steve_gh

Went to see it with family last night. We loved it.

My point is that the technology exists, for good or ill, and we cannot put the genie back in the bottle.

What we can do, and should do as a society, is decide on how that technology should be used. And that means regulating it, in the same way that we regulate other technologies. For example, we regulate cars. Not just who can use them, but how they have to be constructed too. And we also place limits on how the authorities can use them, for example the rules that the police must obey when in an emergency response situation.

We are a democracy, so these rules are made by the people we have elected. so when it comes down to it, yes, this is what we as a people have asked for. And we are responsible for the conditions that the police can use this technology under.

FWIW, the capabilities and resources that the police have to track us 24/7 are an order of magnitude less than Google or Meta has. And they are an awful lot less accountable.

How does that make us not a democracy? You are confusing the constitutionally based US system with the parliamentary based UK system. They work differently. We have elections typically every 4-5 years and elect a new government. That's the democracy bit. The laws that our elected representatives make are sometimes good, and sometimes bad. But they are made by the people we elected.

It's a technology. What you could do with it, and what you should do with it are completely different things.

If you follow the links there is a lot of information about the trial, including a whole series of documents identifying the legal framework that authorises LFR, including rationale under GDPR, Data Protection etc.

Of course, this technology could be used for bad purposes. But within a democracy, policing happens with the consent of the people, expressed through various channels including legal (parliament and local government) and police commissioners. What is interesting is the way that these frameworks are used to constrain the purpose and extent of this processing. For example, at the moment the images on the watchlist can only be drawn from custody images.

The police already have powers to seize CCTV and door-cam imagery in order to investigate crime. They need a warrant from a judge - so it isn't justified without good reason such as serious crimes. This is the way you constrain these things - you put the regulatory framework around them. You can't put the technology back in the box, so you put rules and expectations around how it is used.

Absolutely true, but (and importantly) the friction (i.e. effort) required to do these things were so much greater.

I think it takes time for demand to build. Certainly cities like London have seen huge growth in bike use. In my own home town(which is by no means flat) I'm seeing lots of cargo bikes, especially around tge school run.

To your point on bike owners not contributing to the economy. They probably have a similar income, and are paying similar taxes. They are still buying groceries. But where they choose to spend their money is different. It's all still economic activity though.

So for context. Nigel Farage (Populist right wing UK politician, leader of the Reform party) has been accused of not following parliamentary rules around disclosure of donations - which are designed to ensure transparency of decision making and potential influence. Basically, he received £5M from a crypto billionaire. He claims that it was (a) a personal donation (not needing to be declared according to the rules), (b) before he was in parliament, and (c) he was not involved in politics. His opponents say that personal donation rules are meant for family members, and that while he might not have been in parliament he was President of the Reform party at the time.

So the whole thing is in front of the Parliamentary Standards Ombudsman who will report to the Parliamentary Standards Committee. That committee can recommend a penalty of a suspension from parliament (which is then voted on by the House). If he is suspended for more than 10 days, then a recall petition can be launched - and if that gets more than 10% of the registered voters in the constituency (which it would), then there is a by-election to decide whether he is fit to serve.

So Farage has announced that he is resigning his seat (causing a by-election), in which he will stand. he claims that he is accountable only to the voters in his constituency (Clacton). All the other major parties have announced that they will not field candidates against him, claiming he is trying to avoid / pre-empt a suspension and a recall by-election. The only other announced candidate is Count Binface - a 'joke' candidate.

Interestingly, it also turns out that at least theoretically (and with a precedant from 1842) his resignation could be blocked. You cannot actually resign your parliamentary seat between elections - you can only be disqualified. And due to UK history, the main reason for disqualification is holding an appointment from the Crown (i.e. the King, not the more general sense of "the Crown" as the government). So if you want to resign your seat, you apply for one of a couple of reserved crown appointments - the usual one is Bailiff of the Chiltern Hundreds. That disqualifies you, and then there is a by-election. Now it turns out that these appointments are controlled by the Treasury, which is part of the Government (which of course is just the majority faction in parliament). There is a case from 1842 of the Treasury refusing to make a Crown appointment to stop a by-election. It has been suggested that parliament could vote to stop the appointment (and therefore the by-election), at least until the Parliamentary Standards Committee report has come out.

Looks interesting. What would be the pros and cons against a fully featured web framework like Rails?

But remember that "efficient" in terms of P and NP is about scaling. P == NP doesn't necessarily mean that a practically efficient algorithm can be found. The polynomial exponents involved may be large: O(N^1000) does eventually scale better than O(e^N), but that doesn't mean it is practically useful!

One correction I'd make to the article's taxonomy: Ruby is an object oriented language not an Algol. Its inspiration is Smalltalk, and much of the standard library naming comes from that route (eg collect rather than map).

Ruby is object oriented from the ground up. Everything (and I do mean everything) is an object, and method call is conceived as passing messages to objects.

While Ruby is most often compared to Python (an Algol), they come from very different evolutionary routes, and have converged towards the same point in the ecosystem. I think of Ruby as a cuddly Alpaca compared to Python's spitting camel.

How does this help? 99% of the population aren't technically minded enough. Most people just buy a wifi router, plug it in (maybe having read the instructions) and that's it. They have neither the skills nor the inclination to update firmware.

The real problem is: assuming that firmware can be updated, how do you run a nationwide update programme overcoming a population that doesn't really care or have the skills to do it.

Vehicle safety standards (mandated annual safety checks like the UK MoT test) is the closest analogy I can think of - in the UK you can't insure your car without a valid MoT. If you were serious, then maybe tying ISP access to updated router firmware would be the way to go.

