths yet, let alone know how to improve upon that. I had it the other day arguing black is white over the incorrect details of a tensor, which is trivial maths.

    This is the fundamental issue with the idea of LLM being predicted on probabilistic selection of next token.
    Arguably it doesn't "understand" anything because it's a goldfish in a bowl with a 5 second memory that happens to be born with an encyclopedia inside its head.

    Give it long term memory, and it starts to look shockingly like how human minds work.

    https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.10250.pdf

    An LLM with long term memory accessible the way humans can remember something from 20 years ago at a pinch, starts to look shockingly like us. Give it the ability to improve on its own code and it starts to look very much like us. The human mind is nothing special.

    We may be 5-10 years away from this, or some have speculated, Google or OpenAI may be there already but holding back on releasing it for fear of what it will do. But it is coming.
    ... or the LLM approach is fundamentally flawed, and whilst good at imitating intelligence, will not be able to approach true intelligence or AGI.
    Yes, but...

    To borrow from Westworld, "if you can't tell, does it matter?"

    Either we are 95% of the way to AGI, or the current route (LLM + extended memory and processing power) is a route to nothing. But what seems increasingly likely (Based on some of the uncensored local LLMs I've tried) is we're pretty much there on something that can simulate intelligence already. So if you put one of those models into a humanlike body and for all intents and purposes it behaves like one of us, what's the difference?
    Some philosophical types posit that humans don't really think in a free way either, we just imagine we do after subconscious and chemical processes already determine what we will do.
    “There is no absolute, or free, will,” observed Spinoza, “the mind is determined to will this or that by a cause which is also determined by another, and this again by another, and so to infinity.”

    I'm fascinated by Julian Jaynes, because I think that even though he argues most of what we see as consciousness is actually just a autonomic function, and most of the time we are on autopilot, the idea that our mind itself might be dialoguing with itself (due to bicameralism) at key moments, and that is where free will comes from, is an interesting one that deserves further exploration.

    Of course, it's possible to take the deterministic view that Spinoza does down to the cellular level, that every thought we have is caused by a chemical reaction, which was caused by an earlier one, which was caused by [etc and so forth]

  • Options
    FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,300
    edited October 2023
    No wonder the MET don't seem to want to prosecute anybody during recent anti-Israel marches....

    A furious row has broken out after Metropolitan Police officers were filmed pulling down posters of Israeli children kidnapped by Hamas during the terror group's barbaric October 7 attack.

    Two officers stripped the outside of Cullimore Chemist in Edgware, North London of flyers of the missing innocents.

    Residents in the area, which is home to a sizeable Jewish community, slammed the officers' 'disgusting' actions'.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12689391/Fury-Met-Police-officers-pull-posters-kidnapped-Israeli-children-London-avoid-inflaming-tensions-force-failed-clamp-Islamists-chanting-jihad-pro-Palestine-protests.html
  • Options
    nico679nico679 Posts: 5,070
    One child is dying every 10 minutes in Gaza according to Save the Children .

    Horrific .

  • Options
    NigelbNigelb Posts: 62,900

    Andy_JS said:

    Starmer has problems.

    https://twitter.com/LeftieStats/status/1719056546435322290

    "Stats for Lefties
    @LeftieStats
    🚨 BREAKING: Leftist MP Andy McDonald has been suspended from Labour for a pro-Palestine speech.

    In his speech, McDonald said: "We won’t rest ... until all people ... between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty."

    Labour says this speech was "deeply offensive"."

    Israelis and Palestinians living in peaceful liberty is deeply offensive

    FFS SKS FANS please explain
    Had that been what he wanted to say, he should have said so.
    Including a catchphrase which is a (barely) plausibly deniable call for getting rid of Israel completely isn't really something Starmer can pretend not to notice.
  • Options
    MikeLMikeL Posts: 7,319
    edited October 2023
    kle4 said:

    MikeL said:

    Note from meeting between Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak in March 2020

    “We are killing the patient to tackle the tumour”

    Next line: Why are we destroying the economy for people who are going to die anyway?




    https://twitter.com/nickeardleybbc/status/1719028306907955345

    Can anyone actually read every word of this handwriting?

    I can read most of it but not all.

    Can anyone reproduce it in full?
    "We're killing the patient to tackle the tumour"

    Large ppl [I think this is 'large ppl' eg people? edit - carnyx may be right about being proportion]who will die - why are we destroying the economy for people who will die anyway soon

    Bed blockers

    PM - there month battleplan to win

    What is this/ defeat the virus. testing. interrelate[?] with etc. [Testing may be intended to be after 'with']
    Many thanks! And thanks also to @Carnyx

    Though I'm unclear what the "What is this" relates to - though I appreciate no way of us knowing this.
  • Options
    Alphabet_SoupAlphabet_Soup Posts: 2,773
    edited October 2023
    kle4 said:

    kle4 said:

    Don’t think Labour is going down the agree to differ over honourably held views route.


