doingtheiroming

Yet Another Sale Abroad. Not a criticism of the YASA team. It’s hard to scale a company in the UK and foreign investment is a good thing in general. But still frustrating that the UK was unable to offer the kind of investment that Mercedes could to keep a company British.

An oily Stephen Maturin.

I was hoping this was going to be a malicious MCP from the good old days of security tool naming.

"Does this belong in..." seems to be nearly the correct question.

Stephen Maturin switches from opium to coca leaves about halfway through the Master and Commander series (around 1800). Ensuring a steady supply of the leaves becomes a recurring theme as is his sharing of their wonders with the various scientific personalities he comes across.

There was at least one study during the pandemic that showed efficacy of these things. The problem for studies is knowing exactly how much they're used. I've used the Boots version in the UK for a long time on the basis that there's half decent evidence that it's effective and the only real side effect is on my wallet. It would be great to see a challenge study of these things but I'm going to keep using them regardless.

One study during the pandemic which showed efficacy which could control for use by targeting healthcare workers in their workplace: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8493111/

Surely they could just ask China.

It might well be neoliberal dogma but the rose that got walked through London last week by the Watermen is a reminder that it is also true.

People should complain much more about doctors’ guilds. There are limits on how many doctors can be trained in the US and the U.K. largely as a result of lobbying by doctors’ guilds. They’re called professional associations these days but let’s not pretend they confine themselves to enforcing professional standards.

It's amusing that they actually use the word guild. If the medieval guilds had their way London would still only have one bridge. The irony here is that creatives have an advantage that workers in every other industry lack. Humans value and will continue to value artisinally produced goods. Creatives will always have that in a way that 18th Century weavers and spinners did not. That appreciation also leads to the creative industries being subsidised essentially everywhere in a way that is likely to increase over time rather than decreasing.

Will the rise of AI reduce opportunities for creatives? Almost certainly, but unlike essentially all other industries, it won't be wiped out by the rise of automation because humans won't stop liking things that are created by humans. As in music, there will be a shift to performance where customers / clients are engaged in the creative process. In many ways, it will be a return to something like the golden age of portraiture as people pay for engagement.

There are huge opportunities for creatives in the age of AI to create new art forms, created in new ways for new kinds of consumer. Creatives can choose to engage with that or to throw sabots. As London's liverymen show, guilds cannot stop the tide, the opportunity is to become something new that floats on the rising waters.

There’s a line in one of the Aubury Maturin books, Clarissa Oaks when pumping the ship bilges, a sailor remarks, “she flows as clear and sweet as Hobson’s conduit”.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobson's_Conduit

Fresh water was consumed in prodigious quantities in the Royal Navy, not least for watering down grog but also for extracting the salt from salted meats.

Yep. Grid integration is great. Engineered markets much less so. Sadly, the incentives for regulators and market participants are well aligned here...

Damn. Came to post the same. You said it better.

It's the real disease of the EU. There's no problem of failed policy that shouldn't be addressed by deepening the policy and making it harder to back track. The only possible response to problems of complexity is to make the complexity more intractable.

Don’t shoot the message.

Reading the comments, it seems that absolutely no one is happy about this. It is either a lie, insufficient or a pointless response to a non-problem.

But it’s a clear achievement. An achievement with lots of nuance. And one that runs counter to many strongly held and arguably ideological positions on all sides of the political spectrum.

Reading responses to it here and on Twitter has been rather depressing.

Ah. A simpler time when people were still able to access the operating system internals of products they bought and alter their function without first having to jump through hoops that risked bricking the product they bought.

There’s an irony that the products we buy now which are so thoroughly locked down have learned all the lessons of Windows NT both in terms of product marketing and the security improvements which protect the product companies even more than their users.

I remember playing Unreal for 3 days solid while working an IT service desk in the late '90s. Compaq Deskpro in software mode later upgraded to a Matrox G200 which upended my world. Working Christmas and New Year was a bonus as far as I was concerned. Dodged the family drama and got in plenty of gaming. Also tidied the office...

