Ben Taylor @VoxDei@qoto.org

@rbreich I'm no Trump fan, but in this instance I'd offer up us in the UK as a counterexample. We said yes to everyone who was mates with a Tory MP offering to sell us PPE (and ignored those who weren't) and literally ended up with the guy who ran the health secretary's local pub getting a giant government contract. Billions of pounds spent on PPE that was unusable and simply burned.

Needed to take opportunities, yes. But also to have a process that worked.

Particularly egregious misuse of stats from the Guardian: "Although more than a third of the women in the study had been sexually inactive during the past month, fewer than half expressed dissatisfaction with their sex lives."

Sooo... 1/3 inactive, >1/3 dissatisfied. And yet the article is trying to suggest it's at the other end of the scale by framing it as "fewer than half" and behaving as if it's surprising?

#stats #statistics #guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/article/2024/may/13/i-often-say-the-journey-time-is-longer-how-to-make-sex-after-50-work-for-you

Ooof. Never argue with an ant colony. Cleaning out a storage box in the garden. One corner has an ant colony in it, partially destroyed by my clearing. Also present: Two 3cm-ish false widow spiders, shiny black. Can't escape the box now the contents have been removed, sides are too smooth.

Left the job and went to have lunch, expecting to need to re-home the spiders. Figured they had plenty of ants to eat. On return, no sign of the smaller spider. The larger has had a disagreement with the ants. It has not ended at all well for the spider.

#spiders #ants #bugs #insects #entomology

I have wanted to see this forever. This is outside Newton Abbot in Devon just before midnight. Doesn't look this dramatic to the naked eye, this is about a 3s exposure with a Google Pixel 7a.

#uk #Auroraborealis #Devon #northernlights

What we have at the moment isn't AGI and therefore its capacity for genuine harm is (I believe) limited. However, the idea that we seem to be teaching these things to deceive by accident is concerning.

#ai

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/may/10/is-ai-lying-to-me-scientists-warn-of-growing-capacity-for-deception?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

@setebos Have you seen https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7168 ? ;-)

Argh... reviewing a colleague's python code, and he's used ChatGPT or Copilot or some other AI "helper" to write a bunch of the code. And it's just got a load of "Why the hell have you done this?" bits. Especially in the unit tests - it really doesn't know how to write pytest tests.

If you don't know what you're doing it looks halfway reasonable, and it kind-of-sort-of works, but... you'd never write that code if you were doing it yourself.

#ai #chatgpt #copilot #coding #botshit #python

@helenczerski The only local election I've got is for our PCC, annoyingly. We've had nothing at all to tell us about the candidates and they have almost no power, it really isn't a position that should be elected. Might go spoil my ballot later if I can be bothered.

I find this utterly baffling. You're a non-dom and you're complaining that removing that status will mean you have to pay so much tax that you'll leave. Right, well...

1. From what I've seen, the evidence that the super-rich actually do leave when taxes go up isn't there. So you might leave, but most of your fellows will pay more.

2. If you aren't paying your tax at the moment, then your argument that you have value to the country is essentially trickle-down economics. You have money, therefore you will spend it or give it to others. Trickle down has been shown to be bullshit.

So. You will leave and take your very small contribution with you. Fine. Most of your friends won't, they will compensate for the loss of your (to you) pittance. If you don't want to pay your share like everyone else, then *you are not a loss to this country when you leave*. Piss off and don't let the door hit you on the way out.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2024/may/02/i-am-moving-tycoon-bassim-haidar-non-dom-tax-status-super-rich-exodus

#uk #tax #nondom #guardian #rich #superrich

@GeePawHill I (mostly) got past the fear of presenting when I realised that almost by definition I know more about what I'm giving the talk about than anyone else in the room, and the people that's *not* true of are mostly on my side.

I guess there are presentations where that's not the case, but I haven't had to give any of those and I figure if I do I'll still know enough about the subject to argue about it. ;-)

@drandrewv2 Sorry Jenny. That sucks. I hope you've got something interesting planned that you're able to do.