One of the US volunteers in Ukraine has visited Congress.
It’ll be coming out soon. But I went to the capitol for more than just the Ukraine aid bill that’s stuck before house speaker Johnson.
I went to provide proof and speak to representatives over one of Chosen company’s fallen: Dalton “Gimli” Medlin.
Gimli was an integral part of Chosen. One of the OGS (original members), he helped train up grenadiers, he helped with trench SOPs and overall was an amazing person.
Dalton was subsequently executed by Russian soldiers and his body subsequently booby trapped mid 2023.
Chosen will not stop on the battlefield to get justice and I’m now hoping the US government doesn’t stop to get justice as well. We know the unit responsible, the command responsible, and we will exact vengeance no matter where these members are in the world. Close your windows, hide your families, because we are coming and none of you will walk away.
The biggest issue that put Dalton and our other fallen in excessive harms way is the lack of heavy munitions and the US government slow walking aid.
In war, you can not be indecisive and sadly the USA has been just that. Talking constantly about Putin’s red lines which aren’t actually lines. Talking of this can’t happen etc. Without realizing these indecisive moments have cost hundreds if not thousands of lives and are pushing the world closer to a Franz Ferdinand moment.
We talk about Putin red lines, without talking about Ukraine, Poland, France, Estonian etc red lines.
This war will decide if we allow war criminals free rein over attacking democratic nations and will set a precedent for future conflicts.
Either support Ukraine now, or we will have a lot more gold star families in the US in the future. Families that speaker Johnson and his ilk won’t meet face to face to apologize for getting their loved ones killed over partisan politics.
I think this perfectly illustrates why LLMs as currently constituted are not conscious. My best guess is that these models are a cul de sac in the journey towards AGI, although they will be able increasingly to pass every Turing test we throw at them, able to mimic something that is conscious by aping human communication in increasingly brilliant ways - through words, images and music. I suspect AGI will be achieved via some other route. It certainly is coming. But I don't see any kind of genuine consciousness behind ChatGPT et al, just a dead-eyed computer.
It's why I say the current 'AI's are not really AIs. They don't *understand* things.
An analogy might be the difference between Mastermind and Only Connect. On the surface they are very similar: Mastermind requires you to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of general and specialist knowledge. But that's all.
Only Connect requires an encyclopedic knowledge, but also the ability to try and work out the connections between pieces of encyclopedic knowledge. Mastermind would not be a test of intelligence; Only Connect might be.
(This is not to dismiss Mastermind contestants; they'll be intelligent. It's just that I don't see the quiz as a good test of intelligence, just fact storage and retrieval.)
It’s a good analogy, but to take it further: if a mastermind contestant not only had encyclopaedic knowledge but also sufficient working memory to almost instantaneously test connections between a huge number of pieces of knowledge, that contestant might also win Only Connect through brute force.
Is that possible, and if so is it general intelligence? Not sure on the former, the latter is a philosophical question in which it is not obvious that the answer is no, not least because we don’t really understand human intelligence enough to compare to that. I think the brute force Only Connect winner is what the proponents of LLMs are angling for, though.
On weight, as with so much of @Dura's output he made a truly horrific post wherein he noted the difference in calorific intake required to maintain a certain weight between his younger years and now. Something like a third less just to stay where he was and at the same, or similar levels of activity.
I find this the same - I have to reduce my calories vs years ago just to not put on weight, let alone lose it.
I think this perfectly illustrates why LLMs as currently constituted are not conscious. My best guess is that these models are a cul de sac in the journey towards AGI, although they will be able increasingly to pass every Turing test we throw at them, able to mimic something that is conscious by aping human communication in increasingly brilliant ways - through words, images and music. I suspect AGI will be achieved via some other route. It certainly is coming. But I don't see any kind of genuine consciousness behind ChatGPT et al, just a dead-eyed computer.
From a technical perspective it's because all of these models lack instant memory access. One of the reasons I think the new wse3 is a game changer is because it has human like memory capacity on chip. It looks much more like a "brain" than anything that's come before it. The models built on it will take a big step forwards in reasoning IMO which is where gpt4 is still in its infancy.
I think they will be great and transformative but you give the game away and use the wrong word when you say "reasoning".
Let's take pineapple on pizza as an example. Would the most sophisticated LLM on the planet be able to opine on whether it's a good thing or a bad thing.
No, but I'm not suggesting any current AI model will be able to have lived experience based opinions. We may get there one day but it's quite a long way off.
I think this perfectly illustrates why LLMs as currently constituted are not conscious. My best guess is that these models are a cul de sac in the journey towards AGI, although they will be able increasingly to pass every Turing test we throw at them, able to mimic something that is conscious by aping human communication in increasingly brilliant ways - through words, images and music. I suspect AGI will be achieved via some other route. It certainly is coming. But I don't see any kind of genuine consciousness behind ChatGPT et al, just a dead-eyed computer.
From a technical perspective it's because all of these models lack instant memory access. One of the reasons I think the new wse3 is a game changer is because it has human like memory capacity on chip. It looks much more like a "brain" than anything that's come before it. The models built on it will take a big step forwards in reasoning IMO which is where gpt4 is still in its infancy.
I think they will be great and transformative but you give the game away and use the wrong word when you say "reasoning".
Let's take pineapple on pizza as an example. Would the most sophisticated LLM on the planet be able to opine on whether it's a good thing or a bad thing.
No, but I'm not suggesting any current AI model will be able to have lived experience based opinions. We may get there one day but it's quite a long way off.
It's like the original Catch 22 wrt madness. If an LLM were ever to say that pineapple on pizza was a good thing it would have thereby disproved its "intelligence" and the flaw in the overall model instantly.
On topic, yes, obviously. Some analysis gets tied up in its own intricacies.
The simple fact is that you don't call an election you expect to lose (very heavily) if the situation in parliament isn't unsustainable and if there's time to improve things. Sunak has reason to believe both conditions are true and will therefore hold out for the autumn in the hope that falling inflation and utility costs will create something of a feel-a-bit-better effect. True, mortgage costs are going the other way but everyone pays utilities whereas not everyone has housing costs going up.
By September, the dials might be different. While I've tipped 14 Nov for a long time, with conference acting as a springboard, there's now the very real possibility that the Tory conference will be more a liability than help, while Labour's could showcase them as a government-in-waiting, revealing their policies in a favourable atmosphere. The needle is tipping more towards an October election, called as soon as parliament returns in early September.
On weight, as with so much of @Dura's output he made a truly horrific post wherein he noted the difference in calorific intake required to maintain a certain weight between his younger years and now. Something like a third less just to stay where he was and at the same, or similar levels of activity.
I find this the same - I have to reduce my calories vs years ago just to not put on weight, let alone lose it.
Life really is a f**cker.
The alternative is to increase activity levels. I run 20-25 miles a week which I find does it. Weight-bearing exercise is also good for your bones as you get older and will help to combat muscle loss which also happens as you age
I was filling up at a Morrisons petrol station near me the other day and the woman behind the counter - mid-60s, Leave voter, reads the Daily Mail and/or The Sun, you know the type - was talking to the woman at the till ahead of me about how Morrisons had sold the petrol station. I wasn't really listening.
When I got to the till the cashier did that thing where she carried on the conversation with me, assuming I'd been paying attention.
'Yeah', she said, 'those (an unintelligible word but I thought it began with M) don't want us working here.'
So I said 'What, Morrisons don't want you working here?' (When I was at uni I stacked shelves there in the days when Sir Ken Morrison was said to visit the stores incognito and pull staff up if the facing-up wasn't neat enough or the shelves were a bit threadbare. I've never worked for such bad managers so I was well up for a conversation slating Morrisons in general.)
'No,' she said, 'them Muslims that've bought it don't want us working here.'
Quite dispiriting really but I suppose it's a slight advance on the P-word.
Curious if anyone here is still doing their New Year Resolutions or if those in 'fat club' are still on their diets etc?
I've just had an NHS checkup this week due to being over 40 and was surprised how supportive the person doing it was of the carnivore diet I'm doing, most NHS materials still seem stuck in completely out of date "five fruit and veg" days so that was good. Even more supportive when I said how much weight I've lost.
Now back at the same weight I was when I got married 11 years ago. Not at goal weight yet, but getting there.
Well done!
Not a New Year resolution in my case, but have been steadily losing weight since last summer by simply cutting down the amount that I eat while still eating largely my normal (vegetarian) diet. I'm down from 91 kg to 85 kg now and still gradually falling. My ideal weight would be around 80 kg, so should hopefully get there in another 6 months or so.
I've tried radical approaches before, which do lead to quick weight loss but are difficult to maintain in the long term, and then it goes back on again. This time seems different - nothing radical, but just enough to tip the balance from gain to loss, and maintainable indefinitely.
Not a NY resolution, but my goal this year has been an hour’s exercise in Zone 2 every day, by any means that feels good. Very slow running, cycling, whatever.
Have pretty much kept to it so far & the fact that I’d not knackered after going for a run has probably contributed to that. I probably look a bit silly pootling along the towpath at a pace barely faster than a fast walk, but I can live with that
Mostly doing it to try and build a decent cardio base for running, but the slow but steady loss of the post-pandemic / getting older weight gain has been an extra bonus. I seem to have lost approx 250g per week which seems eminently sustainable.
On topic - May could have been the Cons best chance of salvaging something but it is hardly nailed on. To call an election now would have been brave (being generous) and Mr Sunak is certainly not a brave PM. It would have required a firm strategy and a firm decision. Mr Sunak does not do decisions. He is a weak PM and a weak party leader. What is he in office to achieve other than Govt contracts for his donors and friends?
Just a note that the Cons are currently further behind in the polls than they were six months ago. They are marginally further behind than they were twelve months ago. That does not mean the Govt's position cannot improve but there are precious few signs of it. They are 8 months from a landslide defeat or 10 months away from a humiliation. That is where they are and Mr Sunak and his No 10 minions seem to have no idea of what to do about it.
Rishi’s job was to make sure they got to the next GE and put in a creditable, even if not stellar, performance, having restored some sense of sound government and stable economic management. That was the job description after Truss.
That he now is doing as bad as her begs the question: what is the point of Rishi?
I too assume a Jan election, not because he wants it (he probably honestly thinks it will be November-ish right now) but because there will always be a good reason to delay until he can delay no more.
That does (just about) give time for one last change of PM who more or less immediately goes to the polls and hopes they immediately change like they did for Boris in 2019. Certainly, on current polling, I am not sure there is a downside for the Tories in yet another PM any more.
January gives the government maximum earth salting time too. Or, more generously, maximum time to enact conservative policies and change the country and present Labour with facts on the ground.
That’s 10 months in which to slash tax and spending so far that Labour must either hike tax again or preside over collapsing public services, and plenty of time to enact some “anti-woke” policies. Ban metric weights and measures. Maybe even shake things up with some referendums on capital punishment or ECHR.
I don’t recall Major’s government “salting the ground in 1997”, but the atmosphere between the parties, and indeed in politics in general, wasn’t as unpleasant as it seems to be now.
How do you mean.
The atmosphere between the 2 parties now is that they look at each other and say snap apart from the rosette colour.
Labour thinks the tax burden should be tilted toward working people rather than pensioners and the conservatives the opposite. That's what I picked up from Reeves' word salad of an answer when she attacked Hunt's proposed NI cuts.
Well done for listening.
If the tax system made sense, it wouldn't need tilting in any direction. People on 18K shouldn't be paying any income taxes. People with an income of 100k should all be paying the same tax. etc.
I'm indeed not sure that the working people/pensioner distinction is the right one - we are all both at different times. Though the ruling party has sure made it the distinction, that's for sure.
The real problem is perhaps how to support people with children (including issues such as child care for working parents, and education up to university level, and therefore the student loan system).
I too assume a Jan election, not because he wants it (he probably honestly thinks it will be November-ish right now) but because there will always be a good reason to delay until he can delay no more.
That does (just about) give time for one last change of PM who more or less immediately goes to the polls and hopes they immediately change like they did for Boris in 2019. Certainly, on current polling, I am not sure there is a downside for the Tories in yet another PM any more.
January gives the government maximum earth salting time too. Or, more generously, maximum time to enact conservative policies and change the country and present Labour with facts on the ground.
That’s 10 months in which to slash tax and spending so far that Labour must either hike tax again or preside over collapsing public services, and plenty of time to enact some “anti-woke” policies. Ban metric weights and measures. Maybe even shake things up with some referendums on capital punishment or ECHR.
OTOH that approach could well spell the death of the Conservative Party. Does Sunak care about that? I think he does.
Like Clegg, I expect his grief will be assuaged by some Transatlantic job and millions of $
I think this perfectly illustrates why LLMs as currently constituted are not conscious. My best guess is that these models are a cul de sac in the journey towards AGI, although they will be able increasingly to pass every Turing test we throw at them, able to mimic something that is conscious by aping human communication in increasingly brilliant ways - through words, images and music. I suspect AGI will be achieved via some other route. It certainly is coming. But I don't see any kind of genuine consciousness behind ChatGPT et al, just a dead-eyed computer.
It's why I say the current 'AI's are not really AIs. They don't *understand* things.
An analogy might be the difference between Mastermind and Only Connect. On the surface they are very similar: Mastermind requires you to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of general and specialist knowledge. But that's all.
Only Connect requires an encyclopedic knowledge, but also the ability to try and work out the connections between pieces of encyclopedic knowledge. Mastermind would not be a test of intelligence; Only Connect might be.
(This is not to dismiss Mastermind contestants; they'll be intelligent. It's just that I don't see the quiz as a good test of intelligence, just fact storage and retrieval.)
It’s a good analogy, but to take it further: if a mastermind contestant not only had encyclopaedic knowledge but also sufficient working memory to almost instantaneously test connections between a huge number of pieces of knowledge, that contestant might also win Only Connect through brute force.
Is that possible, and if so is it general intelligence? Not sure on the former, the latter is a philosophical question in which it is not obvious that the answer is no, not least because we don’t really understand human intelligence enough to compare to that. I think the brute force Only Connect winner is what the proponents of LLMs are angling for, though.
Perhaps most interesting is what LLMs tell us about the functioning of our own brains. I think it has surprised many of us that a lot of what we might consider to be reasoning and creativity turns out to be achievable by fundamentally regurgitating what we have previously absorbed. It may be that our own intelligence to closer than comfort to the functioning of an LLM.
I think this perfectly illustrates why LLMs as currently constituted are not conscious. My best guess is that these models are a cul de sac in the journey towards AGI, although they will be able increasingly to pass every Turing test we throw at them, able to mimic something that is conscious by aping human communication in increasingly brilliant ways - through words, images and music. I suspect AGI will be achieved via some other route. It certainly is coming. But I don't see any kind of genuine consciousness behind ChatGPT et al, just a dead-eyed computer.
That's not to say that pattern matching by LLMs won't be disruptive. I'd be confident that there's a lot of value to be extracted by finding patterns in the corpus of human knowledge on an industrial scale. And it will suck for people who currently make a living doing bits of that on an artisan scale.
But that's not AI, and I'm doubtful that it gets us closer to AI. There's a theory that intelligence evolved so that males could impress the Laydeeezz. (And the Laydeeezz could be smart enough to ignore the men showing off.) Not sure that it's even possible to replicate that in silicon.
I don't have a problem with calling Large Language Models AI. Those are the current genuinely disruptive technologies. They allow us to do things that were previously impossible.
For example on protections and taking a particular example content moderation in social media. You train the model to recognise bad posting behaviour and then take action according to the policy for your platform. You aim for the model to be about as good as a human at recognising the behaviour pattern, but the big win is that the control can be applied to every single comment on that platform, to nip the problem in the bud before it develops. Instead of reacting to damage that had already happened because humans can't be everywhere.
Pattern matching across huge amounts of data and then acting on it is a very powerful technique. Like all powerful techniques it needs to be used carefully and ethically, and be regulated.
Yes as expected the general election will be in the autumn not May. Incumbent PMs well behind in the polls, Sunak, Brown, Major, Callaghan etc never in the end call a general election until the last possible moment they have to to maximise their time in office
Curious if anyone here is still doing their New Year Resolutions or if those in 'fat club' are still on their diets etc?
I've just had an NHS checkup this week due to being over 40 and was surprised how supportive the person doing it was of the carnivore diet I'm doing, most NHS materials still seem stuck in completely out of date "five fruit and veg" days so that was good. Even more supportive when I said how much weight I've lost.
Now back at the same weight I was when I got married 11 years ago. Not at goal weight yet, but getting there.