    'Between the river and and the sea can live in peaceful liberty' is an interesting variation I've not seen before.
    The boldest contribution came from a former British diplomat who suggested that if they can’t agree then neither of them should have it. The original comment is now deleted but this is her clarification:

    https://x.com/alexhallhall/status/1716861599309246485

    Many people have misunderstood my post. My mistake. I WASN'T suggesting ethnically cleansing or forcibly removing both peoples from the land. Of course not!!!! I meant maybe neither should be in charge, but a "neutral" (if one exists) outside party on their mutual behalf. 😥
    Wouldn't that just be (benign) colonialism?!
    In other words, a League of Nations mandate, exercised by a major power pro bono publico without any prospect of reward (but a certainty of getting all the blame).
  • Options
    carnforthcarnforth Posts: 3,251
    nico679 said:

    One child is dying every 10 minutes in Gaza according to Save the Children .

    Horrific .

    It is, but remember more than half of Gaza strip residents are children:



    Any collateral damage at all is going to involve people under 18 dying.
  • Options
    ydoethurydoethur Posts: 67,477
    MikeL said:

    kle4 said:

    MikeL said:

    Note from meeting between Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak in March 2020

    “We are killing the patient to tackle the tumour”

    Next line: Why are we destroying the economy for people who are going to die anyway?




    https://twitter.com/nickeardleybbc/status/1719028306907955345

    Can anyone actually read every word of this handwriting?

    I can read most of it but not all.

    Can anyone reproduce it in full?
    "We're killing the patient to tackle the tumour"

    Large ppl [I think this is 'large ppl' eg people? edit - carnyx may be right about being proportion]who will die - why are we destroying the economy for people who will die anyway soon

    Bed blockers

    PM - there month battleplan to win

    What is this/ defeat the virus. testing. interrelate[?] with etc. [Testing may be intended to be after 'with']
    Many thanks! And thanks also to @Carnyx

    Though I'm unclear what the "What is this" relates to - though I appreciate no way of us knowing this.
    It was asking what the three month battle plan actually was.
  • Options
    kle4kle4 Posts: 92,079
    MikeL said:

    kle4 said:

    MikeL said:

    Note from meeting between Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak in March 2020

    “We are killing the patient to tackle the tumour”

    Next line: Why are we destroying the economy for people who are going to die anyway?




    https://twitter.com/nickeardleybbc/status/1719028306907955345

    Can anyone actually read every word of this handwriting?

    I can read most of it but not all.

    Can anyone reproduce it in full?
    "We're killing the patient to tackle the tumour"

    Large ppl [I think this is 'large ppl' eg people? edit - carnyx may be right about being proportion]who will die - why are we destroying the economy for people who will die anyway soon

    Bed blockers

    PM - there month battleplan to win

    What is this/ defeat the virus. testing. interrelate[?] with etc. [Testing may be intended to be after 'with']
    Many thanks! And thanks also to @Carnyx

    Though I'm unclear what the "What is this" relates to - though I appreciate no way of us knowing this.
    I assume it relates to what is the three month battleplan, though if that was just 'defeat the virus' through testing that's a bit thin.
  • Options
    BurgessianBurgessian Posts: 2,466

    Meanwhile, in "are you sure that's entirely wise, Sir?" news,

    In conversation with @elonmusk
    After the AI Safety Summit
    Thursday night on @x

    https://twitter.com/RishiSunak/status/1719055211451306003

    I'm curious about that given Musk's weird political propensities (so far as I can make them out) and cryptic posts. However he obviously has enormous reach - well beyond a humble UK prime minister - so, maybe, it makes sense and gets Rishi's message out to people he couldn't otherwise reach.
  • Options
    Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 55,694
    Andy_JS said:

    Starmer has problems.

    https://twitter.com/LeftieStats/status/1719056546435322290

    "Stats for Lefties
    @LeftieStats
    🚨 BREAKING: Leftist MP Andy McDonald has been suspended from Labour for a pro-Palestine speech.

    In his speech, McDonald said: "We won’t rest ... until all people ... between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty."

    Labour says this speech was "deeply offensive"."

    Palestine seems to touch all sorts of erogenous zones for the Left.

    As I've said before I think it's where all left-wing prejudices meet.
  • Options
    NigelbNigelb Posts: 62,900

    Pulpstar said:

    HYUFD said:

    148grss said:

    That a good list, thanks Mr Brooke. I'd also add the need to ensure as much energy independence as possible is vital.

    But... why not do both? D the list above *and* move towards net zero?

    Oh. and first. If this thread survives...

    I doubt we have the money. But if the investment side is handled correctly some of the projects will meet your goal of doing two things in tandem.
    I never understand the "we don't have the money" argument when it comes to the environment. If we don't invest in a green future there will not be a future. Also, money isn't real! So, if a government with control over its own currency (like the UK) decides it wants to shift its economy to go big on green (in a similar manner as "wartime" economies shift) then we could do that. Would it change a lot of things, yes - but not necessarily negatively. It's just that the British political consensus is that government shouldn't be allowed to do things that could possibly make the world a better place. That we're behind even the US on this (who are investing huge amounts into green infrastructure) is telling about the myopic nature of British political foresight.
    How do you interpret this chart?

    image
    We are already leading the pack on reducing emissions anyway
    The UK is the most improved, but not the best. France still has the lowest emissions per capita in the G7.
    Does France have new nuclear projects going to Judicial Review ?

    https://www.leighday.co.uk/news/news/2023-news/campaigners-win-permission-to-appeal-against-sizewell-c-nuclear-power-station-ruling/
    This sort of bullshit is what massively slows down new infrastructure in this country.
    If government were serious about infrastructure, it could legislate more clearly for projects of national significance, avoiding must judicial reviews.
  • Options

    Andy_JS said:

    Starmer has problems.

    https://twitter.com/LeftieStats/status/1719056546435322290

    "Stats for Lefties
    @LeftieStats
    🚨 BREAKING: Leftist MP Andy McDonald has been suspended from Labour for a pro-Palestine speech.

