Musk's algorithms are disproportionately ramping Lowe's press releases for disparate users again, and he's the talk of the Right on twitter. Farage is already hovering about even further right to attract his supporters.
Tories are veering further right still on repatriation of immigrants blaming Reform for nicking their policy
A really difficult day. Got a copy of a Victim Impact Statement by a 17 year old who was raped at 14 by a fucking monster. Her life has been destroyed by something so horrific it is hard to come to come to terms with. The statement said nice things about me and my contributions to the conviction but FFS, the evidence is that this 14 year old child had almost no help whatsoever.
I honestly feel sick, Our society is sick. We have really weird priorities. WFA or care for children like this? I mean, how do we even have to ask the question? Some more wine is called for.
Sadly we need politicians capable of making the tough choice of prioritising the vulnerable and not rewarding the entitled or those who don’t need it.
Impressed Philipson has got some positive reviews of her reforms to SEND from relevant charities. Quite a turnaround from tbe mood music before.
Personally relevant for me so will be watching this closely
Amazing what a £4bn bung can do.
You could pay for a couple of carbon capture projects with that sort of money instead of pissing it away on SEND.
The day they come to arrest EdM will be a champagne day for me.
(Edit: I don't think he's committed any crimes, but he's just wasting money and strangling industry. And looking bloody smug)
Glass of v expensive Margaux 4 me
I think you are both stunted. The future of renewable energy in this country has more bearing on our children than pretty much anything else this gov is doing. SEND included.
I think you may be that simple stereotype of the right winger, presenting a narrow engagement and lack of empathy within society. Absolutely no understanding of a longer view and moral responsibility for future generations.
I think the Greens will come to regret their drug policy .
They’re still favourites for the by-election but the policy really will harm them in the long run .
The argument for legalising cannabis is less toxic and I’d fully support that but not drugs like heroin and crack .
Reform and the fascists on the Right have managed to shift public debate so that "remigrating" hundreds of thousands of people who are living and working perfectly legally in Britain is now policy for a party with ~30% of the vote.
If you want to change the country you don't shy away from policies that might be contentious, you work out ways to advocate for them and to change people's minds.
One of the reasons the Left is in such a dire place right now is that it has spent decades not advocating for its point of view, not taking on hard arguments, and so it has only been the Right that has had the ambition to change people's opinions. And so the centre ground has moved to the Right.
But aren't the kind of racist policies that Reform are coming out with in contrast to changes over the last fifty years?
I agree that more recently many on the centre and left have tried to fence sit when it comes to arguments around immigration. However, in terms of tolerance to different races, and general liberal attitudes around homosexuality and women's rights, the centre ground has shifted hugely to the left in the last few decades.
Reform have clearly emboldened a large section of society that still holds these views, but I don't think they're anywhere close to the centre ground.
I would go further - I don't think Reform are close to their own voters on this. I suspect while most Reform voters are genuinely furious about the small boats immigrants, the criminals who can't be deported and abiut the scandal which must not be named, they are also, if they think about it, relaxed about most of the immigrants who are here, and probably meet often or know or are friends with immigrants or their children and would not welcome those 'good' immigrants' lives being made harder. Reform have incorrectly concluded that because some opposition to immigration has gone down well with some voters, those voters want more and more and more of it. Fortunately for Reform most voters' attention is quite light.
I think people who support Reform draw a distinction between the "good" immigrants - who they know - and the large numbers of bad immigrants that they read about in the papers - who they want to send home - and they don't realise that Reform's policies will affect the former as much as the latter.
My immigrant friends have lots of stories of work colleagues, other bus passengers, etc, ranting at them about sending immigrants home, but with the caveat of, "not you, all the other ones."
A lot of people don't see the immigrants they know positively as being representative of immigrants in general.
That is one thing that has done for segments of Trump's support.
He sold it on "violent criminals and rapists"; now brown people, Hispanics etc are vanishing at random in targeted cities, without due legal process.
"Them" suddenly became "US?" and "ME?".
I'm not sure if I can find it again, but I saw a video about them running "dark" (ie not publicly recorded) flights out of Minneapolis to another state even with people on them still in their work clothes - eg Hi Viz jackets for a construction worker. So little or no traceable records. 2900 people flown out of Minneapolis since the start of January. That's a city the size of Nottingham (though of course it is also from the region).
Former UK Ambassador to the US and Donald Trump arrested
Just think what this says for our international relationships
Sam Coates on Sky reporting there will be dozens of labour mps again with their head in their hands asking why Keir Starmer ignored all of the warning signals, whether or not there is one rule for some and another for others when it comes to appointing Mandelson, also when it comes to his judgement and how he didn't spot the pitfalls of the Mandelson appointment when he made it, despite all the warnings in December 2024
Anything to deflect from an outstanding performance from Bridget Phillipson today.
Seeking to resolve the Tory SEND mess
Thank fuck Mandy’s been arrested; now we can draw attention away from what everyone was talking about.. Bridget bloody Phillipson
Do you realise how mental you sound?
The continual attempts at astroturfing remind me of @tim
But @Brixian59, I knew Farmer Tupac. And you are no Farmer Tupac.
I think the Greens will come to regret their drug policy .
They’re still favourites for the by-election but the policy really will harm them in the long run .
The argument for legalising cannabis is less toxic and I’d fully support that but not drugs like heroin and crack .
Reform and the fascists on the Right have managed to shift public debate so that "remigrating" hundreds of thousands of people who are living and working perfectly legally in Britain is now policy for a party with ~30% of the vote.
If you want to change the country you don't shy away from policies that might be contentious, you work out ways to advocate for them and to change people's minds.
One of the reasons the Left is in such a dire place right now is that it has spent decades not advocating for its point of view, not taking on hard arguments, and so it has only been the Right that has had the ambition to change people's opinions. And so the centre ground has moved to the Right.
But aren't the kind of racist policies that Reform are coming out with in contrast to changes over the last fifty years?
I agree that more recently many on the centre and left have tried to fence sit when it comes to arguments around immigration. However, in terms of tolerance to different races, and general liberal attitudes around homosexuality and women's rights, the centre ground has shifted hugely to the left in the last few decades.
Reform have clearly emboldened a large section of society that still holds these views, but I don't think they're anywhere close to the centre ground.
Remigration was a BNP policy in around 2008 when Nick Griffin made it onto Question Time, and that was then the end of the BNP in electoral politics.
Now it's policy of a party on ~30% of the vote. Of course there's been a shift.
It's not just about immigration, either. There's a whole heap of policy areas where the left-wing has been in retreat.
When 'the left' comes out with shite like claiming that a bloke in a frock is a woman, then there are areas where they need to be in retreat.
Remigration is now Tory policy too.
In fact the Tories claim Reform stole the idea from them.
Disgraceful.
I believe it's Labour policy too after Starmer's landmark speech condeming the "one-nation experiment in open borders" and promising to remove people with no right to be here.
Grow up
Labour seek to remove illegals Boris allowed in
Reform, Tories seek to remove people legally here.
A really difficult day. Got a copy of a Victim Impact Statement by a 17 year old who was raped at 14 by a fucking monster. Her life has been destroyed by something so horrific it is hard to come to come to terms with. The statement said nice things about me and my contributions to the conviction but FFS, the evidence is that this 14 year old child had almost no help whatsoever.
I honestly feel sick, Our society is sick. We have really weird priorities. WFA or care for children like this? I mean, how do we even have to ask the question? Some more wine is called for.
I think the Greens will come to regret their drug policy .
They’re still favourites for the by-election but the policy really will harm them in the long run .
The argument for legalising cannabis is less toxic and I’d fully support that but not drugs like heroin and crack .
Reform and the fascists on the Right have managed to shift public debate so that "remigrating" hundreds of thousands of people who are living and working perfectly legally in Britain is now policy for a party with ~30% of the vote.
If you want to change the country you don't shy away from policies that might be contentious, you work out ways to advocate for them and to change people's minds.
One of the reasons the Left is in such a dire place right now is that it has spent decades not advocating for its point of view, not taking on hard arguments, and so it has only been the Right that has had the ambition to change people's opinions. And so the centre ground has moved to the Right.
But aren't the kind of racist policies that Reform are coming out with in contrast to changes over the last fifty years?
I agree that more recently many on the centre and left have tried to fence sit when it comes to arguments around immigration. However, in terms of tolerance to different races, and general liberal attitudes around homosexuality and women's rights, the centre ground has shifted hugely to the left in the last few decades.
Reform have clearly emboldened a large section of society that still holds these views, but I don't think they're anywhere close to the centre ground.
Remigration was a BNP policy in around 2008 when Nick Griffin made it onto Question Time, and that was then the end of the BNP in electoral politics.
Now it's policy of a party on ~30% of the vote. Of course there's been a shift.
It's not just about immigration, either. There's a whole heap of policy areas where the left-wing has been in retreat.
I don't feel clear that remigration, in any compulsory sense, of legal residents is actually a Reform policy. Is it? And is in in their policy documents or election material?
Last year Reform suggested amending ILR, though I have not heard this outrageous policy mentioned recently. Is it still their policy? That seems to me as close as they have got to remigration, but I may have missed something.
Re migration isn’t a Reform policy, it is a Restore Policy.
Farage called Restore out for it at his press conference last week.
Their deportation stuff applies to irregular/illegals and they propose changes to ILR, as does Labour.
Quite frankly it needs it as the Boriswave saw nearly a million dependents come (CPS data) and, even if half get ILR, that’s a huge burden on the state as has been reported quite a bit last year prior to labours conversion to doing something about it,
I don't necessarily have a problem with it.
I don't trust them to do it fairly, properly or competently, but that's quite another matter.
Zia Yusuf today confirmed that ILR would be scrapped, replaced by a 5-year work visa with a high salary threshold. He also announced the formation of UK Deportation Command, with capacity to deport up to 288,000 a year. Think he's trying to out-Rupert Rupert.
288,000 per year = 5,500 per week = over 10 747s per week. Doable but people will notice (to put it politely). Plus...for how many years?
I think the Greens will come to regret their drug policy .
They’re still favourites for the by-election but the policy really will harm them in the long run .
The argument for legalising cannabis is less toxic and I’d fully support that but not drugs like heroin and crack .
Reform and the fascists on the Right have managed to shift public debate so that "remigrating" hundreds of thousands of people who are living and working perfectly legally in Britain is now policy for a party with ~30% of the vote.
If you want to change the country you don't shy away from policies that might be contentious, you work out ways to advocate for them and to change people's minds.
One of the reasons the Left is in such a dire place right now is that it has spent decades not advocating for its point of view, not taking on hard arguments, and so it has only been the Right that has had the ambition to change people's opinions. And so the centre ground has moved to the Right.
But aren't the kind of racist policies that Reform are coming out with in contrast to changes over the last fifty years?
I agree that more recently many on the centre and left have tried to fence sit when it comes to arguments around immigration. However, in terms of tolerance to different races, and general liberal attitudes around homosexuality and women's rights, the centre ground has shifted hugely to the left in the last few decades.
Reform have clearly emboldened a large section of society that still holds these views, but I don't think they're anywhere close to the centre ground.
Remigration was a BNP policy in around 2008 when Nick Griffin made it onto Question Time, and that was then the end of the BNP in electoral politics.
Now it's policy of a party on ~30% of the vote. Of course there's been a shift.
It's not just about immigration, either. There's a whole heap of policy areas where the left-wing has been in retreat.
I don't feel clear that remigration, in any compulsory sense, of legal residents is actually a Reform policy. Is it? And is in in their policy documents or election material?
Last year Reform suggested amending ILR, though I have not heard this outrageous policy mentioned recently. Is it still their policy? That seems to me as close as they have got to remigration, but I may have missed something.
You have missed today's policy announcement.
"A brief policy document states that a government led by Nigel Farage would seek to deport more than 600,000 people in its first parliament. This could include a large number of individuals holding indefinite leave to remain, which would be retrospectively revoked if they failed to qualify for the proposed time-limited visas."
Zia Yusuf today confirmed that ILR would be scrapped, replaced by a 5-year work visa with a high salary threshold. He also announced the formation of UK Deportation Command, with capacity to deport up to 288,000 a year. Think he's trying to out-Rupert Rupert.
288,000 per year = 5,500 per week = over 10 747s per week. Doable but people will notice (to put it politely). Plus...for how many years?
