Posts by a pressbutton 538 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Sep 2011
FD: How do i boost the shareprice
Anon Management consultants: Give us lots of money we will recommend you get rid of all your staff and then install a new banking system
FD: I wont fall for that again - begone
...
<opens laptop>
<stares into space just a bit too long>
FD: Clippy - I mean Copilot, how do I boost our profits
Copilot : Well......
Some good songs tho - "Taxman" by the beatles
Let me tell you how it will be
There's one for you, nineteen for me
'Cause I'm the taxman
And you were right - at a ***96%*** marginal rate not many left.
England is not a restaurant you dine at, complain about the bill, and then piss off into the night.
How do they hoard it?
Well, the money is in all those empty new flats in London, land, houses, shares, just about anything.
The assets are held in an overseas trust, or the owner is tax resident abroad.
Tax is minimised in ways that are not open to uk taxpaying residents.
Even if someone v.v. rich is uk tax resident, the rate of tax paid on income is bigger than the rate of tax paid on capital gains / dividends.
Naturally - like water - no moral comment - money flows to things that tend to be taxed less.
Things will not change until the tax rate levied on wealth >= tax rate on earned income.
Hmmm.
Sharepoint....
... information in things that are not files
files that are in a site ... but if you dont know where that site is (or dont have access) you wont find it.
WinFS did get implemented in this alternate future, a bit like Skynet.
deliberate irony? the quote
"... it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or parliament or a communist dictatorship. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country. Hermann Goering, International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (1946)
Turns out to be a fake :). There is no record of Goering saying that in the Nuremberg trial. There is hearsay he said something on the same theme, but not the reported words.
Someone much cleverer than me said:
"The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed"
My sister in law is a chiropodist. She keeps paper receipts and her accounts are handwritten.
It works for her.
I have used the MS llm at work and it's... ok but just a novelty really.
Other divisions of $job are starting to use llms on live help desk webchats.
from the first 2 paras of the earliest article i can see :
BBC
Bolts in need of "additional tightening" have been found during inspections of Boeing 737 Max 9s, United Airlines has said.
guardian
United Airlines has found loose bolts and other “installation issues” on multiple 737 Max 9 aircraft, it said on Monday, referring to the Boeing model that has been grounded after a panel blew off an Alaska Airlines-operated plane mid-flight over the weekend.
telegraph
Phones, magazines and even the shirt off a child’s back were sucked out of an Alaska Airlines service from Oregon to California on Friday, prompting concerns about the Boeing 737 Max 9 plane used by commercial airlines all over the world.
times
A section of fuselage on a nearly new Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max 9 fell off in-flight, leaving a gaping hole in the side of the aircraft, causing a loss of cabin pressure and forcing an emergency landing.
cnn
The FAA temporarily grounded certain Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft after an Alaska Airlines plane made an emergency landing in Oregon on Friday.
so a bit confused unless you mean specifically the 3 words "designed by software"
1
Get a dumb phone
2
Stop using the Internet
Admittedly not software based. My dad was ill a couple of months ago.
Took mum shopping. She didn't understand contactless payments. Dad used to drive her to a bank and she would write a cheque for cash.
In some ways the quality of life will be improved
A recent book by a french paleoanthropologist called ludovic slimak
190 pages in 1 paragraph:
After 40 years of research we know Neanderthals lived all over the place including above the arctic circle across siberia and down to the Med, they did not think like humans, did not have things (tools / clothes / jewelery) in the same way as humans. We almost certainly wiped them out. Not much else.
One point he made was that humans can live in a wide range of conditions with not much artificial support.
One still, dry night I was out looking at the aurora north of kittle in shorts sandals and a t shirt for 20m before realising it was -26c and running inside, only because I saw the number - i wasnt feeling cold.
Having said that it is 15c here and in a long sleeve t shirt thats just right.
... or an AI superintelligence that has worked out a (laboured) acronym:
Greater IntelAIgent Games Play. Now though is it a Veritable and Vital and Virulent Virtual Field of Absolutely Fabulous Fabless Dreams for Remote Proxy Realisation via Alien Intervention.
GIAGP
VVVVFAFFDRPRAI
may be a most excellent joke or pun in another language
Just like USAians often struggle with sarcasm and I (a brit) struggle with some french jokes, we may need to shuffle over and make room for superintelligent AI jokes
--> with this it all becomes clear
It could have been worse.
Starmer isnt ... that great ... but the alternative is a bunch of incompetant nutjobs (*) who think
being horrid to refugee children
adding poo to the water
after 13 years of trying to kill the NHS, pointing out the NHS is not in a good state
pointing out the key 'benefits' of brexit being your children need to learn to pick fruit
is a vote winner. and they have a lot of really unsavoury friends.
(*) sunak excepted, hunt, hmmm
I think Corbyn could win against this lot.
And for those of you smart enough to block Internet access in your firewall, it won't take more than 5min for the manufacturer to figure it out and configure a phone home mechanism that your appliance will use before each start.
There are a fair number of home that *do not have internet* - in the UK it is ~ 1.5 million.