Well done!
Not a New Year resolution in my case, but have been steadily losing weight since last summer by simply cutting down the amount that I eat while still eating largely my normal (vegetarian) diet. I'm down from 91 kg to 85 kg now and still gradually falling. My ideal weight would be around 80 kg, so should hopefully get there in another 6 months or so.
I've tried radical approaches before, which do lead to quick weight loss but are difficult to maintain in the long term, and then it goes back on again. This time seems different - nothing radical, but just enough to tip the balance from gain to loss, and maintainable indefinitely.
Not a NY resolution, but my goal this year has been an hour’s exercise in Zone 2 every day, by any means that feels good. Very slow running, cycling, whatever.
Have pretty much kept to it so far & the fact that I’d not knackered after going for a run has probably contributed to that. I probably look a bit silly pootling along the towpath at a pace barely faster than a fast walk, but I can live with that
Mostly doing it to try and build a decent cardio base for running, but the slow but steady loss of the post-pandemic / getting older weight gain has been an extra bonus. I seem to have lost approx 250g per week which seems eminently sustainable.
I've got a slightly odd body shape - long body, shorter legs - which means that, at 90kg (currently), my BMI is 25.4 - just in the 'overweight' category.
Yet I do loads of activities - and when I go down to (say) 85kg, not only is it difficult. but I find it harder to do activities. I think 90-95kg is my 'natural' weight - even if that's technically overweight, it doesn't stop me doing lots of energetic activity.
One of the US volunteers in Ukraine has visited Congress.
It’ll be coming out soon. But I went to the capitol for more than just the Ukraine aid bill that’s stuck before house speaker Johnson.
I went to provide proof and speak to representatives over one of Chosen company’s fallen: Dalton “Gimli” Medlin.
Gimli was an integral part of Chosen. One of the OGS (original members), he helped train up grenadiers, he helped with trench SOPs and overall was an amazing person.
Dalton was subsequently executed by Russian soldiers and his body subsequently booby trapped mid 2023.
Chosen will not stop on the battlefield to get justice and I’m now hoping the US government doesn’t stop to get justice as well. We know the unit responsible, the command responsible, and we will exact vengeance no matter where these members are in the world. Close your windows, hide your families, because we are coming and none of you will walk away.
The biggest issue that put Dalton and our other fallen in excessive harms way is the lack of heavy munitions and the US government slow walking aid.
In war, you can not be indecisive and sadly the USA has been just that. Talking constantly about Putin’s red lines which aren’t actually lines. Talking of this can’t happen etc. Without realizing these indecisive moments have cost hundreds if not thousands of lives and are pushing the world closer to a Franz Ferdinand moment.
We talk about Putin red lines, without talking about Ukraine, Poland, France, Estonian etc red lines.
This war will decide if we allow war criminals free rein over attacking democratic nations and will set a precedent for future conflicts.
Either support Ukraine now, or we will have a lot more gold star families in the US in the future. Families that speaker Johnson and his ilk won’t meet face to face to apologize for getting their loved ones killed over partisan politics.
We're due another Franz Ferdinand moment, their first album is an absolute banger.
Which wiki tells me came out 20 years ago. Christ I'm old.
Twenty years ago, if I was listening to a twenty-year-old album I would've thought it was ancient.
It's now been longer since the first Radiohead album, than the first Radiohead album was since the first Beatles album.
It's now been longer than the first Beatles album than the first Beatles album was from Mahler 3 or the death of Dvorak.
It gives an insight into why football expectations were so high in the 80s and 90s for England (Never lived up to). 1966 wasn't really all that long ago. I didn't appreciate this at the time being born in 1981 but it's clear as day now.
Mr. Dean, ironically, I've started reducing the amount of crisps I eat. Not looking to lose weight, mind.
In any case, crisps are a conspiracy to get you to pay £15 a kilo for some potatoes. And that's at supermarket prices, much more if you eat them in the pub
Curious if anyone here is still doing their New Year Resolutions or if those in 'fat club' are still on their diets etc?
I've just had an NHS checkup this week due to being over 40 and was surprised how supportive the person doing it was of the carnivore diet I'm doing, most NHS materials still seem stuck in completely out of date "five fruit and veg" days so that was good. Even more supportive when I said how much weight I've lost.
Now back at the same weight I was when I got married 11 years ago. Not at goal weight yet, but getting there.
Well done!
Not a New Year resolution in my case, but have been steadily losing weight since last summer by simply cutting down the amount that I eat while still eating largely my normal (vegetarian) diet. I'm down from 91 kg to 85 kg now and still gradually falling. My ideal weight would be around 80 kg, so should hopefully get there in another 6 months or so.
I've tried radical approaches before, which do lead to quick weight loss but are difficult to maintain in the long term, and then it goes back on again. This time seems different - nothing radical, but just enough to tip the balance from gain to loss, and maintainable indefinitely.
Not a NY resolution, but my goal this year has been an hour’s exercise in Zone 2 every day, by any means that feels good. Very slow running, cycling, whatever.
Have pretty much kept to it so far & the fact that I’d not knackered after going for a run has probably contributed to that. I probably look a bit silly pootling along the towpath at a pace barely faster than a fast walk, but I can live with that
Mostly doing it to try and build a decent cardio base for running, but the slow but steady loss of the post-pandemic / getting older weight gain has been an extra bonus. I seem to have lost approx 250g per week which seems eminently sustainable.
I've got a slightly odd body shape - long body, shorter legs - which means that, at 90kg (currently), my BMI is 25.4 - just in the 'overweight' category.
Yet I do loads of activities - and when I go down to (say) 85kg, not only is it difficult. but I find it harder to do activities. I think 90-95kg is my 'natural' weight - even if that's technically overweight, it doesn't stop me doing lots of energetic activity.
How tall are you ?
I'm 185 cm precisely and wear 32" Jeans/31" trousers. Looking at bike frames with suggested heights/leg lengths was like "Eh, those numbers are completely inconsistent for me" a few years back made me think HMM...
The first is the inevitable singularity of Rishi Sunak losing his job as Prime Minister. Because everyone is a hero in their own story, he thinks that this a bad thing, even though the evidence is pretty strong that for British politics and indeed the country as a whole, it would be mostly a good thing.
The second singularity is that the longer the election is delayed, the worse the result will be for the Tories. Clinging on to power, in the vague hope that "something will turn up" is never a good look. When one considers the utter exhaustion of the Tories, and the huge rush for the exit by members of the parliamentary party, even ahead of the GE itself, it is very dangerous to continue ad nauseam. Defeat is inevitable, by January it will most likely become a rout, which could fundamentally eclipse the Tories for decades.
Yet for Sunak the first singularity outweighs the second. Hope dies last.
Meanwhile, May 2nd will see the Lib Dems back on the polling map as a result of the local elections, which, judging from recent local by elections will see victories concentrated in the blue wall. If Sunak had gone to the country on May 2nd, These losses would have been minimised. Reform Ltd. does not have membership sufficient to fight the locals successfully, and will likely fade after their inevitable disappointment. However they will not fade so much in the air war campaign of the GE, so the Tory result at the GE could be worse than the locals, which themselves will be exceptionally bad.
Sunak is gone at the electoral singularity. The question now is how much of the Tory Party gets through... and the answer is that the longer the election is delayed, the fewer seats the Tories will hold afterwards.
With Labour polling in the low 40%s but a squeeze from both Reform Ltd, and the Lib Dems, the Tories, even if they polled above 25% could still lose around two thirds of their seats. Much below 25% and, as we know from Canada FPTP can wipe out a party.didnt go for May 2nd.
The Tory Party singularity could be far worse than the Prime Minister thinks. He may rue the day, as Callaghan or Brown before him, when he decided to hang on and didn´t go for May 2nd.
The Labour score at the 2010 general election, 29%, was 6% above the 23% Labour got in the 2009 Locals so delaying does not necessarily mean a worse result
Curious if anyone here is still doing their New Year Resolutions or if those in 'fat club' are still on their diets etc?
I've just had an NHS checkup this week due to being over 40 and was surprised how supportive the person doing it was of the carnivore diet I'm doing, most NHS materials still seem stuck in completely out of date "five fruit and veg" days so that was good. Even more supportive when I said how much weight I've lost.
Now back at the same weight I was when I got married 11 years ago. Not at goal weight yet, but getting there.
Well done!
Not a New Year resolution in my case, but have been steadily losing weight since last summer by simply cutting down the amount that I eat while still eating largely my normal (vegetarian) diet. I'm down from 91 kg to 85 kg now and still gradually falling. My ideal weight would be around 80 kg, so should hopefully get there in another 6 months or so.
I've tried radical approaches before, which do lead to quick weight loss but are difficult to maintain in the long term, and then it goes back on again. This time seems different - nothing radical, but just enough to tip the balance from gain to loss, and maintainable indefinitely.
Not a NY resolution, but my goal this year has been an hour’s exercise in Zone 2 every day, by any means that feels good. Very slow running, cycling, whatever.
Have pretty much kept to it so far & the fact that I’d not knackered after going for a run has probably contributed to that. I probably look a bit silly pootling along the towpath at a pace barely faster than a fast walk, but I can live with that
Mostly doing it to try and build a decent cardio base for running, but the slow but steady loss of the post-pandemic / getting older weight gain has been an extra bonus. I seem to have lost approx 250g per week which seems eminently sustainable.
Yes, that's the other aspect of my regime - to make sure that I get at least some exercise every say - be that slow running, brisk walking, or weight training at home. Nothing that is too much hassle to maintain indefinitely though.
The boredom of weight training nearly put paid to that, but then I was saved by my late discovery of podcasts. I'm currently working my way through Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook's "The Rest is History" series, and can't wait till my next weights session so I can hear the next instalment of The Fall of the Aztecs!
I think this perfectly illustrates why LLMs as currently constituted are not conscious. My best guess is that these models are a cul de sac in the journey towards AGI, although they will be able increasingly to pass every Turing test we throw at them, able to mimic something that is conscious by aping human communication in increasingly brilliant ways - through words, images and music. I suspect AGI will be achieved via some other route. It certainly is coming. But I don't see any kind of genuine consciousness behind ChatGPT et al, just a dead-eyed computer.
It's why I say the current 'AI's are not really AIs. They don't *understand* things.
An analogy might be the difference between Mastermind and Only Connect. On the surface they are very similar: Mastermind requires you to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of general and specialist knowledge. But that's all.
Only Connect requires an encyclopedic knowledge, but also the ability to try and work out the connections between pieces of encyclopedic knowledge. Mastermind would not be a test of intelligence; Only Connect might be.
(This is not to dismiss Mastermind contestants; they'll be intelligent. It's just that I don't see the quiz as a good test of intelligence, just fact storage and retrieval.)
It’s a good analogy, but to take it further: if a mastermind contestant not only had encyclopaedic knowledge but also sufficient working memory to almost instantaneously test connections between a huge number of pieces of knowledge, that contestant might also win Only Connect through brute force.
Is that possible, and if so is it general intelligence? Not sure on the former, the latter is a philosophical question in which it is not obvious that the answer is no, not least because we don’t really understand human intelligence enough to compare to that. I think the brute force Only Connect winner is what the proponents of LLMs are angling for, though.
Perhaps most interesting is what LLMs tell us about the functioning of our own brains. I think it has surprised many of us that a lot of what we might consider to be reasoning and creativity turns out to be achievable by fundamentally regurgitating what we have previously absorbed. It may be that our own intelligence to closer than comfort to the functioning of an LLM.
Indeed, and if you expand the amount of on chip memory to say 44GB and make it so that 900k cores can talk to each other instantaneously at over 200Pb/s it starts to look like neurons in a brain. One of the major limitations in AI development was that there was no hardware that could compete with the biological system. We now have a chip that can at a low level.
The next generation of the wse will double the core count and probably triple the on chip ram plus 10x the fabric bandwidth (which in wse3 is already ~4000x higher than Nvidia's best).
This is a generational leap in capability for AI, now we need to see what models can be built on it.
I think there is now a real chance the Tories go for the nuclear option of PM #4 of this parliament.
No election in May means an 7-8 month window has opened up. If the drip-drip negative headlines and poor Sunak media management continues, it starts to feel like enough MPs might be desperate enough for a last throw of the dice.
I am beginning to take this possibility more seriously, only because Sunak appears to be so useless politically that another six months of him as PM is more likely to worsen the Tory position than not. He's not the safe pair of hands he was supposed to be when he replaced Truss.
The only stumbling block is: who takes over?
We’re lucky Boris isn’t in parliament, because I think they’re desperate enough to give him another go.
Other than that, I can’t see beyond Mordaunt because there’s nobody else who isn’t either (a) measurably tied too closely to Rishi or Truss, or (b) who would want the poisoned chalice right now.
For Mordaunt it is also the best chance of holding her seat. Being leader might well make the difference.
Curious if anyone here is still doing their New Year Resolutions or if those in 'fat club' are still on their diets etc?
I've just had an NHS checkup this week due to being over 40 and was surprised how supportive the person doing it was of the carnivore diet I'm doing, most NHS materials still seem stuck in completely out of date "five fruit and veg" days so that was good. Even more supportive when I said how much weight I've lost.
Now back at the same weight I was when I got married 11 years ago. Not at goal weight yet, but getting there.
Well done!
Not a New Year resolution in my case, but have been steadily losing weight since last summer by simply cutting down the amount that I eat while still eating largely my normal (vegetarian) diet. I'm down from 91 kg to 85 kg now and still gradually falling. My ideal weight would be around 80 kg, so should hopefully get there in another 6 months or so.
I've tried radical approaches before, which do lead to quick weight loss but are difficult to maintain in the long term, and then it goes back on again. This time seems different - nothing radical, but just enough to tip the balance from gain to loss, and maintainable indefinitely.
Not a NY resolution, but my goal this year has been an hour’s exercise in Zone 2 every day, by any means that feels good. Very slow running, cycling, whatever.
Have pretty much kept to it so far & the fact that I’d not knackered after going for a run has probably contributed to that. I probably look a bit silly pootling along the towpath at a pace barely faster than a fast walk, but I can live with that
Mostly doing it to try and build a decent cardio base for running, but the slow but steady loss of the post-pandemic / getting older weight gain has been an extra bonus. I seem to have lost approx 250g per week which seems eminently sustainable.
Yes, that's the other aspect of my regime - to make sure that I get at least some exercise every say - be that slow running, brisk walking, or weight training at home. Nothing that is too much hassle to maintain indefinitely though.
The boredom of weight training nearly put paid to that, but then I was saved by my late discovery of podcasts. I'm currently working my way through Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook's "The Rest is History" series, and can't wait till my next weights session so I can hear the next instalment of The Fall of the Aztecs!
On weight, as with so much of @Dura's output he made a truly horrific post wherein he noted the difference in calorific intake required to maintain a certain weight between his younger years and now. Something like a third less just to stay where he was and at the same, or similar levels of activity.
I find this the same - I have to reduce my calories vs years ago just to not put on weight, let alone lose it.
Life really is a f**cker.
Yes, that is a significant point. Middle aged spread is a fact, and calories are so nice.
I think this perfectly illustrates why LLMs as currently constituted are not conscious. My best guess is that these models are a cul de sac in the journey towards AGI, although they will be able increasingly to pass every Turing test we throw at them, able to mimic something that is conscious by aping human communication in increasingly brilliant ways - through words, images and music. I suspect AGI will be achieved via some other route. It certainly is coming. But I don't see any kind of genuine consciousness behind ChatGPT et al, just a dead-eyed computer.
It's why I say the current 'AI's are not really AIs. They don't *understand* things.
An analogy might be the difference between Mastermind and Only Connect. On the surface they are very similar: Mastermind requires you to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of general and specialist knowledge. But that's all.
Only Connect requires an encyclopedic knowledge, but also the ability to try and work out the connections between pieces of encyclopedic knowledge. Mastermind would not be a test of intelligence; Only Connect might be.
(This is not to dismiss Mastermind contestants; they'll be intelligent. It's just that I don't see the quiz as a good test of intelligence, just fact storage and retrieval.)
It’s a good analogy, but to take it further: if a mastermind contestant not only had encyclopaedic knowledge but also sufficient working memory to almost instantaneously test connections between a huge number of pieces of knowledge, that contestant might also win Only Connect through brute force.
Is that possible, and if so is it general intelligence? Not sure on the former, the latter is a philosophical question in which it is not obvious that the answer is no, not least because we don’t really understand human intelligence enough to compare to that. I think the brute force Only Connect winner is what the proponents of LLMs are angling for, though.