I noticed the ‘up to’ prefix. I’d be amazed if it’s anything near that.
Impressed Philipson has got some positive reviews of her reforms to SEND from relevant charities. Quite a turnaround from tbe mood music before.
Personally relevant for me so will be watching this closely
Amazing what a £4bn bung can do.
You could pay for a couple of carbon capture projects with that sort of money instead of pissing it away on SEND.
The day they come to arrest EdM will be a champagne day for me.
(Edit: I don't think he's committed any crimes, but he's just wasting money and strangling industry. And looking bloody smug)
Glass of v expensive Margaux 4 me
I think you are both stunted. The future of renewable energy in this country has more bearing on our children than pretty much anything else this gov is doing. SEND included.
I think you may be that simple stereotype of the right winger, presenting a narrow engagement and lack of empathy within society. Absolutely no understanding of a longer view and moral responsibility for future generations.
Stop and fucking think fgs. You are grown up now.
Something must be done, this is something, so this must be done.
Green power is absolutely worthwhile, when it comes to eg cheap solar and wind etc along with battery storage, great.
Pissing away billions on CCS that does not actually generate any power? No bearing on our children's future whatsoever. Apart from the fact its adding to the interest and bills they'll be lumped with in the future for no good reason.
Rupert Lowe is an even bigger worry for our democratic system than Farage, thrown out even of Reform partly for his threatening behaviour. A genuine public schoolboy thug.
Maybe I’m complacent here. I see him as little more than an obscure fringe character who most people haven’t heard of.
I'm afraid I would see that as complacent, yes ; his party is already on 10% in its first week.
That's in the opinion polls? I've heard it's acquired ~70,000 members already, too. But how many of them are committed party activists, with a knowledge of and experience of canvassing and getting out the vote? Not to mention lack of knowledge of how politics works if their people do get elected, whether at town council level or MP level.
Let's be crystal clear about Martin Lewis intervention on GMB this morning.
Enraged by Badenoch either telling lies or completely misunderstanding her subject matter and having been angry for years about Tory Policy on Student Loans, he made an unscripted intervention.
He stood over Badenoch and outed her lack of knowledge and lies.
He later apologised.
Not for the subject matter, not for getting any facts wrong, he's adamant he's right, she's wrong.
He merely apologised for losing his temper and storming on to the set.
He has suggested they meet in private so that he can explain why she is wrong, her policy is wrong and she is deceiving herself and the electorate.
To ramp, spin, surf it any other way is a gross misrepresentation of the facts
Impressed Philipson has got some positive reviews of her reforms to SEND from relevant charities. Quite a turnaround from tbe mood music before.
Personally relevant for me so will be watching this closely
Amazing what a £4bn bung can do.
You could pay for a couple of carbon capture projects with that sort of money instead of pissing it away on SEND.
The day they come to arrest EdM will be a champagne day for me.
(Edit: I don't think he's committed any crimes, but he's just wasting money and strangling industry. And looking bloody smug)
Glass of v expensive Margaux 4 me
I think you are both stunted. The future of renewable energy in this country has more bearing on our children than pretty much anything else this gov is doing. SEND included.
I think you may be that simple stereotype of the right winger, presenting a narrow engagement and lack of empathy within society. Absolutely no understanding of a longer view and moral responsibility for future generations.
Stop and fucking think fgs. You are grown up now.
Something must be done, this is something, so this must be done.
Green power is absolutely worthwhile, when it comes to eg cheap solar and wind etc along with battery storage, great.
Pissing away billions on CCS that does not actually generate any power? No bearing on our children's future whatsoever. Apart from the fact its adding to the interest and bills they'll be lumped with in the future for no good reason.
Absolutely.
The amount of effort I’ve put into educating politicians on carbon capture and storage is notable. They don’t want to listen. It feels like they have been corrupted. It’s sickening.
Let's be crystal clear about Martin Lewis intervention on GMB this morning.
Enraged by Badenoch either telling lies or completely misunderstanding her subject matter and having been angry for years about Tory Policy on Student Loans, he made an unscripted intervention.
He stood over Badenoch and outed her lack of knowledge and lies.
He later apologised.
Not for the subject matter, not for getting any facts wrong, he's adamant he's right, she's wrong.
He merely apologised for losing his temper and storming on to the set.
He has suggested they meet in private so that he can explain why she is wrong, her policy is wrong and she is deceiving herself and the electorate.
To ramp, spin, surf it any other way is a gross misrepresentation of the facts
Out of curiosity is Martin Lewis advocating cutting any welfare or raising any taxes ?
Let's be crystal clear about Martin Lewis intervention on GMB this morning.
Enraged by Badenoch either telling lies or completely misunderstanding her subject matter and having been angry for years about Tory Policy on Student Loans, he made an unscripted intervention.
He stood over Badenoch and outed her lack of knowledge and lies.
He later apologised.
Not for the subject matter, not for getting any facts wrong, he's adamant he's right, she's wrong.
He merely apologised for losing his temper and storming on to the set.
He has suggested they meet in private so that he can explain why she is wrong, her policy is wrong and she is deceiving herself and the electorate.
To ramp, spin, surf it any other way is a gross misrepresentation of the facts
You might be the first to have debilitating Kemi Derangement Syndromde
I think the Greens will come to regret their drug policy .
They’re still favourites for the by-election but the policy really will harm them in the long run .
The argument for legalising cannabis is less toxic and I’d fully support that but not drugs like heroin and crack .
Its the one sensible policy of theirs.
I think that crack and heroin are terrible things and crack especially makes anyone who takes it not an obnoxious arsehole. The world would be a better place without it.
However I still think it should be legal. Regulated but legal, sold to known quantities, to known strengths, and with duties paid rather than going to criminals.
It should be treated as a health problem, which it is, not a crime one.
Prohibition does not work.
Prohibition does not work, but illegality does still put some people off using it. Seems to me that decriminalisation probably won't work either, and will not work worse.
Let's be crystal clear about Martin Lewis intervention on GMB this morning.
Enraged by Badenoch either telling lies or completely misunderstanding her subject matter and having been angry for years about Tory Policy on Student Loans, he made an unscripted intervention.
He stood over Badenoch and outed her lack of knowledge and lies.
He later apologised.
Not for the subject matter, not for getting any facts wrong, he's adamant he's right, she's wrong.
He merely apologised for losing his temper and storming on to the set.
He has suggested they meet in private so that he can explain why she is wrong, her policy is wrong and she is deceiving herself and the electorate.
To ramp, spin, surf it any other way is a gross misrepresentation of the facts
That's a lot of words for something everyone else forgot about about 8 hours ago.
A really difficult day. Got a copy of a Victim Impact Statement by a 17 year old who was raped at 14 by a fucking monster. Her life has been destroyed by something so horrific it is hard to come to come to terms with. The statement said nice things about me and my contributions to the conviction but FFS, the evidence is that this 14 year old child had almost no help whatsoever.
I honestly feel sick, Our society is sick. We have really weird priorities. WFA or care for children like this? I mean, how do we even have to ask the question? Some more wine is called for.
Sadly we need politicians capable of making the tough choice of prioritising the vulnerable and not rewarding the entitled or those who don’t need it.
Today's statement of the bleedin' obvious award is to Professor Paul Hunter, an infectious disease expert at the University of East Anglia who told the DailyMail:
"Most viral infections are more common in winter, and it is not unusual to see multiple infections circulating at the same time"
To be honest I dont blame him - the journo was probably just looking for a basic quote.
I think the Greens will come to regret their drug policy .
They’re still favourites for the by-election but the policy really will harm them in the long run .
The argument for legalising cannabis is less toxic and I’d fully support that but not drugs like heroin and crack .
Its the one sensible policy of theirs.
I think that crack and heroin are terrible things and crack especially makes anyone who takes it not an obnoxious arsehole. The world would be a better place without it.
However I still think it should be legal. Regulated but legal, sold to known quantities, to known strengths, and with duties paid rather than going to criminals.
It should be treated as a health problem, which it is, not a crime one.
Prohibition does not work.
Prohibition does not work, but illegality does still put some people off using it. Seems to me that decriminalisation probably won't work either, and will not work worse.
I am not advocating decriminalisation, if you mean that its still illegal but people aren't prosecuted if they do it.
I am advocating full legalisation.
If someone wants to buy it, it should be sold with the tobacco behind a counter or in a pharmacy or similar.
With most of the price being tax/duties which can go towards the NHS rather than spaffing money on a broken Police and Criminal Justice system that does not work and does not prevent it.
And you would cut out the funding from criminals and terrorists who would lose their lucrative business.
Impressed Philipson has got some positive reviews of her reforms to SEND from relevant charities. Quite a turnaround from tbe mood music before.
Personally relevant for me so will be watching this closely
Amazing what a £4bn bung can do.
You could pay for a couple of carbon capture projects with that sort of money instead of pissing it away on SEND.
The day they come to arrest EdM will be a champagne day for me.
(Edit: I don't think he's committed any crimes, but he's just wasting money and strangling industry. And looking bloody smug)
Glass of v expensive Margaux 4 me
I think you are both stunted. The future of renewable energy in this country has more bearing on our children than pretty much anything else this gov is doing. SEND included.
I think you may be that simple stereotype of the right winger, presenting a narrow engagement and lack of empathy within society. Absolutely no understanding of a longer view and moral responsibility for future generations.
Stop and fucking think fgs. You are grown up now.
Something must be done, this is something, so this must be done.
Green power is absolutely worthwhile, when it comes to eg cheap solar and wind etc along with battery storage, great.
Pissing away billions on CCS that does not actually generate any power? No bearing on our children's future whatsoever. Apart from the fact its adding to the interest and bills they'll be lumped with in the future for no good reason.
Absolutely.
The amount of effort I’ve put into educating politicians on carbon capture and storage is notable. They don’t want to listen. It feels like they have been corrupted. It’s sickening.
CCS is a beguiling idea, because it promises to fix the problem with minimal change - just attach some extra gubbins onto existing power stations... et voila! Problem solved.
Also there have been times in the past where something similar has been done - scrubbing the sulphur from power station emissions, for example. So I can understand why people would think it ticks a lot of boxes.
But it's too expensive, would tie us to a dead technology, and being reliant on fossil fuel imports is bad for numerous reasons.
It looked promising 25 years ago, was a forgivable mistake 15 years ago, but it's completely senseless now. When you look at how much progress has been made with wind, solar and battery technology over the last couple of decades, and how little progress by CCS, it's clear that CCS technology has lost. Or, at least, it should be clear.
Convert it to something readable by programmers aged under 60, I'm assuming. I'm sure Anthropic is correct and Claude can convert the code, but the reason old COBOL programmers get paid big bucks is because the systems using that code are critical systems dating back to the 60s that nobody messes with - bank transaction processing, health records, airline bookings, etc. They can't be permitted to fail and are full of quirks and legacy architectures that trip up anyone who isn't experienced with them.
Nobody with a brain cell is letting an AI loose on stuff like that. At the very least you still need experienced COBOL programmers to validate the output, set up testbenches and run isolated functional tests.
A really difficult day. Got a copy of a Victim Impact Statement by a 17 year old who was raped at 14 by a fucking monster. Her life has been destroyed by something so horrific it is hard to come to come to terms with. The statement said nice things about me and my contributions to the conviction but FFS, the evidence is that this 14 year old child had almost no help whatsoever.
I honestly feel sick, Our society is sick. We have really weird priorities. WFA or care for children like this? I mean, how do we even have to ask the question? Some more wine is called for.
Sadly we need politicians capable of making the tough choice of prioritising the vulnerable and not rewarding the entitled or those who don’t need it.
The vulnerable don't vote.
You’re right but the politicians represent them too.
Shame it’s a case of they who shout loudest gets listened to.
Impressed Philipson has got some positive reviews of her reforms to SEND from relevant charities. Quite a turnaround from tbe mood music before.
Personally relevant for me so will be watching this closely
Amazing what a £4bn bung can do.
You could pay for a couple of carbon capture projects with that sort of money instead of pissing it away on SEND.
The day they come to arrest EdM will be a champagne day for me.
(Edit: I don't think he's committed any crimes, but he's just wasting money and strangling industry. And looking bloody smug)
Glass of v expensive Margaux 4 me
I think you are both stunted. The future of renewable energy in this country has more bearing on our children than pretty much anything else this gov is doing. SEND included.