    In his speech, McDonald said: "We won’t rest ... until all people ... between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty."

    Labour says this speech was "deeply offensive"."

    Palestine seems to touch all sorts of erogenous zones for the Left.

    As I've said before I think it's where all left-wing prejudices meet.
    And those on the right?
  • Options
    williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 48,175
    Nigelb said:

    Andy_JS said:

    Starmer has problems.

    https://twitter.com/LeftieStats/status/1719056546435322290

    "Stats for Lefties
    @LeftieStats
    🚨 BREAKING: Leftist MP Andy McDonald has been suspended from Labour for a pro-Palestine speech.

    In his speech, McDonald said: "We won’t rest ... until all people ... between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty."

    Labour says this speech was "deeply offensive"."

    Israelis and Palestinians living in peaceful liberty is deeply offensive

    FFS SKS FANS please explain
    Had that been what he wanted to say, he should have said so.
    Including a catchphrase which is a (barely) plausibly deniable call for getting rid of Israel completely isn't really something Starmer can pretend not to notice.
    This is what people like him mean by calling to "free Palestine":

    image

    Susan Abulhawa is a Palestinian diaspora activist:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Abulhawa
  • Options
    rottenboroughrottenborough Posts: 58,469

    nico679 said:

    One child is dying every 10 minutes in Gaza according to Save the Children .

    Horrific .

    Friedman:

    Israel should keep the door open for a humanitarian cease-fire and prisoner exchange that will also allow Israel to pause and reflect on exactly where it is going with its rushed Gaza military operation — and the price it could pay over the long haul.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/29/opinion/israel-hamas-ceasefire.html
  • Options
    kle4kle4 Posts: 92,079

    kle4 said:

    kle4 said:

    Don’t think Labour is going down the agree to differ over honourably held views route.


    'Between the river and and the sea can live in peaceful liberty' is an interesting variation I've not seen before.
    The boldest contribution came from a former British diplomat who suggested that if they can’t agree then neither of them should have it. The original comment is now deleted but this is her clarification:

    https://x.com/alexhallhall/status/1716861599309246485

    Many people have misunderstood my post. My mistake. I WASN'T suggesting ethnically cleansing or forcibly removing both peoples from the land. Of course not!!!! I meant maybe neither should be in charge, but a "neutral" (if one exists) outside party on their mutual behalf. 😥
    Wouldn't that just be (benign) colonialism?!
    In other words, a League of Nations mandate, exercised by a major power pro bono publico without any prospect of reward (but a certainty of getting all the blame).
    What a pity the Wagner Group is no longer available, I'm sure they would have been up for a bit of 'peacekeeping'.
  • Options

    Nigelb said:

    Andy_JS said:

    Starmer has problems.

    https://twitter.com/LeftieStats/status/1719056546435322290

    "Stats for Lefties
    @LeftieStats
    🚨 BREAKING: Leftist MP Andy McDonald has been suspended from Labour for a pro-Palestine speech.

    In his speech, McDonald said: "We won’t rest ... until all people ... between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty."

    Labour says this speech was "deeply offensive"."

    Israelis and Palestinians living in peaceful liberty is deeply offensive

    FFS SKS FANS please explain
    Had that been what he wanted to say, he should have said so.
    Including a catchphrase which is a (barely) plausibly deniable call for getting rid of Israel completely isn't really something Starmer can pretend not to notice.
    This is what people like him mean by calling to "free Palestine":

    image

    Susan Abulhawa is a Palestinian diaspora activist:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Abulhawa
    What is Blak?
  • Options
    kle4kle4 Posts: 92,079

    Nigelb said:

    Andy_JS said:

    Starmer has problems.

    https://twitter.com/LeftieStats/status/1719056546435322290

    "Stats for Lefties
    @LeftieStats
    🚨 BREAKING: Leftist MP Andy McDonald has been suspended from Labour for a pro-Palestine speech.

    In his speech, McDonald said: "We won’t rest ... until all people ... between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty."

    Labour says this speech was "deeply offensive"."

    Israelis and Palestinians living in peaceful liberty is deeply offensive

    FFS SKS FANS please explain
    Had that been what he wanted to say, he should have said so.
    Including a catchphrase which is a (barely) plausibly deniable call for getting rid of Israel completely isn't really something Starmer can pretend not to notice.
    This is what people like him mean by calling to "free Palestine":

    image

    Susan Abulhawa is a Palestinian diaspora activist:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Abulhawa
    Not the main point, but what the heck does 'post capitalist' have to do with any of the rest of it?

