Stuart Watt

Before you know it you have a US-style insurance-based system where it costs a bazillion dollars to get an aspirin.

The only way to make a sensible economy is to pool costs by paying for things together. That’s called taxes.

If we don’t pay together, you pay alone.

The logical conclusion of this mindset is an end to the entire public sector.

You need a doctor? Well, if they need to pay for the degree, they need to earn that back in public money. And so do their teachers. You’re just transferring all these costs onto whoever pays for healthcare.

I’d say look at Brexit. It’s been a complete disaster. The only one to gain from it was Russia. Most would reverse it if they could, but that’s impossible now.

You *cannot* make yourself small and independent and then negotiate a deal that will do anything other than destroy you.

As a former member of Open University faculty and someone who did their PhD there *on AI* I cannot tell you how angry I am at that comparison. Thank you for raising this.

This is the biggest targeted training programme since Harold Wilson started the Open University (note).

Open to all UK adults online, taking as little as under 20 minutes, the courses will give

founding partners - Accenture, Amazon, Barclays, BT, Google, IBM, Intuit, Microsoft, Sage, SAS and Salesforce to take the Al Skills Boost programme to the next level and upskill 10 million workers with Al skills by 2030.

The government’s suggestion that rolling out 20 minute courses on writing “AI“ prompts, sponsored by Google, Microsoft and Amazon, is somehow comparable to the founding of the Open University (the Wilson government‘s, & Jennie Lee’s, proudest achievement), is an insult to our human intelligence.

This post is nothing to do with me being forced to make another batch of gluten free beer against my will.

I hate this modern trend in globalization to have one manufacturer for a unique product that then simply decides to shut down. Product gone.

Bye Candi Syrup. Some of us will miss you.

A plastic pouch of an extremely dark liquid, labelled “D-240”, ingredients listed as beet sugar and water.

Well. I used to use Candi Syrup D-240 as a key ingredient in my gluten free stout.

I say used to, as apparently they shut down all manufacture last year.

I suspect it’s simply caramelized beet syrup, but I do not know for sure. I guess in the not too distant I’ll have to try to make some.

on no account should you allow a vegon to read poetry to you Alt: “On no account should you allow a vegon to read poetry to you”

I’ve heard some terrible things in my life but nothing — not a single thing — comes even close to these new Adobe Acrobat AI ads.

I would strongly prefer Vogon poetry.

I’m getting suspicious that all these tech companies are using AI panels to test their AI ads, hence they’re all donkey doodoo.

I could argue that one of the great evils of modern information tech is the myth that attitudes are stable. We learn by changing. We live in communities of practice that put these forces of attraction and repulsion (and Lewinesque field maps are great btw) in a dynamic tension, not a static one.

So, again, I conclude that current LLMs are architecturally incapable of achieving semantic depth. If they could do it, they would have done by now.

Instead, they’re strongly oriented to generating the superficial appearance of semantic depth.

Nothing new I guess, but a nice demonstration. 4/

The intriguing part is that we can see there is no chunking. There are no semantic relationships. We know cities don’t duplicate street names. We know walls enclose a city, not one roundabout.

None of that is happening here. Our human background knowledge/common sense is missing in action. 3/

Remember, a good way to think about AI is that it’s making a lossy compressed version of the training data.

This is definitely apparent here — at the surface detail level. Everything is “-gate” and Stonegate is everywhere.

If you know York, that bit tracks. 2/

I remember a group of my cognitive psych students once did an experiment on expert knowledge and maps. A variant on theories of chunking for recall.

Basically, can experts remember more because they use patterns rather than details? (The answer is yes) 1/

Gemini looks like a map from a TTRPG where we have the island of York. It has included Clifford's Tower and the Shambles. But everything else is random.

25/n

ChatGPT has just given up here. We have the Minster and Clifford's Tower. Street names are random, although I like that it's renamed Coppergate as Willygate!

24/n

This thread is hilarious — scroll for the funniest AI maps.

Good plan. Here it was deep but light. Just annoying when the wind caught it and blew a shovelful back in my face.

It does feel like that. So frustrating.

What is it that happens every single time ten minutes after shoveling snow from the driveway?

Every single time, within minutes, they drive by again and rebuild the Great Wall of Snow in front of the driveway.

How do they know?

The thing I learned from living in the UK during Murdoch’s ascendancy.

In today’s society, there is no meaningful boundary between press and government. To all intents and purposes, Big Media perceives itself the government PR department. As they put it “It’s The Sun Wot Won It”

Anthropic's philosopher says we don't know for sure if AI can feel.

Kwik Fit's Thought Sommelier said my offside rear tyre might have a rich inner life

Gods I hate AI. I ask how long to roast cauliflower, and I get a hundred ad-packed web pages on the Maillard reaction.

Good question this. I’d say it’s biological essentialism all the way down, both IQ and gender. There has to be some “objective” basis for their supremacy. Hence the resurgence of eugenics and natalism.

And frankly, biological essentialism is bollocks. Which is why we need to burn it down.

“What force or guile could not subdue,
Thro' many warlike ages,
Is wrought now by a coward few
For hireling traitor's wages.”

I’ll be toasting with a dram and a haggis tonight. And tomorrow, let’s clean out the rogues.

So nothing I guess. That’s probably why they were initially reluctant to allow any interpreters into apps, even JS. Even Cordova was on shaky ground for quite some time.

They’re literally the Black and Tans. All those J6ers who were pardoned and released have signed up to harass, hurt and kill innocent people.

It’s going to be a version of the Troubles, but on a continental scale.

So unnecessary.

“Like all true aristocrats, like the patricians of republican Rome or the squires of old England, these powerful men affected a great severity in their habits and customs. They were the ascetics of wealth. At the meetings of the trusts an observer would have noticed their smooth and puffy faces, their lantern cheeks, their sunken eyes and wrinkled brows. With bodies more withered, complexions yellower, lips drier, and eyes filled with a more burning fanaticism than those of the old Spanish monks, these multimillionaires gave themselves up with inextinguishable ardour to the austerities of banking and industry. Several, denying themselves all happiness, all pleasure, and all rest, spent their miserable lives in rooms without light or air, furnished only with electrical apparatus, living on eggs and milk, and sleeping on camp beds. By doing nothing except pressing nickel buttons with their fingers, these mystics heaped up riches of which they never even saw the signs, and acquired the vain possibility of gratifying desires that they never experienced.” (Anatole France, “Penguin Island”, published 1908)

There is lot of app-level sandboxing and signing and they probably trust that to at least stop rogue code attacking other apps, the system, and the app code itself. Don’t think it lets code just execute any old stuff. Probably a lot of blocks on execute permissions on memory pages.