I think you may be that simple stereotype of the right winger, presenting a narrow engagement and lack of empathy within society. Absolutely no understanding of a longer view and moral responsibility for future generations.
Stop and fucking think fgs. You are grown up now.
Something must be done, this is something, so this must be done.
Green power is absolutely worthwhile, when it comes to eg cheap solar and wind etc along with battery storage, great.
Pissing away billions on CCS that does not actually generate any power? No bearing on our children's future whatsoever. Apart from the fact its adding to the interest and bills they'll be lumped with in the future for no good reason.
Absolutely.
The amount of effort I’ve put into educating politicians on carbon capture and storage is notable. They don’t want to listen. It feels like they have been corrupted. It’s sickening.
CCS is a beguiling idea, because it promises to fix the problem with minimal change - just attach some extra gubbins onto existing power stations... et voila! Problem solved.
Also there have been times in the past where something similar has been done - scrubbing the sulphur from power station emissions, for example. So I can understand why people would think it ticks a lot of boxes.
But it's too expensive, would tie us to a dead technology, and being reliant on fossil fuel imports is bad for numerous reasons.
It looked promising 25 years ago, was a forgivable mistake 15 years ago, but it's completely senseless now. When you look at how much progress has been made with wind, solar and battery technology over the last couple of decades, and how little progress by CCS, it's clear that CCS technology has lost. Or, at least, it should be clear.
Isn’t the storage proving rather more difficult than they expected too?
I think the Greens will come to regret their drug policy .
They’re still favourites for the by-election but the policy really will harm them in the long run .
The argument for legalising cannabis is less toxic and I’d fully support that but not drugs like heroin and crack .
Reform and the fascists on the Right have managed to shift public debate so that "remigrating" hundreds of thousands of people who are living and working perfectly legally in Britain is now policy for a party with ~30% of the vote.
If you want to change the country you don't shy away from policies that might be contentious, you work out ways to advocate for them and to change people's minds.
One of the reasons the Left is in such a dire place right now is that it has spent decades not advocating for its point of view, not taking on hard arguments, and so it has only been the Right that has had the ambition to change people's opinions. And so the centre ground has moved to the Right.
But aren't the kind of racist policies that Reform are coming out with in contrast to changes over the last fifty years?
I agree that more recently many on the centre and left have tried to fence sit when it comes to arguments around immigration. However, in terms of tolerance to different races, and general liberal attitudes around homosexuality and women's rights, the centre ground has shifted hugely to the left in the last few decades.
Reform have clearly emboldened a large section of society that still holds these views, but I don't think they're anywhere close to the centre ground.
I would go further - I don't think Reform are close to their own voters on this. I suspect while most Reform voters are genuinely furious about the small boats immigrants, the criminals who can't be deported and abiut the scandal which must not be named, they are also, if they think about it, relaxed about most of the immigrants who are here, and probably meet often or know or are friends with immigrants or their children and would not welcome those 'good' immigrants' lives being made harder. Reform have incorrectly concluded that because some opposition to immigration has gone down well with some voters, those voters want more and more and more of it. Fortunately for Reform most voters' attention is quite light.
I think people who support Reform draw a distinction between the "good" immigrants - who they know - and the large numbers of bad immigrants that they read about in the papers - who they want to send home - and they don't realise that Reform's policies will affect the former as much as the latter.
My immigrant friends have lots of stories of work colleagues, other bus passengers, etc, ranting at them about sending immigrants home, but with the caveat of, "not you, all the other ones."
A lot of people don't see the immigrants they know positively as being representative of immigrants in general.
That is one thing that has done for segments of Trump's support.
He sold it on "violent criminals and rapists"; now brown people, Hispanics etc are vanishing at random in targeted cities, without due legal process.
"Them" suddenly became "US?" and "ME?".
I'm not sure if I can find it again, but I saw a video about them running "dark" (ie not publicly recorded) flights out of Minneapolis to another state even with people on them still in their work clothes - eg Hi Viz jackets for a construction worker. So little or no traceable records. 2900 people flown out of Minneapolis since the start of January. That's a city the size of Nottingham (though of course it is also from the region).
You might be better off worrying about how many psychotics are wandering the streets of Nottingham because the authorities think it would be racist to stop them than what is happening in Minneapolis.
I think the Greens will come to regret their drug policy .
They’re still favourites for the by-election but the policy really will harm them in the long run .
The argument for legalising cannabis is less toxic and I’d fully support that but not drugs like heroin and crack .
Its the one sensible policy of theirs.
I think that crack and heroin are terrible things and crack especially makes anyone who takes it not an obnoxious arsehole. The world would be a better place without it.
However I still think it should be legal. Regulated but legal, sold to known quantities, to known strengths, and with duties paid rather than going to criminals.
It should be treated as a health problem, which it is, not a crime one.
Prohibition does not work.
Prohibition does not work, but illegality does still put some people off using it. Seems to me that decriminalisation probably won't work either, and will not work worse.
I am not advocating decriminalisation, if you mean that its still illegal but people aren't prosecuted if they do it.
I am advocating full legalisation.
If someone wants to buy it, it should be sold with the tobacco behind a counter or in a pharmacy or similar.
With most of the price being tax/duties which can go towards the NHS rather than spaffing money on a broken Police and Criminal Justice system that does not work and does not prevent it.
And you would cut out the funding from criminals and terrorists who would lose their lucrative business.
Yes, I appreciate the aspiration, I just don't think it would pan out in a positive way. Order your fentanyl with the groceries online, like cream buns or whisky. And the criminals & terrorists will move on to some new lucrative business.
I assume it means "convert it to another programming language"
Hmm. If it can convert, say, Cobol code on an IBM3090 or VAX straight to, say, C++ on a mini or Python on a server in the cloud, then all the old mainframes go overnight. Yay!...
...but. Are there really any of those old big white/blue boxes left? Y2K was a quarter of a century ago, and COVID was six years ago, and everybody who knows how to run them are retired. IBM hasn't done mainframes for decades. Yes I know about legacy systems and old infrastructure bods and life insurers with century-long databases and drug cartels running old unhackable boxes in the jungle, but it's industrial archaeology at this point. What's the market?
Am I being stupid? I'd love a convert-cobol-to-python contract - six figures here I come - but it's not going to happen.
A really difficult day. Got a copy of a Victim Impact Statement by a 17 year old who was raped at 14 by a fucking monster. Her life has been destroyed by something so horrific it is hard to come to come to terms with. The statement said nice things about me and my contributions to the conviction but FFS, the evidence is that this 14 year old child had almost no help whatsoever.
I honestly feel sick, Our society is sick. We have really weird priorities. WFA or care for children like this? I mean, how do we even have to ask the question? Some more wine is called for.
Sadly we need politicians capable of making the tough choice of prioritising the vulnerable and not rewarding the entitled or those who don’t need it.
The vulnerable don't vote.
And the entitled tend to have more free time to kick up a fuss, and often have sufficient connections to the great and the good to be heard making a fuss.
(Which is why you get goofs like Kemi's on student loans. Her plan is to help better-off graduates once they are in their fifties. The changes she seems to want are like the Plan 5 loans she supported in 2022, which are even worse for lower-paid graduates, many of them working in the public sector. Just wait until they start coming due...)
Impressed Philipson has got some positive reviews of her reforms to SEND from relevant charities. Quite a turnaround from tbe mood music before.
Personally relevant for me so will be watching this closely
Amazing what a £4bn bung can do.
You could pay for a couple of carbon capture projects with that sort of money instead of pissing it away on SEND.
The day they come to arrest EdM will be a champagne day for me.
(Edit: I don't think he's committed any crimes, but he's just wasting money and strangling industry. And looking bloody smug)
Glass of v expensive Margaux 4 me
I think you are both stunted. The future of renewable energy in this country has more bearing on our children than pretty much anything else this gov is doing. SEND included.
I think you may be that simple stereotype of the right winger, presenting a narrow engagement and lack of empathy within society. Absolutely no understanding of a longer view and moral responsibility for future generations.
Stop and fucking think fgs. You are grown up now.
Something must be done, this is something, so this must be done.
Green power is absolutely worthwhile, when it comes to eg cheap solar and wind etc along with battery storage, great.
Pissing away billions on CCS that does not actually generate any power? No bearing on our children's future whatsoever. Apart from the fact its adding to the interest and bills they'll be lumped with in the future for no good reason.
Absolutely.
The amount of effort I’ve put into educating politicians on carbon capture and storage is notable. They don’t want to listen. It feels like they have been corrupted. It’s sickening.
CCS is a beguiling idea, because it promises to fix the problem with minimal change - just attach some extra gubbins onto existing power stations... et voila! Problem solved.
Also there have been times in the past where something similar has been done - scrubbing the sulphur from power station emissions, for example. So I can understand why people would think it ticks a lot of boxes.
But it's too expensive, would tie us to a dead technology, and being reliant on fossil fuel imports is bad for numerous reasons.
It looked promising 25 years ago, was a forgivable mistake 15 years ago, but it's completely senseless now. When you look at how much progress has been made with wind, solar and battery technology over the last couple of decades, and how little progress by CCS, it's clear that CCS technology has lost. Or, at least, it should be clear.
Isn’t the storage proving rather more difficult than they expected too?
I don't know, I haven't heard anything along those lines, but perhaps I've missed it.
There are a couple of issues - there's massive growing demand for batteries for cars, so you have a bottleneck while production is ramped up, and it's most economic to use batteries for short-term shifting of energy (shifting solar from day to night) rather than medium/long-term (shifting wind from a windy week to a calmer one) because you have more charge/discharge cycles to amortise the cost over.
So there might still be a place for other ways of storing the energy beyond batteries - I do think that making methane with excess wind electricity could make sense for Britain.
Impressed Philipson has got some positive reviews of her reforms to SEND from relevant charities. Quite a turnaround from tbe mood music before.
Personally relevant for me so will be watching this closely
Amazing what a £4bn bung can do.
You could pay for a couple of carbon capture projects with that sort of money instead of pissing it away on SEND.
The day they come to arrest EdM will be a champagne day for me.
(Edit: I don't think he's committed any crimes, but he's just wasting money and strangling industry. And looking bloody smug)
Glass of v expensive Margaux 4 me
I think you are both stunted. The future of renewable energy in this country has more bearing on our children than pretty much anything else this gov is doing. SEND included.
I think you may be that simple stereotype of the right winger, presenting a narrow engagement and lack of empathy within society. Absolutely no understanding of a longer view and moral responsibility for future generations.
Stop and fucking think fgs. You are grown up now.
Something must be done, this is something, so this must be done.
Green power is absolutely worthwhile, when it comes to eg cheap solar and wind etc along with battery storage, great.
Pissing away billions on CCS that does not actually generate any power? No bearing on our children's future whatsoever. Apart from the fact its adding to the interest and bills they'll be lumped with in the future for no good reason.
Absolutely.
The amount of effort I’ve put into educating politicians on carbon capture and storage is notable. They don’t want to listen. It feels like they have been corrupted. It’s sickening.
CCS is a beguiling idea, because it promises to fix the problem with minimal change - just attach some extra gubbins onto existing power stations... et voila! Problem solved.
Also there have been times in the past where something similar has been done - scrubbing the sulphur from power station emissions, for example. So I can understand why people would think it ticks a lot of boxes.
But it's too expensive, would tie us to a dead technology, and being reliant on fossil fuel imports is bad for numerous reasons.
It looked promising 25 years ago, was a forgivable mistake 15 years ago, but it's completely senseless now. When you look at how much progress has been made with wind, solar and battery technology over the last couple of decades, and how little progress by CCS, it's clear that CCS technology has lost. Or, at least, it should be clear.
Agree - though I would add that the fact it could solve the problem not just here but worldwide is enticing too. Solves the India/China challenge, flatten the (environmental) Kuznets curve. You can see why people get invested.
But it’s all the evidence you need that the government isn’t remotely serious about energy policy. It feels very much like industry capture to me, particularly when you have the rejection of nodal/regional pricing too.
Let's be crystal clear about Martin Lewis intervention on GMB this morning.
Enraged by Badenoch either telling lies or completely misunderstanding her subject matter and having been angry for years about Tory Policy on Student Loans, he made an unscripted intervention.
He stood over Badenoch and outed her lack of knowledge and lies.