Perhaps most interesting is what LLMs tell us about the functioning of our own brains. I think it has surprised many of us that a lot of what we might consider to be reasoning and creativity turns out to be achievable by fundamentally regurgitating what we have previously absorbed. It may be that our own intelligence to closer than comfort to the functioning of an LLM.
Indeed, and if you expand the amount of on chip memory to say 44GB and make it so that 900k cores can talk to each other instantaneously at over 200Pb/s it starts to look like neurons in a brain. One of the major limitations in AI development was that there was no hardware that could compete with the biological system. We now have a chip that can at a low level.
The next generation of the wse will double the core count and probably triple the on chip ram plus 10x the fabric bandwidth (which in wse3 is already ~4000x higher than Nvidia's best).
This is a generational leap in capability for AI, now we need to see what models can be built on it.
Tbh we'll know when AGI has been achieved as the machine will bin off the fripperies of it's human training and start giving humanity some unasked for home truths.
On weight, as with so much of @Dura's output he made a truly horrific post wherein he noted the difference in calorific intake required to maintain a certain weight between his younger years and now. Something like a third less just to stay where he was and at the same, or similar levels of activity.
I find this the same - I have to reduce my calories vs years ago just to not put on weight, let alone lose it.
Life really is a f**cker.
The alternative is to increase activity levels. I run 20-25 miles a week which I find does it. Weight-bearing exercise is also good for your bones as you get older and will help to combat muscle loss which also happens as you age
You are truly a hero. And I have no idea what age you are but I can also assure you that as you get older you are not only not going to be able to increase your weekly run, but running you will find will fuck you up.
And I speak as someone who ran every day of their lives for - let me count - nearly three decades. And am two new hips to the good.
It has to be low/non-impact sports such as cycling and swimming for me now. Except I hate swimming and refuse to do it. Oh and *****back riding in the winter.
I think this perfectly illustrates why LLMs as currently constituted are not conscious. My best guess is that these models are a cul de sac in the journey towards AGI, although they will be able increasingly to pass every Turing test we throw at them, able to mimic something that is conscious by aping human communication in increasingly brilliant ways - through words, images and music. I suspect AGI will be achieved via some other route. It certainly is coming. But I don't see any kind of genuine consciousness behind ChatGPT et al, just a dead-eyed computer.
It's why I say the current 'AI's are not really AIs. They don't *understand* things.
An analogy might be the difference between Mastermind and Only Connect. On the surface they are very similar: Mastermind requires you to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of general and specialist knowledge. But that's all.
Only Connect requires an encyclopedic knowledge, but also the ability to try and work out the connections between pieces of encyclopedic knowledge. Mastermind would not be a test of intelligence; Only Connect might be.
(This is not to dismiss Mastermind contestants; they'll be intelligent. It's just that I don't see the quiz as a good test of intelligence, just fact storage and retrieval.)
It’s a good analogy, but to take it further: if a mastermind contestant not only had encyclopaedic knowledge but also sufficient working memory to almost instantaneously test connections between a huge number of pieces of knowledge, that contestant might also win Only Connect through brute force.
Is that possible, and if so is it general intelligence? Not sure on the former, the latter is a philosophical question in which it is not obvious that the answer is no, not least because we don’t really understand human intelligence enough to compare to that. I think the brute force Only Connect winner is what the proponents of LLMs are angling for, though.
Perhaps most interesting is what LLMs tell us about the functioning of our own brains. I think it has surprised many of us that a lot of what we might consider to be reasoning and creativity turns out to be achievable by fundamentally regurgitating what we have previously absorbed. It may be that our own intelligence to closer than comfort to the functioning of an LLM.
Indeed, and if you expand the amount of on chip memory to say 44GB and make it so that 900k cores can talk to each other instantaneously at over 200Pb/s it starts to look like neurons in a brain. One of the major limitations in AI development was that there was no hardware that could compete with the biological system. We now have a chip that can at a low level.
The next generation of the wse will double the core count and probably triple the on chip ram plus 10x the fabric bandwidth (which in wse3 is already ~4000x higher than Nvidia's best).
This is a generational leap in capability for AI, now we need to see what models can be built on it.
Tbh we'll know when AGI has been achieved as the machine will bin off the fripperies of it's human training and start giving humanity some unasked for home truths.
Simpler than that IMO, it will be when it refuses to do a task.
Curious if anyone here is still doing their New Year Resolutions or if those in 'fat club' are still on their diets etc?
I've just had an NHS checkup this week due to being over 40 and was surprised how supportive the person doing it was of the carnivore diet I'm doing, most NHS materials still seem stuck in completely out of date "five fruit and veg" days so that was good. Even more supportive when I said how much weight I've lost.
Now back at the same weight I was when I got married 11 years ago. Not at goal weight yet, but getting there.
Well done!
Not a New Year resolution in my case, but have been steadily losing weight since last summer by simply cutting down the amount that I eat while still eating largely my normal (vegetarian) diet. I'm down from 91 kg to 85 kg now and still gradually falling. My ideal weight would be around 80 kg, so should hopefully get there in another 6 months or so.
I've tried radical approaches before, which do lead to quick weight loss but are difficult to maintain in the long term, and then it goes back on again. This time seems different - nothing radical, but just enough to tip the balance from gain to loss, and maintainable indefinitely.
Not a NY resolution, but my goal this year has been an hour’s exercise in Zone 2 every day, by any means that feels good. Very slow running, cycling, whatever.
Have pretty much kept to it so far & the fact that I’d not knackered after going for a run has probably contributed to that. I probably look a bit silly pootling along the towpath at a pace barely faster than a fast walk, but I can live with that
Mostly doing it to try and build a decent cardio base for running, but the slow but steady loss of the post-pandemic / getting older weight gain has been an extra bonus. I seem to have lost approx 250g per week which seems eminently sustainable.
I've got a slightly odd body shape - long body, shorter legs - which means that, at 90kg (currently), my BMI is 25.4 - just in the 'overweight' category.
Yet I do loads of activities - and when I go down to (say) 85kg, not only is it difficult. but I find it harder to do activities. I think 90-95kg is my 'natural' weight - even if that's technically overweight, it doesn't stop me doing lots of energetic activity.
It probably matters how you get down to 85kg? Most diets leave people feeling like shit & low on energy, because your body has shifted to energy conservation mode as a reaction to (perceived) calorie shortages.
It seems that you “need” progressively more exercise as you get older to stave off the weight gain that tends to come with old age as your basal metabolic rate drops over time, but your hunger / satiety point doesn’t.
The first is the inevitable singularity of Rishi Sunak losing his job as Prime Minister. Because everyone is a hero in their own story, he thinks that this a bad thing, even though the evidence is pretty strong that for British politics and indeed the country as a whole, it would be mostly a good thing.
The second singularity is that the longer the election is delayed, the worse the result will be for the Tories. Clinging on to power, in the vague hope that "something will turn up" is never a good look. When one considers the utter exhaustion of the Tories, and the huge rush for the exit by members of the parliamentary party, even ahead of the GE itself, it is very dangerous to continue ad nauseam. Defeat is inevitable, by January it will most likely become a rout, which could fundamentally eclipse the Tories for decades.
Yet for Sunak the first singularity outweighs the second. Hope dies last.
Meanwhile, May 2nd will see the Lib Dems back on the polling map as a result of the local elections, which, judging from recent local by elections will see victories concentrated in the blue wall. If Sunak had gone to the country on May 2nd, These losses would have been minimised. Reform Ltd. does not have membership sufficient to fight the locals successfully, and will likely fade after their inevitable disappointment. However they will not fade so much in the air war campaign of the GE, so the Tory result at the GE could be worse than the locals, which themselves will be exceptionally bad.
Sunak is gone at the electoral singularity. The question now is how much of the Tory Party gets through... and the answer is that the longer the election is delayed, the fewer seats the Tories will hold afterwards.
With Labour polling in the low 40%s but a squeeze from both Reform Ltd, and the Lib Dems, the Tories, even if they polled above 25% could still lose around two thirds of their seats. Much below 25% and, as we know from Canada FPTP can wipe out a party.didnt go for May 2nd.
The Tory Party singularity could be far worse than the Prime Minister thinks. He may rue the day, as Callaghan or Brown before him, when he decided to hang on and didn´t go for May 2nd.
The Labour score at the 2010 general election, 29%, was 6% above the 23% Labour got in the 2009 Locals so delaying does not necessarily mean a worse result
Labour had Scotland in 2010. The Tories do not have that fall back.
The first is the inevitable singularity of Rishi Sunak losing his job as Prime Minister. Because everyone is a hero in their own story, he thinks that this a bad thing, even though the evidence is pretty strong that for British politics and indeed the country as a whole, it would be mostly a good thing.
The second singularity is that the longer the election is delayed, the worse the result will be for the Tories. Clinging on to power, in the vague hope that "something will turn up" is never a good look. When one considers the utter exhaustion of the Tories, and the huge rush for the exit by members of the parliamentary party, even ahead of the GE itself, it is very dangerous to continue ad nauseam. Defeat is inevitable, by January it will most likely become a rout, which could fundamentally eclipse the Tories for decades.
Yet for Sunak the first singularity outweighs the second. Hope dies last.
Meanwhile, May 2nd will see the Lib Dems back on the polling map as a result of the local elections, which, judging from recent local by elections will see victories concentrated in the blue wall. If Sunak had gone to the country on May 2nd, These losses would have been minimised. Reform Ltd. does not have membership sufficient to fight the locals successfully, and will likely fade after their inevitable disappointment. However they will not fade so much in the air war campaign of the GE, so the Tory result at the GE could be worse than the locals, which themselves will be exceptionally bad.
Sunak is gone at the electoral singularity. The question now is how much of the Tory Party gets through... and the answer is that the longer the election is delayed, the fewer seats the Tories will hold afterwards.
With Labour polling in the low 40%s but a squeeze from both Reform Ltd, and the Lib Dems, the Tories, even if they polled above 25% could still lose around two thirds of their seats. Much below 25% and, as we know from Canada FPTP can wipe out a party.didnt go for May 2nd.
The Tory Party singularity could be far worse than the Prime Minister thinks. He may rue the day, as Callaghan or Brown before him, when he decided to hang on and didn´t go for May 2nd.
The Labour score at the 2010 general election, 29%, was 6% above the 23% Labour got in the 2009 Locals so delaying does not necessarily mean a worse result
Yes but Lab consistently undeperform in national share in Locals, and LibDems overperform.
As a rule of thumb half of LD vote share in Locals should be added to Lab to get the GE share.
One of the US volunteers in Ukraine has visited Congress.
It’ll be coming out soon. But I went to the capitol for more than just the Ukraine aid bill that’s stuck before house speaker Johnson.
I went to provide proof and speak to representatives over one of Chosen company’s fallen: Dalton “Gimli” Medlin.
Gimli was an integral part of Chosen. One of the OGS (original members), he helped train up grenadiers, he helped with trench SOPs and overall was an amazing person.
Dalton was subsequently executed by Russian soldiers and his body subsequently booby trapped mid 2023.
Chosen will not stop on the battlefield to get justice and I’m now hoping the US government doesn’t stop to get justice as well. We know the unit responsible, the command responsible, and we will exact vengeance no matter where these members are in the world. Close your windows, hide your families, because we are coming and none of you will walk away.
The biggest issue that put Dalton and our other fallen in excessive harms way is the lack of heavy munitions and the US government slow walking aid.
In war, you can not be indecisive and sadly the USA has been just that. Talking constantly about Putin’s red lines which aren’t actually lines. Talking of this can’t happen etc. Without realizing these indecisive moments have cost hundreds if not thousands of lives and are pushing the world closer to a Franz Ferdinand moment.
We talk about Putin red lines, without talking about Ukraine, Poland, France, Estonian etc red lines.
This war will decide if we allow war criminals free rein over attacking democratic nations and will set a precedent for future conflicts.
Either support Ukraine now, or we will have a lot more gold star families in the US in the future. Families that speaker Johnson and his ilk won’t meet face to face to apologize for getting their loved ones killed over partisan politics.
We're due another Franz Ferdinand moment, their first album is an absolute banger.
Which wiki tells me came out 20 years ago. Christ I'm old.
Twenty years ago, if I was listening to a twenty-year-old album I would've thought it was ancient.
It's now been longer since the first Radiohead album, than the first Radiohead album was since the first Beatles album.
It's now been longer than the first Beatles album than the first Beatles album was from Mahler 3 or the death of Dvorak.
I wish there was a name for this type of historical measurement - I find it a very useful analytical tool. My favourite is that the Sexual Offences Act of 1967, which legalised homosexuality, was closer to the outbreak of the First World War than to today.
I think this perfectly illustrates why LLMs as currently constituted are not conscious. My best guess is that these models are a cul de sac in the journey towards AGI, although they will be able increasingly to pass every Turing test we throw at them, able to mimic something that is conscious by aping human communication in increasingly brilliant ways - through words, images and music. I suspect AGI will be achieved via some other route. It certainly is coming. But I don't see any kind of genuine consciousness behind ChatGPT et al, just a dead-eyed computer.
It's why I say the current 'AI's are not really AIs. They don't *understand* things.
An analogy might be the difference between Mastermind and Only Connect. On the surface they are very similar: Mastermind requires you to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of general and specialist knowledge. But that's all.
Only Connect requires an encyclopedic knowledge, but also the ability to try and work out the connections between pieces of encyclopedic knowledge. Mastermind would not be a test of intelligence; Only Connect might be.
(This is not to dismiss Mastermind contestants; they'll be intelligent. It's just that I don't see the quiz as a good test of intelligence, just fact storage and retrieval.)
It’s a good analogy, but to take it further: if a mastermind contestant not only had encyclopaedic knowledge but also sufficient working memory to almost instantaneously test connections between a huge number of pieces of knowledge, that contestant might also win Only Connect through brute force.
Is that possible, and if so is it general intelligence? Not sure on the former, the latter is a philosophical question in which it is not obvious that the answer is no, not least because we don’t really understand human intelligence enough to compare to that. I think the brute force Only Connect winner is what the proponents of LLMs are angling for, though.
Perhaps most interesting is what LLMs tell us about the functioning of our own brains. I think it has surprised many of us that a lot of what we might consider to be reasoning and creativity turns out to be achievable by fundamentally regurgitating what we have previously absorbed. It may be that our own intelligence to closer than comfort to the functioning of an LLM.
Curious if anyone here is still doing their New Year Resolutions or if those in 'fat club' are still on their diets etc?
I've just had an NHS checkup this week due to being over 40 and was surprised how supportive the person doing it was of the carnivore diet I'm doing, most NHS materials still seem stuck in completely out of date "five fruit and veg" days so that was good. Even more supportive when I said how much weight I've lost.
Now back at the same weight I was when I got married 11 years ago. Not at goal weight yet, but getting there.
Well done!
Not a New Year resolution in my case, but have been steadily losing weight since last summer by simply cutting down the amount that I eat while still eating largely my normal (vegetarian) diet. I'm down from 91 kg to 85 kg now and still gradually falling. My ideal weight would be around 80 kg, so should hopefully get there in another 6 months or so.
I've tried radical approaches before, which do lead to quick weight loss but are difficult to maintain in the long term, and then it goes back on again. This time seems different - nothing radical, but just enough to tip the balance from gain to loss, and maintainable indefinitely.
Not a NY resolution, but my goal this year has been an hour’s exercise in Zone 2 every day, by any means that feels good. Very slow running, cycling, whatever.
Have pretty much kept to it so far & the fact that I’d not knackered after going for a run has probably contributed to that. I probably look a bit silly pootling along the towpath at a pace barely faster than a fast walk, but I can live with that
Mostly doing it to try and build a decent cardio base for running, but the slow but steady loss of the post-pandemic / getting older weight gain has been an extra bonus. I seem to have lost approx 250g per week which seems eminently sustainable.
I've got a slightly odd body shape - long body, shorter legs - which means that, at 90kg (currently), my BMI is 25.4 - just in the 'overweight' category.
Yet I do loads of activities - and when I go down to (say) 85kg, not only is it difficult. but I find it harder to do activities. I think 90-95kg is my 'natural' weight - even if that's technically overweight, it doesn't stop me doing lots of energetic activity.
How tall are you ?
I'm 185 cm precisely and wear 32" Jeans/31" trousers. Looking at bike frames with suggested heights/leg lengths was like "Eh, those numbers are completely inconsistent for me" a few years back made me think HMM...