The constant 15% that everyone forgets. And the U.K. is still importing French nuclear energy today.

Like I said, can of worms. There are no easy solutions.

You pass a law giving a class of inspector the right to enter premises where building works appear to be progressing. You strictly limit what they are permitted to observe and record and require recording of reasonable suspicion. Refusal to grant entry is itself an offence.

Approaches like this would work but are also a huge can of worms.

I often observe that PPE compliance in the U.K. is dramatically better than it is on the continent where I live. In part I think that’s a result of the concentration of the building contractor business and the (relatively) strong enforcement of workplace regulation at sites of large construction projects.

You’d be shocked in the U.K. if you saw someone scaffolding a building without a helmet. In the EU, you’re shocked if they are wearing one.

There are lots of ways to define “good enough” as well. What are the costs of inferring several small experts contributing to a decomposed workflow versus using GPT4 for example. If you want to run multiple instances for different teams or departments, how do the costs escalate. Do you want to include patient data and have concerns about using a closed source model to do so. Etc.

There’s little doubt that GPT4 is going to be most capable at most tasks either OotB or with prompt engineering as here. But that doesn’t mean it’s the right approach to use now.

These are by far the hardest kinds of fraud for banks to deal with right now. They’re so convincing that even when the bank detects them, the customer still demands the transactions go ahead because they’re so bought into the fraudsters. We need this kind of authentication to become normal for everyone for any transaction.

Does it detect academic back-biting?

France and Germany have realised that cutting European AI development off at the knees might not be the best way to challenge US tech dominance.

The answer might be in the article already. The proportion of manufacturing that is in industries like construction has increased versus heavy industry, semiconductors, auto-manufacturing etc. The reasons for a decline in productivity in those industries seems pretty clear. If you have to build anything in NYC or any big city, your people are going to spend a lot of time standing around waiting for things to happen. When you can't put a hole in the ground without significant paperwork, is it any surprise that it's hard to drive productivity increases?

The obvious contrast is Tesla. The level of productivity with which model 3s are built now is clearly a vast improvement over where it was and the improvements (single casting for e.g.) keep coming. As long as US / UK and EU manufacturing continues to substitute making things in factories for making them in the street, and heavy industry for light industry, it's hardly a surprise that productivity overall is going nowhere.

Multibillion dollar organisation with an essentially unlimited scope for bureaucratic work versus kid trying to move house at the weekend.

The “why did he do this to himself?” meme seems appropriate.

Also, yes. I’ve gotten better over the years at taking a breath and just doing it but it still sets me off. Employers exploit this in people by adding hurdles in expense systems. It’s an oft forgotten corporate dark pattern.

Well known. Airlines including KLM specifically mention during their safety speech that if a device falls into the seat, you're to call an attendant rather than try to retrieve it.

Quite. There aren’t that many estuaries and the greens have demonstrated their commitment to preventing their use. Given the UK’s planning disaster, it’s not happening.

See Private Eyes passim.

Joking aside, tidal has been a subsidy money pit that has attracted chancers and grifters for a long time. That’s not to say there weren’t honest projects (the link I posted being a good example) but nuclear is a proven, well understood tech that doesn’t need to be developed. We know how to do it.

Hinkley C is far too expensive for many reasons but it will generate steady power for many decades once built. Tidal is basically a non-starter. A tech that has been not been commercialised, that offers only low density power generation and which will inevitably be maintenance heavy. It’s a non starter.

I’m not going to read this. Tidal power has failed again and again despite huge amounts of investment. The sea is simply too hostile an environment and the power density too low. The only thing it has going for it is predictability of delivery but as a solution to that, nuclear is a dramatically better bet.

This is a fantastic X thread explaining just how hard it is:

https://x.com/Jordan_W_Taylor/status/1645160329771470848?s=2...