This is an uncharacteristically poor article from the @financialtimes.com PR repeated without any digging into the reality. Physics is physics. Space isn’t cold, vacuums are almost perfect insulators, getting mass into orbit is expensive. www.ft.com/content/a5cf...

One of the easiest ways to shoot down the idea that "AI" is an expert is to show how it deals with something people know about. Younger readers may not get this as most appliances come pre-wired, but anyone 35+ can see these are chaotic fire hazards. From Mastodon, AI asked how to wire a plug:

I have a personal rule to be suspicious of people who can’t be bothered to spell correctly, who use abbreviations like CU, cuz etc and who don’t punctuate or format properly in emails. Over the past few days my rule has been elevated to an eternal verity.

I see some people (<side eyes>) are talking about space based AI server farms. Please stop this. The entire ISS solar array provides enough power to fire up less than two H200 equipped racks. And don't get me started on getting rid of the heat and how hard it is to rad-harden chips in space.

This paragraph describes one of the primary problems with the UK economy and explains many of the post 2007 difficulties.

@robinwigglesworth.ft.com once again displays the sublime wordsmithing skills for which he is justly famous. The Flight to Shite. Genius.

Remember that thing with Grok producing "sexualised" images of children? That was last week?

Seeing an increasing number of what I call "iPhone Torch AI businesses". Interesting niche domain where (maybe) LLMs might add some value. And then, in a year or two Google or Microsoft thinks "hey, we can do that ourselves". Just like the slew of iPhone torch apps which disappeared overnight.

taco schmaco. i've said it before and i'll say it again: you can't put the shit in the donkey. when the trust has gone, it's gone

I see The Crypto is back to its old tricks. “Up to 13% annual interest” where the “up to” is doing a lot of heavy lifting… “Earn 13% interest with a significant chance of vaporising your entire stake” really doesn’t sound so good does it.

Accepting Jenrick into Reform shows Farage’s lack of political nous. Had he been smarter he would have said “no, this guy wanted to be part of Reform but he is emblematic of why the Tories aren’t the solution”. I mean, Jenrick looks like “Tory MP from Central Casting”.

had a really interesting conversation last night with an investor and died-in-the-wool capitalist where the conclusion was something like, most Americans don't realize that functioning capital markets and the rule of law are America's actual superpowers and those things could absolutely end

H/t to @mayfaircynic.bsky.social who suggested the Secret Maps exhibit at the British Library. Where else would you see a beautiful map of the world, an Enigma Machine, an AirTag and Lady Mountbatten’s underpants.

Not enough car manuals have a "how to destroy your car" section in them.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Although you have to be a little bit of a #Linguistics geek to get into it, the human history which is unveiled by the development of proto Indo-European was completely new to me and utterly fascinating.

2/3 done. ~6000 pieces so far. Bloody hell, this is a truly brilliant Lego model.

I know there is some irreducible minimum of idiots but…a quarter of people (polled) in the UK look across the Atlantic and think “yeah, things would be better if we had some of that over here”? We are doomed.

l think the hardest thing to describe to a previous generation is that it used to be extremely unusual for video of a murder to just pop up in your everyday life

1/3rd done. This is as complex as any Lego™ I’ve done.

<sigh>

Roger Daltrey once pushed past me to get to the stage entrance in the Glasgow Apollo.

I have just finished this book and I highly recommend it. The solid history and scientific rigour sensitively blended with the human stories. I visited Pripyat and Chernobyl in 2013 so it has extra resonance for me. This is an event which changed the course of energy policy for good and for bad.

Thanks Santa! This will be fun although it will mean I will get nothing else done for a month.

Although Will Ferrell is miscast, Spirited is actually a great Christmas movie. It’s not the genius-level Muppets Christmas Carol granted but it’s still good.

Came for the ancient human species, sadly not the darts player whom, I suspect, is easy to distinguish.

The most perfect @financialtimes.com headline ever.

Headline in 2 years: “Meta to slash spending on AI as Zuckerberg shifts focus to beanie babies” giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

I wrote something for the @financialtimes.com about the importance of mathematics as a source of innovation for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. on.ft.com/442Mpiq

The Iris Affair is enjoyable tosh but absolutely worth watching because Tom Hollander is a genius actor.

This (from the FT) seems to suggest that tobacco duties already contribute £1 trillion to Treasury. Unless it’s a *total* of £8bn rather than a *extra* £8bn.

There is a word “nocent” which means the opposite of “innocent”. Rarely used now sadly.

Journalist challenge: Use “Machine Learning” when you mean machine learning and “LLM” when you mean LLM. Ditch “AI” as a catch-all term, it’s not useful for readers and it helps companies trying to confuse the public by obscuring the roles played by different technologies. 🧪

FWIW: slow horses continues to be superb. A love poem to London.

Occasionally of variable quality, but @profgalloway.com really nails this. Gamblification of just about everything is destroying young men. Having once been a young man (no...really) I worry a lot about what we are storing up for ourselves with this.

Look, I know that there is a lot of stupidity in this exchange but I feel I have to <tap the sign> Power stations don’t *make* electrons. They just move them around.

Reeves should risk it all on one last roll of the dice. Raise income tax, break the triple lock, slay the deficit, spend the money on the things she believes in. It may not work - but better than waiting for doom to overtake her. open.substack.com/pub/edrith/p...

If you see this, post an album cover with a motor vehicle on it.

Time to watch some proper grownup telly you losers

Well…that’s pretty clear.

The costs of the UK’s Global Talent Visa looks a trifle high in comparison to competitor countries - largely through the Immigration Health Surcharge (which critics say is a form of double taxation as they contribute to the NHS through normal tax on their earnings)

So Microsoft uses AWS?

Still $10k too much

Who robbed the Louvre, Right answers only.

Still use mine pretty much every day. Easier than bringing up the calculator app for things I can’t do in my head.

Insightful and prescient from @thedailymash.bsky.social once again. www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/science...

<sigh>

Taps the sign (having search replaced AI with Quantum). www.ft.com/content/40c6...

Well, this is exciting. (Also, iPhone photography is really very good nowadays).

The even more unbelievable crime fact (which I learned relatively recently) is that burglary has fallen by more than 90% since the 1990s. Did anyone notice? Nope. Does anyone believe it? Nope. But is is true? It is!