Olivier Usher

@gork is this true

I am 100% sure that the “we are a republic not a democracy” discourse you get about the USA is because they are separate options in the government menu in Civilization 1.

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It was sent to me via the WhatsApp App, which I downloaded from the App Store App.

What is common knowledge in your field but shocks outsiders?

There is no "scientific method".

Everybody’s happy when someone manages to play DOOM on their toaster, but they aren’t laughing when Iran builds a missile guidance system from a vape.

Déménagez en province, devenez violet.

🎉correct!🎉

Never had you down as one of those people who rants about people speaking foreign languages on public transport

Are we heading for a version of Betteridge’s Law of Headlines? We think LLM AI might just possibly be useful in other people’s fields, in our own field, we can tell it is going to be hopelessly inadequate.

It’s a seemingly reliable tool for jobs we don’t understand are being done badly.

Edinburgh 2012 and 2017
East Renfrewshire 2012 and 2017
Highland 2012
Dumfries and Galloway 2017 and 2022
Fife 2017
South Ayrshire 2017

Probably others that I haven't checked.

All that said, coalitions aren't everything. The current administration doesn't have a majority. The 2007 parliament was nowhere near a majority (SNP only had a plurality of 1!).

Certainly more stable than a minority Con/Ref and SNP/Green coalition. And while Lab/LD would obviously get on far better with each other, they would also have far fewer seats, which doesn't lead to effective government.

I don't know that that's actually true. Plenty of councils have been run by SNP/Lab coalitions. Wales had PC/Lab in the Senedd for a term. The points of actual friction on policy would be minimal and there's a core of fairly pragmatic politicians in both parties who would probably work together ~OK.

The scenario that is both the banter scenario, but also the good governance scenario, is obviously SNP+Labour.
They hate each other's guts, but basically agree on the broad strokes of everything that's actually within Holyrood's power.

Boss move for Ramaphosa would be to offer Musk political asylum.

An attempt to answer this in slightly longer form: ojusher.medium.com/should-we-be...

…is it any surprise that you see vaccine hesitancy among people in the health services just like you do among the general public? (7/7)

So - given a) that vaccines are a public health intervention being delivered by staff who are not public health professionals, and b) they are weighing up all the same (individual and public) pros and (individual) cons as everyone else… (6/7)

Vaccines make a huge amount of sense as public health measures, but it’s just a fact that the risk:reward ratio for individuals varies. It’s selfish (from a public health perspective) but it’s *not irrational* (for an individual) to refuse a vax yourself and want to benefit from herd immunity. (5/7)

(As it happens, the NHS, thanks to its institutional setup, is somewhat closer to the public health end of things than most comparable countries, but that’s an aside.) (4/7)

And in most countries, for mostly good reasons, healthcare services are *not* focused primarily on public health but on treating the individual patient, seeking their consent and making the decisions best *for them*. (3/7)

It’s a quirk of how they usually get administered (i.e. injections) that they get implemented by medical professionals within healthcare settings, unlike most public health interventions. But that doesn’t make them healthcare in the way most medical treatments are. (2/7)

So, I did my master’s dissertation on vax controversies (caveat: 20 years ago).

And I think an important but overlooked point is that vaccines are public health interventions (like water fluoridation, or cold chain, or ULEZ), far more than they are medical interventions. (1/7)

Yeah I agree, but it’s an interesting thought experiment. And I think it’s interesting that IP protections have ratcheted up for a century as if it were just a law of nature. Turns out they can be ratcheted down too…

How about: big business gets to use creatives’ outputs to train their AI for free, and in return the creatives get to use whatever warez they like?

You can! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasipr...

Can I ask a related question: is the value and the services created by AI (and those destroyed) a test case for what would happen if we stopped enforcing IP rights in the rest of the economy?

The widely-held British conviction that British train fares are a rip off and Europe’s are a bargain very much does not survive contact with the reality of French and German intercity fares. Ooft.