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.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/13/23638823/microsoft-ethics-society-team-responsible-ai-layoffs

It’s always one of the first things to get cut when companies try to save money.

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.

I tried using some but they’re all equally shit.

That would be fine, if people weren’t using LLMs to write code, or to do school work,

But they are. So it’s important to write these articles that say “if you keep using a chainsaw to drive nails, here are the limitations you need to be aware of.”

Good luck suing a cop. The courts have consistently ruled that they can basically do what they like and you can’t sue them for shit.

https://www.ncsl.org/civil-and-criminal-justice/qualified-immunity

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.

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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.

I changed companies and we all use teams now.

But none of that stuff helped when I did use it.

The problem was I was in AWS and needed to be subscribed to hundreds of channels. So when I needed to find something, I’d have to click through maybe 20 different channels all with similar names to find it. At that point the back button is useless.

Thumbs up is good for telling a person you’ve seen something. It doesn’t help the rest of the team know this, unless they like to go back and read old messages.

I mean the real take home message is “don’t work for Aws”. Slack just made some of the dysfunction worse, it didn’t create it.

Fuck slack though.

I hated the channel organisation, I would always click off a channel where I needed to respond to try and find other information, and then I’d never be able to find the channel I was responding to. Chronological sorting channels at least means I have a chance of finding where I was.

Also fuck their terrible reply options. I generally just wanted to acknowledge that I was responding to a message, I didn’t want to spin up some weird thread.

Basically, I hate everything, and don’t want to talk to anyone.

Yeah they’ve rolled it out to everyone, got a defacto monopoly and now they’re increasing the rates for new customers.

This is just capitalism 101 while pretending it’s for the regulators.

It’s good for anything that has thousands of examples on stack overflow.

For example, every time I end up trying to work with pandas, I always forget the syntax and it’s generally good here.

Anything unusual, or that is sufficiently complicated that I wouldn’t be able to Google for, and just forget it.

How fucked up would it be if your actual town square was owned by a private company?

You have just invented malls. Hugely damaging to society, but they come with convenient parking and air con.

I quite like the tag line X, the abandoned shopping mall of the internet.

I think it describes it well.

Great that’ll go really well with teams, teams classic, and teams work and school.

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.

The UK food standards authority says there are more people in hospital because of improved detection.

Jesus fucking Christ, pre Johnson this would be a resigning issue, now it’s just business as usual.

Honestly, most of what Cambridge analytica did was blackmail, illegal spending, and collusion between campaigns that were legally required to be separate.

Much of the data processing/ml was intended as a smoke screen to distract from the big stuff that was known to work and consequently legislated against. The problem is that they were so incompetent that the distraction technique was also illegal.

Maybe the machine learning also worked, but it’s really not clear.