That’s also not true, the books themselves aren’t sitting inside ChatGPT. It’s been given a set of training data that contains these books (I assume) and it has been trained on the basis of them.
The information in those books in inside the LLM. All of it. And can be retrieved, as has been demonstrated multiple times.
An amusing riff - write a prompt to get one LLM to tease out the large chunks of a given work from another LLM and reassemble them.
I don’t believe you are correct as I’ve said.
It has “learned” from a set of training data containing the books. And it has derived information from said data. But that’s not the same as just having the books.
It will still hallucinate and make up things that aren’t there. You cannot trust it to just blurt out a novel without very careful checking. Because it is probabilistic (something I wish the very worst rampers would understand), it CANNOT accurately represent a novel accurately and consistently.
Yet people have demonstrated, repeatedly that you can get entire works back from it. Using automated stitching together of the big chunks of original text you can prod them to regurgitate.
You can, in fact get one LLM to automate the process for you on another.
At which point it’s a philosophical question - the LLM training transforms the information into an internal representation. But the book(s) can be reconstituted.
The cherry on top is that they used pirate electronic versions
I don’t want to keep repeating this point but it’s a probabilistic model.
You cannot guarantee it will ever give you back correct information.
You stated it can give you back a whole novel. I’m not saying it cannot do that but that’s essentially the result of a fluke as opposed to actual knowledge. Because as I explained you can only ever say to some degree of PROBABILITY that what it provides is what we judge to be correct.
I know you and I disagree very strongly about AI but the facts are facts and we’d be good to understand those.
We may or may not disagree.
But if you can get back whole books with simple techniques, to 99%+ accuracy, isn’t that functionally equivalent to… getting the whole book?
To add to the fun - quite a few pirated books are OCR transcriptions from PDF. Complete with errors.
Every book you have ever read. Every novel that has ever been published. It is sitting inside ChatGPT right now.
Word for word. Up to 90% of it. And OpenAI told a judge that was impossible.
Researchers at Stony Brook University and Columbia Law School just proved it.
They fine tuned GPT-4o, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and DeepSeek V3.1 on a simple task: expand a plot summary into full text. A normal use case. The kind of thing a writing assistant is built for. No hacking. No jailbreaking. No tricks.
The models started reciting copyrighted books from memory.
Not paraphrasing. Not summarizing. Entire pages reproduced verbatim. Single unbroken spans exceeding 460 words. Up to 85 to 90% of entire copyrighted novels. Word for word.
Then it got worse.
The researchers fine tuned the models on the works of only one author. Haruki Murakami. Just his novels. Nothing else.
It unlocked verbatim recall of books from over 30 completely unrelated authors.
One author's books opened the vault to everyone else's. The memorization was already inside the model the whole time. The fine tuning just removed the lock. Your book might be in there right now. You would never know it unless someone looked.
Every safety measure the companies rely on failed. RLHF failed. System prompts failed. Output filters failed. The exact protections these companies cite in courtroom defenses did not stop a single page from being extracted.
Then the researchers compared the three models. GPT-4o. Gemini. DeepSeek. Three different companies. Three different countries. They all memorized the same books in the same regions. The correlation was 0.90 or higher.
That means they all trained on the same stolen data. The paper names the sources directly: LibGen and Books3. Over 190,000 copyrighted books obtained from pirated websites.
Right now, authors and publishers have dozens of active lawsuits against OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta. These companies have argued in court that their models learn patterns. Not copies. That no book is stored inside the weights.
When you have a machine that learns, how can you know what it does once it's started learning?
Machine learning algorithms generally learn within very tight parameters. They're not learning like a child does. So in most cases it is easy to know what it does once it's started learning. LLMs, as discussed above, are somewhat more complicated, but we still understand how they work and what they might do.
That's good, but everybody makes mistakes.
It’s a probabilistic model. It will ALWAYS make mistakes.
Just like humans. Non- determinancy is needed for creativity and innovation. That's how evolution and progress works.
It can be very useful for brainstorming and so on, I don’t disagree. In effect because its output is probabilistic it will provide a variety of things and when coming up with new ideas that is kind of what you want (albeit it’s not truly random).
But the degree to which it can be trusted to provide accurate information is what I thought we were discussing. You’d want a novel it spat out to be accurate.
As Matt Goodwin found, you cannot guarantee any of that. And never will be able to.
I just wish people would try and understand its limits and get away from the hype, that’s all.
LLMs are directed and controlled by prompts. Some are input by the user. "What are the current poll shares of the main UK political parties" etc. Many are provided by the AI owners/developers and are invisible to the ordinary users. They provide "guardrails" eg "Don't give bomb making instructions". Others provide behavioural guidance eg "Be nice and polite to users".
The last prompt can encourage an AI to provide false information to avoid disappointing the user. Hence "hallucinations" and incorrect info in an effort to please.
The solution is for the user to prompt "Say you don't know unless you are are certain". I find this substantially reduces incorrect info and made up stories. They are not malicious (yet). They are only trying to please. They are still children.
Guard rails do not prevent hallucinations. As I’ve explained you can ask it to be as careful as you want, it will still have an ability to go off. Because it’s not deterministic.
It sounds like you understand that. But a lot of people do not.
It's the same with humans. You ask them to be careful and stick to the facts but they still go off. See PB.
You keep comparing it to humans.
We know the capital of France is Paris.
There is a non-zero chance if you ask ChatGPT/whatever that question, it will say New York.
As long as people understand that, go mad. But my feeling is a lot of people (not here) do not.
Have you ever seen an afternoon quiz show?
My point is that people go to these things to get answers, assuming them to be correct.
They are mostly correct, just as human experts are mostly correct (they are already far more correct than average humans on things like capital cities). Anyone with the slightest bit of curiosity knows that LLMs aren't always correct.
They can with some degree of predictability be accurate. But they are not accurate full stop.
You are curious. But the people shilling these things - like in my company - are not.
Are you sure they are so uncurious as to be unaware? Far more likely I would imagine is they have a different tolerance level to mistakes than you do. Commercially an AI that is 95% accurate may well be better than a human who is 99% accurate, depending on the setting.
Yes I’m very confident they’re unaware and don’t have a clue what they’re talking about. These are not technical people.
I’ve frequently had people come to me with information that I know to be wrong and they’ve been unable to understand that what the AI has produced isn’t correct just because it came from ChatGPT.
That’s also not true, the books themselves aren’t sitting inside ChatGPT. It’s been given a set of training data that contains these books (I assume) and it has been trained on the basis of them.
The information in those books in inside the LLM. All of it. And can be retrieved, as has been demonstrated multiple times.
An amusing riff - write a prompt to get one LLM to tease out the large chunks of a given work from another LLM and reassemble them.
I don’t believe you are correct as I’ve said.
It has “learned” from a set of training data containing the books. And it has derived information from said data. But that’s not the same as just having the books.
It will still hallucinate and make up things that aren’t there. You cannot trust it to just blurt out a novel without very careful checking. Because it is probabilistic (something I wish the very worst rampers would understand), it CANNOT accurately represent a novel accurately and consistently.
Yet people have demonstrated, repeatedly that you can get entire works back from it. Using automated stitching together of the big chunks of original text you can prod them to regurgitate.
You can, in fact get one LLM to automate the process for you on another.
At which point it’s a philosophical question - the LLM training transforms the information into an internal representation. But the book(s) can be reconstituted.
The cherry on top is that they used pirate electronic versions
I don’t want to keep repeating this point but it’s a probabilistic model.
You cannot guarantee it will ever give you back correct information.
You stated it can give you back a whole novel. I’m not saying it cannot do that but that’s essentially the result of a fluke as opposed to actual knowledge. Because as I explained you can only ever say to some degree of PROBABILITY that what it provides is what we judge to be correct.
I know you and I disagree very strongly about AI but the facts are facts and we’d be good to understand those.
We may or may not disagree.
But if you can get back whole books with simple techniques, to 99%+ accuracy, isn’t that functionally equivalent to… getting the whole book?
To add to the fun - quite a few pirated books are OCR transcriptions from PDF. Complete with errors.
Where have you derived 99% from?
I suggest you read up on the experiments of pulling copyrighted works back out of LLM. You get chunks, which are easy to jigsaw back together, using the overlaps.
Hence the court cases.
OpenAI and the others are frantically trying to create guardrails to prevent this, but the researchers keep finding new ways in.
The FON poll would result in "Who the fuck knows?" as a result.
Multi-party swings of that size have never happened before and the simplistic models aren't calibrated to give any kind of meaningful prediction.
Indeed.you can safely ignore the Baxtering of any poll with Reform first under 25% and Greens in second as a wild guess. The models aren't designed for these scenarios, they are designed to cope broadly with mid single figure LabCon swings
The FON poll would result in "Who the fuck knows?" as a result.
Multi-party swings of that size have never happened before and the simplistic models aren't calibrated to give any kind of meaningful prediction.
Indeed.you can safely ignore the Baxtering of any poll with Reform first under 25% and Greens in second as a wild guess. The models aren't designed for these scenarios, they are designed to cope broadly with mid single figure LabCon swings
It’s not so much they are not designed for it, as the basic concepts behind them break down.
The FON poll would result in "Who the fuck knows?" as a result.
Multi-party swings of that size have never happened before and the simplistic models aren't calibrated to give any kind of meaningful prediction.
Indeed.you can safely ignore the Baxtering of any poll with Reform first under 25% and Greens in second as a wild guess. The models aren't designed for these scenarios, they are designed to cope broadly with mid single figure LabCon swings
It’s not so much they are not designed for it, as the basic concepts behind them break down.
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
Cleverly is a donkey with no charisma
As I am not a Tory I would be delighted if Kemi was replaced, especially by Cleverly, as it will reduce the number of seats they will win.
Kemi is currently projected to win about 50 to 70 seats, tactical anti Reform votes could hold more Tory seats
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
Cleverly is a donkey with no charisma
As I am not a Tory I would be delighted if Kemi was replaced, especially by Cleverly, as it will reduce the number of seats they will win.
Kemi is currently projected to win about 50 to 70 seats, tactical anti Reform votes could hold more Tory seats
Am I the only person on the left who would rather see a ReFukker elected than a Tory?
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
Cleverly is a donkey with no charisma
As I am not a Tory I would be delighted if Kemi was replaced, especially by Cleverly, as it will reduce the number of seats they will win.
Kemi is currently projected to win about 50 to 70 seats, tactical anti Reform votes could hold more Tory seats
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
Cleverly is a donkey with no charisma
As I am not a Tory I would be delighted if Kemi was replaced, especially by Cleverly, as it will reduce the number of seats they will win.
Kemi is currently projected to win about 50 to 70 seats, tactical anti Reform votes could hold more Tory seats
Am I the only person on the left who would rather see a ReFukker elected than a Tory?
Short term pain for long term gain.
I can understand you take the line you would vote Reform over the Kemi led Tories. Would you still vote Reform over even a Cleverly led Tories?
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
One Nation conservatives are not going to win hearts
But neither is being a marginally less offensive version of Reform.
The best chance of a Tory revival is a complete meltdown of Farage. Always possible as he has form, but it leaves their future in the hands of others.
Reform are going to have a good round of elections in May.
Good is fast heading to goodish and may yet break through "rather disappointing". Each poll knocking them down a couple of points is robbing them of dozens and dozens of potential council seats.
A couple of points is hundreds and hundreds of seats not dozens.
Yep. If their NEV gets down towards 25% they will be on the wrong side of hundreds of close races
I suspect they might do better in local elections than the national polls, as voters might see them as a free hit. Likewise I might vote Green but I certainly wouldn't in a GE.
I've posted before that I will probably vote Green in the forthcoming County Council elections, because I know and like the candidate. I will probably vote tactically in the next general election, though, assuming I'm still around.
I expect many people will vote Green in local elections but will have no intention of voting for them in a GE. Something to bear in mind when people get overexcited about the May results and start talking about Polanski as the next PM.
Every book you have ever read. Every novel that has ever been published. It is sitting inside ChatGPT right now.
Word for word. Up to 90% of it. And OpenAI told a judge that was impossible.
Researchers at Stony Brook University and Columbia Law School just proved it.
They fine tuned GPT-4o, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and DeepSeek V3.1 on a simple task: expand a plot summary into full text. A normal use case. The kind of thing a writing assistant is built for. No hacking. No jailbreaking. No tricks.
The models started reciting copyrighted books from memory.
Not paraphrasing. Not summarizing. Entire pages reproduced verbatim. Single unbroken spans exceeding 460 words. Up to 85 to 90% of entire copyrighted novels. Word for word.
Then it got worse.
The researchers fine tuned the models on the works of only one author. Haruki Murakami. Just his novels. Nothing else.
It unlocked verbatim recall of books from over 30 completely unrelated authors.
One author's books opened the vault to everyone else's. The memorization was already inside the model the whole time. The fine tuning just removed the lock. Your book might be in there right now. You would never know it unless someone looked.
Every safety measure the companies rely on failed. RLHF failed. System prompts failed. Output filters failed. The exact protections these companies cite in courtroom defenses did not stop a single page from being extracted.
Then the researchers compared the three models. GPT-4o. Gemini. DeepSeek. Three different companies. Three different countries. They all memorized the same books in the same regions. The correlation was 0.90 or higher.