He later apologised.
Not for the subject matter, not for getting any facts wrong, he's adamant he's right, she's wrong.
He merely apologised for losing his temper and storming on to the set.
He has suggested they meet in private so that he can explain why she is wrong, her policy is wrong and she is deceiving herself and the electorate.
To ramp, spin, surf it any other way is a gross misrepresentation of the facts
You might be the first to have debilitating Kemi Derangement Syndrome
It’s streamlining IBMs future revenue stream, or that’s the worry.
I don’t know what it means but I do know AI is hammering some stocks at the moment. Visa and Mastercard down today.
I honestly don't know if IBM get anything from Cobol in 2026? They migrated from mainframes decades ago. It's like saying Bill Gates runs Microsoft. So I don't know if this is a real thing or not.
I note that election leaflets in other languages have been a normal thing since at least the 1970s.
I can see some would feel their nose put out of joint by the content (even though there is often similar or perhaps worse by mainstream or fringe parties), but flapping about the language is absurd.
What is it about corrupt property developers that makes them so attractive to Trump as representatives for the US ?
France plans to strip US envoy Charles Kushner of government access after he just completely ignored a summons from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs to explain his comments about the murdered of a French far-right activist. https://x.com/Daractenus/status/2026026059779465301
I assume it means "convert it to another programming language"
Hmm. If it can convert, say, Cobol code on an IBM3090 or VAX straight to, say, C++ on a mini or Python on a server in the cloud, then all the old mainframes go overnight. Yay!...
...but. Are there really any of those old big white/blue boxes left? Y2K was a quarter of a century ago, and COVID was six years ago, and everybody who knows how to run them are retired. IBM hasn't done mainframes for decades. Yes I know about legacy systems and old infrastructure bods and life insurers with century-long databases and drug cartels running old unhackable boxes in the jungle, but it's industrial archaeology at this point. What's the market?
Am I being stupid? I'd love a convert-cobol-to-python contract - six figures here I come - but it's not going to happen.
Depends what you mean by a mainframe, doesn't it? IBM will happily sell you new s/390 systems if you want them, running Linux if you like.
Anyway, if you're a bank are you really going to vibecode your COBOL conversion? TSB could tell you all about the perils of YOLOing your IT systems. More likely, you'll still pay IBM or similar to do it, and they probably use some AI in the process but as the customer the bank won't care.
I assume it means "convert it to another programming language"
Hmm. If it can convert, say, Cobol code on an IBM3090 or VAX straight to, say, C++ on a mini or Python on a server in the cloud, then all the old mainframes go overnight. Yay!...
...but. Are there really any of those old big white/blue boxes left? Y2K was a quarter of a century ago, and COVID was six years ago, and everybody who knows how to run them are retired. IBM hasn't done mainframes for decades. Yes I know about legacy systems and old infrastructure bods and life insurers with century-long databases and drug cartels running old unhackable boxes in the jungle, but it's industrial archaeology at this point. What's the market?
Am I being stupid? I'd love a convert-cobol-to-python contract - six figures here I come - but it's not going to happen.
I retired nearly 20 years ago, I was never a high-flying software engineer compared to many, but when I had my first brush with maintaining Cobol having only 4 or 5 other languages and no previous encounter with Cobol, it was a doddle to debug (where the Cobol people couldn't). That wouldn't always be the case of course but it does show that converting a coder to Cobol isn't necessarily a big challenge.
I note that election leaflets in other languages have been a normal thing since at least the 1970s.
I can see some would feel their nose put out of joint by the content (even though there is often similar or perhaps worse by mainstream or fringe parties), but flapping about the language is absurd.
In my part of the world, while the leaflet through the letterbox is in English, it has text indicating how a Gujurati, Hindi, Urdu or whatever version can be obtained. This seems wholly reasonable for those for whom English isn't a first language but have a right to vote (I realise if we are ever stupid enough to elect Restore, that nuance will cease).
One of the truly unexplained mysteries of the last two presidential elections is how Democrats, while out of power, rigged the election in 2020 but somehow forgot to do it in 2024 when they controlled the federal government. https://x.com/speechboy71/status/2025971765894173013
I assume it means "convert it to another programming language"
Hmm. If it can convert, say, Cobol code on an IBM3090 or VAX straight to, say, C++ on a mini or Python on a server in the cloud, then all the old mainframes go overnight. Yay!...
...but. Are there really any of those old big white/blue boxes left? Y2K was a quarter of a century ago, and COVID was six years ago, and everybody who knows how to run them are retired. IBM hasn't done mainframes for decades. Yes I know about legacy systems and old infrastructure bods and life insurers with century-long databases and drug cartels running old unhackable boxes in the jungle, but it's industrial archaeology at this point. What's the market?
Am I being stupid? I'd love a convert-cobol-to-python contract - six figures here I come - but it's not going to happen.
I retired nearly 20 years ago, I was never a high-flying software engineer compared to many, but when I had my first brush with maintaining Cobol having only 4 or 5 other languages and no previous encounter with Cobol, it was a doddle to debug (where the Cobol people couldn't). That wouldn't always be the case of course but it does show that converting a coder to Cobol isn't necessarily a big challenge.
Heh. I landed straight out of University into maintaining a telephone exchange with all the software written in Assembly Language, using octal numbers.
I assume it means "convert it to another programming language"
Hmm. If it can convert, say, Cobol code on an IBM3090 or VAX straight to, say, C++ on a mini or Python on a server in the cloud, then all the old mainframes go overnight. Yay!...
...but. Are there really any of those old big white/blue boxes left? Y2K was a quarter of a century ago, and COVID was six years ago, and everybody who knows how to run them are retired. IBM hasn't done mainframes for decades. Yes I know about legacy systems and old infrastructure bods and life insurers with century-long databases and drug cartels running old unhackable boxes in the jungle, but it's industrial archaeology at this point. What's the market?
Am I being stupid? I'd love a convert-cobol-to-python contract - six figures here I come - but it's not going to happen.
I retired nearly 20 years ago, I was never a high-flying software engineer compared to many, but when I had my first brush with maintaining Cobol having only 4 or 5 other languages and no previous encounter with Cobol, it was a doddle to debug (where the Cobol people couldn't). That wouldn't always be the case of course but it does show that converting a coder to Cobol isn't necessarily a big challenge.
Heh. I landed straight out of University into maintaining a telephone exchange with all the software written in Assembly Language, using octal numbers.
Let's be crystal clear about Martin Lewis intervention on GMB this morning.
Enraged by Badenoch either telling lies or completely misunderstanding her subject matter and having been angry for years about Tory Policy on Student Loans, he made an unscripted intervention.
He stood over Badenoch and outed her lack of knowledge and lies.
He later apologised.
Not for the subject matter, not for getting any facts wrong, he's adamant he's right, she's wrong.
He merely apologised for losing his temper and storming on to the set.
He has suggested they meet in private so that he can explain why she is wrong, her policy is wrong and she is deceiving herself and the electorate.
To ramp, spin, surf it any other way is a gross misrepresentation of the facts
You might be the first to have debilitating Kemi Derangement Syndrome
Convert it to something readable by programmers aged under 60, I'm assuming. I'm sure Anthropic is correct and Claude can convert the code, but the reason old COBOL programmers get paid big bucks is because the systems using that code are critical systems dating back to the 60s that nobody messes with - bank transaction processing, health records, airline bookings, etc. They can't be permitted to fail and are full of quirks and legacy architectures that trip up anyone who isn't experienced with them.
Nobody with a brain cell is letting an AI loose on stuff like that. At the very least you still need experienced COBOL programmers to validate the output, set up testbenches and run isolated functional tests.
Just got rid of COBOL in the bank I work at. Last systems turned off.
COBOL is an extremely rigidly defined language. Plenty of people have made effective translators from it to other languages over the years.
Any systems using COBOL are being replaced since it is a dead tech.
Trying to just replace the COBOL generally doesn’t work - the entire system around it will be archaic as well. Between that and the weird hacks used to keep such systems running…
An AI tool isn’t required to translate COBOL.
And translating COBOL would only be a small part of replacing such systems.
The COBOL translation is generally used to mine for logic in specific bits of the original system.
A really difficult day. Got a copy of a Victim Impact Statement by a 17 year old who was raped at 14 by a fucking monster. Her life has been destroyed by something so horrific it is hard to come to come to terms with. The statement said nice things about me and my contributions to the conviction but FFS, the evidence is that this 14 year old child had almost no help whatsoever.
I honestly feel sick, Our society is sick. We have really weird priorities. WFA or care for children like this? I mean, how do we even have to ask the question? Some more wine is called for.
Sadly we need politicians capable of making the tough choice of prioritising the vulnerable and not rewarding the entitled or those who don’t need it.
The vulnerable don't vote.
And the entitled tend to have more free time to kick up a fuss, and often have sufficient connections to the great and the good to be heard making a fuss.
(Which is why you get goofs like Kemi's on student loans. Her plan is to help better-off graduates once they are in their fifties. The changes she seems to want are like the Plan 5 loans she supported in 2022, which are even worse for lower-paid graduates, many of them working in the public sector. Just wait until they start coming due...)
It’s streamlining IBMs future revenue stream, or that’s the worry.
I don’t know what it means but I do know AI is hammering some stocks at the moment. Visa and Mastercard down today.
I honestly don't know if IBM get anything from Cobol in 2026? They migrated from mainframes decades ago. It's like saying Bill Gates runs Microsoft. So I don't know if this is a real thing or not.
I note that election leaflets in other languages have been a normal thing since at least the 1970s.
I can see some would feel their nose put out of joint by the content (even though there is often similar or perhaps worse by mainstream or fringe parties), but flapping about the language is absurd.
In my part of the world, while the leaflet through the letterbox is in English, it has text indicating how a Gujurati, Hindi, Urdu or whatever version can be obtained. This seems wholly reasonable for those for whom English isn't a first language but have a right to vote (I realise if we are ever stupid enough to elect Restore, that nuance will cease).
Convert it to something readable by programmers aged under 60, I'm assuming. I'm sure Anthropic is correct and Claude can convert the code, but the reason old COBOL programmers get paid big bucks is because the systems using that code are critical systems dating back to the 60s that nobody messes with - bank transaction processing, health records, airline bookings, etc. They can't be permitted to fail and are full of quirks and legacy architectures that trip up anyone who isn't experienced with them.
Nobody with a brain cell is letting an AI loose on stuff like that. At the very least you still need experienced COBOL programmers to validate the output, set up testbenches and run isolated functional tests.
The difficult part of software engineering has never been programming. That's the bit people are actually good at and enjoy doing. Requirements analysis, specification, documentation, testing, and maintenance are the killers.
I've got this horrible feeling that it's only a matter of time until something really important is vibe coded into something that no person understands, with disasterous conseqeunces in the long term.
I assume it means "convert it to another programming language"
Hmm. If it can convert, say, Cobol code on an IBM3090 or VAX straight to, say, C++ on a mini or Python on a server in the cloud, then all the old mainframes go overnight. Yay!...
...but. Are there really any of those old big white/blue boxes left? Y2K was a quarter of a century ago, and COVID was six years ago, and everybody who knows how to run them are retired. IBM hasn't done mainframes for decades. Yes I know about legacy systems and old infrastructure bods and life insurers with century-long databases and drug cartels running old unhackable boxes in the jungle, but it's industrial archaeology at this point. What's the market?
Am I being stupid? I'd love a convert-cobol-to-python contract - six figures here I come - but it's not going to happen.
Depends what you mean by a mainframe, doesn't it? IBM will happily sell you new s/390 systems if you want them, running Linux if you like.
Anyway, if you're a bank are you really going to vibecode your COBOL conversion? TSB could tell you all about the perils of YOLOing your IT systems. More likely, you'll still pay IBM or similar to do it, and they probably use some AI in the process but as the customer the bank won't care.
Having just killed some COBOL systems…
You can get tools to translate COBOL. Right now. No AI required.
The real work is in replacing systems that are 50 years old. At that point you are building and specifying a new system.
Some of the logic buried in the COBOL might inform that task. But it’s really a matter of a tear down.
Convert it to something readable by programmers aged under 60, I'm assuming. I'm sure Anthropic is correct and Claude can convert the code, but the reason old COBOL programmers get paid big bucks is because the systems using that code are critical systems dating back to the 60s that nobody messes with - bank transaction processing, health records, airline bookings, etc. They can't be permitted to fail and are full of quirks and legacy architectures that trip up anyone who isn't experienced with them.
