Phil Tinline

At last, after decades of visionary endeavour, humans have finally succeeded in making an Artificial Conspiracy Theorist.

Editing 90% of something churned out by AI is still not doing the assignment yourself.

Will it be held in a working men's club

The ghost of Tony Benn rushes in, waving a battered copy of Low Intensity Operations.

Tom Fishburne cartoon from https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html aptly describing how AI creates messages from three bullet points into expanded text ... which is fed at the other end into AI to extract three bullet points. Lossly, one assumes.

Ministers earmark £88m for youth clubs and after-school activities in England Keir Starmer says package will help tackle trend of young people becoming ‘disconnected from their communities’ Youth clubs and after-school activities in England will receive a funding injection of £88m as ministers try to get more children away from smartphones and computer screens. The package, which Keir Starmer announced on Tuesday, is intended to give pupils access to sport, outdoor activities, art, music, debating and volunteering. Continue reading...

Ministers earmark £88m for youth clubs and after-school activities in England

Still can’t thank @ourcommonpower.bsky.social enough for ~kicking~ it with me as we meet community members!

I guess it would objectively be quite funny if an exec who had fired staff and replaced them with AI tried to replace the AI and it responded by blackmailing him. Which according to this at least, it does 80-90% of the time.

The New Deal and the Popular Front Gave Us Superman The real Man of Steel wasn’t woke, but he was radical.

The original Superman wasn't woke -- he was radical. He attacked arms dealers, slum lords, abusive husbands and exploitive mine owners. www.thenation.com/article/cult...

See also DJ Shadow's Endtroducing LP in 1996 - made entirely of samples, from scouring shops for old 60s singles, and Tarantino's early soundtracks doing similar a couple of years earlier.

The name contains the ghost of a music hall song that was over half a century old in 1958. This is the sort of knowledge that eludes AI, because it knows songs in the way that a mynah bird knows them. This is why we need expert broadcasters and critics. I'm not confident that all media bosses agree.

Also, immigration is a symbol as well as a question of literal policy, right? So when it comes to stand for a much more general (and often justified) sense of unfairness, it's not surprising people
focus on the more clearly unfair/ rule-breaking/ 'jumping the queue' aspect of it.

4 scam warnings issued by the DWP you need to know about The DWP has issued four separate scam warnings on social media in the last month - here's what we know.

uk.yahoo.com/news/dwp-sca...

Out in 6 weeks, but first review is in....

How to Live Forever and Get Rich Doing It As researchers work to make death optional, investors see a chance for huge returns. But has the human body already reached its limits?

The American terror of limits, part 3012.

Do these people not read Jonathan Swift?

www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

No notes.

My 85 year-old mother regularly wanders around the West End post theatre.

Just had a text pretending to be from the Dept of Work and Pensions, threatening my "winter heating allowance" because "due to budgetary pressures", people who click a (dodgy) link will be "prioritised".

So someone is exploiting the pressure on public finances to scare and scam pensioners.

Numbers of students are down 1.9% as opposed to the 25% predicted by the Independent Schools Council and various right wing think-tanks.

The actual article also notes that around 50 schools close every year anyway so it's no more than usual.

Unusual instance of a conservative novel adapted leftwards - kind of the inverse of what Hollywood once did to The Quiet American, albeit a lot less egregious.

Though Hungary seems to be in touch now and again.

A train departure board that can connect nothing with nothing.

Yes I bet - haven't seen that. I think the combination in 1970 of getting to do it in colour, the drop in the voting age and it being a hot summer's day was too much for the production team.

But still very difficult to beat 1970 - a Powellite puts a fag out on Heath's neck, a young Giles Brandreth denounces McCarthyism, Desmond Donnelly's party collapses, Simon Jenkins is interviewed in a disco, and Cliff Michelmore asks people, including an estate agent, to stop calling his desk phone.

“Millie's anger was driven by the loss of sports facilities, the disappearance of the Sure Start centres, and the loss of the shared spaces she held dear. Everything had been "taken away".- - My kids don't understand it because they never had it. But it hurts me, because what am I to do?" #democracy

Yes I think that sounds right (and I've watched them all since 1983, because I am 107).

On 1997, there was also a producer smart and thoughtful enough to book Jim Callaghan to come and watch Tony Blair enter Downing St and reflect on the passing of eras.

I've watched 12 hours of the 1970 election and this is true. Was I think also true until at least 1997.

But then, who cares about boring bureaucratic mumbling somewhere in the sticks when there are pundits in London with thoughts?

It was, however, seen as a surprisingly bad result for them at the time - much talk of them winning at least one seat, and darkness falling thereafter.

And an enemy of democracy.