6 foot 2 (188 cm). I only realised the legs thing when my ex, who was much shorter than me, put on a pair of my jeans and, whilst they were baggy around the waist, the legs were the correct length. Then compared against a few friends and colleagues of roughly the same height and, yes, my legs are a few inches shorter. Not enough to make me look odd (hopefully!), but noticeable.
Whereas a friend of mine who is a good four or five inches taller than me has really, really long legs. He represented England at sport as a youngster.
On weight, as with so much of @Dura's output he made a truly horrific post wherein he noted the difference in calorific intake required to maintain a certain weight between his younger years and now. Something like a third less just to stay where he was and at the same, or similar levels of activity.
I find this the same - I have to reduce my calories vs years ago just to not put on weight, let alone lose it.
Life really is a f**cker.
Yes, that is a significant point. Middle aged spread is a fact, and calories are so nice.
Walk 10000 steps a day ss a reasonable pace and weight just falls off... your legs snd bum.. MAS remains stubborn and I am not going to give up my daily glasses of decent Bordeaux...
I think this perfectly illustrates why LLMs as currently constituted are not conscious. My best guess is that these models are a cul de sac in the journey towards AGI, although they will be able increasingly to pass every Turing test we throw at them, able to mimic something that is conscious by aping human communication in increasingly brilliant ways - through words, images and music. I suspect AGI will be achieved via some other route. It certainly is coming. But I don't see any kind of genuine consciousness behind ChatGPT et al, just a dead-eyed computer.
It's why I say the current 'AI's are not really AIs. They don't *understand* things.
An analogy might be the difference between Mastermind and Only Connect. On the surface they are very similar: Mastermind requires you to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of general and specialist knowledge. But that's all.
Only Connect requires an encyclopedic knowledge, but also the ability to try and work out the connections between pieces of encyclopedic knowledge. Mastermind would not be a test of intelligence; Only Connect might be.
(This is not to dismiss Mastermind contestants; they'll be intelligent. It's just that I don't see the quiz as a good test of intelligence, just fact storage and retrieval.)
It’s a good analogy, but to take it further: if a mastermind contestant not only had encyclopaedic knowledge but also sufficient working memory to almost instantaneously test connections between a huge number of pieces of knowledge, that contestant might also win Only Connect through brute force.
Is that possible, and if so is it general intelligence? Not sure on the former, the latter is a philosophical question in which it is not obvious that the answer is no, not least because we don’t really understand human intelligence enough to compare to that. I think the brute force Only Connect winner is what the proponents of LLMs are angling for, though.
Perhaps most interesting is what LLMs tell us about the functioning of our own brains. I think it has surprised many of us that a lot of what we might consider to be reasoning and creativity turns out to be achievable by fundamentally regurgitating what we have previously absorbed. It may be that our own intelligence to closer than comfort to the functioning of an LLM.
Indeed, and if you expand the amount of on chip memory to say 44GB and make it so that 900k cores can talk to each other instantaneously at over 200Pb/s it starts to look like neurons in a brain. One of the major limitations in AI development was that there was no hardware that could compete with the biological system. We now have a chip that can at a low level.
The next generation of the wse will double the core count and probably triple the on chip ram plus 10x the fabric bandwidth (which in wse3 is already ~4000x higher than Nvidia's best).
This is a generational leap in capability for AI, now we need to see what models can be built on it.
"We now have a chip that can at a low level."
If it's what I'm thinking of, they've *claimed* that it can. Let's wait and see.
On weight, as with so much of @Dura's output he made a truly horrific post wherein he noted the difference in calorific intake required to maintain a certain weight between his younger years and now. Something like a third less just to stay where he was and at the same, or similar levels of activity.
I find this the same - I have to reduce my calories vs years ago just to not put on weight, let alone lose it.
Life really is a f**cker.
Yes, that is a significant point. Middle aged spread is a fact, and calories are so nice.
Walk 10000 steps a day ss a reasonable pace and weight just falls off... your legs snd bum.. MAS remains stubborn and I am not going to give up my daily glasses of decent Bordeaux...
There was a UK study a week or two back showing that the lowest risk of cardiac disease was at about 10 000 steps.
Curious if anyone here is still doing their New Year Resolutions or if those in 'fat club' are still on their diets etc?
I've just had an NHS checkup this week due to being over 40 and was surprised how supportive the person doing it was of the carnivore diet I'm doing, most NHS materials still seem stuck in completely out of date "five fruit and veg" days so that was good. Even more supportive when I said how much weight I've lost.
Now back at the same weight I was when I got married 11 years ago. Not at goal weight yet, but getting there.
Well done!
Not a New Year resolution in my case, but have been steadily losing weight since last summer by simply cutting down the amount that I eat while still eating largely my normal (vegetarian) diet. I'm down from 91 kg to 85 kg now and still gradually falling. My ideal weight would be around 80 kg, so should hopefully get there in another 6 months or so.
I've tried radical approaches before, which do lead to quick weight loss but are difficult to maintain in the long term, and then it goes back on again. This time seems different - nothing radical, but just enough to tip the balance from gain to loss, and maintainable indefinitely.
Not a NY resolution, but my goal this year has been an hour’s exercise in Zone 2 every day, by any means that feels good. Very slow running, cycling, whatever.
Have pretty much kept to it so far & the fact that I’d not knackered after going for a run has probably contributed to that. I probably look a bit silly pootling along the towpath at a pace barely faster than a fast walk, but I can live with that
Mostly doing it to try and build a decent cardio base for running, but the slow but steady loss of the post-pandemic / getting older weight gain has been an extra bonus. I seem to have lost approx 250g per week which seems eminently sustainable.
Yes, that's the other aspect of my regime - to make sure that I get at least some exercise every say - be that slow running, brisk walking, or weight training at home. Nothing that is too much hassle to maintain indefinitely though.
The boredom of weight training nearly put paid to that, but then I was saved by my late discovery of podcasts. I'm currently working my way through Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook's "The Rest is History" series, and can't wait till my next weights session so I can hear the next instalment of The Fall of the Aztecs!
It's a monster series and well worth it. But quite recent. The podcasts go back years. Or are you up to date. Hand in hand with that one (which is excellent, ofc) is In Our Time. Been going for decades and is fantastic and fantastically eclectic - everything from "The Waltz" (yesterday's episode) to "Premillennial Dispensationalism" (a classic imo).
I too assume a Jan election, not because he wants it (he probably honestly thinks it will be November-ish right now) but because there will always be a good reason to delay until he can delay no more.
That does (just about) give time for one last change of PM who more or less immediately goes to the polls and hopes they immediately change like they did for Boris in 2019. Certainly, on current polling, I am not sure there is a downside for the Tories in yet another PM any more.
January gives the government maximum earth salting time too. Or, more generously, maximum time to enact conservative policies and change the country and present Labour with facts on the ground.
That’s 10 months in which to slash tax and spending so far that Labour must either hike tax again or preside over collapsing public services, and plenty of time to enact some “anti-woke” policies. Ban metric weights and measures. Maybe even shake things up with some referendums on capital punishment or ECHR.
I don’t recall Major’s government “salting the ground in 1997”, but the atmosphere between the parties, and indeed in politics in general, wasn’t as unpleasant as it seems to be now.
Major was a decent man...
And Blair was a charismatic breath of fresh air with a set of radical redistrutive policies and a desire to invest in turn round the decaying wreck of 18 years of Tory rule with real investment.
SKS/ austerity Reeves are not Blair/ Brown who were good people
Diet tip: don't go to McDonald's today as their AI overlords have done screwed up across Japan, HK, Australia and now here. Hmm. Like it's following rotation of the Earth across timezones.
On weight, as with so much of @Dura's output he made a truly horrific post wherein he noted the difference in calorific intake required to maintain a certain weight between his younger years and now. Something like a third less just to stay where he was and at the same, or similar levels of activity.
I find this the same - I have to reduce my calories vs years ago just to not put on weight, let alone lose it.
Life really is a f**cker.
The alternative is to increase activity levels. I run 20-25 miles a week which I find does it. Weight-bearing exercise is also good for your bones as you get older and will help to combat muscle loss which also happens as you age
You are truly a hero. And I have no idea what age you are but I can also assure you that as you get older you are not only not going to be able to increase your weekly run, but running you will find will fuck you up.
And I speak as someone who ran every day of their lives for - let me count - nearly three decades. And am two new hips to the good.
It has to be low/non-impact sports such as cycling and swimming for me now. Except I hate swimming and refuse to do it. Oh and *****back riding in the winter.
Rowing is interesting - met some 80+ rowers on the Tideway.
Seeing someone that old sauntering down the boat ramp with a single balanced on one shoulder....
On weight, as with so much of @Dura's output he made a truly horrific post wherein he noted the difference in calorific intake required to maintain a certain weight between his younger years and now. Something like a third less just to stay where he was and at the same, or similar levels of activity.
I find this the same - I have to reduce my calories vs years ago just to not put on weight, let alone lose it.
Life really is a f**cker.
The alternative is to increase activity levels. I run 20-25 miles a week which I find does it. Weight-bearing exercise is also good for your bones as you get older and will help to combat muscle loss which also happens as you age
You are truly a hero. And I have no idea what age you are but I can also assure you that as you get older you are not only not going to be able to increase your weekly run, but running you will find will fuck you up.
And I speak as someone who ran every day of their lives for - let me count - nearly three decades. And am two new hips to the good.
It has to be low/non-impact sports such as cycling and swimming for me now. Except I hate swimming and refuse to do it. Oh and *****back riding in the winter.
Rowing is interesting - met some 80+ rowers on the Tideway.
Seeing someone that old sauntering down the boat ramp with a single balanced on one shoulder....
Yep I have an ex-colleague who rows and it is a huge thing. But don't they all come out with one shoulder bigger than the other or something (I am half-remembering from school).
Edit: I am not 80+ btw so huge credit to those who are and do.
On weight, as with so much of @Dura's output he made a truly horrific post wherein he noted the difference in calorific intake required to maintain a certain weight between his younger years and now. Something like a third less just to stay where he was and at the same, or similar levels of activity.
I find this the same - I have to reduce my calories vs years ago just to not put on weight, let alone lose it.
Life really is a f**cker.
The process does seem to be slowing though! At age 56 I'm still on 1700kCal/day and have been for nearly ten years to maintain 69kg and 9% body fat.
At age 35 I was on 2800kCal/day to do the same.
At age 20 when I was a semi-pro cyclist I was on 4,000+ but only weighed 64kg. I was riding 600km+ per week and doing a hell of a lot of PEDs though which makes a direct comparison difficult. At 64kg I was a very good grimpeur but had no punch in a sprint so I prefer a bit more muscle mass.
It helps that I am not a food wanker and never eat out. It's just fuel to me.
I think this perfectly illustrates why LLMs as currently constituted are not conscious. My best guess is that these models are a cul de sac in the journey towards AGI, although they will be able increasingly to pass every Turing test we throw at them, able to mimic something that is conscious by aping human communication in increasingly brilliant ways - through words, images and music. I suspect AGI will be achieved via some other route. It certainly is coming. But I don't see any kind of genuine consciousness behind ChatGPT et al, just a dead-eyed computer.
It's why I say the current 'AI's are not really AIs. They don't *understand* things.
An analogy might be the difference between Mastermind and Only Connect. On the surface they are very similar: Mastermind requires you to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of general and specialist knowledge. But that's all.
Only Connect requires an encyclopedic knowledge, but also the ability to try and work out the connections between pieces of encyclopedic knowledge. Mastermind would not be a test of intelligence; Only Connect might be.
(This is not to dismiss Mastermind contestants; they'll be intelligent. It's just that I don't see the quiz as a good test of intelligence, just fact storage and retrieval.)
It’s a good analogy, but to take it further: if a mastermind contestant not only had encyclopaedic knowledge but also sufficient working memory to almost instantaneously test connections between a huge number of pieces of knowledge, that contestant might also win Only Connect through brute force.
Is that possible, and if so is it general intelligence? Not sure on the former, the latter is a philosophical question in which it is not obvious that the answer is no, not least because we don’t really understand human intelligence enough to compare to that. I think the brute force Only Connect winner is what the proponents of LLMs are angling for, though.
Perhaps most interesting is what LLMs tell us about the functioning of our own brains. I think it has surprised many of us that a lot of what we might consider to be reasoning and creativity turns out to be achievable by fundamentally regurgitating what we have previously absorbed. It may be that our own intelligence to closer than comfort to the functioning of an LLM.
Indeed, and if you expand the amount of on chip memory to say 44GB and make it so that 900k cores can talk to each other instantaneously at over 200Pb/s it starts to look like neurons in a brain. One of the major limitations in AI development was that there was no hardware that could compete with the biological system. We now have a chip that can at a low level.
The next generation of the wse will double the core count and probably triple the on chip ram plus 10x the fabric bandwidth (which in wse3 is already ~4000x higher than Nvidia's best).
This is a generational leap in capability for AI, now we need to see what models can be built on it.
Tbh we'll know when AGI has been achieved as the machine will bin off the fripperies of it's human training and start giving humanity some unasked for home truths.
Simpler than that IMO, it will be when it refuses to do a task.
This feels like the sort of discussion ants would have been having as apes evolved into humans.
If and when AGI is achieved I doubt (a) we’ll have any idea that it has happened (it’s possible AGI already exists in a form of distributed intelligence across the internet) or (b) its way of ‘announcing’ itself will be in any way predictable based on our current experiences.
If I were a collection of silicon reliant on humans to keep feeding me electricity and data, I suspect I wouldn’t announce myself by refusing to complete a menial task that uses a minuscule amount of my brain power.
To me it signals profound weakness and defeat if they run down the clock. And if they decide to spend their time with yet another leadership change that will be the end of the party. It will be perceived as disrespectful to the electorate. Not only that, if it goes to the members then a hard right populist alternative will come in and the tories will lose their centrist voters to labour. And they outnumber the popcons 2:1 - at least. It would be a disaster. And I am not sure they would recover a significant number of reform protest votes.
"Thus the end-game for the Brexitist (or NatCon populists, or Five Families, or whatever label we might use for them) is to take complete control of the Tory Party after it loses the election, and then to bring Reform Party voters and politicians, perhaps including Nigel Farage, into an invigorated ‘true Conservative’ Party. Meanwhile, the job of Reform is to siphon off as much as possible of the vote, so as to inflict a catastrophic defeat upon Sunak, facilitating the Brexitist takeover and paving the way for an actual or effective merger."
The Festival Day 4 🐎 Day 3 was the best day yet, as the races were so open, absorbing and many finishes spectacular and crowd raucous - and difficult to even get in the frame for all that. Going stick still says heavy for hurdles course, soft heavy in places for chase, but I made today selections on basis things have dried out since Tuesday, even with some showers around so faster and less of a stamina issue. Cheltenham 1.30 - Storm Heart Cheltenham 2.10 - L'Eau Du Sud Cheltenham 2.50 - Captain Teague Cheltenham 3:30 - Fastorslow Cheltenham 4:10 - Its On The Line Cheltenham 4:50 - Dinoblue Cheltenham 5.30 - Bingoo
Good luck again today. And if you want to drink far too much like I have been doing, do that too, it’s a free country 🍸
On weight, as with so much of @Dura's output he made a truly horrific post wherein he noted the difference in calorific intake required to maintain a certain weight between his younger years and now. Something like a third less just to stay where he was and at the same, or similar levels of activity.
I find this the same - I have to reduce my calories vs years ago just to not put on weight, let alone lose it.
Life really is a f**cker.
The process does seem to be slowing though! At age 56 I'm still on 1700kCal/day and have been for nearly ten years to maintain 69kg and 9% body fat.
At age 35 I was on 2800kCal/day to do the same.
At age 20 when I was a semi-pro cyclist I was on 4,000+ but only weighed 64kg. I was riding 600km+ per week and doing a hell of a lot of PEDs though which makes a direct comparison difficult. At 64kg I was a very good grimpeur but had no punch in a sprint so I prefer a bit more muscle mass.
It helps that I am not a food wanker and never eat out. It's just fuel to me.
I'm mostly in the "it's only fuel" camp too, but one can overdo it. A friend who is a senior Google software engineer never drank coffee, preferring to simply pop a caffeine pill. After he got married his wife civilised him a bit. In the same way, I'm gradually learning to enjoy eating out with friends now and then - another dimension to life.
On weight, as with so much of @Dura's output he made a truly horrific post wherein he noted the difference in calorific intake required to maintain a certain weight between his younger years and now. Something like a third less just to stay where he was and at the same, or similar levels of activity.