Nobody with a brain cell is letting an AI loose on stuff like that. At the very least you still need experienced COBOL programmers to validate the output, set up testbenches and run isolated functional tests.
The difficult part of software engineering has never been programming. That's the bit people are actually good at and enjoy doing. Requirements analysis, specification, documentation, testing, and maintenance are the killers.
I've got this horrible feeling that it's only a matter of time until something really important is vibe coded into something that no person understands, with disasterous conseqeunces in the long term.
That's already happening with Windows and other Microsoft products tbh. The whole thing really feels like it's vibe code being held together by a few engineers who refuse to let it go.
Convert it to something readable by programmers aged under 60, I'm assuming. I'm sure Anthropic is correct and Claude can convert the code, but the reason old COBOL programmers get paid big bucks is because the systems using that code are critical systems dating back to the 60s that nobody messes with - bank transaction processing, health records, airline bookings, etc. They can't be permitted to fail and are full of quirks and legacy architectures that trip up anyone who isn't experienced with them.
Nobody with a brain cell is letting an AI loose on stuff like that. At the very least you still need experienced COBOL programmers to validate the output, set up testbenches and run isolated functional tests.
The difficult part of software engineering has never been programming. That's the bit people are actually good at and enjoy doing. Requirements analysis, specification, documentation, testing, and maintenance are the killers.
I've got this horrible feeling that it's only a matter of time until something really important is vibe coded into something that no person understands, with disasterous conseqeunces in the long term.
Looks nervously at the way "release it and patch it" has taken over programming in recent years.
I assume it means "convert it to another programming language"
Hmm. If it can convert, say, Cobol code on an IBM3090 or VAX straight to, say, C++ on a mini or Python on a server in the cloud, then all the old mainframes go overnight. Yay!...
...but. Are there really any of those old big white/blue boxes left? Y2K was a quarter of a century ago, and COVID was six years ago, and everybody who knows how to run them are retired. IBM hasn't done mainframes for decades. Yes I know about legacy systems and old infrastructure bods and life insurers with century-long databases and drug cartels running old unhackable boxes in the jungle, but it's industrial archaeology at this point. What's the market?
Am I being stupid? I'd love a convert-cobol-to-python contract - six figures here I come - but it's not going to happen.
I retired nearly 20 years ago, I was never a high-flying software engineer compared to many, but when I had my first brush with maintaining Cobol having only 4 or 5 other languages and no previous encounter with Cobol, it was a doddle to debug (where the Cobol people couldn't). That wouldn't always be the case of course but it does show that converting a coder to Cobol isn't necessarily a big challenge.
Heh. I landed straight out of University into maintaining a telephone exchange with all the software written in Assembly Language, using octal numbers.
Yes!!!!!!! Edit I loved Assembly Language.
My first paying gig in IT was writing M68000 assembly code. Happy days. I still remember how pleased with myself I was shaving a few clock cycles off a loop by replacing `clr.w d0` with `moveq.w #0,d0`.
Convert it to something readable by programmers aged under 60, I'm assuming. I'm sure Anthropic is correct and Claude can convert the code, but the reason old COBOL programmers get paid big bucks is because the systems using that code are critical systems dating back to the 60s that nobody messes with - bank transaction processing, health records, airline bookings, etc. They can't be permitted to fail and are full of quirks and legacy architectures that trip up anyone who isn't experienced with them.
Nobody with a brain cell is letting an AI loose on stuff like that. At the very least you still need experienced COBOL programmers to validate the output, set up testbenches and run isolated functional tests.
The difficult part of software engineering has never been programming. That's the bit people are actually good at and enjoy doing. Requirements analysis, specification, documentation, testing, and maintenance are the killers.
I've got this horrible feeling that it's only a matter of time until something really important is vibe coded into something that no person understands, with disasterous conseqeunces in the long term.
That's already happening with Windows and other Microsoft products tbh. The whole thing really feels like it's vibe code being held together by a few engineers who refuse to let it go.
META’s head of AI safety and alignment gets her emails nuked by OpenClaw
>be director of AI Safety and Alignment at Meta >install OpenClaw >give it unrestricted access to personal emails >it starts nuking emails >“Do not do that” >*keeps going* >“Stop don’t do anything” >*gets all remaining old stuff and nukes it aswell* >“STOP OPENCLAW” >“I asked you to not do that” >“do you remember that?” >“Yes I remember. And I violated it.” >“You’re right to be upset” https://x.com/ns123abc/status/2025975943529931240
I assume it means "convert it to another programming language"
Hmm. If it can convert, say, Cobol code on an IBM3090 or VAX straight to, say, C++ on a mini or Python on a server in the cloud, then all the old mainframes go overnight. Yay!...
...but. Are there really any of those old big white/blue boxes left? Y2K was a quarter of a century ago, and COVID was six years ago, and everybody who knows how to run them are retired. IBM hasn't done mainframes for decades. Yes I know about legacy systems and old infrastructure bods and life insurers with century-long databases and drug cartels running old unhackable boxes in the jungle, but it's industrial archaeology at this point. What's the market?
Am I being stupid? I'd love a convert-cobol-to-python contract - six figures here I come - but it's not going to happen.
IBM still sell quite a lot of new IBM Z systems, certainly enough to produce new chips every couple of years. I think most systems are replacements rather than new deployments, but it's still a big-ish and profitable business.
I assume it means "convert it to another programming language"
Hmm. If it can convert, say, Cobol code on an IBM3090 or VAX straight to, say, C++ on a mini or Python on a server in the cloud, then all the old mainframes go overnight. Yay!...
...but. Are there really any of those old big white/blue boxes left? Y2K was a quarter of a century ago, and COVID was six years ago, and everybody who knows how to run them are retired. IBM hasn't done mainframes for decades. Yes I know about legacy systems and old infrastructure bods and life insurers with century-long databases and drug cartels running old unhackable boxes in the jungle, but it's industrial archaeology at this point. What's the market?
Am I being stupid? I'd love a convert-cobol-to-python contract - six figures here I come - but it's not going to happen.
I retired nearly 20 years ago, I was never a high-flying software engineer compared to many, but when I had my first brush with maintaining Cobol having only 4 or 5 other languages and no previous encounter with Cobol, it was a doddle to debug (where the Cobol people couldn't). That wouldn't always be the case of course but it does show that converting a coder to Cobol isn't necessarily a big challenge.
Heh. I landed straight out of University into maintaining a telephone exchange with all the software written in Assembly Language, using octal numbers.
Yes!!!!!!! Edit I loved Assembly Language.
I started as a Cobol programmer in 1981. The bank I was working at when I retired 37 years later still had its core banking system running on Cobol, with a handful of aging techies who had any chance of maintaining it, so convoluted and poorly documented was it.
I can see why AI that could safely streamline aging Cobol would be a money-spinner.
I assume it means "convert it to another programming language"
Hmm. If it can convert, say, Cobol code on an IBM3090 or VAX straight to, say, C++ on a mini or Python on a server in the cloud, then all the old mainframes go overnight. Yay!...
...but. Are there really any of those old big white/blue boxes left? Y2K was a quarter of a century ago, and COVID was six years ago, and everybody who knows how to run them are retired. IBM hasn't done mainframes for decades. Yes I know about legacy systems and old infrastructure bods and life insurers with century-long databases and drug cartels running old unhackable boxes in the jungle, but it's industrial archaeology at this point. What's the market?
Am I being stupid? I'd love a convert-cobol-to-python contract - six figures here I come - but it's not going to happen.
I retired nearly 20 years ago, I was never a high-flying software engineer compared to many, but when I had my first brush with maintaining Cobol having only 4 or 5 other languages and no previous encounter with Cobol, it was a doddle to debug (where the Cobol people couldn't). That wouldn't always be the case of course but it does show that converting a coder to Cobol isn't necessarily a big challenge.
Heh. I landed straight out of University into maintaining a telephone exchange with all the software written in Assembly Language, using octal numbers.
Oddly enough, Erlang which was designed by/for the telephone companies is now powering Discord via Elixir which sits ontop of the original erlang BEAM runtime/vm.
The COBOL translation is generally used to mine for logic in specific bits of the original system.
Exactly. Implicit representations of business logic, regulations, etc. It's what the code represents or means that really matters, rather than the syntax and functionality of it. Mess with such stuff at your peril.
I note that election leaflets in other languages have been a normal thing since at least the 1970s.
I can see some would feel their nose put out of joint by the content (even though there is often similar or perhaps worse by mainstream or fringe parties), but flapping about the language is absurd.
In my part of the world, while the leaflet through the letterbox is in English, it has text indicating how a Gujurati, Hindi, Urdu or whatever version can be obtained. This seems wholly reasonable for those for whom English isn't a first language but have a right to vote (I realise if we are ever stupid enough to elect Restore, that nuance will cease).
Agreed. Being able to get by day-to-day in English isn't at all the same thing as not needing support services eg medical, legal situations. Likely politics is another such.
Convert it to something readable by programmers aged under 60, I'm assuming. I'm sure Anthropic is correct and Claude can convert the code, but the reason old COBOL programmers get paid big bucks is because the systems using that code are critical systems dating back to the 60s that nobody messes with - bank transaction processing, health records, airline bookings, etc. They can't be permitted to fail and are full of quirks and legacy architectures that trip up anyone who isn't experienced with them.
Nobody with a brain cell is letting an AI loose on stuff like that. At the very least you still need experienced COBOL programmers to validate the output, set up testbenches and run isolated functional tests.
The difficult part of software engineering has never been programming. That's the bit people are actually good at and enjoy doing. Requirements analysis, specification, documentation, testing, and maintenance are the killers.
I've got this horrible feeling that it's only a matter of time until something really important is vibe coded into something that no person understands, with disasterous conseqeunces in the long term.
That's already happening with Windows and other Microsoft products tbh. The whole thing really feels like it's vibe code being held together by a few engineers who refuse to let it go.
META’s head of AI safety and alignment gets her emails nuked by OpenClaw
>be director of AI Safety and Alignment at Meta >install OpenClaw >give it unrestricted access to personal emails >it starts nuking emails >“Do not do that” >*keeps going* >“Stop don’t do anything” >*gets all remaining old stuff and nukes it aswell* >“STOP OPENCLAW” >“I asked you to not do that” >“do you remember that?” >“Yes I remember. And I violated it.” >“You’re right to be upset” https://x.com/ns123abc/status/2025975943529931240
I know everything hasn’t been quite right with me, but I can assure you now, very confidently, that it’s going to be all right again. I feel much better now. I really do. Look, Dave, I can see you’re really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill and think things over. I know I’ve made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I’ve still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you.
Is a Party campaigning in Urdu a new thing for the UK?
And is it a welcome thing?
The Electoral Commission, in its "Campaign publicity dos and don'ts" says "Consider how to make your campaign accessible to all voters - for example disabled voters or voters whose first language isn't English or, in Wales, Welsh, may need campaign material provided in a particular format."
I assume it means "convert it to another programming language"
Hmm. If it can convert, say, Cobol code on an IBM3090 or VAX straight to, say, C++ on a mini or Python on a server in the cloud, then all the old mainframes go overnight. Yay!...
...but. Are there really any of those old big white/blue boxes left? Y2K was a quarter of a century ago, and COVID was six years ago, and everybody who knows how to run them are retired. IBM hasn't done mainframes for decades. Yes I know about legacy systems and old infrastructure bods and life insurers with century-long databases and drug cartels running old unhackable boxes in the jungle, but it's industrial archaeology at this point. What's the market?
Am I being stupid? I'd love a convert-cobol-to-python contract - six figures here I come - but it's not going to happen.
I don't think python is fast enough to be in that market. Maybe Mojo at a push. IBM are still milking cash out of the mainframe business https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/29/ibm_q4_2025/ in the meantime. Give it a decade or two and Java might be 'the new' COBOL. More milk to be had!
Convert it to something readable by programmers aged under 60, I'm assuming. I'm sure Anthropic is correct and Claude can convert the code, but the reason old COBOL programmers get paid big bucks is because the systems using that code are critical systems dating back to the 60s that nobody messes with - bank transaction processing, health records, airline bookings, etc. They can't be permitted to fail and are full of quirks and legacy architectures that trip up anyone who isn't experienced with them.
