I wish. Ai is much shitter than that. Current AI (basically everyone means an LLM when they say AI) is just repeating plausible bullshit without fact checking.

It’s Boris Johnson on an industrial scale.

His nanny.

Mommy was too busy so they had to pay someone to spend time with him.

Brexit means Brexit Russian interference.

That line about competent bastards is running right through the Tory party at the moment.

Saatchi - former party chairman and the guy who came up with “labour isn’t working” has been saying the same thing.

It’s interesting that their response to this is always “we should be more competent” and never “we should stop being bastards”.

I mean the big problem is how the labour party will whip.

PR is a significant issue, that changes how much power a party will have in the future. If PR goes through, it’s quite likely that no party will ever have enough MPs to rule without support of another party. It’s also likely to lead to the larger parties splitting into different factions. Because of this, the labour leadership are going to have strong opinions about it, and if they don’t support it, they will probably force their MPs to oppose it by using the party whips.

There’s one thing it will do, and that’s decrease legitimacy of the current system. If Labour get a supermajority and end up with 70% of the seats on 45% of the vote, it makes it very obvious that first past the post isn’t working. With that and what’s likely to be every other party calling for voting reform, it does make a cross party consensus on voting reform more likely.

I mean it’s worth remembering that some of the poorest areas in the country are in London. https://citymonitor.ai/community/uk-census-tower-hamlets-has-the-worst-child-poverty-rates-in-the-uk

Basically, the government doesn’t give a shit about poor people regardless of where they live. They just want to ensure that hedge fund managers living in Surrey can commute into their London office with a minimum of inconvenience.

There’s basically a hierarchy in political decision making.

1. Doing things that are good for the country.
2. Doing things that voters want.
3. Doing things your party wants.

1 should be the reason you get into politics in the first place because you want to make the world a better place. 2 is also super important, we live in a democracy and if you don’t give people some of what they want you’re not doing your job. 3 is basically day to day politicking. You throw red meat to members of the party so they continue to support you.

The Tory party is now so up their own arses that they only do 3 in the hope that they won’t tear themselves apart. This is some random anti-woke bullshit, that will mean it’s harder to catch and prevent child abuse, and kids can’t learn basic biology. And it doesn’t even appeal to what’s left of their fanbase.

The title of the actual paper includes “Occupational Cognitive Demand” which is a lot more on point.

Doesn’t need to be fun, doesn’t need to be interesting, just needs to be hard.

Accountancy has a fairly high cognitive demand, but calling it stimulating is a stretch.

I’m surprised they found that there is no evidence that using these platforms is “rewiring” children’s brains. Wasn’t it shown that social media companies base pretty much their entire technical decision making on psychologically conditioning not just children’s brains but everyone who uses it?

Not really. There’s a difference between things being sticky and actually altering the brain.

Yeah, we spend more time on social media than we intend, but I also take longer to get up in the morning than I’d like. The big question is does this alter the rest of my behaviour, or my mental state, when I’m not doom scrolling or refusing to leave my duvet?

That’s a much harder question to answer, and the evidence is a lot more mixed.

I think that’s a myth.

If spoiled ballots “win” nothing happens and the person with the most votes is elected anyway.

There’s no way to tell the difference between accidentally spoiling a ballot and a protest vote, so they just don’t mean anything.

If you’re hoping that politicians will feel enough shame to step down if no one votes for them, then I’d like to introduce you to our last two prime ministers.

Yeah, they were failing due to chronic under funding. So the Tories took the extra taxes labour had suggested to fund the public services and used them to cut our taxes.

Make the most of the extra money, but honestly if you want to see a doctor easily or for the council to keep collecting your trash, those taxes are probably going to have to come back up.

If you don’t know about it, check out https://wordnet.princeton.edu/

It’s a great starting point for any English word hierarchy.

More generally any personal data obtained from a third party. E.g. if you’re generating a credit score you might contact someone else with a record of financial transactions.

I don’t think you can buy the book. It was 20 volumes in 1989, and they’ve been working on an ongoing update since then. There’s no plans to physically print a third edition.

But yeah, it’s a serious scholarly resource, and they do put out free small dictionaries as well.

https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/

Nah. The honest truth is that the EU doesn’t care that much about the UK.

It’s much more like someone storming out their local pub and refusing to come back. It’s a big deal to the guy that left, but a much smaller deal to everyone still drinking in the pub.

If the UK stops acting like a dick and pays for their share they’d be eventually welcome back, once it looked like they’d actually learnt their lesson and wouldn’t do it again. The real barriers to rejoining are on the UK side. No one wants to reopen that can of worms.

I mean if you genuinely live in a labour dominant area, you can vote for whomever you like, unless the polls change drastically.

It’s not like it will suddenly swing Tory at the next election, with no warning.

This actually says a lot about Twitter engagement.

The only way to disagree on Twitter is to publicly call people out, while Lemmy and Reddit allow you to disagree without repeating and amplifying what they are saying.

This is one of those things where you have to read your employment contract.

If your main job involves generating intellectual property (code, or research or something else) and you live in the US there’s probably a clause saying you can’t do this without permission. Otherwise, it’s probably fine.

However, if you’re in the US, they can still fire you whenever they feel like, so if you think this might seriously piss your company off and you need your job, you might want to ask permission first.

It would be a lot less fucked if it was random. Generally it just comes up tory.

My understanding is that they just didn’t realise she had to resign before going on the honours list.

Basically the problem is a lot more nuanced than you can’t sit in both houses at once, it’s that you can’t be considered to sit in one house if you already have the right to sit in another. Otherwise, people could just pogo back and forth between the two houses as was convenient.

So all the people in the house of lords that wanted to stand as an MP had to resign from the lords first, and I guess it works in the other direction.

Doris only made a fuss about staying as MP when she found out she wasn’t getting the peerage. Before that she didn’t seem to care.