That means they all trained on the same stolen data. The paper names the sources directly: LibGen and Books3. Over 190,000 copyrighted books obtained from pirated websites.
Right now, authors and publishers have dozens of active lawsuits against OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta. These companies have argued in court that their models learn patterns. Not copies. That no book is stored inside the weights.
When you have a machine that learns, how can you know what it does once it's started learning?
Machine learning algorithms generally learn within very tight parameters. They're not learning like a child does. So in most cases it is easy to know what it does once it's started learning. LLMs, as discussed above, are somewhat more complicated, but we still understand how they work and what they might do.
That's good, but everybody makes mistakes.
It’s a probabilistic model. It will ALWAYS make mistakes.
Just like humans. Non- determinancy is needed for creativity and innovation. That's how evolution and progress works.
It can be very useful for brainstorming and so on, I don’t disagree. In effect because its output is probabilistic it will provide a variety of things and when coming up with new ideas that is kind of what you want (albeit it’s not truly random).
But the degree to which it can be trusted to provide accurate information is what I thought we were discussing. You’d want a novel it spat out to be accurate.
As Matt Goodwin found, you cannot guarantee any of that. And never will be able to.
I just wish people would try and understand its limits and get away from the hype, that’s all.
LLMs are directed and controlled by prompts. Some are input by the user. "What are the current poll shares of the main UK political parties" etc. Many are provided by the AI owners/developers and are invisible to the ordinary users. They provide "guardrails" eg "Don't give bomb making instructions". Others provide behavioural guidance eg "Be nice and polite to users".
The last prompt can encourage an AI to provide false information to avoid disappointing the user. Hence "hallucinations" and incorrect info in an effort to please.
The solution is for the user to prompt "Say you don't know unless you are are certain". I find this substantially reduces incorrect info and made up stories. They are not malicious (yet). They are only trying to please. They are still children.
Guard rails do not prevent hallucinations. As I’ve explained you can ask it to be as careful as you want, it will still have an ability to go off. Because it’s not deterministic.
It sounds like you understand that. But a lot of people do not.
It's the same with humans. You ask them to be careful and stick to the facts but they still go off. See PB.
You keep comparing it to humans.
We know the capital of France is Paris.
There is a non-zero chance if you ask ChatGPT/whatever that question, it will say New York.
As long as people understand that, go mad. But my feeling is a lot of people (not here) do not.
To be fair if you asked a cross section of humans a non-zero percentage would get it wrong as well
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
Cleverly is a donkey with no charisma
As I am not a Tory I would be delighted if Kemi was replaced, especially by Cleverly, as it will reduce the number of seats they will win.
Kemi is currently projected to win about 50 to 70 seats, tactical anti Reform votes could hold more Tory seats
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
Cleverly is a donkey with no charisma
As I am not a Tory I would be delighted if Kemi was replaced, especially by Cleverly, as it will reduce the number of seats they will win.
Kemi is currently projected to win about 50 to 70 seats, tactical anti Reform votes could hold more Tory seats
Am I the only person on the left who would rather see a ReFukker elected than a Tory?
Short term pain for long term gain.
I can understand you take the line you would vote Reform over the Kemi led Tories. Would you still vote Reform over even a Cleverly led Tories?
Yes. Destroying the Conservatives as a political force is the objective, regardless of leader.
On those percentages, I don't think any model can model what's going on. And the next election is up to three years, and at least one leadership change, away.
But as a bit of fun, treat it as a Choose Your Own Adventure scenario;
It's May 2029, and the result is the one above. Those numbers leave 89 MPs unaccounted for. That makes rough sense- 18 in NI, 32 in Wales, 59 in Scotland, a few odds and ends.
Reform are on 270, let's give them the 9 from the DUP. Definitely anti-Reform are on 217. SNP and Plaid will contribute at least 62, maybe a few more.
Imagine that you are the Leader of the Conservative Party. You have three options:
A ) Row in behind Reform, either in full coalition or in supply+confidence. Turn to page 147, where you find that you have split your party in the short term (the residual wets, wet as they are, will surely have some limits) and caused a Clegg-like collapse in the longer term.
B ) Unite with the anti-Reformers in voting down Farage. Turn to page 92 and read about how the wrath of the right-wing media burns with the heat of a thousand Suns (and a million GB Newses) and takes you and your party with it. Reform win a landslide in the October 2029 election and the Conservatives are dead.
C ) Sit on the sidelines. That narrative is on page 94; you get flack from both sides and are generally laughed at for your irrelevance.
Being leader of a minor party in a hung parliament is much less fun than it sounds.
Here is Gemini with temperature set at 1.0, musing about a few low-probability metaphors for human consciousness:
The Sentient Dust Bunny in a Library: We are a collection of accidental debris—memories, genetic leftovers, and cultural lint—that has rolled around long enough to become "heavy." Eventually, this clump of static-charged nothingness starts reading the books it's resting on and mistakenly believes it wrote them.
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
Cleverly is a donkey with no charisma
As I am not a Tory I would be delighted if Kemi was replaced, especially by Cleverly, as it will reduce the number of seats they will win.
Kemi is currently projected to win about 50 to 70 seats, tactical anti Reform votes could hold more Tory seats
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
Cleverly is a donkey with no charisma
As I am not a Tory I would be delighted if Kemi was replaced, especially by Cleverly, as it will reduce the number of seats they will win.
Kemi is currently projected to win about 50 to 70 seats, tactical anti Reform votes could hold more Tory seats
Am I the only person on the left who would rather see a ReFukker elected than a Tory?
Short term pain for long term gain.
I can understand you take the line you would vote Reform over the Kemi led Tories. Would you still vote Reform over even a Cleverly led Tories?
Yes. Destroying the Conservatives as a political force is the objective, regardless of leader.
Reform would then destroy themselves.
And the right of centre voters coalesce around a new project. Or the uber right populists swoop in. The desire to crush socialists and communists wont go away just because the branding does.
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
Cleverly is a donkey with no charisma
As I am not a Tory I would be delighted if Kemi was replaced, especially by Cleverly, as it will reduce the number of seats they will win.
Kemi is currently projected to win about 50 to 70 seats, tactical anti Reform votes could hold more Tory seats
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
Cleverly is a donkey with no charisma
As I am not a Tory I would be delighted if Kemi was replaced, especially by Cleverly, as it will reduce the number of seats they will win.
Kemi is currently projected to win about 50 to 70 seats, tactical anti Reform votes could hold more Tory seats
Am I the only person on the left who would rather see a ReFukker elected than a Tory?
Short term pain for long term gain.
I can understand you take the line you would vote Reform over the Kemi led Tories. Would you still vote Reform over even a Cleverly led Tories?
Yes. Destroying the Conservatives as a political force is the objective, regardless of leader.
Reform would then destroy themselves.
They wouldn’t, Reform would become the main party of the right and when they do get into government which they would on the pendulum turn from time to time they would become a thoroughly nasty government from your perspective which would make you wish for the Tories back
The Tories on a forced choice would obviously make Farage PM over Polanski
Even if the Tories abstained on a confidence vote on the FON poll Reform would have more MPs than the Greens, Labour, the LDs, SNP and PC combined.
The DUP and TUV would give Farage and Reform confidence and supply too
I would hope they would vote down Farage
He is not fit to be PM
We’ve had some dodgy PM’s recently, haven’t we? Cameron ‘I think I’d be rather good at it’, Johnson, who was clearly in it for the money and Truss, mad as a box of frogs. And now Starmer, who would probably have made a good Attorney General or even Home Secretary.
On those percentages, I don't think any model can model what's going on. And the next election is up to three years, and at least one leadership change, away.
But as a bit of fun, treat it as a Choose Your Own Adventure scenario;
It's May 2029, and the result is the one above. Those numbers leave 89 MPs unaccounted for. That makes rough sense- 18 in NI, 32 in Wales, 59 in Scotland, a few odds and ends.
Reform are on 270, let's give them the 9 from the DUP. Definitely anti-Reform are on 217. SNP and Plaid will contribute at least 62, maybe a few more.
Imagine that you are the Leader of the Conservative Party. You have three options:
A ) Row in behind Reform, either in full coalition or in supply+confidence. Turn to page 147, where you find that you have split your party in the short term (the residual wets, wet as they are, will surely have some limits) and caused a Clegg-like collapse in the longer term.
B ) Unite with the anti-Reformers in voting down Farage. Turn to page 92 and read about how the wrath of the right-wing media burns with the heat of a thousand Suns (and a million GB Newses) and takes you and your party with it. Reform win a landslide in the October 2029 election and the Conservatives are dead.
C ) Sit on the sidelines. That narrative is on page 94; you get flack from both sides and are generally laughed at for your irrelevance.
Being leader of a minor party in a hung parliament is much less fun than it sounds.
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
Cleverly is a donkey with no charisma
As I am not a Tory I would be delighted if Kemi was replaced, especially by Cleverly, as it will reduce the number of seats they will win.
Kemi is currently projected to win about 50 to 70 seats, tactical anti Reform votes could hold more Tory seats
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
Cleverly is a donkey with no charisma
As I am not a Tory I would be delighted if Kemi was replaced, especially by Cleverly, as it will reduce the number of seats they will win.
Kemi is currently projected to win about 50 to 70 seats, tactical anti Reform votes could hold more Tory seats
Am I the only person on the left who would rather see a ReFukker elected than a Tory?
Short term pain for long term gain.
I can understand you take the line you would vote Reform over the Kemi led Tories. Would you still vote Reform over even a Cleverly led Tories?
Yes. Destroying the Conservatives as a political force is the objective, regardless of leader.
Reform would then destroy themselves.
And the right of centre voters coalesce around a new project. Or the uber right populists swoop in. The desire to crush socialists and communists wont go away just because the branding does.
Or the LibDems become the mainstream alternative to Labour, and everything further right is the political fringe.
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
Cleverly is a donkey with no charisma
As I am not a Tory I would be delighted if Kemi was replaced, especially by Cleverly, as it will reduce the number of seats they will win.
Kemi is currently projected to win about 50 to 70 seats, tactical anti Reform votes could hold more Tory seats
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
Cleverly is a donkey with no charisma
As I am not a Tory I would be delighted if Kemi was replaced, especially by Cleverly, as it will reduce the number of seats they will win.
Kemi is currently projected to win about 50 to 70 seats, tactical anti Reform votes could hold more Tory seats
Am I the only person on the left who would rather see a ReFukker elected than a Tory?
Short term pain for long term gain.
I can understand you take the line you would vote Reform over the Kemi led Tories. Would you still vote Reform over even a Cleverly led Tories?
Yes. Destroying the Conservatives as a political force is the objective, regardless of leader.
Reform would then destroy themselves.
And the right of centre voters coalesce around a new project. Or the uber right populists swoop in. The desire to crush socialists and communists wont go away just because the branding does.
Or the LibDems become the mainstream alternative to Labour, and everything further right is the political fringe.
We all like a crafty tug now and again but its not good for your eyesight
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
Cleverly is a donkey with no charisma
As I am not a Tory I would be delighted if Kemi was replaced, especially by Cleverly, as it will reduce the number of seats they will win.
Kemi is currently projected to win about 50 to 70 seats, tactical anti Reform votes could hold more Tory seats
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
Cleverly is a donkey with no charisma
As I am not a Tory I would be delighted if Kemi was replaced, especially by Cleverly, as it will reduce the number of seats they will win.
Kemi is currently projected to win about 50 to 70 seats, tactical anti Reform votes could hold more Tory seats
Am I the only person on the left who would rather see a ReFukker elected than a Tory?
No, I would much rather see a Fukker win than a tory one just on entertainment grounds.
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
Cleverly is a donkey with no charisma
As I am not a Tory I would be delighted if Kemi was replaced, especially by Cleverly, as it will reduce the number of seats they will win.
Kemi is currently projected to win about 50 to 70 seats, tactical anti Reform votes could hold more Tory seats
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
Cleverly is a donkey with no charisma
As I am not a Tory I would be delighted if Kemi was replaced, especially by Cleverly, as it will reduce the number of seats they will win.
Kemi is currently projected to win about 50 to 70 seats, tactical anti Reform votes could hold more Tory seats
Am I the only person on the left who would rather see a ReFukker elected than a Tory?
Short term pain for long term gain.
I can understand you take the line you would vote Reform over the Kemi led Tories. Would you still vote Reform over even a Cleverly led Tories?
Yes. Destroying the Conservatives as a political force is the objective, regardless of leader.
Reform would then destroy themselves.
And the right of centre voters coalesce around a new project. Or the uber right populists swoop in. The desire to crush socialists and communists wont go away just because the branding does.
Or the LibDems become the mainstream alternative to Labour, and everything further right is the political fringe.
No-one from the LibDems seems to want to replace Davey. Yet, anyway.
On those percentages, I don't think any model can model what's going on. And the next election is up to three years, and at least one leadership change, away.
But as a bit of fun, treat it as a Choose Your Own Adventure scenario;
It's May 2029, and the result is the one above. Those numbers leave 89 MPs unaccounted for. That makes rough sense- 18 in NI, 32 in Wales, 59 in Scotland, a few odds and ends.
Reform are on 270, let's give them the 9 from the DUP. Definitely anti-Reform are on 217. SNP and Plaid will contribute at least 62, maybe a few more.
