pixel graphics but we aren’t committing to them

My last favourite video game trend

The book sounds harmful, but is it the job of libraries to pick books according to such a criterion? That question was going to be rhetorical, but now I think about it, I genuinely have no idea if public libraries have some charter or other that would restrict what kind of books they hold.

I would be more concerned about books on woo-woo health stuff like homeopathy - I’m sure there are books in libraries that have the effect of discouraging people (including parents) from using alternative medicine instead of medicine.

BTW, 58 libraries is about 2% of the total libraries in the UK.

Kinda. You tend to lose weight and develop better sleep habits if you pay attention to them.

Would that be a coot point?

He didn’t exactly give her time for that

Rules governing bike traffic are generally quite reasonable though. It’s not like the enlightened traffic planners in the Netherlands went “you know what, cyclists don’t have to obey red lights” for example. So I’m not seeing the biases you’re talking about, at least in this example.

Comparing running red lights to sleeping under bridges or steal for survival seems, at best, hyperbolic. In any case I don’t think that quote supports the view that the law is intentionally biased

No!

We are in a purely vibes based media landscape. The left cares more about facts than does the right, but overall neither cares overly much about them.

In UK cities where there is extensive cycling and infrastructure, cyclists still run red lights quite often. As a cyclist I don’t obey every traffic law either.

On my old way to work there was a traffic light controlling the entrance to a car park from the main road, but entering traffic was so infrequent that it was always very tempting to dart across. On the same route, a cut across pavement for 25 metres saved negotiating a large roundabout or dismounting.

Neither place could really have had better infrastructure: the junction had poor visibility so you couldn’t see if a car was coming if you did chance it. Backing up the main road wouldn’t have been sensible so both of these mean it couldn’t have been a simple give-way. The section of pavement is narrow and on a bend, so to cycle it safely you must go slow enough to stop. Putting a cycle lane in there would have invited people to go too fast.

And we can still encourage both to obey the rules! Amazing!

It’s about perceptions of corruption not actual corruption

I believe cats have been getting wider by an average of 5mm per year for the last few decades

If they don’t like the paint, they can repaint. If they don’t like the conversation pit, they can remodel… which is gonna be more expensive but I have to imagine if you’re buying a house with a conversation pit you’re probably pretty well off already.

Something that you can’t trust can be good if it is possible to verify without significant penalties, as long as its accuracy is sufficiently high.

In my country, you would never just trust the weather forecast if your life depended on it not raining: if you book an open-air event more than a week in advance, the plan cannot rely on the weather being fair, because the long-range forecast is not that reliable. But this is OK if the cost of inaccuracy is that you take an umbrella with you, or change plans last-minute and stay in. It’s not OK you don’t have an umbrella, or staying in would cost you dearly.

In software development, if you ask a question like, “how do I fix this error message from the CI system”, and it comes back with some answer, you can just try it out. If it doesn’t work, oh well, you wasted a few minutes of your time and some minutes on the CI nodes. If it does, hurrah!

Given that, in practice the alternative is often spending hours digging through internal posts, messaging other people (disrupting their time) who don’t know the answer, only to end up with a hack workaround, this is actually well worth a go - at my place of work. In fact, let’s compare the AI process to the internal search one - I search for the error message and the top 5 results are all completely unrelated. This isn’t much different to the AI returning a hallucinated solution - the difference is that to check the hallucinated solution, I have to run the command it gives (or whatever), whereas to check the search results, I have to read the posts. There is a higher time cost to checking the AI solution - it probably only takes 30 seconds to click a link, load the page, and read enough of it to see it’s wrong. Whereas the hallucinated solution, as I said, will take a few minutes (of my time actually typing commands, watching it run, looking at results - not waiting for CI to complete which I can spend doing something else). So that is, roughly, the ratio for how much better the LLM needs to be than search (in terms of % good results).

Like I said, I wish that the state of our internal search and internal documentation were better, but it ain’t.

No, AI results can be quite good, especially if your internal documentation is poor and disorganised. Fundamentally you cannot trust it, but in software we have the luxury of being able to check solutions cheaply (usually).

Our internal search at work is dogshit, but the internal LLM can turn up things quicker. Do I wish they’d improve the internal search? Yes. Am I going to make that my problem by continuing to use a slower tool? No.

I don’t see any of those objections as being substantive to the point that Labour is making positive changes.

Your point about inflation is not exactly wrong, but calling 3.5% inflation “rampant” is overblown. How exactly could the government have changed this? You want them to have been investing and spending more, which is inflationary.

You then make some points some of which I certainly agree are wrong, but don’t really stick to the point: if your party is in power and does something you disagree with, do you shout about it, harming your party, or put up with it as a cost of being in power? Merely emphasising that you disagree with those actions is beside the point because I’m not saying I agree with them.

I think there has been meaningful change.

• People in government found to have broken rules are sacked, instead of being kept on
• Many more health appointments are available
• A massive increase in the number of criminal investigations into water companies
• On the way to nationalisation of the railways
• Legislation to ban section 21 evictions has been passed

Do you see the Tories having done any of these things?

If I may take the liberty of guessing, I think when you say “nothing has changed” you mean shit is still expensive. And it is. But that was never going to change, not in this timeframe. Nothing the government was going to do would have led to deflation (which is pretty catastrophic in any case). The only way to fix that was to have a responsible economic policy (what that looks like, exactly, is up for debate), stick to it, and wait.

There wasn’t much in the manifesto about about infrastructure investment, because they didn’t think there was room within their economic plan: taxes are high, inflation was (somewhat) high, debt and debt interest was already high. And sure you can have the debate about whether that really constrains the economy, but that was always the line they went with, and people voted for that plan.

Where responsibility lies with the labour left is their inability to rally around a leader not of their stripe, suck it up, compromise and take the win. Constantly moaning about how awful their own party is doesn’t really increase the chance that they get a left-wing labour government next time. That persistent habit is a major contributor to why the country elects more Tory governments than Labour ones.

There are plenty of open plan offices with no natural light either - it’s really a function of how big the floor is whether light can reach to the middle of it (without a lightwell or something)

Gotta hand it to labour left, they really helped make people dislike Starmer!

Writing “dump him” is directly saying “dump him” my friend.