Andy Pearce 🇬🇧👨🏻‍💻

Not that he’d realise the irony of the US complaining about countries taking their time to decide to join a war…

It’s remarkable to me that anyone has ever taken Elon Musk seriously, in particular – the man is practically self-parodying. I think he’d like people to think he’s whimsical and goofy, but it’s a sort of weirdly inauthentic performative version of it, of the sort that an LLM might produce.

If they’re trying to win people over, then rejecting humour entirely is just shooting themselves in the foot…

Just realised autocorrect changed “repetition” to “reception”, in case anyone was puzzled.

I think length is the wrong metric, it’s about density. Some articles are short and still tediously padded with reception, uninformed vox pops, etc. Others are long but crammed with useful and interesting detail. If it’s usefully dense, I don’t care about the length.

I’m pretty sure that my university explicitly mentioned at some point that the primary reason the (very short) ethics course was included was just so the course met the criteria for us to apply for an undergraduate grant from the Engineering Council and get a few hundred quid.

I just checked on Google Street View, didn’t see a single house that didn’t have either a driveway, or a front garden that could be bulldozed to make parking for one car. You want to keep your garden? Totally fine, just ditch your car! But don’t complain like somehow the issue is totally insoluble.

Will this regulation increase costs for already loss-making firms? Yes! But if we make the environmental costs financial, then the free market can do its thing and niches where AI is still a genuine boost despite the costs will be found, and equilibrium reached. That is still achievable, IMO. (6/6)

Huge data centres of course can cause issues, but they are solvable. Water shortage? Invest more in supplies, and use closed-loop systems instead of mains fed. Power consumption? In principle can be entirely renewable. We need regulation to enforce this, IMO, not just blanket bans of the tool. (5/6)

Has it made errors? Certainly! But careful pre-commit review usually catches them, and when you point out the error, Claude itself is pretty good at fixing rapidly. Even spending more time reviewing, it’s still a definite time-saver. I’m used to careful review of junior engineers’ work anyway. (4/6)

The current lack of US government interest in regulation doesn’t mean the tool itself isn’t productive for some uses. I’ve only recently been using Claude for coding, and it’s very impressive, particularly using Opus and plan mode to provide consistent oversight, and constant careful review. (3/6)

Knives are a potentially dangerous weapon, but do we ban them entirely? Of course not! How would you cook? But we do regulate their sale, possession and delivery; we do change policing approaches; and we do ban specific egregiously unnecessary types of blade. Sensible and balanced regulation. (2/6)

Good and balanced thread. I do find it a little surprising how superficially people engage with issues around AI tooling – it has to be all good or all evil, it can’t possibly be a potentially powerful tool which just needs oversight and regulation to reduce the risk and impact of abuse. (1/6)

Optical illusion of a woman bent over some papers. Her sunglasses are pushed up and she is wearing a hair band so the top of her head looks exactly like a Muppet face

Sorry I know the world is in a terrible fix but I've been laughing at this for ten minutes now

Line graph showing Inflation-adjusted % change in UK MP salary against a 2010 baseline. From 2010 to 2014 the line f drops from 0% to -9%, then zooms up to 0.5% due to the 2015 pay reform. It hovers up and down near 0% again until 2021, after which very high inflation pushes it down again. It currently sits at around 7% lower in real terms than the start of 2010.

This is the equivalent graph for MPs. I have no disagreement at all that vital NHS staff should be paid more, but I think it’s fair to acknowledge that the post-2021 inflation surge hit many sectors hard.

Sources:
www.theipsa.org.uk/mps-pay-and-...

www.ons.gov.uk/economy/infl...

They extrapolated from the sample to the population. When they’ve explicitly and clearly stated how many stations they visited, no good faith reading of the document could possibly conclude anything else. Using pedantry to infer statements clearly not intended by the authors is reading in bad faith.

You or anyone else are free to doubt their conclusion, or question their methodology – but don’t misrepresent their claims, when their article is quite clear on the raw numbers.

Democracy Volunteers deployed four accredited election observers across the Gorton and Denton Westminster Parliamentary By-election today. The team attended 22 of the 45 polling stations in the constituency, spending between 30 and 45 minutes in each.

The observer team saw family voting in 15 of the 22 polling stations observed, some 32 cases in total, nine cases in one polling station alone. The team observed a sample of 545 voters casting their vote - meaning 12% of those voters observed either caused or were affected by family voting.

They never claimed that. They were transparent that they visited 22 of 45 polling stations, and witnessed family voting in 15 of those 22. Sampling is a well established technique, it’s not unreasonable to extrapolate from a sizeable sample to the population.

democracyvolunteers.org/major-concer...

The video cuts out just before all the other people touching him crumble into dust, their life force expended.

Even if it wasn’t for that, spam filtering was getting nigh impossible without the kinds of advanced automated filtering that larger providers must be able to do across millions of accounts. That, at least, is more tractable to be solved by the community, however.

I feel seen. Ran my own server from about 2002 for around a decade, but got sick of getting on DNS blacklists, or providers just rejecting anything except well-known servers. SPF, DKIM, DMARC, etc. are easy enough, but the “assume spam by default” approaches are kryptonite for personal servers.

Well, maybe at least its occupants.

Kanwal Sibal @KanwalSibal • 6h X The Iranian ship will not be where it was if we had not invited it to talk part in our Milan exercise. We were the hosts. I am told that as per protocol for this exercise ships cannot carry any ammunition. It was defenceless. The Iranian naval personnel had paraded before our president. The attack by the US submarine was premeditated as the US was aware of the Iranian ship's presence in the exercise to which the US navy was invited but withdrew from participation at the last minute, presumably with this operation in mind. The US has ignored India's sensitivities as the ship was in these waters because of India's invitation. We are far from politically or militarily responsible for the US attack. Our"responsibility" is at a moral and human plane. A word of condolence by the Indian Navy ( after political clearance) at the loss of lives of those who were our invitees and saluted our president would be in order.

Some context to the Iranian boat that was targeted by US off Sri Lanka coast

Former Indian FM: “US was aware of the Iranian ship's presence in the exercise to which the US navy was invited but withdrew from participation at the last minute”

Ah, but you can’t halt the people who say you can’t halt progress.

If “9 Killed in Israeli City…” became “Israel Says 9 Killed in Israeli City…” do you believe the latter is materially misleading in a way that the former is not? The public can decide which sources they trust – journalists don’t need to dress it up to be different between the two. That’s the point.

Yeah, I deleted my erroneous reply. Any second now this alternative timeline will fade away like in ”Back to the Future”.

You never know when a spare will come in ‘andy – and I should know.

Oh I’m sorry, I thought your original post was a reply to the OP. My mistake.

I think the plan is to send in longbowmen.

Sudan to the left of me,
Yemen to the right,
Here I am,
Stuck in the Red Sea with crude.