I think the popular wisdom is that Blair inherited surpluses from the Major era so didn't have to spend as much political capital- though also he's a good communicator (or a good actor, if there's a difference)

How about the cash for "meetings" business?

I like a good fact check... it's probably difficult to calculate but the expansion of the civil service to cover regulation previously performed by the EU is must represent a decent cost ... to achieve....duplicate regulation...

Some have already had a go at debunking the claims in the book. e.g.

gully-foyle-debunked.co.uk/1-10

.... and the media? It will be interesting how much Reform copy from the playbook of the populist right wing movement in America. With this I'm half reminded of the Nazi interest in pseudo science.

This is what I fed back to our local council (uk) in their last consultation: 6 storeys as a default, but in the inner rings of the city don't see every space as something to fill with housing to ensure there is capacity for leisure, culture, amenities etc otherwise places become charmless.

A stack of paper isn't a complex system

Seems to be a few categories : sceptics; people who think Ai is anti-human; people who object to the training process (where it involves copyright theft); everyone else using it to save 10 minutes but spending 5 of those clarifying that it's not splurged some rubbish

Figuratively if you feed an LLM 1000 books with overlapping content it will compress the content. LLMs are definitely a remix technology but alot of what humans do is derivative

LLMs could be described as a sort of exemplification of the power of collectivism (due to the way they compress knowledge and make it accessible) if the the services weren't being pushed by big tech who insist they have to steal all the source martial which they then charge for

Assumed crime was level if prisons are full but could be more punitive sentences?

Interesting article, I've always thought it's the "opportunity cost" of not doing other things but we don't think that about reading

Strange I thought X was alot worse ... one reason to hold my nose and go on to linkedin more then

Maybe if actually it ends up that intelligence is more like producing electricity and the method is easily reproducible (swap fossil fuels for the collective recorded efforts of humanity up to this point)? Then it becomes futile to compete?

Also are they importing vast amounts of timber ?

So although trees are part of the "free carbon" cycle as opposed to sequestered carbon like oil, it still takes years to grow a tree so it's not helping co2 in any way. Is that a summary of an argument against this power source?

I guess the rhetoric is all too try and neutralise the Reform party?As a thought experiment I'd imagine retired people do the most economic "harm" we can then examine why this sort of language isn't used for older retired people

LLMs are an amazing development but their thinking capability is limited, so still a tool (though a spooky one). If scientists can leverage neural nets to unlock further human like capabilities then it doesn't seem far fetched that humans will be outperformed in every activity very quickly

No, people form tribes around these ideas and treat people ouside of their tribes differently- which leads to conflict