    Why does every cause online have to include every other cause?
  • Options

    Nigelb said:

    Andy_JS said:

    Starmer has problems.

    https://twitter.com/LeftieStats/status/1719056546435322290

    "Stats for Lefties
    @LeftieStats
    🚨 BREAKING: Leftist MP Andy McDonald has been suspended from Labour for a pro-Palestine speech.

    In his speech, McDonald said: "We won’t rest ... until all people ... between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty."

    Labour says this speech was "deeply offensive"."

    Israelis and Palestinians living in peaceful liberty is deeply offensive

    FFS SKS FANS please explain
    Had that been what he wanted to say, he should have said so.
    Including a catchphrase which is a (barely) plausibly deniable call for getting rid of Israel completely isn't really something Starmer can pretend not to notice.
    This is what people like him mean by calling to "free Palestine":

    image

    Susan Abulhawa is a Palestinian diaspora activist:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Abulhawa
    What is Blak?
    Balanced milk stout with cocoa and dark fruit

    https://www.pigbeer.com/product-page/blak
  • Options
    FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,300
    edited October 2023
    kle4 said:

    Nigelb said:

    Andy_JS said:

    Starmer has problems.

    https://twitter.com/LeftieStats/status/1719056546435322290

    "Stats for Lefties
    @LeftieStats
    🚨 BREAKING: Leftist MP Andy McDonald has been suspended from Labour for a pro-Palestine speech.

    In his speech, McDonald said: "We won’t rest ... until all people ... between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty."

    Labour says this speech was "deeply offensive"."

    Israelis and Palestinians living in peaceful liberty is deeply offensive

    FFS SKS FANS please explain
    Had that been what he wanted to say, he should have said so.
    Including a catchphrase which is a (barely) plausibly deniable call for getting rid of Israel completely isn't really something Starmer can pretend not to notice.
    This is what people like him mean by calling to "free Palestine":

    image

    Susan Abulhawa is a Palestinian diaspora activist:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Abulhawa
    Not the main point, but what the heck does 'post capitalist' have to do with any of the rest of it?

    Why does every cause online have to include every other cause?
    Marxist notions that it is all about the struggle to free the oppressed from the oppressors....
  • Options
    GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,106
    nico679 said:

    One child is dying every 10 minutes in Gaza according to Save the Children .

    Horrific .

    Hamas are the biggest scum on all the earth
  • Options
    nico679 said:

    One child is dying every 10 minutes in Gaza according to Save the Children .

    Horrific .

    8,306 dead in Gaza, including 2,136 women and 3,457 children.
  • Options
    kle4kle4 Posts: 92,079

    kle4 said:

    Nigelb said:

    Andy_JS said:

    Starmer has problems.

    https://twitter.com/LeftieStats/status/1719056546435322290

    "Stats for Lefties
    @LeftieStats
    🚨 BREAKING: Leftist MP Andy McDonald has been suspended from Labour for a pro-Palestine speech.

    In his speech, McDonald said: "We won’t rest ... until all people ... between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty."

    Labour says this speech was "deeply offensive"."

    Israelis and Palestinians living in peaceful liberty is deeply offensive

    FFS SKS FANS please explain
    Had that been what he wanted to say, he should have said so.
    Including a catchphrase which is a (barely) plausibly deniable call for getting rid of Israel completely isn't really something Starmer can pretend not to notice.
    This is what people like him mean by calling to "free Palestine":

    image

    Susan Abulhawa is a Palestinian diaspora activist:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Abulhawa
    Not the main point, but what the heck does 'post capitalist' have to do with any of the rest of it?

    Why does every cause online have to include every other cause?
    Marxist notions that it is all about the struggle to free the oppressed from the oppressors....
    I wouldn't choose marxism if I was looking for someone to free people from oppressors.
  • Options
    NigelbNigelb Posts: 62,900
    Carnyx said:

    carnforth said:

    carnforth said:

    Taz said:

    Small businesses are being hammered by the war on cash.

    Fees for contactless are rising massively for small businesses.

    https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/cardsloans/article-12682825/Pay-cash-spare-crippling-card-fees-plead-traders.html

    "The cost of processing a card payment has increased by 600 per cent in the past nine years, according to campaign group Axe the Card Tax."

    Doubt.
    They says costs are 2.5% now so back in 2014 costs were 0.004%?

    I call fucking bullshit.
    0.4%, Shirley? 600 percent is six times.
    I still call fucking bullshit.

    Card costs have come down.

    Numerical calculation out by a factor of 100 but fronting it out and doubling down on your original claim, bold. Have you considered a career in politics, young man?
    It was a lack of self confidence that stopped me going into politics.

    I am way too modest for politics.
    I can imagine.
    I really did consider going into politics 20 years ago but there were a few insurmountable barriers

    1) I would be considered gaffe prone for saying outrageous things with my colour metaphors. Apparently I have a tendency to say funny things which you really cannot say in polite society.

    2) My mother wouldn't be able to cope with the constant attacks politicians come under. My private life is erm colourful. Her muslim ladies who lunch group would be ashamed by me.

