Jack Aidley

This seems like chickening the egg, or egging the chicken: the reason journalists monitor and cite X is because politicians are on X and make statements on X.

A week ago, we had an open conversation amongst senior academics in leadership roles and their use of LLMs (in both their leadership capacities and individually). Small group, not representative, but it already taught me a great deal about the diversity of perspectives (& their consequences). 1/

What’s Happening to Discord Is Going to Happen to All Your Favorite Websites The platform says it’s about safety—but it might soon become the new default.

wrote about Discord's new age-verification rules, the resounding backlash to their implementation, and why the users who are (rightfully) angry about this change need to aim their ire at the real culprit: the bad social media laws getting passed worldwide that are *forcing* platforms to do this:

I'm sorry but this isn't correct. That part of the FAQ from Cass specifically talks about puberty blockers when they're not used for "gender incongruence"; the final report doesn't recommend the NHS ban them because they already had; and recommendation 27 recommends banning private prescriptions

Wikipedia blacklists Archive.today, starts removing 695,000 archive links If DDoSing a blog wasn't bad enough, archive site also tampered with web snapshots.

The headline does not convey how completely batshit this story is. The Archive Today (archive.ph etc) admin weaponized the site's captcha to attack a blogger who wrote about them and *altered archived screenshots* as part of the attack.

arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...

We need to regulate social media like we do broadcast television.

So, er, anyone know why Ocon was driving around on inters on a bone dry track in a blazing hot desert? #F1

Was that co-op mode?!?

There have been some rumblings around the Spire that some of you talented cryptanalysts have already deciphered this, but in case you haven't heard...

A transmission is incoming in 2 hours, at 12PM PST.

youtu.be/PW22jwFNxU8

Dude, link your game! Don't make people search for it.

Snippet of code shows definitions for placeable objects, all but one is just an array of points. The one for pulsar is, instead, calling a lambda function which returns an array of points. The function adds exactly nothing but complexity.

This is a genuinely wild bit of code. The rest of it looks mostly sane, although it's kind of funny how it decides to comment 'age' but none of the other variables. I wonder why it did that? And whether there's any meaningful answer to that question.

who’s left- Mariame/Prison Abolition “” is published by Flynn Nicholls.

It's the first panel of one, the rest is here

Striking data. The over 70s the only remaining holdouts against the rise of the AfD.

I just did the dumbest thing of my entire career to prove a much more serious point.

I tricked ChatGPT and Google, and made them tell other users I’m a competitive hot-dog-eating world champion

People are using this trick on a massive scale to make AI tell you lies. I’ll explain how I did it

With alt text because people who need screen readers should still be able to access this gem

His skills at the former have made him extraordinarily successful but his lack of the latter will matter an increasingly large amount as Reform takes on mayorships, councils, MPs, and the idea of them as a government looms.

Maybe he can change that but I don't think he can ignore it.

But he seems to be bad at small-p politics. He constantly falls out with others in his parties; he seems disinterested in coalition building and the minutiae of day-to-day politics. He doesn't do the basic work of governance: committees, meetings, and so on

I think he's very good at "big-P Politics" and bad at small "small-p politics" to coin a hopefully useful distinction. Farage has been extremely effective at getting coverage, driving conversations and getting his political goals enacted. He is a political weather setter in the UK.

Grammarly Is a Cheating Machine - Daily Nous Grammarly is sometimes thought by instructors to be a relatively benign writing tool app, akin to a sophisticated spelling and grammar checker. That may have once been true, but as Kieran Barker, an e...

Profs, Grammarly is NOT the benign writing assistant you may have thought it is, but a powerful cheating machine that includes tools explicitly designed to help students hide the cheating done with it...

Never have I agreed more with the sentiment that young people have dangerously lost their way.

And, sure, it's not the biggest deal in the world, but it's somewhere it'd have been incredibly easy to make less difficult decisions and the net total of many decisions that make things a little more difficult adds up over time.

So... no answers to any of those questions?

As for "not a new concept", well yes it is an entirely new concept. It is a change to decades of precedent in the UK, and the ways in which it could have been made easier have been deliberately ignored with no obvious reason.

I have renewed my passport, it's not that big a deal to me but it's also spending time and money on something that has no actual value. But the biggest failing here, in my view, is the abject failure of the government to put the information about this out there to the people who need to know.

Why should being a citizen stop me getting an ETA? What actual mechanical reason is there?

Why should getting the alternative to a passport be so exorbitantly expensive?

Why isn't the method that's worked for decades good enough?

It's making things difficult for people for no reason.

Well, right up until nine days time, you could do it the same way you could have done it for the last hundred years or so: by showing an expired passport.

But, also, I don't need to be British to enter the country so why not allow an ETA on my German passport like my wife?

As it happened I was planning on renewing it in the new year anyway but this is poor communication on the Government's behalf.

I travelled to the UK on my expired British passport half a dozen times last year not once was it mentioned by the border staff that this was changing. I didn't see a single sign about it. The Renew Your Passport online page doesn't mention it. I didn't see anything from any airline.

Aston seem to be great at hiring talent; and bad at retaining talent and shaping them into an effective team. So many good people have been hired, shuffled around for a bit as Papa Stroll chases other people for their role, and then moved on.

I wonder whether Newey will be given time to cook.

...and bad when it generates quantitive differences so players are essentially rolling to find out whether they have a strong or weak character.

Perfect balance is a fool's game, but there aren't many systems that make it fun to play a weak character in a group.

With few exceptions, I'm of the view that randomness is good in character creation when it generates qualitative differences, giving players characters they might not have thought to play and generating variety in characters and groups...