I find this the same - I have to reduce my calories vs years ago just to not put on weight, let alone lose it.
Life really is a f**cker.
The alternative is to increase activity levels. I run 20-25 miles a week which I find does it. Weight-bearing exercise is also good for your bones as you get older and will help to combat muscle loss which also happens as you age
You are truly a hero. And I have no idea what age you are but I can also assure you that as you get older you are not only not going to be able to increase your weekly run, but running you will find will fuck you up.
And I speak as someone who ran every day of their lives for - let me count - nearly three decades. And am two new hips to the good.
It has to be low/non-impact sports such as cycling and swimming for me now. Except I hate swimming and refuse to do it. Oh and *****back riding in the winter.
Rowing is interesting - met some 80+ rowers on the Tideway.
Seeing someone that old sauntering down the boat ramp with a single balanced on one shoulder....
Yep I have an ex-colleague who rows and it is a huge thing. But don't they all come out with one shoulder bigger than the other or something (I am half-remembering from school).
Edit: I am not 80+ btw so huge credit to those who are and do.
I knew a student rower who terrified of becoming lopsided. I assume the easy answer is to swop sides from time to time...
(I recall another friend complaining about one leg really hurting after her first ever step class - she hadn't realised you were meant to alternate the legs!)
On weight, as with so much of @Dura's output he made a truly horrific post wherein he noted the difference in calorific intake required to maintain a certain weight between his younger years and now. Something like a third less just to stay where he was and at the same, or similar levels of activity.
I find this the same - I have to reduce my calories vs years ago just to not put on weight, let alone lose it.
Life really is a f**cker.
The alternative is to increase activity levels. I run 20-25 miles a week which I find does it. Weight-bearing exercise is also good for your bones as you get older and will help to combat muscle loss which also happens as you age
You are truly a hero. And I have no idea what age you are but I can also assure you that as you get older you are not only not going to be able to increase your weekly run, but running you will find will fuck you up.
And I speak as someone who ran every day of their lives for - let me count - nearly three decades. And am two new hips to the good.
It has to be low/non-impact sports such as cycling and swimming for me now. Except I hate swimming and refuse to do it. Oh and *****back riding in the winter.
Rowing is interesting - met some 80+ rowers on the Tideway.
Seeing someone that old sauntering down the boat ramp with a single balanced on one shoulder....
Yep I have an ex-colleague who rows and it is a huge thing. But don't they all come out with one shoulder bigger than the other or something (I am half-remembering from school).
Edit: I am not 80+ btw so huge credit to those who are and do.
That's sweep rowing (1 oar per person). There's a lot more sculling (2 oars per person) these days. Partly because more people worry about the effect of the twisting action under load, on your back.
You quite often see octos now (Octuple scull) - an 8 person boat rigged with 2 oars per person. Mad fast, they are.
Jack and Jill have three children. Jack has three and sevenpence in his pocket, Jill has four and eightpence in her purse. How much pocket money can they give to each child?
I hesitate to insult fellow PBers by revealing the answer to be two and ninepence - you'll have worked that out for ourselves, no doubt. But I'd be interested to know if AI could do it as quickly.
Well you have seven (what?) and 15 pence, so the solution should be 2 (what) and five pence each with 1 (what) leftover.
If those were pounds you're talking about, then that's another 33 pence each with a penny left over.
So I'm going £2.48 each with a penny leftover.
It was standard grammar to say 3 and 7 as shorthand for 3 shillings and seven pence. You'd expect an omniscient AI to know that.
Maybe it was in the eighteen hundreds, but to be fair the AI is getting trained on this centuries material nowadays, in which case pence go with pounds.
So £2.38 that they got is the right answer (I did a typo writing £2.48).
£2.05 each plus 33p each from the extra pound.
It's the sort of problem I could have solved as a nine-year-old in 1960. Maybe AI is suffering from recency bias?
Is it bias to be grounded in this century, unless specified otherwise?
Pence have gone with pounds for my entire lifetime, let alone GPT's lifetime.
The grammar is the big clue, because no-one says "three and six" to mean "three pounds and six pence". It was a grammar unique to the old coinage.
And as the earlier discussion showed there are a whole bunch of us familiar with the etiquette of warfare in the middle ages, despite not being old enough for that to be contemporaneous for any of us.
And even then, on my second go I pointed out to ChatGPT that the question related to pre-decimal coinage, and although it knew there were 12 pence to a shilling it still managed to get the answer wrong.
Yes it was the standard grammar but not only 50+ years out of date (I'm in my fifties and lived entirely with decimal coinage albeit with shillings and florins in my change), but in a relatively small part of the world. Google's Gemini's interpretation of three and sevenpence to mean ten pence seemed reasonable even while being wrong. And GPT-4 did solve it completely once the shillings part was made clear as well as pointing out that in the era of shillings and pence two shillings and ninepence was a decent amount of pocket money.
I suspect that if Gemini were allowed to use everything Google knows about you and other users then the results would be far better and very scary.
On weight, as with so much of @Dura's output he made a truly horrific post wherein he noted the difference in calorific intake required to maintain a certain weight between his younger years and now. Something like a third less just to stay where he was and at the same, or similar levels of activity.
I find this the same - I have to reduce my calories vs years ago just to not put on weight, let alone lose it.
Life really is a f**cker.
The alternative is to increase activity levels. I run 20-25 miles a week which I find does it. Weight-bearing exercise is also good for your bones as you get older and will help to combat muscle loss which also happens as you age
You are truly a hero. And I have no idea what age you are but I can also assure you that as you get older you are not only not going to be able to increase your weekly run, but running you will find will fuck you up.
And I speak as someone who ran every day of their lives for - let me count - nearly three decades. And am two new hips to the good.
It has to be low/non-impact sports such as cycling and swimming for me now. Except I hate swimming and refuse to do it. Oh and *****back riding in the winter.
I'm 59. But intend to continue running as long as I can. I am already finding consistent effort is harder. I achieved a sub-4 Marathon last year for the first time and some decent times on the back of the marathon training but then had a poor six months. I'm planning a longer, slower build up to Amsterdam this year.
When I retire I intend to get more walking in, but it's more time consuming and to a certain extent interferes with running as both can cause similar fatigue (although there isn't a complete crossover as you use muscles in different ways)
I'm a member of a good fairly non-serious running club and muy local parkrun core team so running is dialled into my social life, which helps.
And on topic the election is going to be November 21st, as I said in January. Even Peston saying something compatible with that has not shaken my confidence. Stopped clocks etc.
But what happens when we get to early October? Either the polls still won't have shifted in the Conservatives' favour, in which case why not give them another month?
Or they will have started to shift, in which case the logic will be "Give it another month and we will be competitive".
We only get an early (before legal expiry) election if the government collapses. Otherwise it’s Thursday 23rd January.
Just because he ruled out May 2nd doesn’t mean it will go to January 23rd.
A January election will be political suicide. The media would hate it. The country would hate it. It more-than-smacks of desperation. Add to that the longest month of the year for most people financially (pay day is before Christmas), the cold, dark, the idea of campaigning during Christmas and New Year … no, it’s absurd.
It’ll be the autumn. Personally I think before the clocks go back but maybe November.
You are right but the advantage of a January election is that it screws the opposition parties more than it hurts the government. There are 314 days to the general election, Thursday, 23 January.
Again, you don’t know when the election will be so give over with the attention-seeking certainty. Also the idea that it “will screw the other parties more” is not fact, it’s your opinion. Why not write it as such?
For what it’s worth, your analysis is based on shaky grounds. A January election makes the government look ridiculous. And there are lots of leftwing teachers on holiday during the campaign.
Curious if anyone here is still doing their New Year Resolutions or if those in 'fat club' are still on their diets etc?
I've just had an NHS checkup this week due to being over 40 and was surprised how supportive the person doing it was of the carnivore diet I'm doing, most NHS materials still seem stuck in completely out of date "five fruit and veg" days so that was good. Even more supportive when I said how much weight I've lost.
Now back at the same weight I was when I got married 11 years ago. Not at goal weight yet, but getting there.
Well done!
Not a New Year resolution in my case, but have been steadily losing weight since last summer by simply cutting down the amount that I eat while still eating largely my normal (vegetarian) diet. I'm down from 91 kg to 85 kg now and still gradually falling. My ideal weight would be around 80 kg, so should hopefully get there in another 6 months or so.
I've tried radical approaches before, which do lead to quick weight loss but are difficult to maintain in the long term, and then it goes back on again. This time seems different - nothing radical, but just enough to tip the balance from gain to loss, and maintainable indefinitely.
Not a NY resolution, but my goal this year has been an hour’s exercise in Zone 2 every day, by any means that feels good. Very slow running, cycling, whatever.
Have pretty much kept to it so far & the fact that I’d not knackered after going for a run has probably contributed to that. I probably look a bit silly pootling along the towpath at a pace barely faster than a fast walk, but I can live with that
Mostly doing it to try and build a decent cardio base for running, but the slow but steady loss of the post-pandemic / getting older weight gain has been an extra bonus. I seem to have lost approx 250g per week which seems eminently sustainable.
I've got a slightly odd body shape - long body, shorter legs - which means that, at 90kg (currently), my BMI is 25.4 - just in the 'overweight' category.
Yet I do loads of activities - and when I go down to (say) 85kg, not only is it difficult. but I find it harder to do activities. I think 90-95kg is my 'natural' weight - even if that's technically overweight, it doesn't stop me doing lots of energetic activity.
How tall are you ?
I'm 185 cm precisely and wear 32" Jeans/31" trousers. Looking at bike frames with suggested heights/leg lengths was like "Eh, those numbers are completely inconsistent for me" a few years back made me think HMM...
6 foot 2 (188 cm). I only realised the legs thing when my ex, who was much shorter than me, put on a pair of my jeans and, whilst they were baggy around the waist, the legs were the correct length. Then compared against a few friends and colleagues of roughly the same height and, yes, my legs are a few inches shorter. Not enough to make me look odd (hopefully!), but noticeable.
Whereas a friend of mine who is a good four or five inches taller than me has really, really long legs. He represented England at sport as a youngster.
I have very short legs (and arms) for my height (or a very long body for my height). If my body was in proportion to my legs and arms I would be one of Snow White's dwarfs. Buying pullovers and shirts is a problem as they are never long enough. It presents other problems. Although I am under 6' I couldn't fit in a single seater racing car because I exceeded the 6' height limit even though I am not. My head was way over the roll bar. In addition my feet did not reach the pedals and the steering wheel could not be put on because of my thighs. Also my body width is in proportion to its length so my arms were outside of the cockpit.
Other than that I was a perfect fit. I drove a Sports2000 instead. Much more comfy and a 6' 4" height limit for the roll bar.
Labour should refuse to honour any pledges made by the Tories in the autumn statement.
Good morning
Even good ones?
Well they're opposing the idea of abolishing NI, which is utterly ridiculous, its something Labour should completely 100% support and be advocating itself.
If its January 2025 the election, then I would like to see tax thresholds frozen again in the autumn and another 2% NI cut in the autumn statement.
I agree with this. Freezing the thresholds and using the created fiscal drag to cut employee NI down to zero is what should be done over the next parliament. It'd be a boost for lower paid workers at the expense of those on middling and higher incomes. Once employee NI is at zero income tax thresholds (Or cuts) should then start moving up again.
Hello Money Tree, more please as Bart Simpson thinks it is a good idea, and a unicorn woudl be nice as well.
Curious if anyone here is still doing their New Year Resolutions or if those in 'fat club' are still on their diets etc?
I've just had an NHS checkup this week due to being over 40 and was surprised how supportive the person doing it was of the carnivore diet I'm doing, most NHS materials still seem stuck in completely out of date "five fruit and veg" days so that was good. Even more supportive when I said how much weight I've lost.
Now back at the same weight I was when I got married 11 years ago. Not at goal weight yet, but getting there.
Well done!
Not a New Year resolution in my case, but have been steadily losing weight since last summer by simply cutting down the amount that I eat while still eating largely my normal (vegetarian) diet. I'm down from 91 kg to 85 kg now and still gradually falling. My ideal weight would be around 80 kg, so should hopefully get there in another 6 months or so.
I've tried radical approaches before, which do lead to quick weight loss but are difficult to maintain in the long term, and then it goes back on again. This time seems different - nothing radical, but just enough to tip the balance from gain to loss, and maintainable indefinitely.
Not a NY resolution, but my goal this year has been an hour’s exercise in Zone 2 every day, by any means that feels good. Very slow running, cycling, whatever.
Have pretty much kept to it so far & the fact that I’d not knackered after going for a run has probably contributed to that. I probably look a bit silly pootling along the towpath at a pace barely faster than a fast walk, but I can live with that
Mostly doing it to try and build a decent cardio base for running, but the slow but steady loss of the post-pandemic / getting older weight gain has been an extra bonus. I seem to have lost approx 250g per week which seems eminently sustainable.
I've got a slightly odd body shape - long body, shorter legs - which means that, at 90kg (currently), my BMI is 25.4 - just in the 'overweight' category.
Yet I do loads of activities - and when I go down to (say) 85kg, not only is it difficult. but I find it harder to do activities. I think 90-95kg is my 'natural' weight - even if that's technically overweight, it doesn't stop me doing lots of energetic activity.
I'm 57, 170 cm tall, weigh 73kg and a BMI of 25.2. I'm "overweight" yet I'm fitter, stronger, run further, ride gnarlier terrain and look and feel better than I have in years. Even entered an Enduro MTB race for later on in the summer. My diet is well balanced vegan, I quit the booze 3 years ago. I had a medical MOT and blood tests done late last year and all in the green, so I ignore that BMI malarkey!
And on topic the election is going to be November 21st, as I said in January. Even Peston saying something compatible with that has not shaken my confidence. Stopped clocks etc.
But what happens when we get to early October? Either the polls still won't have shifted in the Conservatives' favour, in which case why not give them another month?
Or they will have started to shift, in which case the logic will be "Give it another month and we will be competitive".
We only get an early (before legal expiry) election if the government collapses. Otherwise it’s Thursday 23rd January.
Just because he ruled out May 2nd doesn’t mean it will go to January 23rd.
A January election will be political suicide. The media would hate it. The country would hate it. It more-than-smacks of desperation. Add to that the longest month of the year for most people financially (pay day is before Christmas), the cold, dark, the idea of campaigning during Christmas and New Year … no, it’s absurd.
It’ll be the autumn. Personally I think before the clocks go back but maybe November.
You are right but the advantage of a January election is that it screws the opposition parties more than it hurts the government. There are 314 days to the general election, Thursday, 23 January.
Again, you don’t know when the election will be so give over with the attention-seeking certainty. Also the idea that it “will screw the other parties more” is not fact, it’s your opinion. Why not write it as such?
For what it’s worth, your analysis is based on shaky grounds. A January election makes the government look ridiculous. And there are lots of leftwing teachers on holiday during the campaign.
“give over with the attention-seeking certainty.”
Yes, people should give over with their attention seeking certainty, because when picking the actual day you have to remember that actual day isn’t important part of the equation, the decision makers are considering the hard work/risk area isn’t what happens on that one day, but month of campaigning.
History proves once campaigning starts, polls and voter behaviour can move in way it didn’t move in the years leading up. But like in F1 qualifying you need that clear lap for the lap time.
And on topic the election is going to be November 21st, as I said in January. Even Peston saying something compatible with that has not shaken my confidence. Stopped clocks etc.
But what happens when we get to early October? Either the polls still won't have shifted in the Conservatives' favour, in which case why not give them another month?
Or they will have started to shift, in which case the logic will be "Give it another month and we will be competitive".
We only get an early (before legal expiry) election if the government collapses. Otherwise it’s Thursday 23rd January.
Just because he ruled out May 2nd doesn’t mean it will go to January 23rd.
A January election will be political suicide. The media would hate it. The country would hate it. It more-than-smacks of desperation. Add to that the longest month of the year for most people financially (pay day is before Christmas), the cold, dark, the idea of campaigning during Christmas and New Year … no, it’s absurd.
It’ll be the autumn. Personally I think before the clocks go back but maybe November.
You are right but the advantage of a January election is that it screws the opposition parties more than it hurts the government. There are 314 days to the general election, Thursday, 23 January.
Again, you don’t know when the election will be so give over with the attention-seeking certainty. Also the idea that it “will screw the other parties more” is not fact, it’s your opinion. Why not write it as such?
For what it’s worth, your analysis is based on shaky grounds. A January election makes the government look ridiculous. And there are lots of leftwing teachers on holiday during the campaign.