    3) MP pay is shit, I couldn't afford all my shoes and clothes on an MP's salary.

    4) I have to keep my mind occupied, I really couldn't sit on the backbenches for a few years, I need to go straight into the cabinet.
    On the bright side, imagine being an ambitious, not insane Conservative MP right now.

    You probably had a lucky escape.
    I think Boris Johnson would have kicked me out of the party in 2019.
    You could have become a LD and needed to take a great interest in sheep and colourful wellies.
    Good thinking.

    The Liberals do have precedent for 'flamboyant' leaders.
  • Options
    -

    Nigelb said:

    Andy_JS said:

    Starmer has problems.

    https://twitter.com/LeftieStats/status/1719056546435322290

    "Stats for Lefties
    @LeftieStats
    🚨 BREAKING: Leftist MP Andy McDonald has been suspended from Labour for a pro-Palestine speech.

    In his speech, McDonald said: "We won’t rest ... until all people ... between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty."

    Labour says this speech was "deeply offensive"."

    Israelis and Palestinians living in peaceful liberty is deeply offensive

    FFS SKS FANS please explain
    Had that been what he wanted to say, he should have said so.
    Including a catchphrase which is a (barely) plausibly deniable call for getting rid of Israel completely isn't really something Starmer can pretend not to notice.
    This is what people like him mean by calling to "free Palestine":

    image

    Susan Abulhawa is a Palestinian diaspora activist:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Abulhawa
    "Post" is such an old-fashioned concept.
  • Options
    FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,300
    edited October 2023
    kle4 said:

    kle4 said:

    Nigelb said:

    Andy_JS said:

    Starmer has problems.

    https://twitter.com/LeftieStats/status/1719056546435322290

    "Stats for Lefties
    @LeftieStats
    🚨 BREAKING: Leftist MP Andy McDonald has been suspended from Labour for a pro-Palestine speech.

    In his speech, McDonald said: "We won’t rest ... until all people ... between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty."

    Labour says this speech was "deeply offensive"."

    Israelis and Palestinians living in peaceful liberty is deeply offensive

    FFS SKS FANS please explain
    Had that been what he wanted to say, he should have said so.
    Including a catchphrase which is a (barely) plausibly deniable call for getting rid of Israel completely isn't really something Starmer can pretend not to notice.
    This is what people like him mean by calling to "free Palestine":

    image

    Susan Abulhawa is a Palestinian diaspora activist:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Abulhawa
    Not the main point, but what the heck does 'post capitalist' have to do with any of the rest of it?

    Why does every cause online have to include every other cause?
    Marxist notions that it is all about the struggle to free the oppressed from the oppressors....
    I wouldn't choose marxism if I was looking for someone to free people from oppressors.
    The mistake are you are making is believing these people have an informed educated nuanced view of the world. Hence how you get Homosexuals for Hamas....and some describing "social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left."
  • Options
    Andy_JS said:

    Starmer has problems.

    https://twitter.com/LeftieStats/status/1719056546435322290

    "Stats for Lefties
    @LeftieStats
    🚨 BREAKING: Leftist MP Andy McDonald has been suspended from Labour for a pro-Palestine speech.

    In his speech, McDonald said: "We won’t rest ... until all people ... between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty."

    Labour says this speech was "deeply offensive"."

    Starmer has rid himself of another toxic antisemite.

    How's that a problem?
  • Options

    -

    Nigelb said:

    Andy_JS said:

    Starmer has problems.

    https://twitter.com/LeftieStats/status/1719056546435322290

    "Stats for Lefties
    @LeftieStats
    🚨 BREAKING: Leftist MP Andy McDonald has been suspended from Labour for a pro-Palestine speech.

    In his speech, McDonald said: "We won’t rest ... until all people ... between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty."

    Labour says this speech was "deeply offensive"."

    Israelis and Palestinians living in peaceful liberty is deeply offensive

    FFS SKS FANS please explain
    Had that been what he wanted to say, he should have said so.
    Including a catchphrase which is a (barely) plausibly deniable call for getting rid of Israel completely isn't really something Starmer can pretend not to notice.
    This is what people like him mean by calling to "free Palestine":

    image

    Susan Abulhawa is a Palestinian diaspora activist:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Abulhawa
    "Post" is such an old-fashioned concept.
    Text and Email are much faster...
  • Options
    kle4kle4 Posts: 92,079

    -

    Nigelb said:

    Andy_JS said:

    Starmer has problems.

    https://twitter.com/LeftieStats/status/1719056546435322290

    "Stats for Lefties
    @LeftieStats
    🚨 BREAKING: Leftist MP Andy McDonald has been suspended from Labour for a pro-Palestine speech.

    In his speech, McDonald said: "We won’t rest ... until all people ... between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty."

    Labour says this speech was "deeply offensive"."