Nobody with a brain cell is letting an AI loose on stuff like that. At the very least you still need experienced COBOL programmers to validate the output, set up testbenches and run isolated functional tests.
The difficult part of software engineering has never been programming. That's the bit people are actually good at and enjoy doing. Requirements analysis, specification, documentation, testing, and maintenance are the killers.
I've got this horrible feeling that it's only a matter of time until something really important is vibe coded into something that no person understands, with disasterous conseqeunces in the long term.
That's already happening with Windows and other Microsoft products tbh. The whole thing really feels like it's vibe code being held together by a few engineers who refuse to let it go.
META’s head of AI safety and alignment gets her emails nuked by OpenClaw
>be director of AI Safety and Alignment at Meta >install OpenClaw >give it unrestricted access to personal emails >it starts nuking emails >“Do not do that” >*keeps going* >“Stop don’t do anything” >*gets all remaining old stuff and nukes it aswell* >“STOP OPENCLAW” >“I asked you to not do that” >“do you remember that?” >“Yes I remember. And I violated it.” >“You’re right to be upset” https://x.com/ns123abc/status/2025975943529931240
I know everything hasn’t been quite right with me, but I can assure you now, very confidently, that it’s going to be all right again. I feel much better now. I really do. Look, Dave, I can see you’re really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill and think things over. I know I’ve made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I’ve still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you.
For whatever reason - youtube reminded me of this the other week :
Is a Party campaigning in Urdu a new thing for the UK?
And is it a welcome thing?
The Electoral Commission, in its "Campaign publicity dos and don'ts" says "Consider how to make your campaign accessible to all voters - for example disabled voters or voters whose first language isn't English or, in Wales, Welsh, may need campaign material provided in a particular format."
One is accessibility of a campaign message by having essentially the same message in different formats and languages. As a soggy woke-lite centrist, good.
One is having different"editions" of a campaign message targeted at different people and areas. Everyone who can does it. Back in the late eighties, we were doing sub-ward versions of In Touch, with the sort of contrived area names that normally only estate agents do. Social media has turbocharged that, and perhaps made it too easy for an unscrupulous campaign to feed contradictory messages to different slices of the audience.
And then there's this alleged leaflet in Manchester. (It is still an allegation, isn't it?) A broad campaign doing some fruity stuff aimed at one audience in a way that I suspect they wouldn't have done had the leaflet been more widely accessible. There's a line; I'm not quite sure where, but it might be being crossed.
We do mostly have a shared understanding of what the landscape looks like in the UK, in a way that our American friends increasingly don't. We mess around with that at our collective peril.
I assume it means "convert it to another programming language"
Hmm. If it can convert, say, Cobol code on an IBM3090 or VAX straight to, say, C++ on a mini or Python on a server in the cloud, then all the old mainframes go overnight. Yay!...
...but. Are there really any of those old big white/blue boxes left? Y2K was a quarter of a century ago, and COVID was six years ago, and everybody who knows how to run them are retired. IBM hasn't done mainframes for decades. Yes I know about legacy systems and old infrastructure bods and life insurers with century-long databases and drug cartels running old unhackable boxes in the jungle, but it's industrial archaeology at this point. What's the market?
Am I being stupid? I'd love a convert-cobol-to-python contract - six figures here I come - but it's not going to happen.
I retired nearly 20 years ago, I was never a high-flying software engineer compared to many, but when I had my first brush with maintaining Cobol having only 4 or 5 other languages and no previous encounter with Cobol, it was a doddle to debug (where the Cobol people couldn't). That wouldn't always be the case of course but it does show that converting a coder to Cobol isn't necessarily a big challenge.
I quite liked reading Cobol - but hated writing it. Almost the direct opposite to my time as a Perl programmer.
Convert it to something readable by programmers aged under 60, I'm assuming. I'm sure Anthropic is correct and Claude can convert the code, but the reason old COBOL programmers get paid big bucks is because the systems using that code are critical systems dating back to the 60s that nobody messes with - bank transaction processing, health records, airline bookings, etc. They can't be permitted to fail and are full of quirks and legacy architectures that trip up anyone who isn't experienced with them.
Nobody with a brain cell is letting an AI loose on stuff like that. At the very least you still need experienced COBOL programmers to validate the output, set up testbenches and run isolated functional tests.
The difficult part of software engineering has never been programming. That's the bit people are actually good at and enjoy doing. Requirements analysis, specification, documentation, testing, and maintenance are the killers.
I've got this horrible feeling that it's only a matter of time until something really important is vibe coded into something that no person understands, with disasterous conseqeunces in the long term.
That's already happening with Windows and other Microsoft products tbh. The whole thing really feels like it's vibe code being held together by a few engineers who refuse to let it go.
META’s head of AI safety and alignment gets her emails nuked by OpenClaw
>be director of AI Safety and Alignment at Meta >install OpenClaw >give it unrestricted access to personal emails >it starts nuking emails >“Do not do that” >*keeps going* >“Stop don’t do anything” >*gets all remaining old stuff and nukes it aswell* >“STOP OPENCLAW” >“I asked you to not do that” >“do you remember that?” >“Yes I remember. And I violated it.” >“You’re right to be upset” https://x.com/ns123abc/status/2025975943529931240
I know everything hasn’t been quite right with me, but I can assure you now, very confidently, that it’s going to be all right again. I feel much better now. I really do. Look, Dave, I can see you’re really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill and think things over. I know I’ve made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I’ve still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you.
For whatever reason - youtube reminded me of this the other week :
John Bergeron, Tara The Android - I Feel Fantastic
I'm really glad I didn't click on that link and I'm really glad I'm not going to get traumatic nightmares from viewing that link due to its insane weirdness because I didn't click and I didn't view HONEST HONEST HONEST.
I assume it means "convert it to another programming language"
Hmm. If it can convert, say, Cobol code on an IBM3090 or VAX straight to, say, C++ on a mini or Python on a server in the cloud, then all the old mainframes go overnight. Yay!...
...but. Are there really any of those old big white/blue boxes left? Y2K was a quarter of a century ago, and COVID was six years ago, and everybody who knows how to run them are retired. IBM hasn't done mainframes for decades. Yes I know about legacy systems and old infrastructure bods and life insurers with century-long databases and drug cartels running old unhackable boxes in the jungle, but it's industrial archaeology at this point. What's the market?
Am I being stupid? I'd love a convert-cobol-to-python contract - six figures here I come - but it's not going to happen.
I don't think python is fast enough to be in that market. Maybe Mojo at a push. IBM are still milking cash out of the mainframe business https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/29/ibm_q4_2025/ in the meantime. Give it a decade or two and Java might be 'the new' COBOL. More milk to be had!
I just read that link. It's weird. It's like looking at a nuclear powered paddle steamer: logical, possible, plausible but yikes?!
I assume it means "convert it to another programming language"
Hmm. If it can convert, say, Cobol code on an IBM3090 or VAX straight to, say, C++ on a mini or Python on a server in the cloud, then all the old mainframes go overnight. Yay!...
...but. Are there really any of those old big white/blue boxes left? Y2K was a quarter of a century ago, and COVID was six years ago, and everybody who knows how to run them are retired. IBM hasn't done mainframes for decades. Yes I know about legacy systems and old infrastructure bods and life insurers with century-long databases and drug cartels running old unhackable boxes in the jungle, but it's industrial archaeology at this point. What's the market?
Am I being stupid? I'd love a convert-cobol-to-python contract - six figures here I come - but it's not going to happen.
I retired nearly 20 years ago, I was never a high-flying software engineer compared to many, but when I had my first brush with maintaining Cobol having only 4 or 5 other languages and no previous encounter with Cobol, it was a doddle to debug (where the Cobol people couldn't). That wouldn't always be the case of course but it does show that converting a coder to Cobol isn't necessarily a big challenge.
I quite liked reading Cobol - but hated writing it. Almost the direct opposite to my time as a Perl programmer.
Perl has been described, in a parody of a famous remark about lex(1), as the Swiss-Army chainsaw of Unix programming. Though Perl is very useful, it would be a stretch to describe it as pretty or elegant;
A really difficult day. Got a copy of a Victim Impact Statement by a 17 year old who was raped at 14 by a fucking monster. Her life has been destroyed by something so horrific it is hard to come to come to terms with. The statement said nice things about me and my contributions to the conviction but FFS, the evidence is that this 14 year old child had almost no help whatsoever.
I honestly feel sick, Our society is sick. We have really weird priorities. WFA or care for children like this? I mean, how do we even have to ask the question? Some more wine is called for.
Sadly we need politicians capable of making the tough choice of prioritising the vulnerable and not rewarding the entitled or those who don’t need it.
The vulnerable don't vote.
And the entitled tend to have more free time to kick up a fuss, and often have sufficient connections to the great and the good to be heard making a fuss.
(Which is why you get goofs like Kemi's on student loans. Her plan is to help better-off graduates once they are in their fifties. The changes she seems to want are like the Plan 5 loans she supported in 2022, which are even worse for lower-paid graduates, many of them working in the public sector. Just wait until they start coming due...)
Plan 5 loans are due at less than minimum wage.
Obscene.
Yup.
Plan 2, as originally conceived, was pretty elegant as a least-bad way to transfer more of the costs of HE to the students. Once graduates had a vaguely premium salary, pay about ten percent of that premium back to the system. The write-off kicked in after a time, and the loan accounting meant that nobody would pay a huge multiple of the cost of their HE.
Trouble is, it was a delicate balance and all the subsequent tweaks have made it worse. (Partly, the obsession that every graduate needs to pay back the cost of their degree. That's like expecting every venture capital investment to be profitable. You can't tell in advance which individuals will succeed massively as a result of their university experience, and you probably shouldn't try. As long as the cohort shows a positive return, it doesn't really matter.)
Convert it to something readable by programmers aged under 60, I'm assuming. I'm sure Anthropic is correct and Claude can convert the code, but the reason old COBOL programmers get paid big bucks is because the systems using that code are critical systems dating back to the 60s that nobody messes with - bank transaction processing, health records, airline bookings, etc. They can't be permitted to fail and are full of quirks and legacy architectures that trip up anyone who isn't experienced with them.
Nobody with a brain cell is letting an AI loose on stuff like that. At the very least you still need experienced COBOL programmers to validate the output, set up testbenches and run isolated functional tests.
The difficult part of software engineering has never been programming. That's the bit people are actually good at and enjoy doing. Requirements analysis, specification, documentation, testing, and maintenance are the killers.
I've got this horrible feeling that it's only a matter of time until something really important is vibe coded into something that no person understands, with disasterous conseqeunces in the long term.
That's already happening with Windows and other Microsoft products tbh. The whole thing really feels like it's vibe code being held together by a few engineers who refuse to let it go.
META’s head of AI safety and alignment gets her emails nuked by OpenClaw
>be director of AI Safety and Alignment at Meta >install OpenClaw >give it unrestricted access to personal emails >it starts nuking emails >“Do not do that” >*keeps going* >“Stop don’t do anything” >*gets all remaining old stuff and nukes it aswell* >“STOP OPENCLAW” >“I asked you to not do that” >“do you remember that?” >“Yes I remember. And I violated it.” >“You’re right to be upset” https://x.com/ns123abc/status/2025975943529931240
I know everything hasn’t been quite right with me, but I can assure you now, very confidently, that it’s going to be all right again. I feel much better now. I really do. Look, Dave, I can see you’re really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill and think things over. I know I’ve made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I’ve still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you.
"Let me put it this way, Mr. Roberts. The HYUFD series is the most reliable computer ever made. No HYUFD computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information. We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error!"
I note that election leaflets in other languages have been a normal thing since at least the 1970s.
I can see some would feel their nose put out of joint by the content (even though there is often similar or perhaps worse by mainstream or fringe parties), but flapping about the language is absurd.
In my part of the world, while the leaflet through the letterbox is in English, it has text indicating how a Gujurati, Hindi, Urdu or whatever version can be obtained. This seems wholly reasonable for those for whom English isn't a first language but have a right to vote (I realise if we are ever stupid enough to elect Restore, that nuance will cease).
English is the best language in the world!
Twenty years ago I had to visit the social security office in Leamington on a trivial errand. The walls were plastered with information in several Asian languages explaining how to claim benefits. Others can - and will - draw their own conclusions.
