piltdownman

It's incredible when outlined in the context of a known problem domain, and the estimated effort in legacy terms, how far we've come in such a short space of time.

If the introduction HP-65 was the first time an individual was capable of fully replicating the logical and cryptanalytic functionality of the WWII Turing-Welchman Bombe, then the roll-out of Agentic AI could be said to represent the first time an individual was capable of replicating the functionality and deliverables of the WRENs of Bletchley Park. Mindboggling.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WRENS

Even more impressive is the Astra-6 report recently. Given access to the Crypto Cellar Research archive of unbroken intercepts, the AI wrote its own custom Python and C++ software to simulate an Enigma machine and a mechanical Enigma Bombe.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

There was literally a legislative marriage bar in the Irish Civil Service from 1924 till 1973.

The marriage bar forced female civil servants in Ireland to resign from their jobs when they got married and stopped married women from joining the permanent civil service.

We were far from the only country to have such mandates, and it was done so as an equivalence with the governance processes of the private sector. Divorce was only legalised in Ireland 1995.

The less neat thing is this is completely negated by the EU, and we will continue to suffer as VAT is added as % on top of Excise.

EU's Energy Tax Directive (ETD) enforces a rigid minimum excise duty of €0.330 (33 cents) per litre on auto-diesel used as a propellant. Ireland's VAT rate is 23%. Pre-tax costs account for about 62% and various government taxes/levies account for 38%.

It's running at about €2.16/l in Ireland so that's about $9.30/gallon today. It's €2.70 in Germany and around €2.50 in Greece. For reference Greece's statutory gross minimum wage is €920 per month and Germany's is about €2,400. People are going to starve/freeze this Winter.

Occam's Razor my fiend. Ask yourself what's the higher statistical probability in Trump's America:

A minimum wage teenager, in a city of less than 50,000, on the tills during the breakfast rush, managed to positively ID the suspect, despite him wearing a mask and beanie, based on ambiguous CCTV photos, and decided to snitch. He was then detained within 11 minutes.

Versus

A federal agency tapped into CCTV or kiosk-cameras automatically ID'd him via facial recognition, and then established clean, admissible evidentiary trail to mask an unconstitutional investigative source.

There definitely was recorded incidence of this - Washington Square Park for example - but the main reason for the difference today was due to vagrancy and loitering laws, as well as 1930s Dust Bowl governance, that no longer exist for human-rights reasons.

Very easy to keep the parks 'beautiful' when you could just shift anyone undesirable to a prison, asylum, or skid row.

N.B. Littering also wasn't seen as a social failing in 50s America, so there's a bit of a juxtaposition there versus the contemporary reality.

I'm referring to the countries borders consisting of sea, not neighbouring countries. More to the point, all industries I'm referring to were established prior under the constraints of the stated population.

The population of the 26 counties only hit 5 million in 2021, in the midst of lockdown. It then surged massively with global instability, with a 2.2 per cent increase in 2022 alone with the first round of Ukrainian refugees forming the majority of the 117,000 added to the population count.

Yeah those were the pre-Hormutz debacle benchmarks.

At the moment for an ICE @ 40 MPG it's ~22.6p per mile for diesel in the UK

I mean the maths is simple enough if you round up.

ICE @ 40 MPG: ~22.6p per mile for diesel EV: ~3p per mile for off-peak home charging.

The difference from 23 to 3 is a decrease of 20, which is an 86.96% decrease.

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2026/sep/28/price-of-diese...

They tend to be in much lower insurance bands and tend to incurr significantly lower motor tax - comprehensive policies for EVs are higher due to the (current) dearth of parts and licensed repair centres versus ICE cars running on multi-year platforms or sharing parts across lines that share a single monocoque design (e.g. VW, Ford, Toyota versus Tesla and their publicised parts shortages).

The problem is that, for economy of scale reasons, Comprehensive insurance is often cheaper than third-party cover in the UK, despite people tending to never claim so as to keep their no-claims bonus and not spike their premium out of affordability. With 3rd Party the EV option would be cheaper as they tend to be involved in less accidents, and when they do they tend to dissipate more impact on their side due to more modern crumple-zones and safety features.

Mainly due to the standard 20% VAT rate applied to public electricity (compared to 5% for home charging) which could be rectified overnight if there was political will.

Breakdown of UK Public/Private and EV/ICE Per Mile Costs:

* Home (Off-Peak EV Tariff): ~3p per mile

* Home (Standard Standard Variable Tariff): ~8p per mile

* Standard Public EV: ~15p per mile

* Petrol Car: ~17p per mile

* Diesel Car: ~17.5p per mile

* 50kW+ DC Public EV: ~22p to 23p per mile

Am I talking to a particularly obtuse LLM?

