I mean, yeah. All of this. Absurd.

But, FWIW, offloading cheap tat onto charity shops is not going to work well. It costs them money to put it on a shelf and it probably takes up more space than it is worth. Plus, they very likely can’t sell electrical equipment that has had its cord chopped up and repaired, or at least not without spending more on having it tested than they could sell it for anyway.

Next time, find a friend with small feet who would like to take it off your hands.

The fact Starmer won’t even think about joining the single market is stupid too.

Joining the single market would simplify border issues but it wouldn’t solve them… We’d have to join the Customs Union and the common VAT area as well to do that. SM-only is not completely pointless but there is a massive political risk attached because it doesn’t solve all the problems its advocates pretend it does.

There are only two ways to make Brexit work. One is to be an EU member in all but name (following all the rules but having a very limited role in making the rules). The other is a united Ireland (with a lot more expenditure on customs and warehousing in Britain).

The first is politically impossible, and also pointless. The second is up to the people of the island of Ireland and requires a British govt which is willing to invest in the real economy, rather than keeping most of us around to create the illusion of a real country instead of a tax haven based on a massive casino.

National Highways says the radar detects 89% of stopped vehicles - but that means one in 10 are not spotted.

At least 79 people have been killed on smart motorways since they were introduced in 2010. In the past five years, seven coroners have called for them to be made safer.

National Highways’ latest figures suggest that if you break down on a smart motorway without a hard shoulder you are three times more likely to be killed or seriously injured than on one with a hard shoulder.

No brainer. But then they quote this prick without directly challenging the contradiction:

The agency’s operational control director Andrew Page-Dove says action was being taken to “close the gap between how drivers feel and what the safety statistics show”.

The ‘gap’ seems to be a result of drivers having a much more accurate perception than the people paid to defend them.

National Highways says reinstating the hard shoulder would increase congestion and that there are well-rehearsed contingency plans to deal with power outages.

Just add more lanes. That’ll work. It’s never worked but obviously it’ll work. Fuckwits.

I think you overestimate the amount of ‘thought’ going on here. (ref}

The way he plays with the meaning of words

She (or, if you’re not sure, they).

any kind of bureaucratic or rule-based decision-making

Human-written rules are often flawed, and for similar reasons (the sole human thought process that ‘AI’ is very good at reproducing is system justification). But human-written rules can be written down and they can be interrogated. But Apple landed itself in court because it had no clue how its credit algorithm worked and could not conceive how it could possibly be sexist if the machine didn’t get any gender data to analyse.

Perhaps that is the point.

That is, indeed, the point.

It is very easy to have a play with a benefits calculator to find out what reality looks like for yourself.

In-work benefits keep working people who earn less than they need to survive at or slightly above the poverty level. For people who are unable to work, due to sickness, disability or a lack of available jobs, it keeps them stuck below the poverty level with just about enough to survive but not to thrive.

As the article points out, the philosophy this system was built on was not necessarily well thought out at the time. In the post-covid era it is disastrous.

It’s asking why don’t we use it for that purpose, not suggesting that there is anything easy about doing so. I don’t know how you think science works, but it’s not like that.

The data cannot be understood. These models are too large for that.

Apple says it doesn’t understand why its credit card gives lower credit limits to women that men even if they have the same (or better) credit scores, because they don’t use sex as a datapoint. But it’s freaking obvious why, if you have a basic grasp of the social sciences and humanities. Women were not given the legal right to their own bank accounts until the 1970s. After that, banks could be forced to grant them bank accounts but not to extend the same amount of credit. Women earn and spend in ways that are different, on average, to men. So the algorithm does not need to be told that the applicant is a woman, it just identifies them as the sort of person who earns and spends like the class of people with historically lower credit limits.

Apple’s ‘sexist’ credit card investigated by US regulator

Garbage in, garbage out. Society has been garbage for marginalised groups since forever and there’s no way to take that out of the data. Especially not big data. You can try but you just end up playing whackamole with new sources of bias, many of which cannot be measured well, if at all.

It’s how LLMs work.

The systems didn’t do anything they weren’t told to do.

You’re thinking of the kinds of algorithms written by human beings. AI is a black box. No one knows how these models obtain their answers.

Where did you get insurance carriers from?

No idea what your post, before or after edit, is trying to say. But the subject of your quoted sentence is “proponents of AI” not “AI”, and the sentence is about what is enabled by AI systems. Your attempt at pedantry makes no sense.

If you’re suggesting that it is possible to build an AI with none of the biases embedded in the world it learns from, you might want to read that article again because the (obvious) rebuttal is right there.

Isn’t that a continuation of “why the outlier was culled”?

Not sure I follow, but I think the answer is “no”.

If you control for all the causes of a difference, the difference will disappear. Which is fine if you’re looking for causal factors which are not already known to be causal factors, but no good at all if you’re trying to establish whether or not a difference exists.

It’s really quite difficult to ask a coherent question with real-world data from the messy, complicated reality of human beings.

A simple example:

Women are more likely to die from complications after a coronary artery bypass.

But if you include body surface area (a measure of body size) in your model, the difference between men and women disappears.