Looking at the korean soaps, very few have a PC / Laptop at home - but they all have an enormo phone for social media - the same seems to be true of the UK yoof.
So I think may well be the future.
As others have noticed, we do not know what intelligence is. According to Wikipedia, we are close to simulating an entire rat brain (not in real-time). My bet is we will brute-force AGI first.
The brown rat has 200 million neurons and about 4.48×10^11 connections and we are not there yet and not in real-time.
The human brain consists of 100 billion neurons and over ~10^14 trillion synaptic connections.
The ratio is ~1000. Moore's law allows for doubling every 2 years (i know - it wont go on forever) 2 ^ 10 = 1024
So call it 15 years - not least as some of the issues in getting a brain going is a timing and co-ordination issue. So 2038.
Having said that, i doubt they will think or process input as fast as us for a while after that,
Note4/8/S22 Ultra user - and only got that because the note 8 is no longer supported for security updates.
Hated that there is no SD or headphone jack as well
But
got a £4.99 usb-headphone converter
not many mobile blackspots left and pay ~£1 per day when abroad
and the pen can be used to trigger the camera
So not really that bothered
I will replace it ~2027 when the security updates stop
The only thing I would like is a better DEX - 4k 60hz support (and no cable). With that and a bluetooth keyboard I wouldnt need a laptop
Of course ymmv depending on the use case
My apologies for the long post
This is the last 20% of https://annehelen.substack.com/p/the-wages-of-overwork
and yes, I did suffer (?) from that condition / syndrome to the point of burnout a couple of years ago and am heading that way again despite understanding the clear stupidity of what I am doing.
...Now, we see the logical conclusion of that bargain: a society in which overwork is so thoroughly normalized that anything less is interpreted as “lazy,” “lacking hustle,” or “your generation doesn’t want to work.” On Twitter, I’ve seen plenty of self-proclaimed progressives call the protests against changing the French retirement age the actions of an entitled society with no work ethic — instead of understanding that our reaction is deeply colored by the understanding that people should basically work until they die.
Overwork culture is the ideology of the “right” to work at its most perverse. It may monetarily advantage a handful at the top, but the societal damage is tremendous. Most of our acute societal ills are directly tied to poverty, and as numerous studies and pilot programs have shown, could readily be ameliorated by the very simple step of giving people money, whether through programs like the child tax credit (a tremendous success) or UBI (read a great, nuanced explainer here).
But there are second-tier problems that spiderweb around overwork — problems related to community-building, child and eldercare, community wellness, overall health outcomes and plain-out happiness and satisfaction and civic engagement. Turns out it’s incredibly hard to build community, to forge social safety-nets, to agitate for larger social change, to even give and receive care when you’re dedicated, willingly or not, to the culture of overwork.
Maybe this doesn’t sound familiar. Maybe you told overwork culture to fuck off during the pandemic or a decade ago, maybe you live elsewhere and have always considered it a sort of pathology. But maybe some it — the struggle to find the time to do anything but work and raise your kids and recover from work, the philosophical support of unions but a struggle to see the need for one in your workplace, a general inurement to overwork culture — feels comfortably real.
Maybe you feel like you’ve woken up and realized that you’re pretty bad at community, bad at leisure, bad at rest, bad at sustaining friendship….bad at most things, really, that aren’t work. At that, you’re an expert. And in that case, it’s worth asking yourself, again and again, until you can stare the answer straight in the face: at what cost, and for whose benefit?
I wish our BBC interviewers were as firm as Musk on this
(looking at R4 Today / Laura K and others in many interviews with leading politicians from all parties over the last few years)
The simple line
"you made an assertion, back it up with citations / facts pls"
would simplify / shorten a lot of interviews
( looking at you, Mr Johnson - and many of his friends )
or some basic maths
40,000 people arrive at Dover, It used to take 0 seconds to not check a passport, it now takes 30s, there are 12 staff, so you can only process 30,000 in a day
What is the backlog at the end of the day?
Never pay the ransomware to get your data back,
GDPR - right to data portability ?
Generally speaking the data should be free
(https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protection/guide-to-the-general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr/individual-rights/right-to-data-portability/#:~:text=In%20most%20cases%20you%20cannot,is%20manifestly%20unfounded%20or%20excessive.)
See
https://www.nestpensions.org.uk/schemeweb/nest/nestcorporation/who-runs-nest.html
This will not be paid by taxpayers, the costs of running NEST will be (a little) larger than they would have been.
It surprises me that the contract has been terminated. I recognise the continual tension between vendor / client - 'new' stuff that may or may not have ought to be in the original plan / SOW always comes up.
My reason for surprise is that
- these things usually get passed up the chain and then negotiated as a long term contract gives a _lot_ of space to make money back
- the job that NEST does has not changed much (as far as I understand it manages pensions - esp. auto-enroled ones - and the regs have not changed much)
So it tells me
- ATOS did not supply a 'good enough' product / service
and / or
- NEST were completely unreasonable.
I look forward to seeing what any anons out there have to say.
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