Ben Taylor @VoxDei@qoto.org
Software Engineer, Trade Unionist, Gamer, Geek, Dad. Lives in Devon
Joined Nov 2022
Ben Taylor
boosted
Stormy looking on Glastonbury Tor this morning.
#glastonbury #glastonburytor #somerset #stormy #storm #cloud #cloudy #darksky
@Uilebheist @shivvi @cstross I live in Devon, a few miles from Buckfast Abbey. Can confirm that these exist and you occasionally see them heading up the A38.
@Uilebheist @shivvi @cstross I live in Devon, a few miles from Buckfast Abbey. Can confirm these exist and you occasionally see them heading up the A38.
@Uilebheist @shivvi @cstross I live in Devon, a few miles from Buckfast Abbey. Can confirm these exist and you occasionally see them heading up the A38.
@harriettmb @anu1905 @drandrewv2 This is definitely one for you. ;-)
I really don't understand this. This article mentions in passing that Asda was fined £30,000 twice for failing to respond to information requests and for being unable to explain how being taken over affected its fuel pricing policy. In the same paragraph it mentions that Asda is acquiring a fuel business for £2.27bn.
Asda has enough money to be able to make acquisitions of businesses that are not its core business costing in the billions. A fine in the tens of thousands is literally not even noticeable to them. What is the point? I accept the CMA may not have power to impose a greater fine (I don't know), but what's the point in a regulator that either cannot or will not impose fines that actually hurt their targets?
It happens all over the place, companies being handed fines that aren't even negligible, they're just not actually noticeable. Nobody will follow the rules if it costs substantially less to break them than it does to follow them.
Ben Taylor
boosted
To anyone thinking about joining BlueSky, especially artists: everything you post is used to train generative AI models.
BlueSky uses AI to label content for moderation, and to do that they use a company called https://thehive.ai. If you look through their privacy policy, you will see that they use all content sent to them to train models for all their services, which include generative AI for both text and images.
It’s a built in “feature” and cannot be turned off.
@RickGaehl Aaaand there it is. It's almost like Braverman has no interest in solving the problem that allows her to manufacture outraged culture-war sound bites for the Daily Mail, the Torygraph and the BBC.
BBC News - Rwanda policy: Suella Braverman says plan to stop the boats is being held back
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66051292
@RickGaehl I don't think it probably surprised the senior idiots, either. Braverman included. That wasn't the point, they win politically either way.
It's actually probably better for them if the courts block it, because it was never going to work. If it goes ahead and fails to reduce "small boats" or whatever, they own the failure. If the courts block it then they can say "Well, we had a plan, but lefty activist judges and lawyers abused the law to stop us doing it" and blame their failures on someone else.
Ben Taylor
boosted
Well that's more like it. Sunrise this morning on Glastonbury Tor.
#glastonbury #glastonburytor #somerset #landscapephotography #sunrisephotography #sunrise
@astrelion @dungeons I thought it was supposed to be quite bad, TBH. You have engaged something that you are not equipped to fight, unless you're very lucky it's going to end badly. Doing comparable damage to what we could achieve with our primary weapon feels wrong.
Just me though! :-)
Ben Taylor
boosted
As we head towards a(nother) #JuniorDoctors #strike... once again its worth emphasising that this is a strike that has been directly caused by the #Tories defunding of the #NHS, their callous attitude to the well-being of others & their strategy of driving (rich-enough) #patients into the arms of private #healthcare.
If #RishiSunak or #SteveBarclay actually wanted to reach a deal with the BMA/Junior Doctors they could, but they are choosing not to.
@drandrewv2 The bailout is only necessary because it got loaded down with debt and then asset-stripped by Macquarie. As a country we really should be doing everything we possibly can to make their corporate lives miserable until they cough up whatever this costs the public purse.
@pzmyers I'm baffled by how this is an insult. It's a literal description. If he's denying being cis then presumably he's saying he's trans?
@astrelion @dungeons Getting a 9 seems like a lot still? I know our dex is high, but should we really get a +5 damage bonus on an improvised attack?
My familiarity with the rules on that is pretty limited, so maybe so. Sorry, if so!
"Sir John Armitt told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “By 2050, the Environment Agency and the water companies believe that about £50bn needs to be invested to get sewage overflows down to an acceptable level."
Right. My local water company, South West Water, is paying £112M in dividends this year. There are ten water and sewerage companies in England, if we assume they're all about that level then that is £1.1bn per year. Counting 2023 and 2050 there are 28 years to go on that clock, so there's ~£31bn right there.
I'm sorry, water companies should not be paying dividends at the same time as a) breaking the law over sewage discharges and b) arguing that bills need to go up massively to pay for fixing that. They've got the money, they need to (be forced to) spend it on regulatory compliance before kickbacks to shareholders.
Ben Taylor
boosted
Hearing more and more about marketers using GPT-type "a.i." for SEO and marketing copy, and every time i talk to these people, none of them seem to understand/care that they're in an algorithmically-defined self fulfilling confirmation bias feedback loop.
And i mean, marketing's ALWAYS had something like this problem, but the uncritical gpt/"a.i."/"ML" feedback processes are going to make it a goddamn flat plastic nightmare.
I sweatr, the way some people are willing to cede their preferential and decisional criteria to something that crystalizes and amplifies THE WORST processes of human cognition just TERRIFIES me some days.
@dungeons Raised #21 on your Gitlab for this. Hope you don't mind!
@dungeons And again. We did 6 damage and then 7 damage with a 1d4 improvised attack. There's a bug here.
@dungeons If we pick "Ranged, improvised" for this one, can we watch the damage please? The last one of those that got picked (that I saw) we rolled an 8 and a 9 for damage, which really shouldn't be possible with a 1d4 improvised attack!
There's a bug hiding there somewhere...
Software Engineer, Trade Unionist, Gamer, Geek, Dad. Lives in Devon
Joined Nov 2022