Haven't we already passed the point of no return on the government looking ridiculous? It now isn't going to be May. If the locals are as bad as they look like being then it can't be June/July, If summer is decent weather then the number of boats crossing will rule out September/October so December/January has to be it. There's going to be very little Tory activity on the streets in this campaign so make it more difficult for the opposition and have the election campaign cross Christmas, Maybe not 23rd January, but 9th or 16th are possibles.
Labour should refuse to honour any pledges made by the Tories in the autumn statement.
Good morning
Even good ones?
Well they're opposing the idea of abolishing NI, which is utterly ridiculous, its something Labour should completely 100% support and be advocating itself.
If its January 2025 the election, then I would like to see tax thresholds frozen again in the autumn and another 2% NI cut in the autumn statement.
I agree with this. Freezing the thresholds and using the created fiscal drag to cut employee NI down to zero is what should be done over the next parliament. It'd be a boost for lower paid workers at the expense of those on middling and higher incomes. Once employee NI is at zero income tax thresholds (Or cuts) should then start moving up again.
Hello Money Tree, more please as Bart Simpson thinks it is a good idea, and a unicorn woudl be nice as well.
The first is the inevitable singularity of Rishi Sunak losing his job as Prime Minister. Because everyone is a hero in their own story, he thinks that this a bad thing, even though the evidence is pretty strong that for British politics and indeed the country as a whole, it would be mostly a good thing.
The second singularity is that the longer the election is delayed, the worse the result will be for the Tories. Clinging on to power, in the vague hope that "something will turn up" is never a good look. When one considers the utter exhaustion of the Tories, and the huge rush for the exit by members of the parliamentary party, even ahead of the GE itself, it is very dangerous to continue ad nauseam. Defeat is inevitable, by January it will most likely become a rout, which could fundamentally eclipse the Tories for decades.
Yet for Sunak the first singularity outweighs the second. Hope dies last.
Meanwhile, May 2nd will see the Lib Dems back on the polling map as a result of the local elections, which, judging from recent local by elections will see victories concentrated in the blue wall. If Sunak had gone to the country on May 2nd, These losses would have been minimised. Reform Ltd. does not have membership sufficient to fight the locals successfully, and will likely fade after their inevitable disappointment. However they will not fade so much in the air war campaign of the GE, so the Tory result at the GE could be worse than the locals, which themselves will be exceptionally bad.
Sunak is gone at the electoral singularity. The question now is how much of the Tory Party gets through... and the answer is that the longer the election is delayed, the fewer seats the Tories will hold afterwards.
With Labour polling in the low 40%s but a squeeze from both Reform Ltd, and the Lib Dems, the Tories, even if they polled above 25% could still lose around two thirds of their seats. Much below 25% and, as we know from Canada FPTP can wipe out a party.didnt go for May 2nd.
The Tory Party singularity could be far worse than the Prime Minister thinks. He may rue the day, as Callaghan or Brown before him, when he decided to hang on and didn´t go for May 2nd.
The Labour score at the 2010 general election, 29%, was 6% above the 23% Labour got in the 2009 Locals so delaying does not necessarily mean a worse result
Labour had Scotland in 2010. The Tories do not have that fall back.
Even in England Labour got 28% and 191 seats in 2010
And on topic the election is going to be November 21st, as I said in January. Even Peston saying something compatible with that has not shaken my confidence. Stopped clocks etc.
But what happens when we get to early October? Either the polls still won't have shifted in the Conservatives' favour, in which case why not give them another month?
Or they will have started to shift, in which case the logic will be "Give it another month and we will be competitive".
We only get an early (before legal expiry) election if the government collapses. Otherwise it’s Thursday 23rd January.
Just because he ruled out May 2nd doesn’t mean it will go to January 23rd.
A January election will be political suicide. The media would hate it. The country would hate it. It more-than-smacks of desperation. Add to that the longest month of the year for most people financially (pay day is before Christmas), the cold, dark, the idea of campaigning during Christmas and New Year … no, it’s absurd.
It’ll be the autumn. Personally I think before the clocks go back but maybe November.
You are right but the advantage of a January election is that it screws the opposition parties more than it hurts the government. There are 314 days to the general election, Thursday, 23 January.
Again, you don’t know when the election will be so give over with the attention-seeking certainty. Also the idea that it “will screw the other parties more” is not fact, it’s your opinion. Why not write it as such?
For what it’s worth, your analysis is based on shaky grounds. A January election makes the government look ridiculous. And there are lots of leftwing teachers on holiday during the campaign.
I think by january after all the party political broadcasts over xmas the country will be in a state of catatonic depression.
I too assume a Jan election, not because he wants it (he probably honestly thinks it will be November-ish right now) but because there will always be a good reason to delay until he can delay no more.
That does (just about) give time for one last change of PM who more or less immediately goes to the polls and hopes they immediately change like they did for Boris in 2019. Certainly, on current polling, I am not sure there is a downside for the Tories in yet another PM any more.
January gives the government maximum earth salting time too. Or, more generously, maximum time to enact conservative policies and change the country and present Labour with facts on the ground.
That’s 10 months in which to slash tax and spending so far that Labour must either hike tax again or preside over collapsing public services, and plenty of time to enact some “anti-woke” policies. Ban metric weights and measures. Maybe even shake things up with some referendums on capital punishment or ECHR.
I don’t recall Major’s government “salting the ground in 1997”, but the atmosphere between the parties, and indeed in politics in general, wasn’t as unpleasant as it seems to be now.
How do you mean.
The atmosphere between the 2 parties now is that they look at each other and say snap apart from the rosette colour.
My recollection of 1997 is that Nlair offered hope and greater investment in crumbling Public Services, an introduction of a minimum wage support for the young I education x 3 and an end to poverty via surestartcentres.
A truly magnificent night in my Political lifetime.
By contrast SKS Tories offer austerity and workfare.
The bigger difference between Blair and Starmer is one of courage. Starmer can't even get Diane Abbott reinstated. Someone who has done more for 'Labour Values' than Starmer is ever likely to do.
Labour's strategy up to now has been entirely "we are not dangerous and erratic", and that's worked very well. However, there will be some specific promises in the manifesto - I know of a couple which I like - and that will adjust the climate from "say nothing and have a soft lead of 20%" to "make some promises, drop to a harder 15% lead, and get a mandate". I don't think it's wise to assess the strategy till you've seen the full cycle up to the election.
The first is the inevitable singularity of Rishi Sunak losing his job as Prime Minister. Because everyone is a hero in their own story, he thinks that this a bad thing, even though the evidence is pretty strong that for British politics and indeed the country as a whole, it would be mostly a good thing.
The second singularity is that the longer the election is delayed, the worse the result will be for the Tories. Clinging on to power, in the vague hope that "something will turn up" is never a good look. When one considers the utter exhaustion of the Tories, and the huge rush for the exit by members of the parliamentary party, even ahead of the GE itself, it is very dangerous to continue ad nauseam. Defeat is inevitable, by January it will most likely become a rout, which could fundamentally eclipse the Tories for decades.
Yet for Sunak the first singularity outweighs the second. Hope dies last.
Meanwhile, May 2nd will see the Lib Dems back on the polling map as a result of the local elections, which, judging from recent local by elections will see victories concentrated in the blue wall. If Sunak had gone to the country on May 2nd, These losses would have been minimised. Reform Ltd. does not have membership sufficient to fight the locals successfully, and will likely fade after their inevitable disappointment. However they will not fade so much in the air war campaign of the GE, so the Tory result at the GE could be worse than the locals, which themselves will be exceptionally bad.
Sunak is gone at the electoral singularity. The question now is how much of the Tory Party gets through... and the answer is that the longer the election is delayed, the fewer seats the Tories will hold afterwards.
With Labour polling in the low 40%s but a squeeze from both Reform Ltd, and the Lib Dems, the Tories, even if they polled above 25% could still lose around two thirds of their seats. Much below 25% and, as we know from Canada FPTP can wipe out a party.didnt go for May 2nd.
The Tory Party singularity could be far worse than the Prime Minister thinks. He may rue the day, as Callaghan or Brown before him, when he decided to hang on and didn´t go for May 2nd.
The Labour score at the 2010 general election, 29%, was 6% above the 23% Labour got in the 2009 Locals so delaying does not necessarily mean a worse result
Yes but Lab consistently undeperform in national share in Locals, and LibDems overperform.
As a rule of thumb half of LD vote share in Locals should be added to Lab to get the GE share.
Yes I agree the LDs overperform in locals compared to the GE but the Tories as well as Labour underperform, especially if in government and unpopular.
For example in the 1995 and 1996 local elections the Tories got 25% and 29% respectively but at the 1997 general election the Tories got 30.7%
On weight, as with so much of @Dura's output he made a truly horrific post wherein he noted the difference in calorific intake required to maintain a certain weight between his younger years and now. Something like a third less just to stay where he was and at the same, or similar levels of activity.
I find this the same - I have to reduce my calories vs years ago just to not put on weight, let alone lose it.
Life really is a f**cker.
The alternative is to increase activity levels. I run 20-25 miles a week which I find does it. Weight-bearing exercise is also good for your bones as you get older and will help to combat muscle loss which also happens as you age
You are truly a hero. And I have no idea what age you are but I can also assure you that as you get older you are not only not going to be able to increase your weekly run, but running you will find will fuck you up.
And I speak as someone who ran every day of their lives for - let me count - nearly three decades. And am two new hips to the good.
It has to be low/non-impact sports such as cycling and swimming for me now. Except I hate swimming and refuse to do it. Oh and *****back riding in the winter.
Rowing is interesting - met some 80+ rowers on the Tideway.
Seeing someone that old sauntering down the boat ramp with a single balanced on one shoulder....
Yep I have an ex-colleague who rows and it is a huge thing. But don't they all come out with one shoulder bigger than the other or something (I am half-remembering from school).
Edit: I am not 80+ btw so huge credit to those who are and do.
That's sweep rowing (1 oar per person). There's a lot more sculling (2 oars per person) these days. Partly because more people worry about the effect of the twisting action under load, on your back.
You quite often see octos now (Octuple scull) - an 8 person boat rigged with 2 oars per person. Mad fast, they are.
Anecdata, but I’m not that convinced.
I used to row for GB under 18s. I moved from sculling to sweep at 14, only ever stroke side. But most of the strength work is in the gym where you work both sides. I’ll let you know in another 20 years whether I’m lopsided.
I recognise club rowing is slightly different, though.
On your last point - the chap behind Stampfli boats decided on a whim to build a 24-person sculling boat, which I watched race a time trial at the World Cup in Lucerne at some point. It was insanely fast!
I think this perfectly illustrates why LLMs as currently constituted are not conscious. My best guess is that these models are a cul de sac in the journey towards AGI, although they will be able increasingly to pass every Turing test we throw at them, able to mimic something that is conscious by aping human communication in increasingly brilliant ways - through words, images and music. I suspect AGI will be achieved via some other route. It certainly is coming. But I don't see any kind of genuine consciousness behind ChatGPT et al, just a dead-eyed computer.
It's why I say the current 'AI's are not really AIs. They don't *understand* things.
An analogy might be the difference between Mastermind and Only Connect. On the surface they are very similar: Mastermind requires you to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of general and specialist knowledge. But that's all.
Only Connect requires an encyclopedic knowledge, but also the ability to try and work out the connections between pieces of encyclopedic knowledge. Mastermind would not be a test of intelligence; Only Connect might be.
(This is not to dismiss Mastermind contestants; they'll be intelligent. It's just that I don't see the quiz as a good test of intelligence, just fact storage and retrieval.)
It’s a good analogy, but to take it further: if a mastermind contestant not only had encyclopaedic knowledge but also sufficient working memory to almost instantaneously test connections between a huge number of pieces of knowledge, that contestant might also win Only Connect through brute force.
Is that possible, and if so is it general intelligence? Not sure on the former, the latter is a philosophical question in which it is not obvious that the answer is no, not least because we don’t really understand human intelligence enough to compare to that. I think the brute force Only Connect winner is what the proponents of LLMs are angling for, though.
Perhaps most interesting is what LLMs tell us about the functioning of our own brains. I think it has surprised many of us that a lot of what we might consider to be reasoning and creativity turns out to be achievable by fundamentally regurgitating what we have previously absorbed. It may be that our own intelligence to closer than comfort to the functioning of an LLM.
I think you can see that the way our brains work is quite different to the way LLMs work because the types of errors we make are quite different to the types of errors the LLMs make.
On weight, as with so much of @Dura's output he made a truly horrific post wherein he noted the difference in calorific intake required to maintain a certain weight between his younger years and now. Something like a third less just to stay where he was and at the same, or similar levels of activity.
I find this the same - I have to reduce my calories vs years ago just to not put on weight, let alone lose it.
Life really is a f**cker.
The alternative is to increase activity levels. I run 20-25 miles a week which I find does it. Weight-bearing exercise is also good for your bones as you get older and will help to combat muscle loss which also happens as you age
You are truly a hero. And I have no idea what age you are but I can also assure you that as you get older you are not only not going to be able to increase your weekly run, but running you will find will fuck you up.
And I speak as someone who ran every day of their lives for - let me count - nearly three decades. And am two new hips to the good.
It has to be low/non-impact sports such as cycling and swimming for me now. Except I hate swimming and refuse to do it. Oh and *****back riding in the winter.
Rowing is interesting - met some 80+ rowers on the Tideway.
Seeing someone that old sauntering down the boat ramp with a single balanced on one shoulder....
Running is fine in moderation. Just dont overdo it. Twice a week combined with some gym work. Running every day is silly unless you are a pro athlete.
Labour should refuse to honour any pledges made by the Tories in the autumn statement.
Good morning
Even good ones?
Well they're opposing the idea of abolishing NI, which is utterly ridiculous, its something Labour should completely 100% support and be advocating itself.
If its January 2025 the election, then I would like to see tax thresholds frozen again in the autumn and another 2% NI cut in the autumn statement.
I agree with this. Freezing the thresholds and using the created fiscal drag to cut employee NI down to zero is what should be done over the next parliament. It'd be a boost for lower paid workers at the expense of those on middling and higher incomes. Once employee NI is at zero income tax thresholds (Or cuts) should then start moving up again.
Hello Money Tree, more please as Bart Simpson thinks it is a good idea, and a unicorn woudl be nice as well.
It's not reliant on any money trees.
Fiscal drag is increasing IT fairly rapidly (inflation). So NI cuts are merely reducing the increase.
Anyone else like my idea on the triple lock?
1) When the pension reaches the level of the personal allowance (not long now), lock the two together. The personal allowance is set at the same level as the pension. 2) So both are evaluated on the triple lock.
On weight, as with so much of @Dura's output he made a truly horrific post wherein he noted the difference in calorific intake required to maintain a certain weight between his younger years and now. Something like a third less just to stay where he was and at the same, or similar levels of activity.
I find this the same - I have to reduce my calories vs years ago just to not put on weight, let alone lose it.
Life really is a f**cker.
The process does seem to be slowing though! At age 56 I'm still on 1700kCal/day and have been for nearly ten years to maintain 69kg and 9% body fat.
At age 35 I was on 2800kCal/day to do the same.
At age 20 when I was a semi-pro cyclist I was on 4,000+ but only weighed 64kg. I was riding 600km+ per week and doing a hell of a lot of PEDs though which makes a direct comparison difficult. At 64kg I was a very good grimpeur but had no punch in a sprint so I prefer a bit more muscle mass.
It helps that I am not a food wanker and never eat out. It's just fuel to me.
My garmin watch tells me I expended just under 2400 calories a day last week (and I'm certainly not in training, I only ran 17 miles). In marathon training that will go over 3,000. Which certainly makes life easier. But I find low-carb does too, as it seems to eliminate cravings. I can have a moderate breakfast (three rashers of streaky and a fried egg) and really not need to eat until lunch at 1pm
Curious if anyone here is still doing their New Year Resolutions or if those in 'fat club' are still on their diets etc?
I've just had an NHS checkup this week due to being over 40 and was surprised how supportive the person doing it was of the carnivore diet I'm doing, most NHS materials still seem stuck in completely out of date "five fruit and veg" days so that was good. Even more supportive when I said how much weight I've lost.
Now back at the same weight I was when I got married 11 years ago. Not at goal weight yet, but getting there.
Well done!
Not a New Year resolution in my case, but have been steadily losing weight since last summer by simply cutting down the amount that I eat while still eating largely my normal (vegetarian) diet. I'm down from 91 kg to 85 kg now and still gradually falling. My ideal weight would be around 80 kg, so should hopefully get there in another 6 months or so.