    Israelis and Palestinians living in peaceful liberty is deeply offensive

    FFS SKS FANS please explain
    Had that been what he wanted to say, he should have said so.
    Including a catchphrase which is a (barely) plausibly deniable call for getting rid of Israel completely isn't really something Starmer can pretend not to notice.
    This is what people like him mean by calling to "free Palestine":

    image

    Susan Abulhawa is a Palestinian diaspora activist:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Abulhawa
    "Post" is such an old-fashioned concept.
    I've been postpost for years now.

    I think various people have progressed to neo-neoliberalism and neo-neoconservative as well.
  • Options
    JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 39,134
    kyf_100 said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    We were discussing the impact of AI on the global south yesterday. I’ve just read a cogent article saying 5m coding jobs in India will disappear immediately - ie in the next two years. Not in a decade. From now on

    I use ChatGPT and CoPilot every day to assist with coding. Now I am not doing run of mill boilerplate stuff, but it still makes absolutely loads of mistakes. I would say at the moment, it is more like an a combination of decent auto-complete (like you do with text messages) and an advanced search for stack overflow (which all coders have used for donkeys years to get an idealised solution to common problems). Once you get too far from tasks that are easily found there, it starts to break down.

    In summary, will it cause lots of job losses a few years down the line, yes. I wouldn't want to be a random coder starting out their career now. Would I trust it to go from 10 coders to 1-3 coders doing the same job, not yet, not unless you want massively buggy code.
    Indeed. I use ChatGPT and AWS's CodeWhisperer, and they're great tools, but that's all they are - tools. You have to be really careful how you use them though, and you still have to understand what you are doing. I've already been caught out once or twice by suggested code that initially looked perfectly good but turned out to contain some stupid bug that I missed on checking through it.
    Lots of these prognoses are predicated on another leap by AI in the next year. GPT5 etc

    And if the rumours are right, and GPT5 is to GPT4 what GPT4 was to 3, then they are right to be “alarmist”

    And that’s just OpenAI
    GPT3 -> GPT4 for coding wasn't that big of advance. It was evolution, rather than revolution. You could say well now you can show it a picture of some maths and it will code that function, thats new, but again, its very very hit and miss. I have been trying this to speed up implementing academic papers and its really not that great. I find I have to convert image to latex (a kinda of programming language to create scientific texts) then to say python and still so so.
    It just takes one of these machines to have the ability to self improve - then KABOOM
    It doesn't even "understand" basic maths yet, let alone know how to improve upon that. I had it the other day arguing black is white over the incorrect details of a tensor, which is trivial maths.

    This is the fundamental issue with the idea of LLM being predicted on probabilistic selection of next token.
    Arguably it doesn't "understand" anything because it's a goldfish in a bowl with a 5 second memory that happens to be born with an encyclopedia inside its head.

    Give it long term memory, and it starts to look shockingly like how human minds work.

    https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.10250.pdf

    An LLM with long term memory accessible the way humans can remember something from 20 years ago at a pinch, starts to look shockingly like us. Give it the ability to improve on its own code and it starts to look very much like us. The human mind is nothing special.

    We may be 5-10 years away from this, or some have speculated, Google or OpenAI may be there already but holding back on releasing it for fear of what it will do. But it is coming.
    ... or the LLM approach is fundamentally flawed, and whilst good at imitating intelligence, will not be able to approach true intelligence or AGI.
    Yes, but...

    To borrow from Westworld, "if you can't tell, does it matter?"

    Either we are 95% of the way to AGI, or the current route (LLM + extended memory and processing power) is a route to nothing. But what seems increasingly likely (Based on some of the uncensored local LLMs I've tried) is we're pretty much there on something that can simulate intelligence already. So if you put one of those models into a humanlike body and for all intents and purposes it behaves like one of us, what's the difference?
    My own experience is somewhat different. Eliza 'fooled' people decades ago, and was about as intelligent as a stick.

    This matters for a variety of reasons. For one, IMO the biggest threat from 'AI' comes not from AIs taking over the world and nuking us all, but us believing they are better than they really are, and trusting them as they made dumb-ass decisions. "The computer must be right".
  • Options
    LeonLeon Posts: 47,607

    Nigelb said:

    Andy_JS said:

    Starmer has problems.

    https://twitter.com/LeftieStats/status/1719056546435322290

    "Stats for Lefties
    @LeftieStats
    🚨 BREAKING: Leftist MP Andy McDonald has been suspended from Labour for a pro-Palestine speech.

    In his speech, McDonald said: "We won’t rest ... until all people ... between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty."

    Labour says this speech was "deeply offensive"."

    Israelis and Palestinians living in peaceful liberty is deeply offensive

    FFS SKS FANS please explain
    Had that been what he wanted to say, he should have said so.
    Including a catchphrase which is a (barely) plausibly deniable call for getting rid of Israel completely isn't really something Starmer can pretend not to notice.
    This is what people like him mean by calling to "free Palestine":

    image

    Susan Abulhawa is a Palestinian diaspora activist:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Abulhawa
    What is Blak?
    i think it’s an even newer dumber form of Black with a capital B, I saw it a few times in the Aussie Voice campaign. The aboriginal people are apparently “Blaks”

    Here’s a thing, some people are trying to revive “sambo” - I kid you not. But you have to use a capital S to give it dignity

    What amazes me is that no one ever finds this patronizing. It is generally white, bourgeois and often female academics who determine the New Words We Must Use for The Blaks
  • Options
    kle4 said:

    kle4 said:

    Nigelb said:

    Andy_JS said:

    Starmer has problems.

    https://twitter.com/LeftieStats/status/1719056546435322290

    "Stats for Lefties
    @LeftieStats
    🚨 BREAKING: Leftist MP Andy McDonald has been suspended from Labour for a pro-Palestine speech.

