Ben Taylor @VoxDei@qoto.org
Software Engineer, Trade Unionist, Gamer, Geek, Dad. Lives in Devon
Joined Nov 2022
Ben Taylor
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'Britain has for too long presented one face to the world while concealing the awful truth...'
Aditya Chakrbortty summarises the work of a research group at Manchester University which aims to show how our delusional #politics is contributing to our #economic decline...
a depressing but vital read - its worth a few minutes of your time.
Ben Taylor
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A rock bonus for your hard work https://www.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/14kdc0g/a_rock_bonus_for_your_hard_work/
Ben Taylor
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I spent 5 hours in A&E yesterday. (I'm fine.)
After triage I had bloods taken + blood sugars (separately), an ECG, a chest x-ray, a head CT scan, and two sessions with a doctor. I left with a prescription for two weeks of meds and a referral to a specialist unit.
Total cost to me: £0.
Fuck the government and what they're doing to our health services. Fuck privatisation. Fuck the fact the staff are underpaid and overworked. Fuck the Tories. Support your #NHS.
Ben Taylor
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Why am I standing in the #UxbridgeAndSouthRuislip by-election? And why should the wonderful people of that constituency vote for me? I present the 2023 Count Binface Charter. #VoteBinface #BinItToWinIt
Ben Taylor
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I asked ChatGPT about primes ending in 2 to make it prove a point and it proved the point far better than I could have hoped for.
Please do not be a fool who trusts ChatGPT with anything outside your field of expertise, and even then double or triple check what it tells you if you must use it.
Ben Taylor
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The Russians can do what they like in sorting out how their rebellion goes. Mostly it's a question of which unpleasant dictator is in control. If Putin wins, presumably little changes other than that Russia has spent a load of resources fighting itself.
There are two questions I care about, if Prigozhin wins:
1. Would he continue the war in Ukraine? He's already said the pretext was false, so maybe less likely than Putin?
2. If he does, is he more or less likely than Putin to escalate to a direct confrontation with NATO?
I want the Russians out of Ukraine and I want not to have a nuclear war in the process. I'm rooting for whichever side makes that more likely.
Ben Taylor
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"Years ago, anthropologist Margaret Mead was asked by a student what she considered to be the first sign of civilization in a culture. The student expected Mead to talk about fishhooks or clay pots or grinding stones.
But no. Mead said that the first sign of civilization in an ancient culture was a femur (thighbone) that had been broken and then healed. Mead explained that in the animal kingdom, if you break your leg, you die. You cannot run from danger, get to the river for a drink or hunt for food. You are meat for prowling beasts. No animal survives a broken leg long enough for the bone to heal.
A broken femur that has healed is evidence that someone has taken time to stay with the one who fell, has bound up the wound, has carried the person to safety and has tended the person through recovery. Helping someone else through difficulty is where civilization starts, Mead said."
We are at our best when we serve others. Be civilized.
Sadly, Jonathan Freedland is right. Rejoining the EU will be a multi-decade project that if I'm very lucky I might see accomplished in my lifetime (I'm 42). It will require the old who never understood the benefits and who were seduced by lies and meaningless jingoism to die, and the young who had their rights stolen to get old enough to have children in turn to be angry about their rights being stolen.
Because it will not happen until the demand is overwhelming, and overwhelming enough to withstand the demands the EU will place on us to consider letting us back in (not getting our rebate back will be the least of it - we'll probably have to join the Euro, for a start, and Schengen). 52-48 was sufficient to trigger the hardest Brexit possible. Rejoin will be impossible until that figure swings back to nearer 30-70 and stays there.
Ben Taylor
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Ben Taylor
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An #AmazonRiver plume stretches thousands of kilometres across the tropical Atlantic Ocean.
🛰️ #Copernicus Sentinel-3, 19-06-2023
📷 Full-size: https://www.flickr.com/photos/191444271@N08/52994079196/in/dateposted-public/
Image is about 525 kilometers wide.
Ben Taylor
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Totally unsurprising: NHS England in emergency crisis due to 100,000 excess deaths from cardiovascular incidents since March 2020 *beyond* those attributable to COVID19. Turns out Tory NHS cuts over the previous decade, followed by a pandemic, pushed heart attack/stroke care into meltdown on a national scale, death rate rising (the surplus deaths alone are 10x the death rate from all road traffic accidents).
OpenAI wants regulation for its competition but not for itself. I'm shocked. 🙄
I've been saying since the big AI players made their call for regulation that what they actually wanted was for regulators to strangle their nascent competitors for them. And here's the proof.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/21/openai_government_regulation/
Ben Taylor
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This sign, warning of a steep path at a South African crocodile farm, is fairly unambiguous about the potential risks.
Ben Taylor
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Ben Taylor
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*A few oil and coal majors eff around for a while, then (in surprisingly short order when it might have taken centuries), everybody very painfully finds out
Ben Taylor
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FYI... there is evidence that crowd-sourced workers, who are typically tasked with training AI models for pennies, are using AI models to produce that training data
That's not good. As we put it, artificial intelligence will end up eating itself
https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/16/crowd_workers_bots_ai_training/
#bot
Original tweet : https://nitter.42l.fr/TheRegister/status/1671293141310394368
Ben Taylor
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The rogue 2FA app that steals scanned secrets is now ranked 18 on the German App Store for the productivity category. No wonder! The app disguises as a Microsoft app. It is the top hit when you search for "Microsoft Authenticator" and the developer has updated the screenshots in the ad card to highlight the word "Microsoft". Surprisingly, the product page of the app shows different screenshots with the word "Microsoft" removed.
The app now has 1.2K reviews, as opposed to 18 when we first addressed the app.
Interesting different press takes on the British passenger in this missing submersible. To the BBC, Hamish Harding is a "British Adventurer". To the Guardian, he is a "UK Billionaire". Interestingly, on this one the Daily Mail has gone with the same line as the Guardian - he's a billionaire.
Presumably both are true(ish). One is designed to make you feel some sympathy with him, one is designed to make you think it serves him right.
Software Engineer, Trade Unionist, Gamer, Geek, Dad. Lives in Devon
Joined Nov 2022