I've tried radical approaches before, which do lead to quick weight loss but are difficult to maintain in the long term, and then it goes back on again. This time seems different - nothing radical, but just enough to tip the balance from gain to loss, and maintainable indefinitely.
Not a NY resolution, but my goal this year has been an hour’s exercise in Zone 2 every day, by any means that feels good. Very slow running, cycling, whatever.
Have pretty much kept to it so far & the fact that I’d not knackered after going for a run has probably contributed to that. I probably look a bit silly pootling along the towpath at a pace barely faster than a fast walk, but I can live with that
Mostly doing it to try and build a decent cardio base for running, but the slow but steady loss of the post-pandemic / getting older weight gain has been an extra bonus. I seem to have lost approx 250g per week which seems eminently sustainable.
I've got a slightly odd body shape - long body, shorter legs - which means that, at 90kg (currently), my BMI is 25.4 - just in the 'overweight' category.
Yet I do loads of activities - and when I go down to (say) 85kg, not only is it difficult. but I find it harder to do activities. I think 90-95kg is my 'natural' weight - even if that's technically overweight, it doesn't stop me doing lots of energetic activity.
If you don't mind me asking, what is your waist-to-height ratio?
And on topic the election is going to be November 21st, as I said in January. Even Peston saying something compatible with that has not shaken my confidence. Stopped clocks etc.
But what happens when we get to early October? Either the polls still won't have shifted in the Conservatives' favour, in which case why not give them another month?
Or they will have started to shift, in which case the logic will be "Give it another month and we will be competitive".
We only get an early (before legal expiry) election if the government collapses. Otherwise it’s Thursday 23rd January.
Just because he ruled out May 2nd doesn’t mean it will go to January 23rd.
A January election will be political suicide. The media would hate it. The country would hate it. It more-than-smacks of desperation. Add to that the longest month of the year for most people financially (pay day is before Christmas), the cold, dark, the idea of campaigning during Christmas and New Year … no, it’s absurd.
It’ll be the autumn. Personally I think before the clocks go back but maybe November.
You are right but the advantage of a January election is that it screws the opposition parties more than it hurts the government. There are 314 days to the general election, Thursday, 23 January.
Again, you don’t know when the election will be so give over with the attention-seeking certainty. Also the idea that it “will screw the other parties more” is not fact, it’s your opinion. Why not write it as such?
For what it’s worth, your analysis is based on shaky grounds. A January election makes the government look ridiculous. And there are lots of leftwing teachers on holiday during the campaign.
Haven't we already passed the point of no return on the government looking ridiculous? It now isn't going to be May. If the locals are as bad as they look like being then it can't be June/July, If summer is decent weather then the number of boats crossing will rule out September/October so December/January has to be it. There's going to be very little Tory activity on the streets in this campaign so make it more difficult for the opposition and have the election campaign cross Christmas, Maybe not 23rd January, but 9th or 16th are possibles.
I don't know if the "boats" still has the totemic salience it did last year. Most people are used to it now and don't think the government either want to fix it or can fix it.
The little shit wants to be PM as long as possible and doesn't really care if he leaves the tory party or country in a state of desolation after he's gone. However, he will want to go out at the inevitable GE loss not the indignity of being ousted as party leader in a Night of the Long Letters. With that in mind, he might want to avoid the tory conference which will be a febrile shit show if they are 20+ behind in the polls.
"We negotiated as much as we could, but there is nothing to talk about with Putin anymore. Ukraine must win. There will be no red lines for France. I’m the President of France and I decide"
The first is the inevitable singularity of Rishi Sunak losing his job as Prime Minister. Because everyone is a hero in their own story, he thinks that this a bad thing, even though the evidence is pretty strong that for British politics and indeed the country as a whole, it would be mostly a good thing.
The second singularity is that the longer the election is delayed, the worse the result will be for the Tories. Clinging on to power, in the vague hope that "something will turn up" is never a good look. When one considers the utter exhaustion of the Tories, and the huge rush for the exit by members of the parliamentary party, even ahead of the GE itself, it is very dangerous to continue ad nauseam. Defeat is inevitable, by January it will most likely become a rout, which could fundamentally eclipse the Tories for decades.
Yet for Sunak the first singularity outweighs the second. Hope dies last.
Meanwhile, May 2nd will see the Lib Dems back on the polling map as a result of the local elections, which, judging from recent local by elections will see victories concentrated in the blue wall. If Sunak had gone to the country on May 2nd, These losses would have been minimised. Reform Ltd. does not have membership sufficient to fight the locals successfully, and will likely fade after their inevitable disappointment. However they will not fade so much in the air war campaign of the GE, so the Tory result at the GE could be worse than the locals, which themselves will be exceptionally bad.
Sunak is gone at the electoral singularity. The question now is how much of the Tory Party gets through... and the answer is that the longer the election is delayed, the fewer seats the Tories will hold afterwards.
With Labour polling in the low 40%s but a squeeze from both Reform Ltd, and the Lib Dems, the Tories, even if they polled above 25% could still lose around two thirds of their seats. Much below 25% and, as we know from Canada FPTP can wipe out a party.didnt go for May 2nd.
The Tory Party singularity could be far worse than the Prime Minister thinks. He may rue the day, as Callaghan or Brown before him, when he decided to hang on and didn´t go for May 2nd.
The Labour score at the 2010 general election, 29%, was 6% above the 23% Labour got in the 2009 Locals so delaying does not necessarily mean a worse result
Yes but Lab consistently undeperform in national share in Locals, and LibDems overperform.
As a rule of thumb half of LD vote share in Locals should be added to Lab to get the GE share.
Yes I agree the LDs overperform in locals compared to the GE but the Tories as well as Labour underperform, especially if in government and unpopular.
For example in the 1995 and 1996 local elections the Tories got 25% and 29% respectively but at the 1997 general election the Tories got 30.7%
That's pretty marginal between '96 and '97. Certainly within MoE.
So we have to put up with this drivel for another 6-9 months?
Reform ahead of the Tories in the polls by midsummer? I don't think Sunak will enjoy his party conference.
Pretty much. The people arguing that May 2nd was Sunak's last best chance were solid in their reasoning; I'm expecting things to go downhill (possibly chaotically) from here.
But not even a hyper rationalist with a spreadsheet would call an election when twenty points behind.
I don’t for one moment believe they are twenty points behind, I wouldn’t expect a May 2nd election if the Tories were 15 or more behind. I’m doubtful the top of the Tory party believe the situation is that difficult right now.
You got to match current unicorn polling with what we know will happen in parliamentary constituency elections. Why? Because that’s the pattern from the last three elections this election will follow.
The polling you refer to, and people have brainwashed themselves into thinking you can’t call an election when twenty points behind, is unicorn polling. Forced choice polling is the only indicator where we actually are, and that shows the Tories on 31% just 11 behind.
History proves once campaigning starts, polls and voter behaviour can move in way it didn’t move in the years leading up. The problem is, the expected Swingback either will or won’t happen depending on the campaign month itself, not anything we can be sure of before the election actually kicks off, all we can look for are the risks in the campaign month.
Labour should refuse to honour any pledges made by the Tories in the autumn statement.
Good morning
Even good ones?
Well they're opposing the idea of abolishing NI, which is utterly ridiculous, its something Labour should completely 100% support and be advocating itself.
If its January 2025 the election, then I would like to see tax thresholds frozen again in the autumn and another 2% NI cut in the autumn statement.
I agree with this. Freezing the thresholds and using the created fiscal drag to cut employee NI down to zero is what should be done over the next parliament. It'd be a boost for lower paid workers at the expense of those on middling and higher incomes. Once employee NI is at zero income tax thresholds (Or cuts) should then start moving up again.
Hello Money Tree, more please as Bart Simpson thinks it is a good idea, and a unicorn woudl be nice as well.
It's not reliant on any money trees.
Fiscal drag is increasing IT fairly rapidly (inflation). So NI cuts are merely reducing the increase.
Anyone else like my idea on the triple lock?
1) When the pension reaches the level of the personal allowance (not long now), lock the two together. The personal allowance is set at the same level as the pension. 2) So both are evaluated on the triple lock.
I think that would be an excellent way to go after employee NI can be eliminated via drag.
On weight, as with so much of @Dura's output he made a truly horrific post wherein he noted the difference in calorific intake required to maintain a certain weight between his younger years and now. Something like a third less just to stay where he was and at the same, or similar levels of activity.
I find this the same - I have to reduce my calories vs years ago just to not put on weight, let alone lose it.
Life really is a f**cker.
The process does seem to be slowing though! At age 56 I'm still on 1700kCal/day and have been for nearly ten years to maintain 69kg and 9% body fat.
At age 35 I was on 2800kCal/day to do the same.
At age 20 when I was a semi-pro cyclist I was on 4,000+ but only weighed 64kg. I was riding 600km+ per week and doing a hell of a lot of PEDs though which makes a direct comparison difficult. At 64kg I was a very good grimpeur but had no punch in a sprint so I prefer a bit more muscle mass.
It helps that I am not a food wanker and never eat out. It's just fuel to me.
I'm mostly in the "it's only fuel" camp too, but one can overdo it. A friend who is a senior Google software engineer never drank coffee, preferring to simply pop a caffeine pill. After he got married his wife civilised him a bit. In the same way, I'm gradually learning to enjoy eating out with friends now and then - another dimension to life.
Since you have to do it (eat) you might as well try and enjoy it. The ultimate in this principle is breathing. Don't just do it unconsciously, get right into it, enjoying each and every breath, revelling in the feel of the air as it enters the nostrils, then moments later leaves by the same route to be replaced by the next. On and on and on it goes, the only physical thing that a person does all of the time. If you can learn to enjoy breathing you will enjoy life. You'll have cracked it.
There are only 2592 seats up at the council elections . So less scope for huge Tory losses in terms of actual seats but it could still turn ugly in terms of percentage loss .
Good point. But there's also mayoral elections, police and crime commissioner elections and the London Assembly. There are some possibilities of embarrassing losses there too.
I forget who it was who recommended the Australian political comedy drama "The Hollowmen". I've been quite getting into it, and its spiritual successor "Utopia". These and other Working Dog Productions productions (ouch!) are a lot like Armando Iannucci's stuff if you remove Time Trumpet and don't f*** off to the States for more money coughcoughCharlieBrooker.
So we have to put up with this drivel for another 6-9 months?
Reform ahead of the Tories in the polls by midsummer? I don't think Sunak will enjoy his party conference.
Pretty much. The people arguing that May 2nd was Sunak's last best chance were solid in their reasoning; I'm expecting things to go downhill (possibly chaotically) from here.
But not even a hyper rationalist with a spreadsheet would call an election when twenty points behind.
I don’t for one moment believe they are twenty points behind, I wouldn’t expect a May 2nd election if the Tories were 15 or more behind. I’m doubtful the top of the Tory party believe the situation is that difficult right now.
You got to match current unicorn polling with what we know will happen in parliamentary constituency elections. Why? Because that’s the pattern from the last three elections this election will follow.
The polling you refer to, and people have brainwashed themselves into thinking you can’t call an election when twenty points behind, is unicorn polling. Forced choice polling is the only indicator where we actually are, and that shows the Tories on 31% just 11 behind.
History proves once campaigning starts, polls and voter behaviour can move in way it didn’t move in the years leading up. The problem is, the expected Swingback either will or won’t happen depending on the campaign month itself, not anything we can be sure of before the election actually kicks off, all we can look for are the risks in the campaign month.
That shift won't always favour the Tories (see 2017) indeed the question to low attention voters will be "do you want 5 more years of this?"
"The next months will be decisive. Many analysts expect a major Russian offensive this summer, and Ukraine cannot wait until the result of the next U.S. elections," he added...
On weight, as with so much of @Dura's output he made a truly horrific post wherein he noted the difference in calorific intake required to maintain a certain weight between his younger years and now. Something like a third less just to stay where he was and at the same, or similar levels of activity.
I find this the same - I have to reduce my calories vs years ago just to not put on weight, let alone lose it.
Life really is a f**cker.
The alternative is to increase activity levels. I run 20-25 miles a week which I find does it. Weight-bearing exercise is also good for your bones as you get older and will help to combat muscle loss which also happens as you age
You are truly a hero. And I have no idea what age you are but I can also assure you that as you get older you are not only not going to be able to increase your weekly run, but running you will find will fuck you up.
And I speak as someone who ran every day of their lives for - let me count - nearly three decades. And am two new hips to the good.
It has to be low/non-impact sports such as cycling and swimming for me now. Except I hate swimming and refuse to do it. Oh and *****back riding in the winter.
Rowing is interesting - met some 80+ rowers on the Tideway.
Seeing someone that old sauntering down the boat ramp with a single balanced on one shoulder....
Running is fine in moderation. Just dont overdo it. Twice a week combined with some gym work. Running every day is silly unless you are a pro athlete.
Why's it silly? Literally what we are designed to do. Chase down deer.
When I was 20 I could run 10k a day no bother. My ability to do that has diminished over the last 10 years. Time for the tribe to boot me out.
"We negotiated as much as we could, but there is nothing to talk about with Putin anymore. Ukraine must win. There will be no red lines for France. I’m the President of France and I decide"
It's been obvious since the start (see the published conversation between Macron and Putin three days before the invasion) that we were dealing with a pathological liar. And it's become utterly clear since then that the war criminal isn't going to appeased with a small slice of Ukraine.
What if the Rwanda policy actually works and leads to a big drop in boat crossings ?
Together with that , the economy improving and interest rates falling there is certainly room for the Tories to see a significant improvement in their polling .
Rwanda is not going to work!
I think the economy will improve. We'll come out of recession. Interest rates could improve (albeit those renegotiating mortgages will still see big rises). I think it is possible that things look a bit better over the summer, the Tories avoid quite so many scandals, Reform UK trip up over something, and the Conservative polling improves somewhat. Not enough to win, but better than now.
I think it is also possible that the death spiral will continue and their polling will fall below Reform UK. I think it is also possible that they just hover around the current figure. Lots of things might happen! I am sceptical of anyone claiming to have a crystal ball (except over Rwanda, which is not going to work).
And on topic the election is going to be November 21st, as I said in January. Even Peston saying something compatible with that has not shaken my confidence. Stopped clocks etc.
But what happens when we get to early October? Either the polls still won't have shifted in the Conservatives' favour, in which case why not give them another month?
Or they will have started to shift, in which case the logic will be "Give it another month and we will be competitive".
We only get an early (before legal expiry) election if the government collapses. Otherwise it’s Thursday 23rd January.
Just because he ruled out May 2nd doesn’t mean it will go to January 23rd.
A January election will be political suicide. The media would hate it. The country would hate it. It more-than-smacks of desperation. Add to that the longest month of the year for most people financially (pay day is before Christmas), the cold, dark, the idea of campaigning during Christmas and New Year … no, it’s absurd.
It’ll be the autumn. Personally I think before the clocks go back but maybe November.
You are right but the advantage of a January election is that it screws the opposition parties more than it hurts the government. There are 314 days to the general election, Thursday, 23 January.
Again, you don’t know when the election will be so give over with the attention-seeking certainty. Also the idea that it “will screw the other parties more” is not fact, it’s your opinion. Why not write it as such?
For what it’s worth, your analysis is based on shaky grounds. A January election makes the government look ridiculous. And there are lots of leftwing teachers on holiday during the campaign.
Haven't we already passed the point of no return on the government looking ridiculous? It now isn't going to be May. If the locals are as bad as they look like being then it can't be June/July, If summer is decent weather then the number of boats crossing will rule out September/October so December/January has to be it. There's going to be very little Tory activity on the streets in this campaign so make it more difficult for the opposition and have the election campaign cross Christmas, Maybe not 23rd January, but 9th or 16th are possibles.
I don't know if the "boats" still has the totemic salience it did last year. Most people are used to it now and don't think the government either want to fix it or can fix it.
The little shit wants to be PM as long as possible and doesn't really care if he leaves the tory party or country in a state of desolation after he's gone. However, he will want to go out at the inevitable GE loss not the indignity of being ousted as party leader in a Night of the Long Letters. With that in mind, he might want to avoid the tory conference which will be a febrile shit show if they are 20+ behind in the polls.
I think there is now a real chance the Tories go for the nuclear option of PM #4 of this parliament.
No election in May means an 7-8 month window has opened up. If the drip-drip negative headlines and poor Sunak media management continues, it starts to feel like enough MPs might be desperate enough for a last throw of the dice.