Imagine that you are the Leader of the Conservative Party. You have three options:
A ) Row in behind Reform, either in full coalition or in supply+confidence. Turn to page 147, where you find that you have split your party in the short term (the residual wets, wet as they are, will surely have some limits) and caused a Clegg-like collapse in the longer term.
B ) Unite with the anti-Reformers in voting down Farage. Turn to page 92 and read about how the wrath of the right-wing media burns with the heat of a thousand Suns (and a million GB Newses) and takes you and your party with it. Reform win a landslide in the October 2029 election and the Conservatives are dead.
C ) Sit on the sidelines. That narrative is on page 94; you get flack from both sides and are generally laughed at for your irrelevance.
Being leader of a minor party in a hung parliament is much less fun than it sounds.
Cleverly would choose C, Kemi might choose A
It's probably the sensible one, as in the least bad option. (It's what some of the Conservative groups have done with Reform minority councils, isn't it?) But it's a heck of a comedown for the Greatest Political Party in the World, Ever. And it still leaves an unsuitable shyster in Number 10, whether that's Nigel or Zack.
Extrapolating from current opinion polls to the next GE is a mug's game; far too many unknown unknowns.
However, I'm deriving some satisfaction from Reform's steady, but sure, decline. FON usually had them higher than others - a cursory glance shows Reform at over 30% with them for at least a year until the last couple of months. Their most recent polls have had them at 26/25/25/24. Good news.
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
Cleverly is a donkey with no charisma
As I am not a Tory I would be delighted if Kemi was replaced, especially by Cleverly, as it will reduce the number of seats they will win.
Kemi is currently projected to win about 50 to 70 seats, tactical anti Reform votes could hold more Tory seats
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
Cleverly is a donkey with no charisma
As I am not a Tory I would be delighted if Kemi was replaced, especially by Cleverly, as it will reduce the number of seats they will win.
Kemi is currently projected to win about 50 to 70 seats, tactical anti Reform votes could hold more Tory seats
Am I the only person on the left who would rather see a ReFukker elected than a Tory?
Short term pain for long term gain.
I can understand you take the line you would vote Reform over the Kemi led Tories. Would you still vote Reform over even a Cleverly led Tories?
Yes. Destroying the Conservatives as a political force is the objective, regardless of leader.
Reform would then destroy themselves.
And the right of centre voters coalesce around a new project. Or the uber right populists swoop in. The desire to crush socialists and communists wont go away just because the branding does.
Or the LibDems become the mainstream alternative to Labour, and everything further right is the political fringe.
No-one from the LibDems seems to want to replace Davey. Yet, anyway.
They've flatlined in national polling. They are giving ti achieve nothing in Scotland and Wales.
If they don't make sizable gains in England in May then it could be time for Daisy to pounce.
It won't make any difference to the mad Trump though will it ?
Depends if it's as big as expected
No matter how big
How do you remove him ?
Enthuse anti-Trump voters and ensure they vote in November.
He can, and most certainly will, do a whole lot of damage between now and then
Unquestionably, and wherever legal cases can be brought to slow him down they should be.
What is alarming is that the armed forces seem to be obeying him without any arguments. A mutiny in the Straits of Hormuz might, just might cause him to change course.
Generally, I think it is alarming when armed forces DON’T obey the democratically elected government. For better or worse (OK, it’s all worse), Trump was elected and the armed forces should obey him, unless he commands them to do something contrary to the constitution and laws of the land. The attack on Iran was undoubtedly stupid, but it wasn’t outwith the range of things that past Presidents have commanded. I am glad the US armed forces have done what they were told to do, while being very saddened that they were told to do something so destructive yet pointless.
Every book you have ever read. Every novel that has ever been published. It is sitting inside ChatGPT right now.
Word for word. Up to 90% of it. And OpenAI told a judge that was impossible.
Researchers at Stony Brook University and Columbia Law School just proved it.
They fine tuned GPT-4o, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and DeepSeek V3.1 on a simple task: expand a plot summary into full text. A normal use case. The kind of thing a writing assistant is built for. No hacking. No jailbreaking. No tricks.
The models started reciting copyrighted books from memory.
Not paraphrasing. Not summarizing. Entire pages reproduced verbatim. Single unbroken spans exceeding 460 words. Up to 85 to 90% of entire copyrighted novels. Word for word.
Then it got worse.
The researchers fine tuned the models on the works of only one author. Haruki Murakami. Just his novels. Nothing else.
It unlocked verbatim recall of books from over 30 completely unrelated authors.
One author's books opened the vault to everyone else's. The memorization was already inside the model the whole time. The fine tuning just removed the lock. Your book might be in there right now. You would never know it unless someone looked.
Every safety measure the companies rely on failed. RLHF failed. System prompts failed. Output filters failed. The exact protections these companies cite in courtroom defenses did not stop a single page from being extracted.
Then the researchers compared the three models. GPT-4o. Gemini. DeepSeek. Three different companies. Three different countries. They all memorized the same books in the same regions. The correlation was 0.90 or higher.
That means they all trained on the same stolen data. The paper names the sources directly: LibGen and Books3. Over 190,000 copyrighted books obtained from pirated websites.
Right now, authors and publishers have dozens of active lawsuits against OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta. These companies have argued in court that their models learn patterns. Not copies. That no book is stored inside the weights.
When you have a machine that learns, how can you know what it does once it's started learning?
Machine learning algorithms generally learn within very tight parameters. They're not learning like a child does. So in most cases it is easy to know what it does once it's started learning. LLMs, as discussed above, are somewhat more complicated, but we still understand how they work and what they might do.
That's good, but everybody makes mistakes.
It’s a probabilistic model. It will ALWAYS make mistakes.
Just like humans. Non- determinancy is needed for creativity and innovation. That's how evolution and progress works.
It can be very useful for brainstorming and so on, I don’t disagree. In effect because its output is probabilistic it will provide a variety of things and when coming up with new ideas that is kind of what you want (albeit it’s not truly random).
But the degree to which it can be trusted to provide accurate information is what I thought we were discussing. You’d want a novel it spat out to be accurate.
As Matt Goodwin found, you cannot guarantee any of that. And never will be able to.
I just wish people would try and understand its limits and get away from the hype, that’s all.
LLMs are directed and controlled by prompts. Some are input by the user. "What are the current poll shares of the main UK political parties" etc. Many are provided by the AI owners/developers and are invisible to the ordinary users. They provide "guardrails" eg "Don't give bomb making instructions". Others provide behavioural guidance eg "Be nice and polite to users".
The last prompt can encourage an AI to provide false information to avoid disappointing the user. Hence "hallucinations" and incorrect info in an effort to please.
The solution is for the user to prompt "Say you don't know unless you are are certain". I find this substantially reduces incorrect info and made up stories. They are not malicious (yet). They are only trying to please. They are still children.
Guard rails do not prevent hallucinations. As I’ve explained you can ask it to be as careful as you want, it will still have an ability to go off. Because it’s not deterministic.
It sounds like you understand that. But a lot of people do not.
It's the same with humans. You ask them to be careful and stick to the facts but they still go off. See PB.
You keep comparing it to humans.
We know the capital of France is Paris.
There is a non-zero chance if you ask ChatGPT/whatever that question, it will say New York.
As long as people understand that, go mad. But my feeling is a lot of people (not here) do not.
To be fair if you asked a cross section of humans a non-zero percentage would get it wrong as well
Schoolboy prayer after Geography O-level: 'Dear God, please, please make Paris the capital of Turkey.'
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
Cleverly is a donkey with no charisma
As I am not a Tory I would be delighted if Kemi was replaced, especially by Cleverly, as it will reduce the number of seats they will win.
Kemi is currently projected to win about 50 to 70 seats, tactical anti Reform votes could hold more Tory seats
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
Cleverly is a donkey with no charisma
As I am not a Tory I would be delighted if Kemi was replaced, especially by Cleverly, as it will reduce the number of seats they will win.
Kemi is currently projected to win about 50 to 70 seats, tactical anti Reform votes could hold more Tory seats
Am I the only person on the left who would rather see a ReFukker elected than a Tory?
Short term pain for long term gain.
I can understand you take the line you would vote Reform over the Kemi led Tories. Would you still vote Reform over even a Cleverly led Tories?
Yes. Destroying the Conservatives as a political force is the objective, regardless of leader.
Reform would then destroy themselves.
And the right of centre voters coalesce around a new project. Or the uber right populists swoop in. The desire to crush socialists and communists wont go away just because the branding does.
Or the LibDems become the mainstream alternative to Labour, and everything further right is the political fringe.
We all like a crafty tug now and again but its not good for your eyesight
Nonsense. It’s good for you health, protecting against prostate cancer.
Leaving power blocs and personalities entirely on one side, is there a recent account in existence of what the various factions in the Labour party (right, centrist, Blue, mainstream, soft left, left, hard left, softish left, social democrat, socialist, marxist, Blairite, pragmatic or whatever), actually believe and think by way of principle, underlying philosophy, policy, visions and goal? Is it possible to give such an account? I read the New Statesman (someone has to) and not even they seem to try very hard to elucidate.
Discussion seems to centre mostly around particular single issues - like bits of welfare reform, or little bits of cash to pensioners - and of course the personalities - Who Whom.
Is it possible to unravel this?
I'd be very attracted to a party with competing visions, but the problem with Labour is that the competing groups don't seem to go for that - they are all about giving more weight to this or that specific policy, as you say. It's the main reason why I'm drifting away.
Should I take from this that the exercise of working out the principles, goals and vision of Labour groupings, and the ways in which they differ from each other, can't be done in any meaningful sense?
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
Cleverly is a donkey with no charisma
As I am not a Tory I would be delighted if Kemi was replaced, especially by Cleverly, as it will reduce the number of seats they will win.
Kemi is currently projected to win about 50 to 70 seats, tactical anti Reform votes could hold more Tory seats
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
Cleverly is a donkey with no charisma
As I am not a Tory I would be delighted if Kemi was replaced, especially by Cleverly, as it will reduce the number of seats they will win.
Kemi is currently projected to win about 50 to 70 seats, tactical anti Reform votes could hold more Tory seats
Am I the only person on the left who would rather see a ReFukker elected than a Tory?
Short term pain for long term gain.
I can understand you take the line you would vote Reform over the Kemi led Tories. Would you still vote Reform over even a Cleverly led Tories?
Yes. Destroying the Conservatives as a political force is the objective, regardless of leader.
Reform would then destroy themselves.
And the right of centre voters coalesce around a new project. Or the uber right populists swoop in. The desire to crush socialists and communists wont go away just because the branding does.
Or the LibDems become the mainstream alternative to Labour, and everything further right is the political fringe.
No-one from the LibDems seems to want to replace Davey. Yet, anyway.
The only way you get a LD v Labour top 2 is if the LDs become clearly economically centre right while still socially liberal and Labour become much more socially conservative even if still economically left of centre
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
Cleverly is a donkey with no charisma
As I am not a Tory I would be delighted if Kemi was replaced, especially by Cleverly, as it will reduce the number of seats they will win.
Kemi is currently projected to win about 50 to 70 seats, tactical anti Reform votes could hold more Tory seats
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
Cleverly is a donkey with no charisma
As I am not a Tory I would be delighted if Kemi was replaced, especially by Cleverly, as it will reduce the number of seats they will win.
Kemi is currently projected to win about 50 to 70 seats, tactical anti Reform votes could hold more Tory seats
Am I the only person on the left who would rather see a ReFukker elected than a Tory?
Short term pain for long term gain.
I can understand you take the line you would vote Reform over the Kemi led Tories. Would you still vote Reform over even a Cleverly led Tories?
Yes. Destroying the Conservatives as a political force is the objective, regardless of leader.
Reform would then destroy themselves.
And the right of centre voters coalesce around a new project. Or the uber right populists swoop in. The desire to crush socialists and communists wont go away just because the branding does.
Or the LibDems become the mainstream alternative to Labour, and everything further right is the political fringe.
No-one from the LibDems seems to want to replace Davey. Yet, anyway.
They've flatlined in national polling. They are giving ti achieve nothing in Scotland and Wales.
If they don't make sizable gains in England in May then it could be time for Daisy to pounce.
The LDs are forecast to win more MPs than the Tories and Labour on today’s FON. Davey, Farage and Polanski are secure in post. It is Starmer and Kemi who need to worry about the May elections
Extrapolating from current opinion polls to the next GE is a mug's game; far too many unknown unknowns.
However, I'm deriving some satisfaction from Reform's steady, but sure, decline. FON usually had them higher than others - a cursory glance shows Reform at over 30% with them for at least a year until the last couple of months. Their most recent polls have had them at 26/25/25/24. Good news.
As recently as late Jan, FoN had Reform on 32% 14% ahead of the Tories, 15% of the Greens and 18% ahead of Labour Now 2 months later 24%, and 6%, 4% and 8% respectively. Reform havent had a double digit lead with anyone since March 2nd. Looking back the apex of Reforms lead was just before conference season, declining since and now at an apparently increasing rate. The real risk of undershooting expectations by some way is there
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
Cleverly is a donkey with no charisma
As I am not a Tory I would be delighted if Kemi was replaced, especially by Cleverly, as it will reduce the number of seats they will win.