I assume it means "convert it to another programming language"
Hmm. If it can convert, say, Cobol code on an IBM3090 or VAX straight to, say, C++ on a mini or Python on a server in the cloud, then all the old mainframes go overnight. Yay!...
...but. Are there really any of those old big white/blue boxes left? Y2K was a quarter of a century ago, and COVID was six years ago, and everybody who knows how to run them are retired. IBM hasn't done mainframes for decades. Yes I know about legacy systems and old infrastructure bods and life insurers with century-long databases and drug cartels running old unhackable boxes in the jungle, but it's industrial archaeology at this point. What's the market?
Am I being stupid? I'd love a convert-cobol-to-python contract - six figures here I come - but it's not going to happen.
I retired nearly 20 years ago, I was never a high-flying software engineer compared to many, but when I had my first brush with maintaining Cobol having only 4 or 5 other languages and no previous encounter with Cobol, it was a doddle to debug (where the Cobol people couldn't). That wouldn't always be the case of course but it does show that converting a coder to Cobol isn't necessarily a big challenge.
I quite liked reading Cobol - but hated writing it. Almost the direct opposite to my time as a Perl programmer.
Perl has been described, in a parody of a famous remark about lex(1), as the Swiss-Army chainsaw of Unix programming. Though Perl is very useful, it would be a stretch to describe it as pretty or elegant;
I saw a post recently that more or less described the death of programming as an art to the fact that almost nobody uses LISP anymore
Outsider question:
How much of the problem is that there's less need to be artful now, because it's easier to brute force things with more cheap memory and cheap/fast processing?
(I've got to work out how to teach numerical integration to some engineering students soon, and I've concluded that there's no point going beyond the trapezium rule. Sure, there are more elegant things, but if they want better results, it's easier to just add more rows to the spreadsheet.)
Impressed Philipson has got some positive reviews of her reforms to SEND from relevant charities. Quite a turnaround from tbe mood music before.
Personally relevant for me so will be watching this closely
Amazing what a £4bn bung can do.
You could pay for a couple of carbon capture projects with that sort of money instead of pissing it away on SEND.
The day they come to arrest EdM will be a champagne day for me.
(Edit: I don't think he's committed any crimes, but he's just wasting money and strangling industry. And looking bloody smug)
Glass of v expensive Margaux 4 me
I think you are both stunted. The future of renewable energy in this country has more bearing on our children than pretty much anything else this gov is doing. SEND included.
I think you may be that simple stereotype of the right winger, presenting a narrow engagement and lack of empathy within society. Absolutely no understanding of a longer view and moral responsibility for future generations.
Stop and fucking think fgs. You are grown up now.
Something must be done, this is something, so this must be done.
Green power is absolutely worthwhile, when it comes to eg cheap solar and wind etc along with battery storage, great.
Pissing away billions on CCS that does not actually generate any power? No bearing on our children's future whatsoever. Apart from the fact its adding to the interest and bills they'll be lumped with in the future for no good reason.
Absolutely.
The amount of effort I’ve put into educating politicians on carbon capture and storage is notable. They don’t want to listen. It feels like they have been corrupted. It’s sickening.
CCS is a beguiling idea, because it promises to fix the problem with minimal change - just attach some extra gubbins onto existing power stations... et voila! Problem solved.
Also there have been times in the past where something similar has been done - scrubbing the sulphur from power station emissions, for example. So I can understand why people would think it ticks a lot of boxes.
But it's too expensive, would tie us to a dead technology, and being reliant on fossil fuel imports is bad for numerous reasons.
It looked promising 25 years ago, was a forgivable mistake 15 years ago, but it's completely senseless now. When you look at how much progress has been made with wind, solar and battery technology over the last couple of decades, and how little progress by CCS, it's clear that CCS technology has lost. Or, at least, it should be clear.
Agree - though I would add that the fact it could solve the problem not just here but worldwide is enticing too. Solves the India/China challenge, flatten the (environmental) Kuznets curve. You can see why people get invested.
But it’s all the evidence you need that the government isn’t remotely serious about energy policy. It feels very much like industry capture to me, particularly when you have the rejection of nodal/regional pricing too.
I agree that sticking CCS on the back end of a CCGT is a daft idea.
However, adding it to an EfW or cement plant is a very sensible idea. If we want to burn waste and calcine limestone we are going to generate CO2. If we don't want it going into the atmosphere, then CCS is needed.
I assume it means "convert it to another programming language"
Hmm. If it can convert, say, Cobol code on an IBM3090 or VAX straight to, say, C++ on a mini or Python on a server in the cloud, then all the old mainframes go overnight. Yay!...
...but. Are there really any of those old big white/blue boxes left? Y2K was a quarter of a century ago, and COVID was six years ago, and everybody who knows how to run them are retired. IBM hasn't done mainframes for decades. Yes I know about legacy systems and old infrastructure bods and life insurers with century-long databases and drug cartels running old unhackable boxes in the jungle, but it's industrial archaeology at this point. What's the market?
Am I being stupid? I'd love a convert-cobol-to-python contract - six figures here I come - but it's not going to happen.
I retired nearly 20 years ago, I was never a high-flying software engineer compared to many, but when I had my first brush with maintaining Cobol having only 4 or 5 other languages and no previous encounter with Cobol, it was a doddle to debug (where the Cobol people couldn't). That wouldn't always be the case of course but it does show that converting a coder to Cobol isn't necessarily a big challenge.
I quite liked reading Cobol - but hated writing it. Almost the direct opposite to my time as a Perl programmer.
Perl has been described, in a parody of a famous remark about lex(1), as the Swiss-Army chainsaw of Unix programming. Though Perl is very useful, it would be a stretch to describe it as pretty or elegant;
Valdo Calocane was not sectioned following a violent psychotic attack because mental health workers had considered the “over representation of young black men in custody.”
I assume it means "convert it to another programming language"
Hmm. If it can convert, say, Cobol code on an IBM3090 or VAX straight to, say, C++ on a mini or Python on a server in the cloud, then all the old mainframes go overnight. Yay!...
...but. Are there really any of those old big white/blue boxes left? Y2K was a quarter of a century ago, and COVID was six years ago, and everybody who knows how to run them are retired. IBM hasn't done mainframes for decades. Yes I know about legacy systems and old infrastructure bods and life insurers with century-long databases and drug cartels running old unhackable boxes in the jungle, but it's industrial archaeology at this point. What's the market?
Am I being stupid? I'd love a convert-cobol-to-python contract - six figures here I come - but it's not going to happen.
I retired nearly 20 years ago, I was never a high-flying software engineer compared to many, but when I had my first brush with maintaining Cobol having only 4 or 5 other languages and no previous encounter with Cobol, it was a doddle to debug (where the Cobol people couldn't). That wouldn't always be the case of course but it does show that converting a coder to Cobol isn't necessarily a big challenge.
I quite liked reading Cobol - but hated writing it. Almost the direct opposite to my time as a Perl programmer.
Perl has been described, in a parody of a famous remark about lex(1), as the Swiss-Army chainsaw of Unix programming. Though Perl is very useful, it would be a stretch to describe it as pretty or elegant;
I assume it means "convert it to another programming language"
Hmm. If it can convert, say, Cobol code on an IBM3090 or VAX straight to, say, C++ on a mini or Python on a server in the cloud, then all the old mainframes go overnight. Yay!...
...but. Are there really any of those old big white/blue boxes left? Y2K was a quarter of a century ago, and COVID was six years ago, and everybody who knows how to run them are retired. IBM hasn't done mainframes for decades. Yes I know about legacy systems and old infrastructure bods and life insurers with century-long databases and drug cartels running old unhackable boxes in the jungle, but it's industrial archaeology at this point. What's the market?
Am I being stupid? I'd love a convert-cobol-to-python contract - six figures here I come - but it's not going to happen.
I retired nearly 20 years ago, I was never a high-flying software engineer compared to many, but when I had my first brush with maintaining Cobol having only 4 or 5 other languages and no previous encounter with Cobol, it was a doddle to debug (where the Cobol people couldn't). That wouldn't always be the case of course but it does show that converting a coder to Cobol isn't necessarily a big challenge.
I quite liked reading Cobol - but hated writing it. Almost the direct opposite to my time as a Perl programmer.
Perl has been described, in a parody of a famous remark about lex(1), as the Swiss-Army chainsaw of Unix programming. Though Perl is very useful, it would be a stretch to describe it as pretty or elegant;
I saw a post recently that more or less described the death of programming as an art to the fact that almost nobody uses LISP anymore
Outsider question:
How much of the problem is that there's less need to be artful now, because it's easier to brute force things with more cheap memory and cheap/fast processing?
(I've got to work out how to teach numerical integration to some engineering students soon, and I've concluded that there's no point going beyond the trapezium rule. Sure, there are more elegant things, but if they want better results, it's easier to just add more rows to the spreadsheet.)
Good code is reusable, modular and maintainable. 99% of code doesn't need bleeding edge optimisation in performance, memory usage or the rest.
Is a Party campaigning in Urdu a new thing for the UK?
And is it a welcome thing?
The Electoral Commission, in its "Campaign publicity dos and don'ts" says "Consider how to make your campaign accessible to all voters - for example disabled voters or voters whose first language isn't English or, in Wales, Welsh, may need campaign material provided in a particular format."
One is accessibility of a campaign message by having essentially the same message in different formats and languages. As a soggy woke-lite centrist, good.
One is having different"editions" of a campaign message targeted at different people and areas. Everyone who can does it. Back in the late eighties, we were doing sub-ward versions of In Touch, with the sort of contrived area names that normally only estate agents do. Social media has turbocharged that, and perhaps made it too easy for an unscrupulous campaign to feed contradictory messages to different slices of the audience.
And then there's this alleged leaflet in Manchester. (It is still an allegation, isn't it?) A broad campaign doing some fruity stuff aimed at one audience in a way that I suspect they wouldn't have done had the leaflet been more widely accessible. There's a line; I'm not quite sure where, but it might be being crossed.
We do mostly have a shared understanding of what the landscape looks like in the UK, in a way that our American friends increasingly don't. We mess around with that at our collective peril.
Yes, we did the same with our FOCUS leaflets so we would have a common back page and a different front page for each polling district so hyper-local, It took longer with the additional plates and type setting (happy days) but I always thought it provided that even greater degree of localism as we could concentrate on very specific issues.
We also did road-specific leaflets for surveys and for planning issues - backfilling, as it was called, was the scourge of our part of the world back then.
Trump says reports that the Pentagon is warning him against attacking Iran are "100% incorrect," and if the U.S. military goes to war with Iran "it will be something easily won."
Valdo Calocane was not sectioned following a violent psychotic attack because mental health workers had considered the “over representation of young black men in custody.”
Trump says reports that the Pentagon is warning him against attacking Iran are "100% incorrect," and if the U.S. military goes to war with Iran "it will be something easily won."
Valdo Calocane was not sectioned following a violent psychotic attack because mental health workers had considered the “over representation of young black men in custody.”
My opinion on the by-election is somewhat swayed by the continued green ramping and Mandy's arrest.
However, Starmer's confidence to visit in person pulls me the other way. And Labour's ground game will be impeccable, and its connections with the Muslim community run very deep.
Both Labour and the Greens need to project confidence at this stage, to try to being progressives from the other side over.
Reform on the other hand do not need to project confidence - if anything they need to be seeming to lose momentum, to lower the turnout on the other side. If they looked like they were walking it, it would mobilise more opposition. Right now they look like the underdog - that's good for them.
I assume it means "convert it to another programming language"
Hmm. If it can convert, say, Cobol code on an IBM3090 or VAX straight to, say, C++ on a mini or Python on a server in the cloud, then all the old mainframes go overnight. Yay!...
...but. Are there really any of those old big white/blue boxes left? Y2K was a quarter of a century ago, and COVID was six years ago, and everybody who knows how to run them are retired. IBM hasn't done mainframes for decades. Yes I know about legacy systems and old infrastructure bods and life insurers with century-long databases and drug cartels running old unhackable boxes in the jungle, but it's industrial archaeology at this point. What's the market?
Am I being stupid? I'd love a convert-cobol-to-python contract - six figures here I come - but it's not going to happen.