Roughly 20% of the UK population (1 in 5 people) is clinically deficient (<20 ng/mL). Similar in Ireland.

If we extrapolate slightly from 'clinically deficient' to 'subnormal' then 94 % of children, 94 % of teenagers and 90 % of adults on the island of Ireland have inadequate vitamin D intakes. This is because the Sunlight UVB radiation needed to make vitamin D is only available in Ireland during the months of April through October.

For us and the other latitudes which experience a ‘vitamin D winter’ that stretches from the end of October to late March, almost everybody in Ireland needs a supplement of vitamin D and 15 µg (600 IU) is recommended on a daily basis.

I mean this is just such FUD.

In Ireland alone we manufacture:

* Cardiovascular Stents (80% of Global Supply)

* Orthopaedic Knee Implants (75% of Global Supply)

* Acute Hospital Ventilators (50% of Global Supply)

* Contact Lenses (World Leader)

19 of the world's top 20 pharmaceutical companies operate manufacturing, R&D, or biopharma facilities in Ireland; this compromises over 50% of all physical goods exported from Ireland, totaling well over €100 billion annually. Needless to say it's also the pivotal manufacturing hub for high-demand GLP-1 weight-loss and diabetes treatments (like Mounjaro).

Ireland is among the top global exporters of antisera, blood fractions, and complex cell cultures, making it indispensable to global healthcare infrastructure.

Ireland is the absolute world leader in dairy science per capita, and produces roughly 10% to 15% of the entire world's infant milk formula, with estimates indicating that roughly one in ten to one in seven babies globally consume formula manufactured in the country.

That's an Island of less than 5 million people, 1/8th the size of Texas, that was basically bypassed by the Industrial Revolution and had no colonial benefit. Now extrapolate for a second and imagine what Germany is manufacturing.

The average salary (not including RSUs/Bonus) in Dublin's Silcon Docklands is north of €130k+, with sick pay, 23 days leave, and the sort of employee protections which would be an utter fantasy in the US (defined redundancy payments, mandated collective bargaining, governance processes around mass redundancy handling at state level).

This was hugely evident during the recent spate of tech layoffs - employers planning collective dismissals are obliged to hold a mandatory 30-day consultation with employee representatives and notify the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment beforehand. Issuing premature "done deal" announcements before meaningful consultation breaches Irish law.

Even at the micro level, non-collective or individual restructuring must still rely on objective selection criteria and fair procedures. Failing to do so exposes employers to Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) claims for unfair or constructive dismissal.

There's also very very strict regulations around work/life issues. A famous case this year in 2023 where a Customer Care Team Lead at the Dublin office of Israeli software company Wix was dismissed after posting comments on LinkedIn. In her posts, she described Israel as a "terrorist state" and referred to Zionism as "the root of violence" while expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people. In July 2024, the WRC ordered Wix to pay Carey €35,000 in compensation after Wix acknowledged that the dismissal was "procedurally unfair" under Irish employment law.

In short, we're not that poor and have significant societal safety-nets that make up the delta in direct wages.

I mixed up a tense or two there. It was done in 4 years, even accounting for Covid. The timeline looks like this

2019: Kick-off

2020: Construction in Ireland basically halted due to Lockdown for 18 months

Q3'2023: Fab 34 begins running a ‘First Full Loop’ of silicon

Q4'2023: Fab 34 completed. Doubles the manufacturing capacity available in Ireland, enabling the production of Intel 4 and Intel 3, some of the company’s most advanced process technologies, and the first to incorporate EUV lithography

2024: Intel sold 49% stake to Apollo GM for $11.2bn

2026: Intel buys back stake for $14.2bn

Q2'2026: Intel announce a further $5.7bn investment to upgrade existing capacity for server chips, slated for completion by late 2027

Semiconductor design capacity is a massive issue almost always overlooked in these conversations. Spot on.

Rather the US lax rules regarding their own enforcement.

The Double Irish (& Dutch Sandwich) where Companies routed profits through two Irish-registered subsidiaries, attributing intellectual property royalties to a management seat in a tax haven like Bermuda, is closed since 2015.

Subsequent sequential mismatch structures (the "Single Malt" tool) that replaced the Double Irish for certain firms using non-EU residency loops were also banned. Finally there's a 12.5% charge on unrealized capital gains when a company moves its assets or tax residency out of Ireland.

The headline tax rate and the effective tax rate are also very different things. France's effective corporate tax rate was actually lower than Irelands - but France is an absolutely brutal place to do business in for employers and they've comparatively no english-language tech FDI to speak of.