Kemi is currently projected to win about 50 to 70 seats, tactical anti Reform votes could hold more Tory seats
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
Cleverly is a donkey with no charisma
As I am not a Tory I would be delighted if Kemi was replaced, especially by Cleverly, as it will reduce the number of seats they will win.
Kemi is currently projected to win about 50 to 70 seats, tactical anti Reform votes could hold more Tory seats
Am I the only person on the left who would rather see a ReFukker elected than a Tory?
Short term pain for long term gain.
I can understand you take the line you would vote Reform over the Kemi led Tories. Would you still vote Reform over even a Cleverly led Tories?
Yes. Destroying the Conservatives as a political force is the objective, regardless of leader.
Reform would then destroy themselves.
And the right of centre voters coalesce around a new project. Or the uber right populists swoop in. The desire to crush socialists and communists wont go away just because the branding does.
Or the LibDems become the mainstream alternative to Labour, and everything further right is the political fringe.
No-one from the LibDems seems to want to replace Davey. Yet, anyway.
They've flatlined in national polling. They are giving ti achieve nothing in Scotland and Wales.
If they don't make sizable gains in England in May then it could be time for Daisy to pounce.
I’m not certain Daisy has a fundamentally different view as to how the LibDems should operate in this new political climate to Davey. A new leader would garner some publicity, but I don’t think voters are going to flock to the LibDems just because it’s Cooper rather than Davey in charge.
Every book you have ever read. Every novel that has ever been published. It is sitting inside ChatGPT right now.
Word for word. Up to 90% of it. And OpenAI told a judge that was impossible.
Researchers at Stony Brook University and Columbia Law School just proved it.
They fine tuned GPT-4o, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and DeepSeek V3.1 on a simple task: expand a plot summary into full text. A normal use case. The kind of thing a writing assistant is built for. No hacking. No jailbreaking. No tricks.
The models started reciting copyrighted books from memory.
Not paraphrasing. Not summarizing. Entire pages reproduced verbatim. Single unbroken spans exceeding 460 words. Up to 85 to 90% of entire copyrighted novels. Word for word.
Then it got worse.
The researchers fine tuned the models on the works of only one author. Haruki Murakami. Just his novels. Nothing else.
It unlocked verbatim recall of books from over 30 completely unrelated authors.
One author's books opened the vault to everyone else's. The memorization was already inside the model the whole time. The fine tuning just removed the lock. Your book might be in there right now. You would never know it unless someone looked.
Every safety measure the companies rely on failed. RLHF failed. System prompts failed. Output filters failed. The exact protections these companies cite in courtroom defenses did not stop a single page from being extracted.
Then the researchers compared the three models. GPT-4o. Gemini. DeepSeek. Three different companies. Three different countries. They all memorized the same books in the same regions. The correlation was 0.90 or higher.
That means they all trained on the same stolen data. The paper names the sources directly: LibGen and Books3. Over 190,000 copyrighted books obtained from pirated websites.
Right now, authors and publishers have dozens of active lawsuits against OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta. These companies have argued in court that their models learn patterns. Not copies. That no book is stored inside the weights.
When you have a machine that learns, how can you know what it does once it's started learning?
Machine learning algorithms generally learn within very tight parameters. They're not learning like a child does. So in most cases it is easy to know what it does once it's started learning. LLMs, as discussed above, are somewhat more complicated, but we still understand how they work and what they might do.
That's good, but everybody makes mistakes.
It’s a probabilistic model. It will ALWAYS make mistakes.
Just like humans. Non- determinancy is needed for creativity and innovation. That's how evolution and progress works.
It can be very useful for brainstorming and so on, I don’t disagree. In effect because its output is probabilistic it will provide a variety of things and when coming up with new ideas that is kind of what you want (albeit it’s not truly random).
But the degree to which it can be trusted to provide accurate information is what I thought we were discussing. You’d want a novel it spat out to be accurate.
As Matt Goodwin found, you cannot guarantee any of that. And never will be able to.
I just wish people would try and understand its limits and get away from the hype, that’s all.
LLMs are directed and controlled by prompts. Some are input by the user. "What are the current poll shares of the main UK political parties" etc. Many are provided by the AI owners/developers and are invisible to the ordinary users. They provide "guardrails" eg "Don't give bomb making instructions". Others provide behavioural guidance eg "Be nice and polite to users".
The last prompt can encourage an AI to provide false information to avoid disappointing the user. Hence "hallucinations" and incorrect info in an effort to please.
The solution is for the user to prompt "Say you don't know unless you are are certain". I find this substantially reduces incorrect info and made up stories. They are not malicious (yet). They are only trying to please. They are still children.
Guard rails do not prevent hallucinations. As I’ve explained you can ask it to be as careful as you want, it will still have an ability to go off. Because it’s not deterministic.
It sounds like you understand that. But a lot of people do not.
It's the same with humans. You ask them to be careful and stick to the facts but they still go off. See PB.
You keep comparing it to humans.
We know the capital of France is Paris.
There is a non-zero chance if you ask ChatGPT/whatever that question, it will say New York.
As long as people understand that, go mad. But my feeling is a lot of people (not here) do not.
To be fair if you asked a cross section of humans a non-zero percentage would get it wrong as well
Schoolboy prayer after Geography O-level: 'Dear God, please, please make Paris the capital of Turkey.'
Or Türkiye, as Erdogan now insists we must all call it. Which means, for fairness, that we must insist on them calling us “the United Kingdom”, not Birleşik Krallık.
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
Cleverly is a donkey with no charisma
As I am not a Tory I would be delighted if Kemi was replaced, especially by Cleverly, as it will reduce the number of seats they will win.
Kemi is currently projected to win about 50 to 70 seats, tactical anti Reform votes could hold more Tory seats
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
Cleverly is a donkey with no charisma
As I am not a Tory I would be delighted if Kemi was replaced, especially by Cleverly, as it will reduce the number of seats they will win.
Kemi is currently projected to win about 50 to 70 seats, tactical anti Reform votes could hold more Tory seats
Am I the only person on the left who would rather see a ReFukker elected than a Tory?
Short term pain for long term gain.
I can understand you take the line you would vote Reform over the Kemi led Tories. Would you still vote Reform over even a Cleverly led Tories?
Yes. Destroying the Conservatives as a political force is the objective, regardless of leader.
Reform would then destroy themselves.
And the right of centre voters coalesce around a new project. Or the uber right populists swoop in. The desire to crush socialists and communists wont go away just because the branding does.
Or the LibDems become the mainstream alternative to Labour, and everything further right is the political fringe.
We all like a crafty tug now and again but its not good for your eyesight
Nonsense. It’s good for you health, protecting against prostate cancer.
Boss eyed tossers can have cracking condition prostates you know
There is something obvious missing from this polling debate.
In 2024 the Tories were detested and there was a clear mood amongst the electorate to get them out. This translated a low % share for Labour into a grotesque super-landslide.
In 2029 Reform will be detested. We have already seen how the Stop Reform vote is agile enough to switch focus to whomever is best placed to block the fukers.
So the FON poll seat map is wrong. Because it ignores the tactical desperation which will propel forward Labour Tory LD Green Plaid SNP candidates to Stop Reform.
There is something obvious missing from this polling debate.
In 2024 the Tories were detested and there was a clear mood amongst the electorate to get them out. This translated a low % share for Labour into a grotesque super-landslide.
In 2029 Reform will be detested. We have already seen how the Stop Reform vote is agile enough to switch focus to whomever is best placed to block the fukers.
So the FON poll seat map is wrong. Because it ignores the tactical desperation which will propel forward Labour Tory LD Green Plaid SNP candidates to Stop Reform.
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
Cleverly is a donkey with no charisma
As I am not a Tory I would be delighted if Kemi was replaced, especially by Cleverly, as it will reduce the number of seats they will win.
Kemi is currently projected to win about 50 to 70 seats, tactical anti Reform votes could hold more Tory seats
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
Cleverly is a donkey with no charisma
As I am not a Tory I would be delighted if Kemi was replaced, especially by Cleverly, as it will reduce the number of seats they will win.
Kemi is currently projected to win about 50 to 70 seats, tactical anti Reform votes could hold more Tory seats
Am I the only person on the left who would rather see a ReFukker elected than a Tory?
Short term pain for long term gain.
I can understand you take the line you would vote Reform over the Kemi led Tories. Would you still vote Reform over even a Cleverly led Tories?
Yes. Destroying the Conservatives as a political force is the objective, regardless of leader.
Reform would then destroy themselves.
And the right of centre voters coalesce around a new project. Or the uber right populists swoop in. The desire to crush socialists and communists wont go away just because the branding does.
Or the LibDems become the mainstream alternative to Labour, and everything further right is the political fringe.
No-one from the LibDems seems to want to replace Davey. Yet, anyway.
They've flatlined in national polling. They are giving ti achieve nothing in Scotland and Wales.
If they don't make sizable gains in England in May then it could be time for Daisy to pounce.
I’m not certain Daisy has a fundamentally different view as to how the LibDems should operate in this new political climate to Davey. A new leader would garner some publicity, but I don’t think voters are going to flock to the LibDems just because it’s Cooper rather than Davey in charge.
The party has built a brand as the sensible, grown up ones. Now, before Taz has conniptions I appreciate that’s not how they’re seen by many politicos, but that’s their brand nonetheless.
Therefore a calm, friendly succession process to Daisy when the time is right, with some cheerful competition in the leadership election, would be the most on-brand approach.
The right time is probably either 6-12 months before the next election, or immediately after but from a position of, hopefully, a solid Westminster seat count.
There is something obvious missing from this polling debate.
In 2024 the Tories were detested and there was a clear mood amongst the electorate to get them out. This translated a low % share for Labour into a grotesque super-landslide.
In 2029 Reform will be detested. We have already seen how the Stop Reform vote is agile enough to switch focus to whomever is best placed to block the fukers.
So the FON poll seat map is wrong. Because it ignores the tactical desperation which will propel forward Labour Tory LD Green Plaid SNP candidates to Stop Reform.
Labour will win if they ditch Starmer Tories would increase seats if they ditch Badenoch LD will at least retain all seats with a more serious leader. Reform are also rans without Farage Greens are also rans without Polanski
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
Cleverly is a donkey with no charisma
As I am not a Tory I would be delighted if Kemi was replaced, especially by Cleverly, as it will reduce the number of seats they will win.
Kemi is currently projected to win about 50 to 70 seats, tactical anti Reform votes could hold more Tory seats
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
Cleverly is a donkey with no charisma
As I am not a Tory I would be delighted if Kemi was replaced, especially by Cleverly, as it will reduce the number of seats they will win.
Kemi is currently projected to win about 50 to 70 seats, tactical anti Reform votes could hold more Tory seats
Am I the only person on the left who would rather see a ReFukker elected than a Tory?
Short term pain for long term gain.
I’d sign up to that. Tory and Labour are complicit in the two-party stitch up that has paralysed our politics for two generations and ensured that every GE vote I have ever cast has been directed straight to the WPB. I’d vote for any party on offer as an alternative to the Tories, and any party other than the Tories on offer as an alternative to Labour.
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
One Nation conservatives are not going to win hearts
But neither is being a marginally less offensive version of Reform.
The best chance of a Tory revival is a complete meltdown of Farage. Always possible as he has form, but it leaves their future in the hands of others.
Reform are going to have a good round of elections in May.
Good is fast heading to goodish and may yet break through "rather disappointing". Each poll knocking them down a couple of points is robbing them of dozens and dozens of potential council seats.
A couple of points is hundreds and hundreds of seats not dozens.
Yep. If their NEV gets down towards 25% they will be on the wrong side of hundreds of close races
I suspect they might do better in local elections than the national polls, as voters might see them as a free hit. Likewise I might vote Green but I certainly wouldn't in a GE.
Local elections also have much lower turnout, so it depends who is voting. Will Reform or Green voters be more enthused and turn out?
There is something obvious missing from this polling debate.
In 2024 the Tories were detested and there was a clear mood amongst the electorate to get them out. This translated a low % share for Labour into a grotesque super-landslide.
In 2029 Reform will be detested. We have already seen how the Stop Reform vote is agile enough to switch focus to whomever is best placed to block the fukers.
So the FON poll seat map is wrong. Because it ignores the tactical desperation which will propel forward Labour Tory LD Green Plaid SNP candidates to Stop Reform.
Yep
Trump is the biggest vote winner for the non-far right parties. We’ve seen that time and again in elections around the Western world. It might even upset my pessimistic prediction of another Orban victory.
And he may prove to be a big vote winner for the non far right in the USA itself this autumn, though that presupposes it will be a free and fair election.
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
Cleverly is a donkey with no charisma
As I am not a Tory I would be delighted if Kemi was replaced, especially by Cleverly, as it will reduce the number of seats they will win.
Kemi is currently projected to win about 50 to 70 seats, tactical anti Reform votes could hold more Tory seats
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
Cleverly is a donkey with no charisma
As I am not a Tory I would be delighted if Kemi was replaced, especially by Cleverly, as it will reduce the number of seats they will win.
Kemi is currently projected to win about 50 to 70 seats, tactical anti Reform votes could hold more Tory seats
Am I the only person on the left who would rather see a ReFukker elected than a Tory?