    In his speech, McDonald said: "We won’t rest ... until all people ... between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty."

    Labour says this speech was "deeply offensive"."

    Israelis and Palestinians living in peaceful liberty is deeply offensive

    FFS SKS FANS please explain
    Had that been what he wanted to say, he should have said so.
    Including a catchphrase which is a (barely) plausibly deniable call for getting rid of Israel completely isn't really something Starmer can pretend not to notice.
    This is what people like him mean by calling to "free Palestine":

    image

    Susan Abulhawa is a Palestinian diaspora activist:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Abulhawa
    Not the main point, but what the heck does 'post capitalist' have to do with any of the rest of it?

    Why does every cause online have to include every other cause?
    Marxist notions that it is all about the struggle to free the oppressed from the oppressors....
    I wouldn't choose marxism if I was looking for someone to free people from oppressors.
    Its the first commandment of Marxism: thou shalt have no other oppressors before me.
  • Options
    JohnLilburneJohnLilburne Posts: 6,018
    kle4 said:

    kle4 said:

    Leon said:

    kle4 said:

    A Roman emperor has been listed as “black Briton” by the BBC and some UK museums, despite not being black.

    Lucius Septimius Severus died on campaign in Britain in 211AD , and has been included in teaching material and children’s books alongside influential black Britons such as Mary Seacole and Olaudah Equiano.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/10/30/bbc-hails-roman-emperor-black-briton/

    Is it like Cleopatra where they'll go 'Oh, we don't really know so they might have been'(which at best is still wishful thinking rather than being able to claim as fact) or is there an actual reason behind the idea? I know at least one Emperor was born in Africa and one was named 'the arab', so did they just go off that?
    One quote from that article


    “The ancient biographical collection Historia Augustus explains that Severus was disturbed by the sight of a black person on one occasion, taking his “ominous colour” as a bad omen while on campaign.”

    I mean, I know, but. Lol
    Ouch.

    I mean, no one expects everyone to be an expert to know that level of detail, but does the story provide an explanation from the BBC and museums as to how they made the error? Because if it is as simple as 'Wikipedia says he was born in Africa and we just assumed' that is bad, but if that is not the reason they thought it then what was the reason?
    Hard core racism was common in Ancient Rome.

    In one of his rants*, Cicero likened a consul to every bad thing he could think of. Then said he (the consul) was a dumb as a black slave….
    Imperialist conquerors racist? Well, it seems most unusual to me.
    Septimius was Libyan of part Phoenician ancestry, so possibly browner than your average Roman. It doesn't of course stop him being prejudiced against black people.
  • Options
    Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 55,694

    Nigelb said:

    Andy_JS said:

    Starmer has problems.

    https://twitter.com/LeftieStats/status/1719056546435322290

    "Stats for Lefties
    @LeftieStats
    🚨 BREAKING: Leftist MP Andy McDonald has been suspended from Labour for a pro-Palestine speech.

    In his speech, McDonald said: "We won’t rest ... until all people ... between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty."

    Labour says this speech was "deeply offensive"."

    Israelis and Palestinians living in peaceful liberty is deeply offensive

    FFS SKS FANS please explain
    Had that been what he wanted to say, he should have said so.
    Including a catchphrase which is a (barely) plausibly deniable call for getting rid of Israel completely isn't really something Starmer can pretend not to notice.
    This is what people like him mean by calling to "free Palestine":

    image

    Susan Abulhawa is a Palestinian diaspora activist:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Abulhawa
    Ahem.

    Like I just said several minutes ago upthread👆
  • Options
    ydoethurydoethur Posts: 67,477
    edited October 2023
    Nigelb said:

    Andy_JS said:

    Starmer has problems.

    https://twitter.com/LeftieStats/status/1719056546435322290

    "Stats for Lefties
    @LeftieStats
    🚨 BREAKING: Leftist MP Andy McDonald has been suspended from Labour for a pro-Palestine speech.

    In his speech, McDonald said: "We won’t rest ... until all people ... between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty."

    Labour says this speech was "deeply offensive"."

    Israelis and Palestinians living in peaceful liberty is deeply offensive

    FFS SKS FANS please explain
    Had that been what he wanted to say, he should have said so.
    Including a catchphrase which is a (barely) plausibly deniable call for getting rid of Israel completely isn't really something Starmer can pretend not to notice.
    Also, he has form. He defended Corbyn over that mural, was one of the MPs who refused to sign the IHRA's definition of anti-semitism and once said in the same breath that he'd been to Auschwitz and the West Bank, meaning he had to clarify he didn't think Israelis were comparable to Nazis (which he did rather unconvincingly).