While I agree completely with you regarding how we handle FDI, the role of Enterprise Ireland, and that our ability to act as an educated, stable and culturally compatible western european base for US industry is not to be understated, the Intel situation in particular has its own special nuance.

This is where the 'Inside Tennis' knowledge of the Irish Tech industry from someone working within it comes in handy. Enter the 21st Century Luddite, Thomas Reid, from stage left.

Thomas is an eccentric, independent bachelor farmer whose family has owned a 72-acre farm next to Intel's Leixlip manufacturing campus for generations.

Ireland’s State Industrial Development Agency (IDA) attempted to use a Compulsory Purchase Order (CPO) to buy Reid's land so that Intel could proceed with a multi-billion euro expansion of its microchip production plant. The land was valued at €5 million. During the negotiations that followed, the farmer was reportedly offered in the region of €10 million. He turned it down. Reid had no interest in being a millionaire. Instead, he continued to live on-site without a telephone or modern amenities while taking on Intel and the state alone.

The battle culminated in a landmark legal fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court of Ireland, where Reid ultimately won a historic victory against corporate overreach and protected his property rights

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lonely_Battle_of_Thomas_Re...

https://www.reddit.com/r/ireland/comments/3s4bg1/how_a_farme...

https://www.irishtimes.com/business/commercial-property/inte...

https://www.rte.ie/culture/2020/1102/1003311-the-lonely-batt...

I mean Ireland has some of the most strenuous regulations in this regard, with dozens of data centres blocked over planning and environmental impact assessments. Despite this Intel still put €30 billion in turning a 360-acre former stud farm in Kildare into a semiconductor wafer fabrication facility, powered entirely by green energy, and acting a key location for production of Intel’s 14nm process technology. They currently pull 1,677,197 MWh/year from our grid.

More to the point, from 2019 they built €17 billion new fab development which doubled the manufacturing capacity available in Ireland and enabled the production of Intel 4, the company’s most advanced process technology.

Vitamin D deficiency manifests itself as rickets (weakening of the bones) in children and osteomalacia (softening of the bones) in adults. Less severe vitamin D deficiency contributes to osteoporosis (bones are weaker and more likely to break). All of these are well documented outcomes in Western Europe.

More to the point, since Covid Researchers have posited that Vitamin D plays a critical role in preventing respiratory infections, reducing antibiotic use, and boosting the immune system response to infections. Vitamin D is important in regulation and suppression of the inflammatory cytokine response, which plays a role in the severe consequences of COVID-19 and ‘acute respiratory distress syndrome’ associated with ventilation and mortality in COVID-19. Vitamin D also helps the respiratory tract produce antimicrobial peptides that can lower viral replication rates.

RAPID EVIDENCE SUMMARY: VITAMIN D IN COVID-19 https://assets.gov.ie/static/documents/rapid-evidence-summar...

The causal role of vitamin d deficiency in worse Covid-19 outcomes: implications for policy and practice development https://repository.rcsi.com/articles/journal_contribution/Th...

Coronavirus disease 2019 and vitamin D https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10277257/

Vitamin-D and COVID-19: do deficient risk a poorer outcome? https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8...

Insufficient in Ireland is also set at 30--50 nmol/L (12--20 ng/mL).

Sunlight UVB radiation needed to make vitamin D is only available in Ireland during the months of April through October. This is due to our geographic location 52o - 55o North and means that Ireland experiences a ‘vitamin D winter’ that stretches from the end of October to late March.

Currently, 94 % of children, 94 % of teenagers and 90 % of adults on the island of Ireland have inadequate vitamin D intakes. Therefore, almost everybody in Ireland needs a supplement of vitamin D and 15 µg (600 IU) is recommended on a daily basis.

N.B. In the early 2000s, over 20 cases of rickets (a weakening of the bones caused by severe vitamin D deficiency) in infants and toddlers were reported in Ireland.

In terms of 3rd level accession and standardised testing I'd imagine they boast great statistics, and that the students are self-evident in communicating a degree of confidence and holistic education beyond their traditionally educated peers.

However, I would fear that the issue with home-schooling would manifest: that the rarified atmosphere would render them incapable of engaging or coping with the brutal reality of binary-minded Authority figures and hierarchical social constructs in their work and life in the 'real world'.

To writ, some of the most important lessons I learnt in school were to do with the concept of 'fairness', my own ability for emotional regulation, navigation of social hierarchies, and the symbols and signifiers of popular culture. The curriculum as a whole came a distant second.

N.B. Public (read:Private) schools in the UK are about £30k a year. Boarding schools hit about 50k in the UK/Ireland. 'New Age' or International schools for the children of diplomats and HNW ex-pats like Nord Anglia or similar go from about €/£20k upwards. 40k a year isn't outrageous in context, even outside of America.