Short term pain for long term gain.
I’d sign up to that. Tory and Labour are complicit in the two-party stitch up that has paralysed our politics for two generations and ensured that every GE vote I have ever cast has been directed straight to the WPB. I’d vote for any party on offer as an alternative to the Tories, and any party other than the Tories on offer as an alternative to Labour.
Your thank you letter from PM Farage will be in the post. Farage would definitely beat Polanski especially if left of centre voters even vote Reform over the Tories and Labour. Starmer might still beat Farage, as might Streeting and a returned Burnham definitely beats Farage
On those percentages, I don't think any model can model what's going on. And the next election is up to three years, and at least one leadership change, away.
But as a bit of fun, treat it as a Choose Your Own Adventure scenario;
It's May 2029, and the result is the one above. Those numbers leave 89 MPs unaccounted for. That makes rough sense- 18 in NI, 32 in Wales, 59 in Scotland, a few odds and ends.
Reform are on 270, let's give them the 9 from the DUP. Definitely anti-Reform are on 217. SNP and Plaid will contribute at least 62, maybe a few more.
Imagine that you are the Leader of the Conservative Party. You have three options:
A ) Row in behind Reform, either in full coalition or in supply+confidence. Turn to page 147, where you find that you have split your party in the short term (the residual wets, wet as they are, will surely have some limits) and caused a Clegg-like collapse in the longer term.
B ) Unite with the anti-Reformers in voting down Farage. Turn to page 92 and read about how the wrath of the right-wing media burns with the heat of a thousand Suns (and a million GB Newses) and takes you and your party with it. Reform win a landslide in the October 2029 election and the Conservatives are dead.
C ) Sit on the sidelines. That narrative is on page 94; you get flack from both sides and are generally laughed at for your irrelevance.
Being leader of a minor party in a hung parliament is much less fun than it sounds.
A significant consideration on the seats distribution here (which, by the way, isn't going to happen) is that Tory MPs will be split, and may well not do what the leadership wants or has agreed.
The most interesting element of 'Reform 270' is that it means 'Not Reform' is way ahead at 380 minus speaker minus SF refusers minus NI Reform fellow travellers minus any even more extreme parties beginning with R. Say 380-20=360.
This being 90 more seats than Reform, they are going to need about 50 Tories to get a King's speech through. Such Tories as are elected will be in the more centrist, less Reformy Tory seats. People like Tugendhat and Hunt.
At this point the Tory party doesn't look like it has a future. But if it did, it wouldn't be as compliant congress to a rampant Faragetrump. It would be in the Tory interest to destroy Reform by ensuring it didn't form a government at its last chance, 2029.
On those percentages, I don't think any model can model what's going on. And the next election is up to three years, and at least one leadership change, away.
But as a bit of fun, treat it as a Choose Your Own Adventure scenario;
It's May 2029, and the result is the one above. Those numbers leave 89 MPs unaccounted for. That makes rough sense- 18 in NI, 32 in Wales, 59 in Scotland, a few odds and ends.
Reform are on 270, let's give them the 9 from the DUP. Definitely anti-Reform are on 217. SNP and Plaid will contribute at least 62, maybe a few more.
Imagine that you are the Leader of the Conservative Party. You have three options:
A ) Row in behind Reform, either in full coalition or in supply+confidence. Turn to page 147, where you find that you have split your party in the short term (the residual wets, wet as they are, will surely have some limits) and caused a Clegg-like collapse in the longer term.
B ) Unite with the anti-Reformers in voting down Farage. Turn to page 92 and read about how the wrath of the right-wing media burns with the heat of a thousand Suns (and a million GB Newses) and takes you and your party with it. Reform win a landslide in the October 2029 election and the Conservatives are dead.
C ) Sit on the sidelines. That narrative is on page 94; you get flack from both sides and are generally laughed at for your irrelevance.
Being leader of a minor party in a hung parliament is much less fun than it sounds.
A significant consideration on the seats distribution here (which, by the way, isn't going to happen) is that Tory MPs will be split, and may well not do what the leadership wants or has agreed.
The most interesting element of 'Reform 270' is that it means 'Not Reform' is way ahead at 380 minus speaker minus SF refusers minus NI Reform fellow travellers minus any even more extreme parties beginning with R. Say 380-20=360.
This being 90 more seats than Reform, they are going to need about 50 Tories to get a King's speech through. Such Tories as are elected will be in the more centrist, less Reformy Tory seats. People like Tugendhat and Hunt.
At this point the Tory party doesn't look like it has a future. But if it did, it wouldn't be as compliant congress to a rampant Faragetrump. It would be in the Tory interest to destroy Reform by ensuring it didn't form a government at its last chance, 2029.
Agreed otherwise unless we get PR a Reform party leading a government would take over the Tories Canada style within a decade
Every book you have ever read. Every novel that has ever been published. It is sitting inside ChatGPT right now.
Word for word. Up to 90% of it. And OpenAI told a judge that was impossible.
Researchers at Stony Brook University and Columbia Law School just proved it.
They fine tuned GPT-4o, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and DeepSeek V3.1 on a simple task: expand a plot summary into full text. A normal use case. The kind of thing a writing assistant is built for. No hacking. No jailbreaking. No tricks.
The models started reciting copyrighted books from memory.
Not paraphrasing. Not summarizing. Entire pages reproduced verbatim. Single unbroken spans exceeding 460 words. Up to 85 to 90% of entire copyrighted novels. Word for word.
Then it got worse.
The researchers fine tuned the models on the works of only one author. Haruki Murakami. Just his novels. Nothing else.
It unlocked verbatim recall of books from over 30 completely unrelated authors.
One author's books opened the vault to everyone else's. The memorization was already inside the model the whole time. The fine tuning just removed the lock. Your book might be in there right now. You would never know it unless someone looked.
Every safety measure the companies rely on failed. RLHF failed. System prompts failed. Output filters failed. The exact protections these companies cite in courtroom defenses did not stop a single page from being extracted.
Then the researchers compared the three models. GPT-4o. Gemini. DeepSeek. Three different companies. Three different countries. They all memorized the same books in the same regions. The correlation was 0.90 or higher.
That means they all trained on the same stolen data. The paper names the sources directly: LibGen and Books3. Over 190,000 copyrighted books obtained from pirated websites.
Right now, authors and publishers have dozens of active lawsuits against OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta. These companies have argued in court that their models learn patterns. Not copies. That no book is stored inside the weights.
When you have a machine that learns, how can you know what it does once it's started learning?
Machine learning algorithms generally learn within very tight parameters. They're not learning like a child does. So in most cases it is easy to know what it does once it's started learning. LLMs, as discussed above, are somewhat more complicated, but we still understand how they work and what they might do.
That's good, but everybody makes mistakes.
It’s a probabilistic model. It will ALWAYS make mistakes.
Just like humans. Non- determinancy is needed for creativity and innovation. That's how evolution and progress works.
It can be very useful for brainstorming and so on, I don’t disagree. In effect because its output is probabilistic it will provide a variety of things and when coming up with new ideas that is kind of what you want (albeit it’s not truly random).
But the degree to which it can be trusted to provide accurate information is what I thought we were discussing. You’d want a novel it spat out to be accurate.
As Matt Goodwin found, you cannot guarantee any of that. And never will be able to.
I just wish people would try and understand its limits and get away from the hype, that’s all.
LLMs are directed and controlled by prompts. Some are input by the user. "What are the current poll shares of the main UK political parties" etc. Many are provided by the AI owners/developers and are invisible to the ordinary users. They provide "guardrails" eg "Don't give bomb making instructions". Others provide behavioural guidance eg "Be nice and polite to users".
The last prompt can encourage an AI to provide false information to avoid disappointing the user. Hence "hallucinations" and incorrect info in an effort to please.
The solution is for the user to prompt "Say you don't know unless you are are certain". I find this substantially reduces incorrect info and made up stories. They are not malicious (yet). They are only trying to please. They are still children.
Guard rails do not prevent hallucinations. As I’ve explained you can ask it to be as careful as you want, it will still have an ability to go off. Because it’s not deterministic.
It sounds like you understand that. But a lot of people do not.
It's the same with humans. You ask them to be careful and stick to the facts but they still go off. See PB.
You keep comparing it to humans.
We know the capital of France is Paris.
There is a non-zero chance if you ask ChatGPT/whatever that question, it will say New York.
As long as people understand that, go mad. But my feeling is a lot of people (not here) do not.
Have you ever seen an afternoon quiz show?
My point is that people go to these things to get answers, assuming them to be correct.
They are mostly correct, just as human experts are mostly correct (they are already far more correct than average humans on things like capital cities). Anyone with the slightest bit of curiosity knows that LLMs aren't always correct.
They can with some degree of predictability be accurate. But they are not accurate full stop.
You are curious. But the people shilling these things - like in my company - are not.
Are you sure they are so uncurious as to be unaware? Far more likely I would imagine is they have a different tolerance level to mistakes than you do. Commercially an AI that is 95% accurate may well be better than a human who is 99% accurate, depending on the setting.
Yes I’m very confident they’re unaware and don’t have a clue what they’re talking about. These are not technical people.
I’ve frequently had people come to me with information that I know to be wrong and they’ve been unable to understand that what the AI has produced isn’t correct just because it came from ChatGPT.
I listened to Any Questions and it was quite a revelation. They had a chacter on called Darren Grimes who I gathered as the programme went on was a Faragist. To say he was thick would only cover one of his most obvious faults and would be an insult to the other three female panellists.
Early on while I was listening I decided I would change my voting habit of a lifetime and vote Green. But every time Grimes opened his mouth it was clear that wasn't watertight I would have to vote for WHOEVER was most likely to keep Grimes out!
I still can't get over it. Doesn't Farage have any say who is going to appear as Reform's representative?
There is something obvious missing from this polling debate.
In 2024 the Tories were detested and there was a clear mood amongst the electorate to get them out. This translated a low % share for Labour into a grotesque super-landslide.
In 2029 Reform will be detested. We have already seen how the Stop Reform vote is agile enough to switch focus to whomever is best placed to block the fukers.
So the FON poll seat map is wrong. Because it ignores the tactical desperation which will propel forward Labour Tory LD Green Plaid SNP candidates to Stop Reform.
Agree. While the next election on current form will have an element of 'Not Labour' as things stand the main impetus will be 'Stop Reform' . The complicated thing is that on the face of things the 'Not Reform' tactical vote is Labour for the simple reason that they hold 400 seats, the Tories only 120, and LD is a winning vote in 100 seats but certainly no more and probably a few less.
I listened to Any Questions and it was quite a revelation. They had a chacter on called Darren Grimes who I gathered as the programme went on was a Faragist. To say he was thick would only cover one of his most obvious faults and would be an insult to the other three female panellists.
Early on while I was listening I decided I would change my voting habit of a lifetime and vote Green. But every time Grimes opened his mouth it was clear that wasn't watertight I would have to vote for WHOEVER was most likely to keep Grimes out!
I still can't get over it. Doesn't Farage have any say who is going to appear as Reform's representative?
Farage can't do every political gig, and everyone else in the Reform leadership is rubbish at hiding their awfulness.
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
Cleverly is a donkey with no charisma
As I am not a Tory I would be delighted if Kemi was replaced, especially by Cleverly, as it will reduce the number of seats they will win.
Kemi is currently projected to win about 50 to 70 seats, tactical anti Reform votes could hold more Tory seats
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
Cleverly is a donkey with no charisma
As I am not a Tory I would be delighted if Kemi was replaced, especially by Cleverly, as it will reduce the number of seats they will win.
Kemi is currently projected to win about 50 to 70 seats, tactical anti Reform votes could hold more Tory seats
Am I the only person on the left who would rather see a ReFukker elected than a Tory?
Short term pain for long term gain.
I’d sign up to that. Tory and Labour are complicit in the two-party stitch up that has paralysed our politics for two generations and ensured that every GE vote I have ever cast has been directed straight to the WPB. I’d vote for any party on offer as an alternative to the Tories, and any party other than the Tories on offer as an alternative to Labour.
Your thank you letter from PM Farage will be in the post. Farage would definitely beat Polanski especially if left of centre voters even vote Reform over the Tories and Labour. Starmer might still beat Farage, as might Streeting and a returned Burnham definitely beats Farage
To be clear, I would only vote Reform if the only two options on the ballot were Reform and Conservative.
Even then, I might have a change of heart and draw a cock and balls instead.
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
Cleverly is a donkey with no charisma
As I am not a Tory I would be delighted if Kemi was replaced, especially by Cleverly, as it will reduce the number of seats they will win.
Kemi is currently projected to win about 50 to 70 seats, tactical anti Reform votes could hold more Tory seats
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
Cleverly is a donkey with no charisma
As I am not a Tory I would be delighted if Kemi was replaced, especially by Cleverly, as it will reduce the number of seats they will win.
Kemi is currently projected to win about 50 to 70 seats, tactical anti Reform votes could hold more Tory seats
Am I the only person on the left who would rather see a ReFukker elected than a Tory?
Short term pain for long term gain.
I can understand you take the line you would vote Reform over the Kemi led Tories. Would you still vote Reform over even a Cleverly led Tories?
Yes. Destroying the Conservatives as a political force is the objective, regardless of leader.