I am beginning to take this possibility more seriously, only because Sunak appears to be so useless politically that another six months of him as PM is more likely to worsen the Tory position than not. He's not the safe pair of hands he was supposed to be when he replaced Truss.
The only stumbling block is: who takes over?
We’re lucky Boris isn’t in parliament, because I think they’re desperate enough to give him another go.
Other than that, I can’t see beyond Mordaunt because there’s nobody else who isn’t either (a) measurably tied too closely to Rishi or Truss, or (b) who would want the poisoned chalice right now.
For Mordaunt it is also the best chance of holding her seat. Being leader might well make the difference.
I think Boris would have been at serious risk of losing his old seat in a GE as well, given the local issue of ULEZ would be less pertinent than it was in the by-election. Agree there would have been an immense clamour to get him back in charge though. They'd still likely lose with him, which he probably also knows, so is happy to be king-over-the-water for now.
He's got a good ten years yet, and I don't think we've seen the last of him in politics.
It is now longer since Liz Truss's mini-budget than the mini-budget was from the Hartlepool by-election.
Okay.
Did you know that the period between the last Stegosaurus dying out and the first Tyrannosaurus Rex appearing is longer than that between the Tyrannosaurus Rex going extinct and Liz Truss's mini-budget? True fact.
On weight, as with so much of @Dura's output he made a truly horrific post wherein he noted the difference in calorific intake required to maintain a certain weight between his younger years and now. Something like a third less just to stay where he was and at the same, or similar levels of activity.
I find this the same - I have to reduce my calories vs years ago just to not put on weight, let alone lose it.
Life really is a f**cker.
The alternative is to increase activity levels. I run 20-25 miles a week which I find does it. Weight-bearing exercise is also good for your bones as you get older and will help to combat muscle loss which also happens as you age
You are truly a hero. And I have no idea what age you are but I can also assure you that as you get older you are not only not going to be able to increase your weekly run, but running you will find will fuck you up.
And I speak as someone who ran every day of their lives for - let me count - nearly three decades. And am two new hips to the good.
It has to be low/non-impact sports such as cycling and swimming for me now. Except I hate swimming and refuse to do it. Oh and *****back riding in the winter.
Rowing is interesting - met some 80+ rowers on the Tideway.
Seeing someone that old sauntering down the boat ramp with a single balanced on one shoulder....
Running is fine in moderation. Just dont overdo it. Twice a week combined with some gym work. Running every day is silly unless you are a pro athlete.
Why's it silly? Literally what we are designed to do. Chase down deer.
When I was 20 I could run 10k a day no bother. My ability to do that has diminished over the last 10 years. Time for the tribe to boot me out.
I normally run 4 days a week. Rest days are good though, as it allows muscles to recover, and I don't normally do more than 5 even in marathon training. On 2 days a week you will struggle to maintain performance.
Run streaks are interesting though, and can really increase endurance
So we have to put up with this drivel for another 6-9 months?
Reform ahead of the Tories in the polls by midsummer? I don't think Sunak will enjoy his party conference.
Pretty much. The people arguing that May 2nd was Sunak's last best chance were solid in their reasoning; I'm expecting things to go downhill (possibly chaotically) from here.
But not even a hyper rationalist with a spreadsheet would call an election when twenty points behind.
I don’t for one moment believe they are twenty points behind, I wouldn’t expect a May 2nd election if the Tories were 15 or more behind. I’m doubtful the top of the Tory party believe the situation is that difficult right now.
You got to match current unicorn polling with what we know will happen in parliamentary constituency elections. Why? Because that’s the pattern from the last three elections this election will follow.
The polling you refer to, and people have brainwashed themselves into thinking you can’t call an election when twenty points behind, is unicorn polling. Forced choice polling is the only indicator where we actually are, and that shows the Tories on 31% just 11 behind.
History proves once campaigning starts, polls and voter behaviour can move in way it didn’t move in the years leading up. The problem is, the expected Swingback either will or won’t happen depending on the campaign month itself, not anything we can be sure of before the election actually kicks off, all we can look for are the risks in the campaign month.
That shift won't always favour the Tories (see 2017) indeed the question to low attention voters will be "do you want 5 more years of this?"
No fox. 2017 perfectly supports my point how fluid and different a GE is from everything that’s gone before it.
The DNA of a GE election is different than the DNA of how pollsters are capturing GE choice opinion polls.
And at this moment - Friday 1040 i’m still sceptical Rishi has actually confirmed no May 2nd election.
Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, are on a visit in the north-east of 11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
Any sign this morning of rowing back, or not confirming, or not even wishing to be drawn in election dates, confirms a May 2nd election.
Comments
Is that possible, and if so is it general intelligence? Not sure on the former, the latter is a philosophical question in which it is not obvious that the answer is no, not least because we don’t really understand human intelligence enough to compare to that. I think the brute force Only Connect winner is what the proponents of LLMs are angling for, though.
I find this the same - I have to reduce my calories vs years ago just to not put on weight, let alone lose it.
Life really is a f**cker.
Mr. Dean, ironically, I've started reducing the amount of crisps I eat. Not looking to lose weight, mind.
The simple fact is that you don't call an election you expect to lose (very heavily) if the situation in parliament isn't unsustainable and if there's time to improve things. Sunak has reason to believe both conditions are true and will therefore hold out for the autumn in the hope that falling inflation and utility costs will create something of a feel-a-bit-better effect. True, mortgage costs are going the other way but everyone pays utilities whereas not everyone has housing costs going up.
By September, the dials might be different. While I've tipped 14 Nov for a long time, with conference acting as a springboard, there's now the very real possibility that the Tory conference will be more a liability than help, while Labour's could showcase them as a government-in-waiting, revealing their policies in a favourable atmosphere. The needle is tipping more towards an October election, called as soon as parliament returns in early September.
When I got to the till the cashier did that thing where she carried on the conversation with me, assuming I'd been paying attention.
'Yeah', she said, 'those (an unintelligible word but I thought it began with M) don't want us working here.'
So I said 'What, Morrisons don't want you working here?' (When I was at uni I stacked shelves there in the days when Sir Ken Morrison was said to visit the stores incognito and pull staff up if the facing-up wasn't neat enough or the shelves were a bit threadbare. I've never worked for such bad managers so I was well up for a conversation slating Morrisons in general.)
'No,' she said, 'them Muslims that've bought it don't want us working here.'
Quite dispiriting really but I suppose it's a slight advance on the P-word.
Have pretty much kept to it so far & the fact that I’d not knackered after going for a run has probably contributed to that. I probably look a bit silly pootling along the towpath at a pace barely faster than a fast walk, but I can live with that
Mostly doing it to try and build a decent cardio base for running, but the slow but steady loss of the post-pandemic / getting older weight gain has been an extra bonus. I seem to have lost approx 250g per week which seems eminently sustainable.
That he now is doing as bad as her begs the question: what is the point of Rishi?
The real problem is perhaps how to support people with children (including issues such as child care for working parents, and education up to university level, and therefore the student loan system).
For example on protections and taking a particular example content moderation in social media. You train the model to recognise bad posting behaviour and then take action according to the policy for your platform. You aim for the model to be about as good as a human at recognising the behaviour pattern, but the big win is that the control can be applied to every single comment on that platform, to nip the problem in the bud before it develops. Instead of reacting to damage that had already happened because humans can't be everywhere.
Pattern matching across huge amounts of data and then acting on it is a very powerful technique. Like all powerful techniques it needs to be used carefully and ethically, and be regulated.
Yet I do loads of activities - and when I go down to (say) 85kg, not only is it difficult. but I find it harder to do activities. I think 90-95kg is my 'natural' weight - even if that's technically overweight, it doesn't stop me doing lots of energetic activity.
I'm 185 cm precisely and wear 32" Jeans/31" trousers. Looking at bike frames with suggested heights/leg lengths was like "Eh, those numbers are completely inconsistent for me" a few years back made me think HMM...
The boredom of weight training nearly put paid to that, but then I was saved by my late discovery of podcasts. I'm currently working my way through Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook's "The Rest is History" series, and can't wait till my next weights session so I can hear the next instalment of The Fall of the Aztecs!
The next generation of the wse will double the core count and probably triple the on chip ram plus 10x the fabric bandwidth (which in wse3 is already ~4000x higher than Nvidia's best).
This is a generational leap in capability for AI, now we need to see what models can be built on it.
https://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/revolutions_podcast/
And the encyclopedic 'British History' podcast. 441 episodes in, and has only got up to William the Conqueror...
https://www.thebritishhistorypodcast.com/
And I speak as someone who ran every day of their lives for - let me count - nearly three decades. And am two new hips to the good.
It has to be low/non-impact sports such as cycling and swimming for me now. Except I hate swimming and refuse to do it. Oh and *****back riding in the winter.
It seems that you “need” progressively more exercise as you get older to stave off the weight gain that tends to come with old age as your basal metabolic rate drops over time, but your hunger / satiety point doesn’t.
As a rule of thumb half of LD vote share in Locals should be added to Lab to get the GE share.
Whereas a friend of mine who is a good four or five inches taller than me has really, really long legs. He represented England at sport as a youngster.
If it's what I'm thinking of, they've *claimed* that it can. Let's wait and see.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/mar/06/every-step-above-2200-steps-a-day-reduces-risk-of-early-death-study-finds
Seeing someone that old sauntering down the boat ramp with a single balanced on one shoulder....
Edit: I am not 80+ btw so huge credit to those who are and do.
At age 35 I was on 2800kCal/day to do the same.
At age 20 when I was a semi-pro cyclist I was on 4,000+ but only weighed 64kg. I was riding 600km+ per week and doing a hell of a lot of PEDs though which makes a direct comparison difficult. At 64kg I was a very good grimpeur but had no punch in a sprint so I prefer a bit more muscle mass.
It helps that I am not a food wanker and never eat out. It's just fuel to me.
If and when AGI is achieved I doubt (a) we’ll have any idea that it has happened (it’s possible AGI already exists in a form of distributed intelligence across the internet) or (b) its way of ‘announcing’ itself will be in any way predictable based on our current experiences.
If I were a collection of silicon reliant on humans to keep feeding me electricity and data, I suspect I wouldn’t announce myself by refusing to complete a menial task that uses a minuscule amount of my brain power.
https://chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com/2024/03/i-want-my-country-back-whats-in-phrase.html?m=1
Day 3 was the best day yet, as the races were so open, absorbing and many finishes spectacular and crowd raucous - and difficult to even get in the frame for all that.
Going stick still says heavy for hurdles course, soft heavy in places for chase, but I made today selections on basis things have dried out since Tuesday, even with some showers around so faster and less of a stamina issue.
Cheltenham 1.30 - Storm Heart
Cheltenham 2.10 - L'Eau Du Sud
Cheltenham 2.50 - Captain Teague
Cheltenham 3:30 - Fastorslow
Cheltenham 4:10 - Its On The Line
Cheltenham 4:50 - Dinoblue
Cheltenham 5.30 - Bingoo
Good luck again today. And if you want to drink far too much like I have been doing, do that too, it’s a free country 🍸
(I recall another friend complaining about one leg really hurting after her first ever step class - she hadn't realised you were meant to alternate the legs!)
You quite often see octos now (Octuple scull) - an 8 person boat rigged with 2 oars per person. Mad fast, they are.
Never acceptable on here.
I suspect that if Gemini were allowed to use everything Google knows about you and other users then the results would be far better and very scary.
When I retire I intend to get more walking in, but it's more time consuming and to a certain extent interferes with running as both can cause similar fatigue (although there isn't a complete crossover as you use muscles in different ways)
I'm a member of a good fairly non-serious running club and muy local parkrun core team so running is dialled into my social life, which helps.
For what it’s worth, your analysis is based on shaky grounds. A January election makes the government look ridiculous. And there are lots of leftwing teachers on holiday during the campaign.
Other than that I was a perfect fit. I drove a Sports2000 instead. Much more comfy and a 6' 4" height limit for the roll bar.
Only on PB.
Yes, people should give over with their attention seeking certainty, because when picking the actual day you have to remember that actual day isn’t important part of the equation, the decision makers are considering the hard work/risk area isn’t what happens on that one day, but month of campaigning.
History proves once campaigning starts, polls and voter behaviour can move in way it didn’t move in the years leading up. But like in F1 qualifying you need that clear lap for the lap time.
For example in the 1995 and 1996 local elections the Tories got 25% and 29% respectively but at the 1997 general election the Tories got 30.7%
I used to row for GB under 18s. I moved from sculling to sweep at 14, only ever stroke side. But most of the strength work is in the gym where you work both sides. I’ll let you know in another 20 years whether I’m lopsided.
I recognise club rowing is slightly different, though.
On your last point - the chap behind Stampfli boats decided on a whim to build a 24-person sculling boat, which I watched race a time trial at the World Cup in Lucerne at some point. It was insanely fast!
https://www.newswire.com/news/worlds-longest-rowing-shell-to-make-its-american-debut-on
https://twitter.com/mod_soc_dem/status/1768562146068095351
Not sure about Starmer's logic at the end, though.
Anyone else like my idea on the triple lock?
1) When the pension reaches the level of the personal allowance (not long now), lock the two together. The personal allowance is set at the same level as the pension.
2) So both are evaluated on the triple lock.
The little shit wants to be PM as long as possible and doesn't really care if he leaves the tory party or country in a state of desolation after he's gone. However, he will want to go out at the inevitable GE loss not the indignity of being ousted as party leader in a Night of the Long Letters. With that in mind, he might want to avoid the tory conference which will be a febrile shit show if they are 20+ behind in the polls.
Macron tells France in a live TV address:
"We negotiated as much as we could, but there is nothing to talk about with Putin anymore. Ukraine must win. There will be no red lines for France. I’m the President of France and I decide"
You got to match current unicorn polling with what we know will happen in parliamentary constituency elections. Why? Because that’s the pattern from the last three elections this election will follow.
The polling you refer to, and people have brainwashed themselves into thinking you can’t call an election when twenty points behind, is unicorn polling. Forced choice polling is the only indicator where we actually are, and that shows the Tories on 31% just 11 behind.
History proves once campaigning starts, polls and voter behaviour can move in way it didn’t move in the years leading up. The problem is, the expected Swingback either will or won’t happen depending on the campaign month itself, not anything we can be sure of before the election actually kicks off, all we can look for are the risks in the campaign month.
Anyhoo here's some clips. Enjoy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgspkxfkS4k
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaoaygGbPbw
https://www.reuters.com/world/eu-foreign-policy-chief-borrell-washington-says-outcome-ukraine-war-will-be-2024-03-14/
.."It's true for us. We have to speed up. We have to increase our support, to do more and quicker. That's why we are increasing our industrial defense capacities. And it is also true for the US," Borrell said of Europe's efforts to support Ukraine's war effort.
"The next months will be decisive. Many analysts expect a major Russian offensive this summer, and Ukraine cannot wait until the result of the next U.S. elections," he added...
When I was 20 I could run 10k a day no bother. My ability to do that has diminished over the last 10 years. Time for the tribe to boot me out.
And it's become utterly clear since then that the war criminal isn't going to appeased with a small slice of Ukraine.
Would you be willing to reinstate his account? I will be very happy to remind him of the rules around quoting in future.
I think the economy will improve. We'll come out of recession. Interest rates could improve (albeit those renegotiating mortgages will still see big rises). I think it is possible that things look a bit better over the summer, the Tories avoid quite so many scandals, Reform UK trip up over something, and the Conservative polling improves somewhat. Not enough to win, but better than now.
I think it is also possible that the death spiral will continue and their polling will fall below Reform UK. I think it is also possible that they just hover around the current figure. Lots of things might happen! I am sceptical of anyone claiming to have a crystal ball (except over Rwanda, which is not going to work).
He's got a good ten years yet, and I don't think we've seen the last of him in politics.
Did you know that the period between the last Stegosaurus dying out and the first Tyrannosaurus Rex appearing is longer than that between the Tyrannosaurus Rex going extinct and Liz Truss's mini-budget? True fact.
Run streaks are interesting though, and can really increase endurance
The DNA of a GE election is different than the DNA of how pollsters are capturing GE choice opinion polls.
And at this moment - Friday 1040 i’m still sceptical Rishi has actually confirmed no May 2nd election.
Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, are on a visit in the north-east of
11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
Any sign this morning of rowing back, or not confirming, or not even wishing to be drawn in election dates, confirms a May 2nd election.
Watch this space 😁