And if you go the whole hog and measure vein size, the importance of body size disappears too.

And, while we can never do an RCT to prove it, it makes perfect sense that smaller veins would increase the risk for a surgery which involves operating on blood vessels.

None of that means women do not, in fact, have a higher risk of dying after coronary artery bypass surgery. Collect all the data which has ever existed and women will still be more likely to die from the surgery. We have explained the phenomenon and found what is very likely to be the direct cause of higher mortality. Being a woman just makes you more likely to have that risk factor.

It is rare that the answer is as neat and simple as this. It is very easy to ask a different question from the one you thought you were asking (or pretend to be answering one question when you answered another).

You can’t just throw masses of data into a pot and expect sensible answers to come out. This is the key difference between statisticians and data scientists. And, not to throw shade on data scientists, they often end up explaining to the world that oestrogen makes people more likely to die from complications of coronary artery bypass surgery.

All barristers are only as good as the evidence given to them

That’s not entirely true. The Secret Barrister made a good point on the site I won’t visit to grab the link: people always ask how you can defend someone you know is guilty; they never ask how you can prosecute someone who you know is innocent.

We have an adversarial system, not an inquisatorial one. Barristers are paid to present one case or the other, not decide what is true for themselves.

There are barristers and judges who may well be sanctioned, professionally if not also criminally, for their part in this scandal. Richard Morgan is one that sticks in my mind. He relied on an entirely circular argument (Lee Castleton signed off the accounts therefore the reliability of Horizon is irrelevant, even though it produced the accounts that Castleton had to sign if he wanted to continue trading). If you read/watch his appearance at the inquiry, it appears to literally dawn on him during the questioning. He was professionally negligent and he should not be allowed to get away with it.

That kind of analysis is done all the time. But, even if we can collect all the relevant data (big if), the methods required are difficult to interpret and easy to abuse (we can’t do an RCT of being born female vs male, or black vs white, &c). A good example is the proliferation of analyses claiming that the gender pay gap does not exist (after you’ve ‘controlled’ for all the things that cause the gender pay gap).

It’s not easy to do ‘right’ even when done in good faith.

The article isn’t claiming that it is easy, of course. It’s asking why power is so keen on one type of question and not its inverse. And that is a very good question, albeit one with a very easy answer. Power is not in the business of abolishing itself.

The CPS, and equivalents in Scotland, brought around a third of the wrongful prosecutions.

The barristers the CPS employs to bring prosecutions are the same barristers used by the Post Office, using the same courts and the same judges.

This scandal just shines a light on how impossible the criminal justice system is for ordinary people with more limited means. Bates vs PO only happened because they managed to find 555 claimants (500 being the minimum their funders needed to risk it).

There was a case settled in 2003 because the court appointed a single independent expert to act for both sides and he pointed out all the holes in the Post Office case. That should have been the end of it. But they made the Cleveleys subpostmaster sign a confidentiality agreement, slandered the expert, and carried on prosecuting.

I told Post Office the truth about Horizon in 2003, IT expert says

This is disgusting. PIP is designed to help with additional costs incurred due to an illness or disability but there are loads of people who are too sick to work who don’t need it, and many others who do need it but don’t qualify.

Cold weather payments should be extended to everyone who is reliant on benefits to survive (which would mean almost every benefit other than PIP being a qualifying benefit).

She has used her considerable platform to make trans lives worse in many ways, not just with regard to sport.

Because she is a transphobic piece of shit, you see.

How is the microphone for phone calls?

As I’ve said elsewhere, it’s about who you want to benefit from your clicks. Pirate her books and articles if you want to know what she has to say (but honestly, it’s not much so probs don’t bother).

She’s very similar to JK Rowling, even if Jordan Peterson is as far as she’s got in her adventures with the far right so far.

You have an incorrect mental timeline on sports inclusion. Some sporting bodies have recently begun to introduce bans under pressure from conservative politicians desperate to distract the people they are pickpocketing. The stronger trend is for inclusion, because two years on gender-affirming hormones eliminates all the advantages a trans woman might have apart from extra height for those who went through a male puberty because they weren’t lucky enough to get puberty blockers early enough.

Laurel Hubbard: First transgender athlete to compete at Olympics

The 43-year-old became eligible to compete at the Olympics when the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 2015 changed its rules allowing transgender athletes to compete as a woman if their testosterone levels are below a certain threshold.

(Feel free to look up Hubbard’s performances before and after transition.)

One of the big tells with Lewis is her scare-mongering about trans women in women’s prisons. It has long been the case in the UK that women who are considered too violent to be housed in a women’s prison have been sent to men’s prisons. This applies to all women, cis and trans, and obviously includes trans women who have committed violent crimes against other women. People like Lewis seize on very rare instances where errors have been made to cause alarm and distress. Of course, they ignore the fates of trans women who have mistakenly been housed in men’s prisons without any of the protective segregation cis women in men’s prisons receive.

Also it was weird of you to bring up her race in the original comment - her being a white woman is orthogonal to the criticism you are making of her.

No idea why you think race and class are not relevant in a comment about her abuse of intersectionality. If you don’t understand, dictionaires exist.