Reform would then destroy themselves.
And the right of centre voters coalesce around a new project. Or the uber right populists swoop in. The desire to crush socialists and communists wont go away just because the branding does.
Or the LibDems become the mainstream alternative to Labour, and everything further right is the political fringe.
No-one from the LibDems seems to want to replace Davey. Yet, anyway.
They've flatlined in national polling. They are giving ti achieve nothing in Scotland and Wales.
If they don't make sizable gains in England in May then it could be time for Daisy to pounce.
I’m not certain Daisy has a fundamentally different view as to how the LibDems should operate in this new political climate to Davey. A new leader would garner some publicity, but I don’t think voters are going to flock to the LibDems just because it’s Cooper rather than Davey in charge.
The party has built a brand as the sensible, grown up ones. Now, before Taz has conniptions I appreciate that’s not how they’re seen by many politicos, but that’s their brand nonetheless.
Therefore a calm, friendly succession process to Daisy when the time is right, with some cheerful competition in the leadership election, would be the most on-brand approach.
The right time is probably either 6-12 months before the next election, or immediately after but from a position of, hopefully, a solid Westminster seat count.
There's nothing wrong as such with Davey's boring centre-left centrism with a pro-Europe, anti-Trumo tilt.
It's just that wholly unambitious as a platform.
I fear the Lib Dems have been so successful in socially liberal, middle class ex-Tory seats that they have embedded that small-c conservatism into their ethos.
I would rather the party embraced more 'radical centrism' with ideas for reforms that go beyond spending a bit more money here or there. That could be stealing the Green's clothes and being the party of the environment and renewables. Or making a bigger thing of marijuana legalisation policy. Or being the party of housebuilding given how much Labour has failed there. Or any number of other things given more than 2 minutes thought.
We're at a time of unprecedented shift in the British political landscape and the Lib Dems just seem to be a side show clinging onto their 70-80 seats with no voice in the national political debate. I think it's worth rolling the dice and seeing if a new leader can make themselves heard.
I listened to Any Questions and it was quite a revelation. They had a chacter on called Darren Grimes who I gathered as the programme went on was a Faragist. To say he was thick would only cover one of his most obvious faults and would be an insult to the other three female panellists.
Early on while I was listening I decided I would change my voting habit of a lifetime and vote Green. But every time Grimes opened his mouth it was clear that wasn't watertight I would have to vote for WHOEVER was most likely to keep Grimes out!
I still can't get over it. Doesn't Farage have any say who is going to appear as Reform's representative?
I turned it off quite quickly. Grimes unedited and unfiltered (regardless of political stance) was just not up to the minimal standard of coherence which an R4 audience expects. That the BBC should report on powerful people saying deranged and dim things is fine, but an R4 programme to discuss diverse viewpoints really should only select people capable of sustaining a discussion in a valuable way. It is there to report on the doings of the very dim, not to give them a platform. Other Reform characters (whose politics is no improvement) can do this.
Hope you're all enjoying the beginning of the cricket season. IPL just started
And right on cue, the road was white with hail an hour ago. The heating is on and I am wearing two jumpers and a woolly hat. Indoors. The County Championship starts in six days.
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
Cleverly is a donkey with no charisma
As I am not a Tory I would be delighted if Kemi was replaced, especially by Cleverly, as it will reduce the number of seats they will win.
Kemi is currently projected to win about 50 to 70 seats, tactical anti Reform votes could hold more Tory seats
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
Cleverly is a donkey with no charisma
As I am not a Tory I would be delighted if Kemi was replaced, especially by Cleverly, as it will reduce the number of seats they will win.
Kemi is currently projected to win about 50 to 70 seats, tactical anti Reform votes could hold more Tory seats
Am I the only person on the left who would rather see a ReFukker elected than a Tory?
Short term pain for long term gain.
I can understand you take the line you would vote Reform over the Kemi led Tories. Would you still vote Reform over even a Cleverly led Tories?
Yes. Destroying the Conservatives as a political force is the objective, regardless of leader.
Reform would then destroy themselves.
And the right of centre voters coalesce around a new project. Or the uber right populists swoop in. The desire to crush socialists and communists wont go away just because the branding does.
Or the LibDems become the mainstream alternative to Labour, and everything further right is the political fringe.
No-one from the LibDems seems to want to replace Davey. Yet, anyway.
They've flatlined in national polling. They are giving ti achieve nothing in Scotland and Wales.
If they don't make sizable gains in England in May then it could be time for Daisy to pounce.
I’m not certain Daisy has a fundamentally different view as to how the LibDems should operate in this new political climate to Davey. A new leader would garner some publicity, but I don’t think voters are going to flock to the LibDems just because it’s Cooper rather than Davey in charge.
The party has built a brand as the sensible, grown up ones. Now, before Taz has conniptions I appreciate that’s not how they’re seen by many politicos, but that’s their brand nonetheless.
Therefore a calm, friendly succession process to Daisy when the time is right, with some cheerful competition in the leadership election, would be the most on-brand approach.
The right time is probably either 6-12 months before the next election, or immediately after but from a position of, hopefully, a solid Westminster seat count.
There's nothing wrong as such with Davey's boring centre-left centrism with a pro-Europe, anti-Trumo tilt.
It's just that wholly unambitious as a platform.
I fear the Lib Dems have been so successful in socially liberal, middle class ex-Tory seats that they have embedded that small-c conservatism into their ethos.
I would rather the party embraced more 'radical centrism' with ideas for reforms that go beyond spending a bit more money here or there. That could be stealing the Green's clothes and being the party of the environment and renewables. Or making a bigger thing of marijuana legalisation policy. Or being the party of housebuilding given how much Labour has failed there. Or any number of other things given more than 2 minutes thought.
We're at a time of unprecedented shift in the British political landscape and the Lib Dems just seem to be a side show clinging onto their 70-80 seats with no voice in the national political debate. I think it's worth rolling the dice and seeing if a new leader can make themselves heard.
LD voters are mostly Nimbys now so they won’t be the party of mass house building. The Greens are already the party of marijuana legalisation and net zero, Labour under Ed Miliband also the latter and for solar panels everywhere
Anyone on the left will be feeling like a total mug if they vote Conservative to keep Reform out and then see their Tory MP filing into the same lobby as PM Farage for the next five years.
Anyone on the left will be feeling like a total mug if they vote Conservative to keep Reform out and then see their Tory MP filing into the same lobby as PM Farage for the next five years.
Vote Blue, Get Turquoise.
Only with Kemi is that likely, if Cleverly was Conservative leader he would likely not give Farage confidence and supply in a hung parliament but abstain
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
Cleverly is a donkey with no charisma
As I am not a Tory I would be delighted if Kemi was replaced, especially by Cleverly, as it will reduce the number of seats they will win.
Kemi is currently projected to win about 50 to 70 seats, tactical anti Reform votes could hold more Tory seats
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
Cleverly is a donkey with no charisma
As I am not a Tory I would be delighted if Kemi was replaced, especially by Cleverly, as it will reduce the number of seats they will win.
Kemi is currently projected to win about 50 to 70 seats, tactical anti Reform votes could hold more Tory seats
Am I the only person on the left who would rather see a ReFukker elected than a Tory?
Short term pain for long term gain.
I can understand you take the line you would vote Reform over the Kemi led Tories. Would you still vote Reform over even a Cleverly led Tories?
Yes. Destroying the Conservatives as a political force is the objective, regardless of leader.
Reform would then destroy themselves.
And the right of centre voters coalesce around a new project. Or the uber right populists swoop in. The desire to crush socialists and communists wont go away just because the branding does.
Or the LibDems become the mainstream alternative to Labour, and everything further right is the political fringe.
No-one from the LibDems seems to want to replace Davey. Yet, anyway.
They've flatlined in national polling. They are giving ti achieve nothing in Scotland and Wales.
If they don't make sizable gains in England in May then it could be time for Daisy to pounce.
I’m not certain Daisy has a fundamentally different view as to how the LibDems should operate in this new political climate to Davey. A new leader would garner some publicity, but I don’t think voters are going to flock to the LibDems just because it’s Cooper rather than Davey in charge.
The party has built a brand as the sensible, grown up ones. Now, before Taz has conniptions I appreciate that’s not how they’re seen by many politicos, but that’s their brand nonetheless.
Therefore a calm, friendly succession process to Daisy when the time is right, with some cheerful competition in the leadership election, would be the most on-brand approach.
The right time is probably either 6-12 months before the next election, or immediately after but from a position of, hopefully, a solid Westminster seat count.
There's nothing wrong as such with Davey's boring centre-left centrism with a pro-Europe, anti-Trumo tilt.
It's just that wholly unambitious as a platform.
I fear the Lib Dems have been so successful in socially liberal, middle class ex-Tory seats that they have embedded that small-c conservatism into their ethos.
I would rather the party embraced more 'radical centrism' with ideas for reforms that go beyond spending a bit more money here or there. That could be stealing the Green's clothes and being the party of the environment and renewables. Or making a bigger thing of marijuana legalisation policy. Or being the party of housebuilding given how much Labour has failed there. Or any number of other things given more than 2 minutes thought.
We're at a time of unprecedented shift in the British political landscape and the Lib Dems just seem to be a side show clinging onto their 70-80 seats with no voice in the national political debate. I think it's worth rolling the dice and seeing if a new leader can make themselves heard.
LD voters are mostly Nimbys now so they won’t be the party of mass house building. The Greens are already the party of marijuana legalisation and net zero, Labour under Ed Miliband also the latter and for solar panels everywhere
I listened to Any Questions and it was quite a revelation. They had a chacter on called Darren Grimes who I gathered as the programme went on was a Faragist. To say he was thick would only cover one of his most obvious faults and would be an insult to the other three female panellists.
Early on while I was listening I decided I would change my voting habit of a lifetime and vote Green. But every time Grimes opened his mouth it was clear that wasn't watertight I would have to vote for WHOEVER was most likely to keep Grimes out!
I still can't get over it. Doesn't Farage have any say who is going to appear as Reform's representative?
I turned it off quite quickly. Grimes unedited and unfiltered (regardless of political stance) was just not up to the minimal standard of coherence which an R4 audience expects. That the BBC should report on powerful people saying deranged and dim things is fine, but an R4 programme to discuss diverse viewpoints really should only select people capable of sustaining a discussion in a valuable way. It is there to report on the doings of the very dim, not to give them a platform. Other Reform characters (whose politics is no improvement) can do this.
Surely it's best that the BBC put up all the Reform options, so that the depth of talent becomes obvious.
There is a very curious question to be asked about Mr Grimes as to where he got his money from as it seems to have appeared in 1 very large payment.
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
Cleverly is a donkey with no charisma
As I am not a Tory I would be delighted if Kemi was replaced, especially by Cleverly, as it will reduce the number of seats they will win.
Kemi is currently projected to win about 50 to 70 seats, tactical anti Reform votes could hold more Tory seats
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
Cleverly is a donkey with no charisma
As I am not a Tory I would be delighted if Kemi was replaced, especially by Cleverly, as it will reduce the number of seats they will win.
Kemi is currently projected to win about 50 to 70 seats, tactical anti Reform votes could hold more Tory seats
Am I the only person on the left who would rather see a ReFukker elected than a Tory?
Short term pain for long term gain.
I’d sign up to that. Tory and Labour are complicit in the two-party stitch up that has paralysed our politics for two generations and ensured that every GE vote I have ever cast has been directed straight to the WPB. I’d vote for any party on offer as an alternative to the Tories, and any party other than the Tories on offer as an alternative to Labour.
Your thank you letter from PM Farage will be in the post. Farage would definitely beat Polanski especially if left of centre voters even vote Reform over the Tories and Labour. Starmer might still beat Farage, as might Streeting and a returned Burnham definitely beats Farage
Luckily my principled position, which I would hold regardless of where I lived, would direct me to vote Green before considering Reform, in my own current constituency. Thus I won’t ever be held responsible for future PM Farage. Unlike this site’s numpty in residence Leon, who will likely get it wrong for the fourth time in a row.
1. Last year, Reform, Conservatives, and Labour were close to level-pegging. Now, Reform are 7-8% clear of them. These are FPTP elections, not PR. What matters, is beating your main rival, not what your vote share is overall.
2. Most seats being contested were last fought in 2022. The Conservatives were 29% clear of Reform, then, and Labour 34% clear. Now, they're running well behind them.
3. Local by elections point to a big win for Reform. March's contests saw:
Reform 6,145 votes (29.3%) 5 seats (+4)
Conservatives 4,233 (20.3%) 4 seats (+1)
Labour 2,744, (13.1%) 1 seat, (-2)
Lib Dems, 3,710 (17.7%) 2 seats (-2)
Green Party 3,159 (15.1%) 3 seats (+2)
Independents lost 3 seats.
One should assume that even if Steven Fisher is wrong, the number of gains for Reform will be clear of 1,200, and bet accordingly.
Hope you're all enjoying the beginning of the cricket season. IPL just started
Most boring "sport" in the world!
You make this point often Sunil. I disagree. I rank sports, from most to least exciting, thus: Rugby union Cricket Golf (but only the Ryder Cup) American Football Rugby League Athletics Snooker Ice Hockey Football (unless I amwatching a game my daughter is playing) Basketball Formula One Tennis
Hope you're all enjoying the beginning of the cricket season. IPL just started
Most boring "sport" in the world!