Sunk-cost, social pressure and obligation are probably the most salient points for educational success in a classroom setting with a teacher of median-skill versus an AI trained on the same corpus.

The sad reality is that many of the most senior professors and lecturers in top universities are their for their research rather than teaching ability, and that the success of the elite institutions is somewhat self-selecting as regards their cachet and filtering done by their admissions process (i.e. Ivy League institutions do not offer athletic scholarships).

You're basically describing the established pedagogical field of Problem Based Learning, which is around as long as personal computing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem-based_learning

In PBL the teacher adopts a constructivist approach - supporting, guiding, and monitoring the learning process as opposed to delivering a defined curriculum via lectures or seminars.

Agentic AI is arguably a better fit for this as it can scale infinitely to monitor student progress, offer timely feedback on design choices, and adjust difficulty dynamically based on how the student interacts with the problem.

Your main contention is one I'd broadly agree with - that use of Agentic AI for tutoring abdicates intellectual agency, allowing the AI to perform the critical synthesis and analysis that the student should be doing themselves for learning to occur.

The solution, however, is clear: guardrail the AI to promote core pedagogical principles rather than replace learner cognition by mandating things like instructional friction and the strategic fading of AI support as students build competence.

As explored in the paper I link below, by balancing proactive scaffolding with necessary and beneficial cognitive challenges, AI can preserve the productive struggle essential to effective learning.

https://arxiv.org/html/2606.04543v1

(A final thought: have a look at the current field of companies who specialise in turning training materials into engaging interactive experiences for the likes of Compliance and Security training. This is a corporate field now being automated and democratised for use by the average student in Academic pursuits in an on-demand fashion. Appropriate AI tutoring is basically the same concept.)

A calculator is a tool that replaced the slide-rule or Abacus - no one contended the Abacus replaced teaching or teachers. Ditto an iPad which is effectively just a fancy calculator in this context.

Similarly Youtube didn't replace teachers - it afforded remote learning and correspondence courses a new medium for transmission, recording, and playback of teaching.

More to the point none of those were trained on a corpus containing the history of human pedagogy, were capable of inference, or of generating dynamic learning resources based on best-practice models with inherent self-correction and pedagogical reinforcement mechanisms.

That's not true in the EU anyway.

Under EU Commission Regulation (EU) 2019/2023, washing machines sold in the European Union must include a mandatory standardized program called "Eco 40-60".

The whole point is to enforce strict legal limits on maximum water and electricity consumption per cycle based on the machine's rated capacity. This it the reason they tend to run for hours - it uses less water and energy than a standard cotton cycle by having longer soak times and using less electricity to heat the water.

In 1995 it took 94 litres of water and 350 kWh/a for a cycle in the average EU washing machine. These measures, amongst others, reduced that to 36 l/cycle and 96 kWh/a in 2020 and an expected 30 l/cycle by 2030.

https://energy-efficient-products.ec.europa.eu/product-list/...

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE...

Much respect for the prompt response, humility, and frank disclosure.

Anecdotally from an Irish dermatologist - the majority of her clients under 30 are holiday sunburn casualties from either Iberian waterparks or activities like snorkeling/skin-diving in SEA. The ones over 30 are basically all farmers.

She has her entire family wearing SPF20 24/365, constantly reminding me 'it's the overcast days that actually do the long-term damage'.

The Peruvian Andes has the most extreme UV index in the world due to being 10,000ft+ above sea level and on the most susceptible line of latitude. That being said, even with the atmospheric deficit, the max peak recorded by ground and local meteorological observations was 18. Can't seem to find a citation for 2x Sydneys max (14/15).

Indeed looking at Oceania; Sydney, Perth, and Auckland all hit 14/15 regularly in the Summer months. Auckland in particular has ~40% more UV than comparable northern latitudes.

Given the genetics and immigration is heavily skewed in favour of the British and Irish diaspora, it's about 3x the UV Index of what the UK and Ireland see. Dunno where 10x came from.

The likes of Sir Walter Scott, Peter Ackroyd, Stephen King, Tim Ferris, Robert Greene, Tucker Max, Catherine Asaro, Neil Gaiman, Charlaine Harris, Nancy Holder etc... all rely heavily on research assistants in various capacities including proofreading.

Honest question - where does an Author like the above place in your authenticity framework?

Meta go one further and literally spell it out with an equivalent example of advertising for an equivalent event in their own published guidelines on Slide - in this case a 'Civil Rights Exhibition' - as eligible to run in the EU.

https://efa-net.eu/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/META_EU_Update...

This was either an automated filter set to 'anti-woke' or some childish attempt at malicious compliance, or both. Thousands of such plays are advertised on numerous platforms across Europe every year without incident or comment.