Martin Murray

YouTube video by Pivot with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway Netflix and Paramount Face Off for Warner Bros: Who Will Win the Bidding War? | Pivot

This, on the battle for Warner. It’s about business issues, but the politics are underneath the discussion and keep surfacing, with Galloway interesting on monopolisation in tech/media and Swisher on point about the depredations of Hollywood. Towards the end, they focus on other parties involved.

‘In newspapers and on television, every reference to a council estate is prefixed with the word ‘tough’, as though bare knuckle boxing is the leisure activity of choice for every British person who doesn’t own their own home.’

How A.I. and Social Media Contribute to ‘Brain Rot’

Discuss, or alternatively, ask Chat GPT.

Well Boy George and Glenn Tilbrook attended and did pretty well, although of course they were both expelled.

Meta Raises Its Spending Forecast on A.I. to Above $70 Billion

Not risky at all (as I’m sure Nick Clegg would say).

YouTube video by GBH Music Lankum – Live at WGBH

This is an excellent short Lankum performance IMO, in which they play three of their most powerful, dark and slightly manic rearrangements of traditional Irish songs: The Wild Rover/Rocky Road to Dublin/Bear Creek.

Nvidia to Invest $100 Billion in OpenAI

Astonishing figures. OAI might be worth $.5tn, but plans to invest that amount in US data centres alone. It will have to make even more to pay off investors. Only one example of a tech. company with a huge valuation financed by other tech. companies. Analysts predict a market correction - at least.

An actual quote from the Secretary of State for Business and Trade

Too often people go to university to ‘explore research and knowledge’

Look forward to Wes S saying 'too often people go to hospital to have operations' or Heidi Alexander saying 'too often people go to the station to catch a train'

I have to tell you, there’s a big difference between ‘absolute truth’ and a set of questionable generalisations that happen to match your experience.

Brexit has cost the UK creative sector an estimated €184 million.

Reporter: The FDA has a new AI tool that's intended to speed up drug approvals. But several FDA employees say the new AI helper is making up studies that do not exist. One FDA employee telling us, 'Anything that you don't have time to double check is unreliable. It hallucinates confidently'

French president and wife sue rightwing US commentator Candace Owens for defamation Owens has claimed that France’s first lady, Brigitte Macron, is a man, and that French president is controlled by CIA

Good. Defamatory lying on social media is the aggressive business model of the 21st Century - pioneered by Alex Jones and copied by Candace Owen. It’s like a hostile takeover bid on a personal level. Horrible, disturbed and disturbing.

And yes, this isn’t atypical in big cities - in fact cities - in a globalised world, and the right-wing depiction of them as dystopic is nonsense. But the sense that they’ve simply got better does beg the question: better for who?

Which is to say that the city, in general and historically, has got wealthier and many of the ‘once very deprived areas’ now have richer people in them. One example among many: Shoreditch. Sure, there are poorer areas, but poorer populations have generally been pushed to the outskirts and beyond.

People aren’t denying it, but neither are they saying it.

Yes, London is safer and ‘nicer’ than it was, as the comments show. But many of the good things people appreciate about the city here have been coincident with gentrification. There are still areas that are deprived and where there is violence, and most poorer people have been priced and pushed out.

Estimates of amount lost annually due to decreased trade are £120-140bn.

I’m quite ready to believe that a good LLM could imitate, say, Nietzsche and even offer Nietzschean interpretations of different phenomena (although the quality and accuracy of them would be variable). But one of my questions is this: if Nietzsche hadn’t existed, could AI have invented him?

YouTube video by LankumDublin Radie Peat & Daragh Lynch (LANKUM) - 'Hares on the Mountain' from episode 3 of 'This Ain't No Disco'

Lovely, IMO.

In the long run, doctors get paid more than MPs. Taxing Jeff Bezos won’t solve the problems of the public finances - wealth taxes will help, but won’t be anywhere near enough. Ask the IFS and the OBR. It actually *isn’t* an easy problem to solve.

As I keep saying: if it's truth you want, read fiction, not 'true stories'. Fiction writers are honest liars. They're not out to con you. If you want to read a redemption narrative about going on a long walk, read The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry.

'I'm being paid to fix issues caused by AI' Businesses that rush to use AI to write content or computer code, often have to pay humans to fix it.

The biggest gap in people’s knowledge about AI right now is to do with what it can’t do, not what it can.

Don’t moralise?

Really? Are the guardian blatantly pitching for the teen readership now?

It’s in The Telegraph.

I don’t think that many of the things you dislike about London are different to other Western global cities: Paris, New York, etc. They’re all big, expensive, crowded and unlike other cities in the country they’re in.

Glastonbury media coverage reveals more about media than Glastonbury.

Jeff Bezos wears a black peak lapel tuxedo with a formal shirt, dress studs, black bow tie, and a black business waistcoat. He's standing on what appears to be a boat. He's also wearing sunglasses.

Andy wears a black shawl collar dinner suit with a white formal shirt, black dress waistcoat, and a black bow tie. Mountains appear behind him and he's holding a martini. His Instagram handle is styleafter50

Jeff Bezos appears to be wearing the wrong waistcoat for his wedding. This is a dinner suit (aka a tuxedo) and thus requires a dress waistcoat, which is cut lower on the body. He's wearing a business vest, which is designed for business suits. Needs a formal waistcoat like the one on the right.