You make this point often Sunil. I disagree. I rank sports, from most to least exciting, thus: Rugby union Cricket Golf (but only the Ryder Cup) American Football Rugby League Athletics Snooker Ice Hockey Football (unless I amwatching a game my daughter is playing) Basketball Formula One Tennis
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
Cleverly is a donkey with no charisma
As I am not a Tory I would be delighted if Kemi was replaced, especially by Cleverly, as it will reduce the number of seats they will win.
Kemi is currently projected to win about 50 to 70 seats, tactical anti Reform votes could hold more Tory seats
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
Cleverly is a donkey with no charisma
As I am not a Tory I would be delighted if Kemi was replaced, especially by Cleverly, as it will reduce the number of seats they will win.
Kemi is currently projected to win about 50 to 70 seats, tactical anti Reform votes could hold more Tory seats
Am I the only person on the left who would rather see a ReFukker elected than a Tory?
Short term pain for long term gain.
I can understand you take the line you would vote Reform over the Kemi led Tories. Would you still vote Reform over even a Cleverly led Tories?
Yes. Destroying the Conservatives as a political force is the objective, regardless of leader.
Reform would then destroy themselves.
And the right of centre voters coalesce around a new project. Or the uber right populists swoop in. The desire to crush socialists and communists wont go away just because the branding does.
Or the LibDems become the mainstream alternative to Labour, and everything further right is the political fringe.
No-one from the LibDems seems to want to replace Davey. Yet, anyway.
They've flatlined in national polling. They are giving ti achieve nothing in Scotland and Wales.
If they don't make sizable gains in England in May then it could be time for Daisy to pounce.
I’m not certain Daisy has a fundamentally different view as to how the LibDems should operate in this new political climate to Davey. A new leader would garner some publicity, but I don’t think voters are going to flock to the LibDems just because it’s Cooper rather than Davey in charge.
The party has built a brand as the sensible, grown up ones. Now, before Taz has conniptions I appreciate that’s not how they’re seen by many politicos, but that’s their brand nonetheless.
Therefore a calm, friendly succession process to Daisy when the time is right, with some cheerful competition in the leadership election, would be the most on-brand approach.
The right time is probably either 6-12 months before the next election, or immediately after but from a position of, hopefully, a solid Westminster seat count.
There's nothing wrong as such with Davey's boring centre-left centrism with a pro-Europe, anti-Trumo tilt.
It's just that wholly unambitious as a platform.
I fear the Lib Dems have been so successful in socially liberal, middle class ex-Tory seats that they have embedded that small-c conservatism into their ethos.
I would rather the party embraced more 'radical centrism' with ideas for reforms that go beyond spending a bit more money here or there. That could be stealing the Green's clothes and being the party of the environment and renewables. Or making a bigger thing of marijuana legalisation policy. Or being the party of housebuilding given how much Labour has failed there. Or any number of other things given more than 2 minutes thought.
We're at a time of unprecedented shift in the British political landscape and the Lib Dems just seem to be a side show clinging onto their 70-80 seats with no voice in the national political debate. I think it's worth rolling the dice and seeing if a new leader can make themselves heard.
LD voters are mostly Nimbys now so they won’t be the party of mass house building. The Greens are already the party of marijuana legalisation and net zero, Labour under Ed Miliband also the latter and for solar panels everywhere
Labour have decreased protection for protected species and are about to decrease it for protected areas, whilst reducing the need for Biodiversity Net Gain for damaging developments. Environmentalists are not going to be voting Labour, except by holding their nose and stopping Reform. The Conservatives did more for the environment than Labour. Not under Kemi they won't though.
Hope you're all enjoying the beginning of the cricket season. IPL just started
Most boring "sport" in the world!
You make this point often Sunil. I disagree. I rank sports, from most to least exciting, thus: Rugby union Cricket Golf (but only the Ryder Cup) American Football Rugby League Athletics Snooker Ice Hockey Football (unless I amwatching a game my daughter is playing) Basketball Formula One Tennis
You're conclusions are all wrong, Cookie.
Tennis and football (proper played with the feet football, natch) are my favourite sports. Followed probably by athletics (track, mostly).
That’s also not true, the books themselves aren’t sitting inside ChatGPT. It’s been given a set of training data that contains these books (I assume) and it has been trained on the basis of them.
The information in those books in inside the LLM. All of it. And can be retrieved, as has been demonstrated multiple times.
An amusing riff - write a prompt to get one LLM to tease out the large chunks of a given work from another LLM and reassemble them.
I don’t believe you are correct as I’ve said.
It has “learned” from a set of training data containing the books. And it has derived information from said data. But that’s not the same as just having the books.
It will still hallucinate and make up things that aren’t there. You cannot trust it to just blurt out a novel without very careful checking. Because it is probabilistic (something I wish the very worst rampers would understand), it CANNOT accurately represent a novel accurately and consistently.
Yet people have demonstrated, repeatedly that you can get entire works back from it. Using automated stitching together of the big chunks of original text you can prod them to regurgitate.
You can, in fact get one LLM to automate the process for you on another.
At which point it’s a philosophical question - the LLM training transforms the information into an internal representation. But the book(s) can be reconstituted.
The cherry on top is that they used pirate electronic versions
I don’t want to keep repeating this point but it’s a probabilistic model.
You cannot guarantee it will ever give you back correct information.
You stated it can give you back a whole novel. I’m not saying it cannot do that but that’s essentially the result of a fluke as opposed to actual knowledge. Because as I explained you can only ever say to some degree of PROBABILITY that what it provides is what we judge to be correct.
I know you and I disagree very strongly about AI but the facts are facts and we’d be good to understand those.
We may or may not disagree.
But if you can get back whole books with simple techniques, to 99%+ accuracy, isn’t that functionally equivalent to… getting the whole book?
To add to the fun - quite a few pirated books are OCR transcriptions from PDF. Complete with errors.
Where have you derived 99% from?
I suggest you read up on the experiments of pulling copyrighted works back out of LLM. You get chunks, which are easy to jigsaw back together, using the overlaps.
Hence the court cases.
OpenAI and the others are frantically trying to create guardrails to prevent this, but the researchers keep finding new ways in.
The question is basically, is Reform’s “peak” (assuming that was their peak) enough to sustain momentum until 2029?
Labour can play for time. So can the Tories.
Some signs like the Lib Dems in 2019 that Reform have got high on their own supply. They’re playing like the next election is next year, Farage has even repeated this claim more than once.
The next election is not going to be anytime soon. So their strategy is somewhat baffling to me.
1. Last year, Reform, Conservatives, and Labour were close to level-pegging. Now, Reform are 7-8% clear of them. These are FPTP elections, not PR. What matters, is beating your main rival, not what your vote share is overall.
2. Most seats being contested were last fought in 2022. The Conservatives were 29% clear of Reform, then, and Labour 34% clear. Now, they're running well behind them.
3. Local by elections point to a big win for Reform. March's contests saw:
Reform 6,145 votes (29.3%) 5 seats (+4)
Conservatives 4,233 (20.3%) 4 seats (+1)
Labour 2,744, (13.1%) 1 seat, (-2)
Lib Dems, 3,710 (17.7%) 2 seats (-2)
Green Party 3,159 (15.1%) 3 seats (+2)
Independents lost 3 seats.
One should assume that even if Steven Fisher is wrong, the number of gains for Reform will be clear of 1,200, and bet accordingly.
In the last 10 polls/fortnight before the 2025 local Elections Reform were, on average, just over 5 % points ahead of the Tories and on an increasing support trend. In the past 10 polls Reform are on average 7% points ahead of the Tories and are on a decreasing support trend They are better off against Labour than 2025 (8% ahead versus 3% ahead over same 10 polls)
But as 2025 showed there is not a direct correlation between polling and LE vote, Reform outpolled anything they had ever achieved in an opinion poll. Will they do the same with support declining? Will the Tory core stay home having seem what happened in 2025? What effect a relative weak area like London?
Theyll make 4 figure gains probably, but it wont look anywhere near as uniquely impresive as 2025
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
As a committed pro-semite (I'm technically Jewish and I was brought up on accounts of the horrors of 30s Germany and the necessity of Israel), I've really had enough of Netanyahu and current Israeli policy, and that doesn't make me an anti-semite. Obviously burning Jewish ambulances is both wrong and stupid, but I don't think that being critical of Israeli policy qualifies at all.
Typical succinct comment from @NickPalmer that many should take on board
Hope you're all enjoying the beginning of the cricket season. IPL just started
Most boring "sport" in the world!
You make this point often Sunil. I disagree. I rank sports, from most to least exciting, thus: Rugby union Cricket Golf (but only the Ryder Cup) American Football Rugby League Athletics Snooker Ice Hockey Football (unless I amwatching a game my daughter is playing) Basketball Formula One Tennis
You should get out more
I'd rather watch paint dry than watch snooker American Football is for drug addled freaks Baseball is Rounders
The one US Sport you have to watch to appreciate live is Basketball. The Knicks at MSG in the top tier full house is an incredible iccssion
Best ball sports for me Soccer in a full atmospheric older stadium not a prawn sandwich empirium Rugby Union in Cardiff Cricket Test Cricket Tennis not what it was
Athletics major events very entertaining more so indoors
Motor sports
F1 has become a joke Same engine manufacturer formulas more entertaining Moto GP Speedway Racing on occasions decent
Cycling Classics very very underrated, Tour De France a must see
Downhill Alpine best sport if all in my ipinion Biathlon live well worth a try...
That’s also not true, the books themselves aren’t sitting inside ChatGPT. It’s been given a set of training data that contains these books (I assume) and it has been trained on the basis of them.
The information in those books in inside the LLM. All of it. And can be retrieved, as has been demonstrated multiple times.
An amusing riff - write a prompt to get one LLM to tease out the large chunks of a given work from another LLM and reassemble them.
I don’t believe you are correct as I’ve said.
It has “learned” from a set of training data containing the books. And it has derived information from said data. But that’s not the same as just having the books.
It will still hallucinate and make up things that aren’t there. You cannot trust it to just blurt out a novel without very careful checking. Because it is probabilistic (something I wish the very worst rampers would understand), it CANNOT accurately represent a novel accurately and consistently.
Yet people have demonstrated, repeatedly that you can get entire works back from it. Using automated stitching together of the big chunks of original text you can prod them to regurgitate.
You can, in fact get one LLM to automate the process for you on another.
At which point it’s a philosophical question - the LLM training transforms the information into an internal representation. But the book(s) can be reconstituted.
The cherry on top is that they used pirate electronic versions
I don’t want to keep repeating this point but it’s a probabilistic model.
You cannot guarantee it will ever give you back correct information.
You stated it can give you back a whole novel. I’m not saying it cannot do that but that’s essentially the result of a fluke as opposed to actual knowledge. Because as I explained you can only ever say to some degree of PROBABILITY that what it provides is what we judge to be correct.
I know you and I disagree very strongly about AI but the facts are facts and we’d be good to understand those.
We may or may not disagree.
But if you can get back whole books with simple techniques, to 99%+ accuracy, isn’t that functionally equivalent to… getting the whole book?
To add to the fun - quite a few pirated books are OCR transcriptions from PDF. Complete with errors.
Where have you derived 99% from?
I suggest you read up on the experiments of pulling copyrighted works back out of LLM. You get chunks, which are easy to jigsaw back together, using the overlaps.
Hence the court cases.
OpenAI and the others are frantically trying to create guardrails to prevent this, but the researchers keep finding new ways in.
Using multiple LLMs and jigsawing, others have kicked those results up from 90%+ to over 99%
The jigsaw technique is of interest - a friend at uni, many years ago wrote software to deconstruct layers of historical texts from the multiple inaccurate /modified versions we have. He also did authorial analysis to detect writing styles.
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
As a committed pro-semite (I'm technically Jewish and I was brought up on accounts of the horrors of 30s Germany and the necessity of Israel), I've really had enough of Netanyahu and current Israeli policy, and that doesn't make me an anti-semite. Obviously burning Jewish ambulances is both wrong and stupid, but I don't think that being critical of Israeli policy qualifies at all.
Typical succinct comment from @NickPalmer that many should take on board
Needs a fellow Jew to take him out.
Improve the chance of global peace no end
That seems harsh, poor Nick.
Indeed. Normally, I’m on board for reducing head count in the Communist section, but that’s OTT
The question is basically, is Reform’s “peak” (assuming that was their peak) enough to sustain momentum until 2029?
Labour can play for time. So can the Tories.
Some signs like the Lib Dems in 2019 that Reform have got high on their own supply. They’re playing like the next election is next year, Farage has even repeated this claim more than once.
The next election is not going to be anytime soon. So their strategy is somewhat baffling to me.
They cant keep the rage they politically feed off going for 5 years. Nor can they keep saying Britain needs reform without offering a vision of that reform. You dont set a defection cut off date of the LEs if you expect the LEs to help seal the deal You dont keep attacking the opposition if you think you can beat the government You dont atrack pollsters unless youre wobbling
Hope you're all enjoying the beginning of the cricket season. IPL just started
And right on cue, the road was white with hail an hour ago. The heating is on and I am wearing two jumpers and a woolly hat. Indoors. The County Championship starts in six days.
