Yes, they will move fast and they will brake things, and some of those breakages will have catastrophic consequences, and then they can go "whoopsy daisy", face no consequences, and try the same thing again. Very normal, extremely sane way to structure society
The AI summaries are what made me switch. I don't love the idea of using Google products for all the obvious reasons, but they had good UX so that's what I kept using. Enter the AI summaries which made Google search unusable for me, and I was more than happy to pay Kagi
I actually liked that version. I have a fairly verbose "personality" configuration and up to this point it seemed that chatgpt mainly incorporated phrasing from it into the answers. With this update, it actually started following it.
For example, I have "be dry and a little cynical" in there and it routinely starts answers with "let's be dry about this" and then gives a generic answer, but the sycophantic chatgpt was just... Dry and a little cynical. I used it to get book recommendations and it actually threw shade at Google. I asked if that was explicit training by Altman and the model made jokes about him as well. It was refreshing.
I'd say that whatever they rolled out was just much much better at following "personality" instructions, and since the default is being a bit of a sycophant... That's what they got.
This adds an interesting nuance. It may be that the sycophancy (which I noticed and was a little odd to me), is a kind of excess of fidelity in honoring cues and instructions, which, when applied to custom instructions like yours... actually was reasonably well aligned with what you were hoping for.
From reading the report mentioned in the article, it seems (page 63) that once counterespionage intelligence is shared with police no special provisions exist in the law to protect sources and methods of collection from being exposed in court. Obviously no self respecting domestic security service would take that risk, and the Canadian parliament is rightfully criticized in the report for not doing enough to change the relevant laws
Very interesting. If I try to think back, my first hobby project must have been in 10th grade. At that point I very well nearly memorized the C# part of the MSDN, as well as CLR via C# and some other programmimg books (maybe GoF?) but haven't actually written any code that does anything useful. In 10th grade everyone in our class was doing some sort of ASP.NET project for school and a lot of the other students were having trouble with the data layer and SQL stuff, so I decided to code up an ORM (a thing I knew existed, but haven't actually used) and later a utility library for exposing REST APIs which were both used by most of my classmates. It was a fun project. Later projects included a script that tells you where to live based on your public transit needs, a wordle clone for the original GameBoy, and probably other even less useful stuff.
Wow, from this comment alone I can tell you were much further ahead and smarter than your peers in terms of your ability to understand concepts and abstract, while your peers were struggling on such simple things. I can tell you were a highly intelligent child. Bravo, very impressive!
> [Britons beleave Brexit] has hampered government attempts to control immigration
I'm not very well versed in UK politics but what's the narrative behind this? In what way do Britons believe Brexit has made controlling immigration harder? While the ways it has hurt trade and the economy in general are obvious to me (both on the factual level and what I presume Britons believe) I have a hard time imagining what they could possibly think on this subject.
A lot of Brexit politics was about immigration: how EU rules mean you cannot bar any European from entering and reading, except in extreme circumstances. And indeed, UK is much more international than many European peers.
But what happened post-Brexit is that (legal) immigration numbers are at all time high. There is a high fraction of low skilled immigrants from outside EU, often with questionable English and, well, looking different - which matters to some people. My point isn't to disparage hard working people, but that it's very visible.
So that's a major Brexit pledge gone completely awry. I don't think there is anything Brexit-related that made migration control objectively harder, only that the control failed. Although what also happened, not unrelated, is that high-skilled immigrants from EU largely left, because post-Brexit UK is not very attractive to Europeans. This is very perceptible especially in health care, where shortages of doctors and nurses are now quite scary.
And the immigration is so high in then because UK has always had labour shortages, patched by foreigners. It's only the country of origin that changed.
But if the immigration is legal then the control isn't failing at all, is it?
The few brexitters I talked with shared the same stance, that it was not acceptable for the EU to dictate immigration to the UK. It was not a matter of the influx itself, but about having that control. sovereignty was a big thing.
Well, yes, people wanted control, but also to hear the foreigners are kept out. Not, good news, on our own volition, we decided to let in more people than ever.
> There are no labour shortages that justify 750k immigrants in a single year.
Actually, yes. There was a very severe reduction in labour market participation due to the pandemic. The reasons for this are complex, varied and in many ways the fault of the government, but the upshot is that we lost ~700,000 employees from the labour market over the course of 2021/22. Job vacancies have declined sharply since mid-2022, but we still have about 150,000 more vacancies than we did pre-pandemic.
Sorry, but no-one reasonable can believe that this is an accurate representation of the situation.
This just shows the state of the economy where, on the one hand the government is happy to use weak health reasons not to officially count people as unemployed [1], and thus to claim low unemployment while, on the other hand, importing more people, which only keeps productivity and wages down, and keeps the housing market hot.
This also allows the government to claim that the economy is strong when, in fact GDP per capita is going down.
The UK has a big issue with immigration in that it overly depends on it instead of fixing its domestic issues.
From my (foreign) point of view, is that now that the UK can no longer benefit even indirectly from what used to be a large transient workforce from the border-free Schengen Area, it instead is forced to actually accept "unsightly more permanent and real immigration" from the rest of the EU and the world at large to keep the economy turning.
So it went from "we don't like immigrants" to "pretty please immigrate to the UK even if you're not from the EU or we're toast".