    Put it this way, if I had a record like that and didn't want to be accused of being a stupid racist, I would pick my words very, very carefully and certainly not choose a phrase used to call for genocide in any interview no matter what I meant.

    But because he seems to think as a left-wing person he can't possibly be a racist he clearly didn't.

    An attitude of blind arrogance mingled with some pretty unsavoury personal attitudes and a stunning lack of self-awareness we've been seeing far too often in the last month from two particular posters on here.
  • Options
    FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,300
    edited October 2023
    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Andy_JS said:

    Starmer has problems.

    https://twitter.com/LeftieStats/status/1719056546435322290

    "Stats for Lefties
    @LeftieStats
    🚨 BREAKING: Leftist MP Andy McDonald has been suspended from Labour for a pro-Palestine speech.

    In his speech, McDonald said: "We won’t rest ... until all people ... between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty."

    Labour says this speech was "deeply offensive"."

    Israelis and Palestinians living in peaceful liberty is deeply offensive

    FFS SKS FANS please explain
    Had that been what he wanted to say, he should have said so.
    Including a catchphrase which is a (barely) plausibly deniable call for getting rid of Israel completely isn't really something Starmer can pretend not to notice.
    This is what people like him mean by calling to "free Palestine":

    image

    Susan Abulhawa is a Palestinian diaspora activist:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Abulhawa
    What is Blak?
    i think it’s an even newer dumber form of Black with a capital B, I saw it a few times in the Aussie Voice campaign. The aboriginal people are apparently “Blaks”

    Here’s a thing, some people are trying to revive “sambo” - I kid you not. But you have to use a capital S to give it dignity

    What amazes me is that no one ever finds this patronizing. It is generally white, bourgeois and often female academics who determine the New Words We Must Use for The Blaks
    And what do the native people to Australia want to be called?

    There is a guy called Peter Santenello who makes some really interesting long form videos about different areas of US (and other countries). He did a number of videos where he spent weeks with American Indians, First Nation, what do we want to call them...well he asked and the responses were wide and varied. Some demanded to be called Indians, some hated it, some others thought First Nation terms was bollocks....but most seemed to hate more than anything the lumping together of all the different tribes of people as if they were really all the same 'block'.
  • Options
    kle4kle4 Posts: 92,079

    Again, it really isn't that hard to put forward criticisms of Israel approach, for instance the need for aid to be allowed in, without touching the antisemitism rail....you just don't include phrases about rivers to the sea, final solutions, apartheid states, or inserting any common Jewish tropes. Its not rocket science.

    It really is easy. Pretty easy to call for a pause/ceasefire without excusing or ignoring Hamas too, which is why it can both weird and tellinf if people find it hard.

    But that is why I found the 'between the river' statement intriguing, because unlike so many others it shows an awareness of what is problematic about the the 'from the river' phrase, by adjusting to something much more benign sounding about all living in liberty.
  • Options
    ydoethurydoethur Posts: 67,477
    edited October 2023

    kle4 said:

    kle4 said:

    Nigelb said:

    Andy_JS said:

    Starmer has problems.

    https://twitter.com/LeftieStats/status/1719056546435322290

    "Stats for Lefties
    @LeftieStats
    🚨 BREAKING: Leftist MP Andy McDonald has been suspended from Labour for a pro-Palestine speech.

    In his speech, McDonald said: "We won’t rest ... until all people ... between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty."

    Labour says this speech was "deeply offensive"."

    Israelis and Palestinians living in peaceful liberty is deeply offensive

    FFS SKS FANS please explain
    Had that been what he wanted to say, he should have said so.
    Including a catchphrase which is a (barely) plausibly deniable call for getting rid of Israel completely isn't really something Starmer can pretend not to notice.
    This is what people like him mean by calling to "free Palestine":

    image

    Susan Abulhawa is a Palestinian diaspora activist:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Abulhawa
    Not the main point, but what the heck does 'post capitalist' have to do with any of the rest of it?

    Why does every cause online have to include every other cause?
    Marxist notions that it is all about the struggle to free the oppressed from the oppressors....
    I wouldn't choose marxism if I was looking for someone to free people from oppressors.
    Its the first commandment of Marxism: thou shalt have no other oppressors before me.
    There is a version of the Internationale recorded by Billy Bragg. It's available on YouTube with a background consisting solely of an image of Lenin giving a speech.

    The irony always cheers me up.

    https://youtu.be/3sh4kz_zhyo?si=dlQSBWmF9xOQwyJP
  • Options
    viewcodeviewcode Posts: 19,060

    Meanwhile, in "are you sure that's entirely wise, Sir?" news,

    In conversation with @elonmusk
    After the AI Safety Summit
    Thursday night on @x

    https://twitter.com/RishiSunak/status/1719055211451306003

    I'm curious about that given Musk's weird political propensities (so far as I can make them out) and cryptic posts. However he obviously has enormous reach - well beyond a humble UK prime minister - so, maybe, it makes sense and gets Rishi's message out to people he couldn't otherwise reach.
    Sunak is being interviewed by Musk in order to reach right-wing conspiracy theorists. This is because Sunak is a right-wing conspiracy theorist. We keep ignoring this.
This discussion has been closed.