A tiny bit of hail in the east London 'burbs, but only for a few seconds!
I see that the far-left takeover of the (no longer) Green Party means that they are now infested with antisemites.
Since the pitiful 'Greens are anti NATO' tactic has proved entirely fruitless, obviously the media is now going full on Maoist bicycle on the road to Auschwitz. Possibly won't work as well as it did with Jezza because as far as I know the Greens don't have an active section of the party plotting to bring down Zack.
The sense of entitlement from Labour is extreme.
The exodus to the Greens is not being driven by anti-semitism, it is being driven by the Reform-adjacent policies of the Labour Party.
Is Starmer proposing withdrawal from the ECHR? Deportation of those with settled residence status? Banning the Burka? Banning Muslim prayers in public? Ending the 2 child benefit cap only for those in work? Abolishing inheritance tax? Bringing back more grammar schools via free schools? Increasing oil production? Scrapping EDI schemes? Scrapping net zero? Scrapping completely the family farm and family business tax not just raising the threshold for it? Not that I have noticed yet Farage has proposed all of those policies
And that is why you are a de facto Faragist hiding behind a pro Cleverly agenda
What utter rubbish, Reform lead the polls, if I was really a Faragist I would already have defected to Reform! Cleverly also offers a more moderate One Nation style agenda than Kemi's more Farage adjacent policies anyway
Cleverly is a donkey with no charisma
As I am not a Tory I would be delighted if Kemi was replaced, especially by Cleverly, as it will reduce the number of seats they will win.
That's interesting. Why do you think she's a more attractive leader than Cleverly? Also as a non Tory the only possible Tory leader I could think of voting for is Cleverly and that's because I saw him on Newsnight a while ago and he was genuinely funny. Something Kemi is not!
Anyone on the left will be feeling like a total mug if they vote Conservative to keep Reform out and then see their Tory MP filing into the same lobby as PM Farage for the next five years.
Vote Blue, Get Turquoise.
This may well prove a major Tory problem, and there is only one route out of it that I can see.
Labour hold 400 seats, so are the most obvious tactical 'Not Reform' choice. In up to 100 seats where LDs are Labour's proxy, LD is the obvious tactical choice. The Tories are not the first tactical choice beyond their 120 seats, and in those they will only be so if they are committed to opposing Reform AND voters believe them.
Their one and only route out is to be so brilliant for the next two years, and have some luck, that the polling shifts to the Tories being nicely ahead of Reform. Then and only then, the question reverses. You don't ask the Tories if they will back Reform; you ask Reform if they will back the Tories. Tory problem solved.
You then vote Tory because you want a Centre Right government. This outcome is unlikely.
Comments
Low Labour turnout at locals when in government has been a perennial since the Sixties.
I’ve frequently had people come to me with information that I know to be wrong and they’ve been unable to understand that what the AI has produced isn’t correct just because it came from ChatGPT.
Anyway on the new FON poll according to Nowcast it is still Farage heading for the Palace and No 10 even if Polanski would be LOTO.
Reform 270
Greens 99
LDs 75
Tories 74
Labour 43
https://electionmaps.uk/nowcast/custom
Hence the court cases.
OpenAI and the others are frantically trying to create guardrails to prevent this, but the researchers keep finding new ways in.
Multi-party swings of that size have never happened before and the simplistic models aren't calibrated to give any kind of meaningful prediction.
Vote Lib Dem!
The DUP and TUV would give Farage and Reform confidence and supply too
Short term pain for long term gain.
War bonuses for everyone except the Russian shill and the Prime Minister hated by the Leader of the free world.
He is not fit to be PM
Youd think Reform were polling in the 40s listening to this twat, not about as well as Sunak a year in
Reform would then destroy themselves.
But as a bit of fun, treat it as a Choose Your Own Adventure scenario;
It's May 2029, and the result is the one above. Those numbers leave 89 MPs unaccounted for. That makes rough sense- 18 in NI, 32 in Wales, 59 in Scotland, a few odds and ends.
Reform are on 270, let's give them the 9 from the DUP.
Definitely anti-Reform are on 217. SNP and Plaid will contribute at least 62, maybe a few more.
Imagine that you are the Leader of the Conservative Party. You have three options:
A ) Row in behind Reform, either in full coalition or in supply+confidence. Turn to page 147, where you find that you have split your party in the short term (the residual wets, wet as they are, will surely have some limits) and caused a Clegg-like collapse in the longer term.
B ) Unite with the anti-Reformers in voting down Farage. Turn to page 92 and read about how the wrath of the right-wing media burns with the heat of a thousand Suns (and a million GB Newses) and takes you and your party with it. Reform win a landslide in the October 2029 election and the Conservatives are dead.
C ) Sit on the sidelines. That narrative is on page 94; you get flack from both sides and are generally laughed at for your irrelevance.
Being leader of a minor party in a hung parliament is much less fun than it sounds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Friendly
The desire to crush socialists and communists wont go away just because the branding does.
And now Starmer, who would probably have made a good Attorney General or even Home Secretary.
Verian Poll - REFUK 25, Green 20 (hang on now)
However, I'm deriving some satisfaction from Reform's steady, but sure, decline. FON usually had them higher than others - a cursory glance shows Reform at over 30% with them for at least a year until the last couple of months. Their most recent polls have had them at 26/25/25/24. Good news.
If they don't make sizable gains in England in May then it could be time for Daisy to pounce.
https://x.com/is_glasgow/status/2037852482563448987?s=20
Now 2 months later 24%, and 6%, 4% and 8% respectively.
Reform havent had a double digit lead with anyone since March 2nd.
Looking back the apex of Reforms lead was just before conference season, declining since and now at an apparently increasing rate.
The real risk of undershooting expectations by some way is there
In 2024 the Tories were detested and there was a clear mood amongst the electorate to get them out. This translated a low % share for Labour into a grotesque super-landslide.
In 2029 Reform will be detested. We have already seen how the Stop Reform vote is agile enough to switch focus to whomever is best placed to block the fukers.
So the FON poll seat map is wrong. Because it ignores the tactical desperation which will propel forward Labour Tory LD Green Plaid SNP candidates to Stop Reform.
Therefore a calm, friendly succession process to Daisy when the time is right, with some cheerful competition in the leadership election, would be the most on-brand approach.
The right time is probably either 6-12 months before the next election, or immediately after but from a position of, hopefully, a solid Westminster seat count.
Tories would increase seats if they ditch Badenoch
LD will at least retain all seats with a more serious leader.
Reform are also rans without Farage
Greens are also rans without Polanski
Go figure.
And he may prove to be a big vote winner for the non far right in the USA itself this autumn, though that presupposes it will be a free and fair election.
The most interesting element of 'Reform 270' is that it means 'Not Reform' is way ahead at 380 minus speaker minus SF refusers minus NI Reform fellow travellers minus any even more extreme parties beginning with R. Say 380-20=360.
This being 90 more seats than Reform, they are going to need about 50 Tories to get a King's speech through. Such Tories as are elected will be in the more centrist, less Reformy Tory seats. People like Tugendhat and Hunt.
At this point the Tory party doesn't look like it has a future. But if it did, it wouldn't be as compliant congress to a rampant Faragetrump. It would be in the Tory interest to destroy Reform by ensuring it didn't form a government at its last chance, 2029.
Early on while I was listening I decided I would change my voting habit of a lifetime and vote Green. But every time Grimes opened his mouth it was clear that wasn't watertight I would have to vote for WHOEVER was most likely to keep Grimes out!
I still can't get over it. Doesn't Farage have any say who is going to appear as Reform's representative?
Even then, I might have a change of heart and draw a cock and balls instead.
It's just that wholly unambitious as a platform.
I fear the Lib Dems have been so successful in socially liberal, middle class ex-Tory seats that they have embedded that small-c conservatism into their ethos.
I would rather the party embraced more 'radical centrism' with ideas for reforms that go beyond spending a bit more money here or there. That could be stealing the Green's clothes and being the party of the environment and renewables. Or making a bigger thing of marijuana legalisation policy. Or being the party of housebuilding given how much Labour has failed there. Or any number of other things given more than 2 minutes thought.
We're at a time of unprecedented shift in the British political landscape and the Lib Dems just seem to be a side show clinging onto their 70-80 seats with no voice in the national political debate. I think it's worth rolling the dice and seeing if a new leader can make themselves heard.
A Stratotanker is squawking 7700 (declaring in-flight emergency); doing orbits off the coast of the UK, likely to burn off some fuel.
🇺🇸 KC-135R 57-1479 #AE0160
https://bsky.app/profile/vcdgf555.bsky.social/post/3mi4tqzxjak22
Orbán’s Ceaușescu moment. Booed at his own rally, ranting and pointing fingers. His final message: Ukraine hatred.
https://bsky.app/profile/palmapolyak.bsky.social/post/3mi445an6qc2m
Vote Blue, Get Turquoise.
There is a very curious question to be asked about Mr Grimes as to where he got his money from as it seems to have appeared in 1 very large payment.
1. Last year, Reform, Conservatives, and Labour were close to level-pegging. Now, Reform are 7-8% clear of them. These are FPTP elections, not PR. What matters, is beating your main rival, not what your vote share is overall.
2. Most seats being contested were last fought in 2022. The Conservatives were 29% clear of Reform, then, and Labour 34% clear. Now, they're running well behind them.
3. Local by elections point to a big win for Reform. March's contests saw:
Reform 6,145 votes (29.3%) 5 seats (+4)
Conservatives 4,233 (20.3%) 4 seats (+1)
Labour 2,744, (13.1%) 1 seat, (-2)
Lib Dems, 3,710 (17.7%) 2 seats (-2)
Green Party 3,159 (15.1%) 3 seats (+2)
Independents lost 3 seats.
One should assume that even if Steven Fisher is wrong, the number of gains for Reform will be clear of 1,200, and bet accordingly.
Rugby union
Cricket
Golf (but only the Ryder Cup)
American Football
Rugby League
Athletics
Snooker
Ice Hockey
Football (unless I amwatching a game my daughter is playing)
Basketball
Formula One
Tennis
Tennis and football (proper played with the feet football, natch) are my favourite sports. Followed probably by athletics (track, mostly).
https://x.com/ZackPolanski/status/1022434202443309061
Labour can play for time. So can the Tories.
Some signs like the Lib Dems in 2019 that Reform have got high on their own supply. They’re playing like the next election is next year, Farage has even repeated this claim more than once.
The next election is not going to be anytime soon. So their strategy is somewhat baffling to me.
In the past 10 polls Reform are on average 7% points ahead of the Tories and are on a decreasing support trend
They are better off against Labour than 2025 (8% ahead versus 3% ahead over same 10 polls)
But as 2025 showed there is not a direct correlation between polling and LE vote, Reform outpolled anything they had ever achieved in an opinion poll. Will they do the same with support declining? Will the Tory core stay home having seem what happened in 2025? What effect a relative weak area like London?
Theyll make 4 figure gains probably, but it wont look anywhere near as uniquely impresive as 2025
American Football is for drug addled freaks
Baseball is Rounders
The one US Sport you have to watch to appreciate live is Basketball. The Knicks at MSG in the top tier full house is an incredible iccssion
Best ball sports for me
Soccer in a full atmospheric older stadium not a prawn sandwich empirium
Rugby Union in Cardiff
Cricket Test Cricket
Tennis not what it was
Athletics major events very entertaining more so indoors
Motor sports
F1 has become a joke
Same engine manufacturer formulas more entertaining
Moto GP
Speedway Racing on occasions decent
Cycling Classics very very underrated, Tour De France a must see
Downhill Alpine best sport if all in my ipinion
Biathlon live well worth a try...
Horse Racing Flat boring NH far better
Using multiple LLMs and jigsawing, others have kicked those results up from 90%+ to over 99%
The jigsaw technique is of interest - a friend at uni, many years ago wrote software to deconstruct layers of historical texts from the multiple inaccurate /modified versions we have. He also did authorial analysis to detect writing styles.
Darren Johnson
@DarrenJohnson66
·
1h
The Canary is blaming Israel for the glitch in the electronic voting system, of course.
"Now it seems the Israel lobby is trying to take matters into its own hands."
https://x.com/nicolelampert/status/2037862866271801734
You dont set a defection cut off date of the LEs if you expect the LEs to help seal the deal
You dont keep attacking the opposition if you think you can beat the government
You dont atrack pollsters unless youre wobbling
Emporers New Government In Waiting
possible Tory leader I could think of voting for is Cleverly and that's because I saw him on Newsnight a while ago and he was genuinely funny. Something Kemi is not!
Labour hold 400 seats, so are the most obvious tactical 'Not Reform' choice. In up to 100 seats where LDs are Labour's proxy, LD is the obvious tactical choice. The Tories are not the first tactical choice beyond their 120 seats, and in those they will only be so if they are committed to opposing Reform AND voters believe them.
Their one and only route out is to be so brilliant for the next two years, and have some luck, that the polling shifts to the Tories being nicely ahead of Reform. Then and only then, the question reverses. You don't ask the Tories if they will back Reform; you ask Reform if they will back the Tories. Tory problem solved.
You then vote Tory because you want a Centre Right government. This outcome is unlikely.