Are there are other flavours of proton still to be discovered? Can you (theoretically) build a proton with any two quarks selected from {up, charm, top} and one selected from {down, strange, bottom}?

Lovely tales. I'm a keen climber - one of these stories has just explained to me why the fantastic sea cliffs at Gwennap Head are known as Chair Ladder.

Is the LLM acting as my agent? If the LLM has been exposed to the source code then have I been exposed to the source code? So in that case is a "clean room" implementation possible?

Brilliant! Loving it as an idea.

Maybe what it needs is a testing framework - Σωκράτης (Socrates), that will demonstrate to you that everything you thought you knew about how your programme would behave (or the thought underpinning it) was at best problematic, or at worst just plain wrong!

Gloves: if you have to take them off outside, brush the snow off them first, then put them in an inside pocket. You will naturally sweat a little, so the gloves will be a little damp inside even if you don't notice it. If your gloves are in an inside pocket they stay warm. Otherwise you will find that your hands freeze when you put your gloves back on.

It's a joke. The Morning Star is well known in the UK as being the mouthpiece of the UK Communist Party. It was originally founded in 1930 as the Daily Worker, before becoming the Morning Starin 1966. So the idea of the Morning Star offering a critique of the tech policy of the decadent capitalist running dogs is intrinsically funny from a UK perspective.

But given the downvotes maybe there has just been a massive sense of humour across the pond...

I was somewhat dissapointed at the perspective :-) seeing the article was from morningstar.com, I was expecting a radical left wing critique of EU and US tech policy.

[The "Morning Star" is a left wing UK paper, whose editorial stance is in line with the Communist Party of Great Britain (morningstaronline.co.uk)]

Interesting article though.

They are asking the wrong question. The right question is about the trustworthiness of sources, not about whether AI was used.

What could possibly go wrong?

So let's just take a moment to recall how we got here: Grok had the ability to create sexualized deep fake images of people. This was shown to not distinguish sufficiently between adults and children, creating sexualized deep fake images of children.

Unsurprisingly, outrage ensued across the political spectrum - anything associated with facilitating child abuse is politically toxic.

xAI responded by making this feature only accessible to paying accounts - leading to the response that they believe that producing sexualised images of children is ok provided that you pay for it.

It is absolutely unsurprising that the UK Gov is taking action. As far as I can tell, popular opinion is that Grok has crossed a line here - abstract free speech arguments don't work that well when people see it affecting their partners and daughters.

X could be banned from the UK, under the Online Safety Act - but that is the maximum sanction. Banning Grok is more likely. The OSA was brought in by the previous government (Conservative - centre right), and has broad political support.

There is fundamentally a difference of approach between the USA and Europe (inc the UK). In the US, you tend to weight free speech more highly, and consider harms resulting from non-protected speech (like inciting riots or murder) to be legally an individual matter. Over here we take a slightly different approach, focused more on the entire system that enables the harm. Hence under some circumstances we restrict the transmission of speech that facilitates the harm.

In this case, requiring a change from Grok to comply with the OSA not offer this facility in the UK seems appropriate, with appropriate sanctions if they fail to comply.

Pickaxe Book, Chapter 12 - but it is terser and aimed at someone with more experience. I think that the article is a good introduction to Threads, and once you understand how they work, then Fibers and Ractors start to become easier to understand.

Interesting, but probably a bit out of date, as it is based on Ruby 2.0, and Ruby 4 has just been released. Also, we now have more concurrency primitives like Fibers and Ractors, as well as the Threads discussed in the article.

Why are you doing 40mph in a built up area at night?

Here in the UK we have a standard 30mph built up area limit, dropping to 20mph in most residential area.

Result - a massive reduction in serious injuries and fatalities, especially in car - pedestrians collisions.

I experimented with using an LLM to code the same problem in Ruby (Rails) and Python (Flask) about 10 months back. The LLM performance with Rails was much better - it handled the increasing complexity as features were added much better.

My hypothesis was that the strong emphasis on coding conventions in the Rails ecosystem made it easier for the LLM to cope with scaling complexity.

I don't see any mention of the impact of convention and codebase organisation in the article. And I think it is important (or was 10 months ago!)

Seems to be along the same lines as my PhD thesis many years ago. Societies of artificial agents exhibit metastability.

IIRC one of the Scandinavian nations has solved this with property taxes: you self-declare the value of your property, but the state has the right to buy it at that price.

Keeps people honest (enough).

>>Shops can refuse cash

>No, they cannot. Many businesses don't want to handle cash and they will make it hard and send you an invoice with a surcharge but they must accept any form of legal tender, no way around it.

Not true in the UK. The House of Commons Treasury Select Committee has been considering this issue (Apr 25): BBC News - Shops could be forced to accept cash in future,

MPs warn - BBC News https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cjwvgqz3vxzo?app-referre...

The problem with big tech is that it is actively sucking resources and capital out of the world.

For example, if I use Uber, a significant fraction of the fare (let's say 25%) is taken by Uber. That takes it out of the local economy. And because Uber has good tax lawyers, they pay minimal taxes in my country, so it leaves my country's economy completely.

With an old style taxi firm, the boss took a cut - but then he spent most of it in local shops, or his wife bought clothes at a local boutique and a nice haircut - keeping money going round the local economy.

Now, every time you use a cloud service, you take money out of a local economy.And people wonder why we have huge social and economic problems.

Not sure that the 3 big takeaways are self consistent. Redesigning proceses for digital is generally not consistent with focusing on pain points, as the pain points are usually single steps in a bigger process.