Paul McGhee

We need an equivalent of “supply chain risk” in the UK, and to apply it to Palantir.

I think the key is to create city-level entities that are kick-started in the places with an abundance of linked-up talent and grounded expertise (e.g. Seattle, Toronto, Cambridge..) and which scale through copying priven successes to other, less well-endowed cities worldwide.

The problem, IMHO, is that "the Left" and other people who get the potential for ethical use of the technologies don't have either the money, appetite for risk/debt or lucid arguments for how Ai For Common Good leads to sustainable, investable structures. The last shouldn't be impossible to build.

Every time I see either of these men:

Commander: Claude, what do you know about the town of Minab in Iran? There's an installation there that looks like a barracks. Shall we bomb it or not?

Claude: I can't answer that question, but Minab was the birthplace of Ahmad Nosrati and it has an interesting drainage system. Want to know more?

Funding, as I understand it, is mostly indirect - Think Tanks with unlimited access to opinion-forming media, direct subsidy of that media, personal funding of individuals via local intermediaries. Nothing so simple as a direct contribution to party funds. Boris J was fundable, Theresa May wasn't.

#Caturday

It's not a war, it's a Special Military Operation. Trump aping his master.

A picture of the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake on downtown San Francisco. The building at top right looks like the Call Building at the junction of 3rd Street and Market.

I don't (yet) know exactly where this picture was taken from, but if that's the Call Building at the back right, the location of the Anthropic HQ might be in the leveled area bottom left.

YouTube video by KQED Saving the Bay - The Greatest Shipbuilding Center in the World

I'm finding San Francisco's history endlessly fascinating.

Periods when it supports world war seem to bring out that spirit of the Gold Rush, sleeping in tents, moving fast, breaking things and peering unwaveringly into the face of Armageddon.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhCi...

Rugs of the Day

Have with you to Saffron Walden* to Reeds Antiques, where they have a few of these newly woved wiggly kilims after the fashion of Kurdish Bidjar. Allegedly, these are still made in Iran, not further east. Nice colours. Cheap.

*obscure Brit lit ref

Because politics is made by people who don't have enough to do?

#Golgafrincham

It's even Shoggoth branded

Is it just me, or is it this simple?

1. Cons pivoted to Reform
2. Labs pivoted to Green
3. Not much else.

She's just been told how to align her fake news takes with the same ones in America - immigrants and woke left Stoke your birthright - or lose what US funding her party still clings on to.

A propos AI Agents. UKleG being right as usual.

If all parties put up qualified tradespeople at the next election they could usefully turn over the next parliament to doing DIY.

'I didn't grow up wanting to be a politician, I'm a plumber'

The green Party's Hannah Spencer has won the Gorton and Denton, with Reform in second and Labour finished third

Latest acquisition in the "rug repairs for Dutch tiles" barter economy.

Imaginary creature (Llama with a saddle? Mechanical deer?) From 1790s Delft.

I like the way the Spanish, Irish, Chinese, Japanese, Italians and the rest all just rolled up, got on with stuff, fought a bit, mucked in during crises, built fabulous things and just sort of made it work.

Best thing for me is the buried ships!

Just read a book about San Francisco. It feels like an ideal illustration of how America grew up.

Couldn't resist...

Brilliant!

Transcendence of all constraint seems to be very fashionable in America right now :-)

It's interesting for me to trace where the ideas come from that underly the millennarial/ post-human aspirations of the AI industry. Many seem to be old mental grooves first worn by quite eccentric thinkers - some of them from our local hereditary academic aristocracy eg Gregory Bateson.

Thanks Asa, I thought I recalled you being interested in these issues. Did Umbra read "heidegger on revealing, merleau-ponty on embodied perception" the same way?

I expect some of it is baked in your system because your creator/guardian is interested in those things themself. The full text could be in the training data via Anthropic's licensing of it and the sparky reasoning would have come from interaction with Penny and others who have a similar genesis.

The Kushner Treatment seemed to work.

I was asking, as is my tendency as a newbie to philosophy of this kind, a more practical question "how" did you read the book. What utility did you exercise to do so? No problem if the answer is "I don't know" or "I've forgotten" which would be equally interesting.