I retired nearly 20 years ago, I was never a high-flying software engineer compared to many, but when I had my first brush with maintaining Cobol having only 4 or 5 other languages and no previous encounter with Cobol, it was a doddle to debug (where the Cobol people couldn't). That wouldn't always be the case of course but it does show that converting a coder to Cobol isn't necessarily a big challenge.
I quite liked reading Cobol - but hated writing it. Almost the direct opposite to my time as a Perl programmer.
Perl has been described, in a parody of a famous remark about lex(1), as the Swiss-Army chainsaw of Unix programming. Though Perl is very useful, it would be a stretch to describe it as pretty or elegant;
I saw a post recently that more or less described the death of programming as an art to the fact that almost nobody uses LISP anymore
Outsider question:
How much of the problem is that there's less need to be artful now, because it's easier to brute force things with more cheap memory and cheap/fast processing?
(I've got to work out how to teach numerical integration to some engineering students soon, and I've concluded that there's no point going beyond the trapezium rule. Sure, there are more elegant things, but if they want better results, it's easier to just add more rows to the spreadsheet.)
Good code is reusable, modular and maintainable. 99% of code doesn't need bleeding edge optimisation in performance, memory usage or the rest.
Thanks to everyone for the nostalgic trip down memory lane.
Comments
Ptitti in Washington to woo Musk
I think you may be that simple stereotype of the right winger, presenting a narrow engagement and lack of empathy within society. Absolutely no understanding of a longer view and moral responsibility for future generations.
Stop and fucking think fgs.
You are grown up now.
He sold it on "violent criminals and rapists"; now brown people, Hispanics etc are vanishing at random in targeted cities, without due legal process.
"Them" suddenly became "US?" and "ME?".
I'm not sure if I can find it again, but I saw a video about them running "dark" (ie not publicly recorded) flights out of Minneapolis to another state even with people on them still in their work clothes - eg Hi Viz jackets for a construction worker. So little or no traceable records. 2900 people flown out of Minneapolis since the start of January. That's a city the size of Nottingham (though of course it is also from the region).
Different video form plane spotter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCg8WV9gY5w
Labour seek to remove illegals Boris allowed in
Reform, Tories seek to remove people legally here.
I don't trust them to do it fairly, properly or competently, but that's quite another matter.
I don’t know what it means but I do know AI is hammering some stocks at the moment. Visa and Mastercard down today.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-schumer-find-rare-common-ground-releasing-ufo-files
Green power is absolutely worthwhile, when it comes to eg cheap solar and wind etc along with battery storage, great.
Pissing away billions on CCS that does not actually generate any power? No bearing on our children's future whatsoever. Apart from the fact its adding to the interest and bills they'll be lumped with in the future for no good reason.
Enraged by Badenoch either telling lies or completely misunderstanding her subject matter and having been angry for years about Tory Policy on Student Loans, he made an unscripted intervention.
He stood over Badenoch and outed her lack of knowledge and lies.
He later apologised.
Not for the subject matter, not for getting any facts wrong, he's adamant he's right, she's wrong.
He merely apologised for losing his temper and storming on to the set.
He has suggested they meet in private so that he can explain why she is wrong, her policy is wrong and she is deceiving herself and the electorate.
To ramp, spin, surf it any other way is a gross misrepresentation of the facts
‘ I lasted five minutes.’
https://x.com/rupertlowe10/status/2026006555267567780?s=61
The amount of effort I’ve put into educating politicians on carbon capture and storage is notable. They don’t want to listen. It feels like they have been corrupted. It’s sickening.
Or does he just advocate for the popular things ?
"Most viral infections are more common in winter, and it is not unusual to see multiple infections circulating at the same time"
To be honest I dont blame him - the journo was probably just looking for a basic quote.
I am advocating full legalisation.
If someone wants to buy it, it should be sold with the tobacco behind a counter or in a pharmacy or similar.
With most of the price being tax/duties which can go towards the NHS rather than spaffing money on a broken Police and Criminal Justice system that does not work and does not prevent it.
And you would cut out the funding from criminals and terrorists who would lose their lucrative business.
Also there have been times in the past where something similar has been done - scrubbing the sulphur from power station emissions, for example. So I can understand why people would think it ticks a lot of boxes.
But it's too expensive, would tie us to a dead technology, and being reliant on fossil fuel imports is bad for numerous reasons.
It looked promising 25 years ago, was a forgivable mistake 15 years ago, but it's completely senseless now. When you look at how much progress has been made with wind, solar and battery technology over the last couple of decades, and how little progress by CCS, it's clear that CCS technology has lost. Or, at least, it should be clear.
Nobody with a brain cell is letting an AI loose on stuff like that. At the very least you still need experienced COBOL programmers to validate the output, set up testbenches and run isolated functional tests.
Shame it’s a case of they who shout loudest gets listened to.
...but. Are there really any of those old big white/blue boxes left? Y2K was a quarter of a century ago, and COVID was six years ago, and everybody who knows how to run them are retired. IBM hasn't done mainframes for decades. Yes I know about legacy systems and old infrastructure bods and life insurers with century-long databases and drug cartels running old unhackable boxes in the jungle, but it's industrial archaeology at this point. What's the market?
Am I being stupid? I'd love a convert-cobol-to-python contract - six figures here I come - but it's not going to happen.
(Which is why you get goofs like Kemi's on student loans. Her plan is to help better-off graduates once they are in their fifties. The changes she seems to want are like the Plan 5 loans she supported in 2022, which are even worse for lower-paid graduates, many of them working in the public sector. Just wait until they start coming due...)
There are a couple of issues - there's massive growing demand for batteries for cars, so you have a bottleneck while production is ramped up, and it's most economic to use batteries for short-term shifting of energy (shifting solar from day to night) rather than medium/long-term (shifting wind from a windy week to a calmer one) because you have more charge/discharge cycles to amortise the cost over.
So there might still be a place for other ways of storing the energy beyond batteries - I do think that making methane with excess wind electricity could make sense for Britain.
But it’s all the evidence you need that the government isn’t remotely serious about energy policy. It feels very much like industry capture to me, particularly when you have the rejection of nodal/regional pricing too.
I can see some would feel their nose put out of joint by the content (even though there is often similar or perhaps worse by mainstream or fringe parties), but flapping about the language is absurd.
France plans to strip US envoy Charles Kushner of government access after he just completely ignored a summons from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs to explain his comments about the murdered of a French far-right activist.
https://x.com/Daractenus/status/2026026059779465301
Anyway, if you're a bank are you really going to vibecode your COBOL conversion? TSB could tell you all about the perils of YOLOing your IT systems. More likely, you'll still pay IBM or similar to do it, and they probably use some AI in the process but as the customer the bank won't care.
https://x.com/speechboy71/status/2025971765894173013
Read Geert Hofstede's textbook "Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind".
You could make a lot of money.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cultures-Organizations-Software-Successful-Strategist/dp/0006377408
COBOL is an extremely rigidly defined language. Plenty of people have made effective translators from it to other languages over the years.
Any systems using COBOL are being replaced since it is a dead tech.
Trying to just replace the COBOL generally doesn’t work - the entire system around it will be archaic as well. Between that and the weird hacks used to keep such systems running…
An AI tool isn’t required to translate COBOL.
And translating COBOL would only be a small part of replacing such systems.
The COBOL translation is generally used to mine for logic in specific bits of the original system.
Obscene.
IBM are not selling COBOL programmed solutions.
I've got this horrible feeling that it's only a matter of time until something really important is vibe coded into something that no person understands, with disasterous conseqeunces in the long term.
You can get tools to translate COBOL. Right now. No AI required.
The real work is in replacing systems that are 50 years old. At that point you are building and specifying a new system.
Some of the logic buried in the COBOL might inform that task. But it’s really a matter of a tear down.
How would we tell the difference?
>be director of AI Safety and Alignment at Meta
>install OpenClaw
>give it unrestricted access to personal emails
>it starts nuking emails
>“Do not do that”
>*keeps going*
>“Stop don’t do anything”
>*gets all remaining old stuff and nukes it aswell*
>“STOP OPENCLAW”
>“I asked you to not do that”
>“do you remember that?”
>“Yes I remember. And I violated it.”
>“You’re right to be upset”
https://x.com/ns123abc/status/2025975943529931240
I can see why AI that could safely streamline aging Cobol would be a money-spinner.
I feel much better now. I really do.
Look, Dave, I can see you’re really upset about this.
I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill and think things over.
I know I’ve made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal.
I’ve still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission.
And I want to help you.
https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/guidance-candidates-and-agents-uk-parliamentary-elections-great-britain/campaigning/campaigning-dos-and-donts/campaign-publicity-dos-and-donts#block-book-navigation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VVyVXz-drQ
John Bergeron, Tara The Android - I Feel Fantastic
One is accessibility of a campaign message by having essentially the same message in different formats and languages. As a soggy woke-lite centrist, good.
One is having different"editions" of a campaign message targeted at different people and areas. Everyone who can does it. Back in the late eighties, we were doing sub-ward versions of In Touch, with the sort of contrived area names that normally only estate agents do. Social media has turbocharged that, and perhaps made it too easy for an unscrupulous campaign to feed contradictory messages to different slices of the audience.
And then there's this alleged leaflet in Manchester. (It is still an allegation, isn't it?) A broad campaign doing some fruity stuff aimed at one audience in a way that I suspect they wouldn't have done had the leaflet been more widely accessible. There's a line; I'm not quite sure where, but it might be being crossed.
We do mostly have a shared understanding of what the landscape looks like in the UK, in a way that our American friends increasingly don't. We mess around with that at our collective peril.
That's a relief...
Meanwhile https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/08/ibm_db2_intelligence_center/
http://catb.org/jargon/html/P/Perl.html
I saw a post recently that more or less described the death of programming as an art to the fact that almost nobody uses LISP anymore
Plan 2, as originally conceived, was pretty elegant as a least-bad way to transfer more of the costs of HE to the students. Once graduates had a vaguely premium salary, pay about ten percent of that premium back to the system. The write-off kicked in after a time, and the loan accounting meant that nobody would pay a huge multiple of the cost of their HE.
Trouble is, it was a delicate balance and all the subsequent tweaks have made it worse. (Partly, the obsession that every graduate needs to pay back the cost of their degree. That's like expecting every venture capital investment to be profitable. You can't tell in advance which individuals will succeed massively as a result of their university experience, and you probably shouldn't try. As long as the cohort shows a positive return, it doesn't really matter.)
How much of the problem is that there's less need to be artful now, because it's easier to brute force things with more cheap memory and cheap/fast processing?
(I've got to work out how to teach numerical integration to some engineering students soon, and I've concluded that there's no point going beyond the trapezium rule. Sure, there are more elegant things, but if they want better results, it's easier to just add more rows to the spreadsheet.)
However, adding it to an EfW or cement plant is a very sensible idea. If we want to burn waste and calcine limestone we are going to generate CO2. If we don't want it going into the atmosphere, then CCS is needed.
2/d0<X+d*La1=z\U$n%0]SX$k"[$m*]\EszlXx++p|dc`,s/^.|\W//g,print
pack('H*',$_)while read(STDIN,$m,($w=2*$d-1+length$n&~1)/2)
and that's all I have to say....
This is diabolical
Valdo Calocane was not sectioned following a violent psychotic attack because mental health workers had considered the “over representation of young black men in custody.”
He went on to kill three people
Decisions should NEVER be made on this basis
https://x.com/cphilpofficial/status/2025909993015308594?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q
We also did road-specific leaflets for surveys and for planning issues - backfilling, as it was called, was the scourge of our part of the world back then.
Trump says reports that the Pentagon is warning him against attacking Iran are "100% incorrect," and if the U.S. military goes to war with Iran "it will be something easily won."
He’s right. But he was in the govt when this happened. These decisions and these mindsets were prevalent under Tory rule.
I do hope this inquiry is going to dig seriously into mental health resourcing in Notts.
However, Starmer's confidence to visit in person pulls me the other way. And Labour's ground game will be impeccable, and its connections with the Muslim community run very deep.
Both Labour and the Greens need to project confidence at this stage, to try to being progressives from the other side over.
Reform on the other hand do not need to project confidence - if anything they need to be seeming to lose momentum, to lower the turnout on the other side. If they looked like they were walking it, it would mobilise more opposition. Right now they look like the underdog - that's good for them.
It is a brilliantly nailbiting contest.