The UK isn't exactly begging people to immigrate. Quite the opposite. Legal immigration has blown through all records since the UK left the EU because the Conservative government set the salary thresholds very low.
This isn't what voters want or were promised at all, but there are currently no established parties in the UK that are willing to actually reduce immigration. They are all committed to allowing in the highest numbers possible.
In theory this behavior should be punished by voters, but if all the parties are the same then there isn't much voters can do except refuse to vote at all. This is what they're telling pollsters they'll do in the next GE. Polls predict a big shift to Labour, but this isn't because Labour is suddenly more popular. It's because the Conservative voters have become so disillusioned with being misled over the immigration issue that they're just refusing to vote at all.
Just speculating here, but one way would be that the UK no longer can take part in EU-wide efforts to control the flow of migrants. The EU is doing quite a bit to keep immigrants out by e.g. paying Turkey to take them in instead.
The EU has a rule (Common European Asylum System) that you have to claim asylum/refugee status in the first EU country you arrive in. The UK benefited greatly from this rule while in the EU - anyone entering from France and claiming to be a refugee, they could be sent straight back to France, and under this EU rule France had to accept them.
Post-Brexit, once an asylum seeker in France makes it to the UK, France is no longer under any legal obligation to take them back, so they refuse. There isn't anything in it for them.
It also has rules about spreading the burden, so once a refugee claim is accepted, governments can then forcibly transfer them to a different EU country. Post-Brexit, the UK government can only transfer refugees to EU member states if they agree to receive them, and why should they, what is in it for them?
There are no international water in the short straits between England and France.
To send a ship back we'd have to escort it, then the French would forcefully object to our actions.
Basically for us to send ships back, or send people back, without French cooperation amounts to an act of war. We'd have to use our armed forces, with the obvious reaction from the French armed forces.
> The current PABX-based system went live over the weekend of 27-29th July 1990
A PBX serving a whole country, even a small one, is wild. From what I could find [1] the system used was a UXD5 exchange [2] which is technically a PSTN exchange intended for rural areas and based off the Monarch 120 PBX [3].
The architecture of the UXD5 is common to a lot of telephone exchanges of the time (possibly modern ones as well?) with actor based message passing, actors running on different levels (more real time vs less real time) and a combination of assembly and a high level language (in this case, Coral [4]). Fascinating stuff.
It is valuable in the sense that someone productive can extract value from it, i.e. secure funding for a company that may actually produce a product that makes someones life better. That is the same sort of value a natural resource like, say, wood has. It has no value in and of itself, unless imbued with the skillfull work of a productive person. An investor needn't add anything besides capital to the mix. Now, some investors do add expertise or other actual skills of value but that doesn't have anything to do with them being the source of capital, per se. You could argue that investors are proactive in choosing investments that have a good potential for ROI but that doesn't correlate to actual value for actual people, as all the very profitable but very stupid Web 3 and other fad investments show. Sometimes they aren't even profitable, but that's another matter. So yes, investors are as worthless as wool or wood or gold without the time and skill and labor of the worker who preforms the alchemy of transforming this worthless commodity into value.
We can disagree on this point. I'd say you can have the best solution, best possible product, best idea, and best people building it, and if you have no capital, you're toast.
In the same way that you could have the best chair design but without the resources, the wood or the steel or what have you, and without the proper tools to shape them, your idea is still just going to be an idea. Would you say that the wood in this scenario has value in and of itself, beyond the value the worker may imbue into it? How about the tools? We as a society have come to recognize the people who dole out access to resources as providing value, but they don't, neither in principle nor in reality. As I said in my earlier comment, the only value one might ascribe to them is only in picking the best ideas and they obviously don't do that. We obviously need a better way to fund creative ideas for the betterment of all.
I have to assume that the answer is suicide which is tragically all too common in the trans community. They are denied basic medical care and the psychological pain is too much to bare. Tragically this mechanism of targeting trans people and, basically, encouraging their suicide is happening or is starting to happen in some western countries as well. I guess the world is united in this at least - hate for queer folk.
I'll note that from my experience as a programmer and a manager the best coders (and best code) was done by the people who "just felt this is the right way". Usually the code produced is exactly good enough for the task at hand, and by creating a code base that can be easily refactored (for example, with lots of automated tests) it can be easily changed later. I always tell my junior programmers who tend to ask a lot of questions and get stuck up on process - code whatever you feel like coding. I trust your judgment. I'll correct you during CR if needed.
>I'll note that from my experience as a programmer and a manager the best coders (and best code) was done by the people who "just felt this is the right way".
I'll note that from my experience as a programmer, the worst code was done by people who "just felt this is the right way".
Note that I'm not disagreeing with you. This is a classic case of confirmation bias. Looking at what is common amongst great coders/code is the first step. But that step is incomplete unless you test against crappy code. Is that feature you found in great code often present in crappy code? Then it likely has little to do with code quality...
Coding from the gut is the thing to do if you're a great coder. Not the other way round.
I'm not arguing against using your gut feeling, it is more that if those coders examined why they do things they way they do they could probably come up with some good reasons.
And then if you want to convince other people to do it your way it is better to say "do this because X, Y, Z" than "do this because I think it's better."
So the people who churned out the worst code; did you ask them why they did it that way? How many of them did it because it felt like the right way, and how many of them made an objective analysis of their options and happened to just get that analysis completely wrong?
