Posts by LucreLout 3209 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jun 2014
There needs to be weight given to how involuntary data provision is to the public sector. If he worked at the local Ford dealership you can just shop elsewhere and secure your data from him, but when he works for the state the penalty for deliberate breaches needs to always be custodial in nature. No exceptions.
I've built successful globalised teams for a long time now. There is a very definite performance difference observable depending on the quality of the manager that follows me into the role - pick the one I recommended and productivity continues or improves, pick an outsider and it all falls apart. Managers do things, even if you don't understand what they are.
There's a definite observable difference in productivity volatility between people who have worked in an office before the pandemic working from home, and the drop off in the "mouse jiggler" generations that haven't. Sorry, but there just is. Hybrid working leaves no way to hide that - when sat at a PC, in an observable workplace, their productivity numbers soar relative to their work from home output.
With the typical departmental tenure measured on about 3 or 4 years, even the most doe hard civil servant would have to admit they have little to no expertise in what they're doing.
The civil service has gone backwards so fast it's now about 40% behind its own 2016 productivity numbers on a per head basis. You can't seriously see that as anything other than incompetence and stupidity, can you? Really?!
That's not remotely true. They ignore the government when it suits them, like returning to the office or adopting modern working practices etc.
That there's no accountability on the public sector is the primary reason the country is in a mess. Services can't improve if failure isn't recognised, acted upon, and owned.
The irony of course is that you can't do anything about the cash in hand economy.
Take it to the extreme and make pounds digital only. Cool, everyone will cash in hand using USD instead.
The only thing that can actually work is to reduce the tax burden while increasing the penalties for being caught, thereby making evasion unappealing.
Half of what HMRC perceive as missing isn't evasion though, it's actually just common tax avoidance, which is both legally and morally correct.
Again, that can be addressed in the manner I described but not with this nonsense approach of needing paid for software and quarterly reporting.
They've made it so complicated and needlessly expensive that I've shuttered my side hustle that ran as a ltd for liability reasons more than tax.
It might not make a big dent on GDP but it's definitely nudging it in the wrong direction, as that effort now simy doesn't happen.
Driving certainly "scales" better than walking. I mean, even if you walk for 24 hours straight, no pee stops, you'd only cover 96 miles. That's as little as an hour on the motorway.
If you're just popping to the shop then walking is great, or if you're one of those people with lots of spare time to fill.
Banning stuff is generally a bad thing, but we ban all kinds of things that are far less harmful than social media.
Surely rather than deciding if we should ban kids from using it we should first decide if we shouldn't just ban the whole toxic cesspit of social media for everyone.
I've yet to meet anyone make a credible argument it does more good than harm.
That, to me, is one of the critical AI questions.
If AI can do the coding, and AO can do the work of the management consultant, then why do I need the management consultancy at all?
Claude can very definitely code, yes it can. Denying that is like denying that night follows day. But, can it code to a sufficiently accurate level to replace each grade of engineer cost effectively while consuming both tokens and a "pilot" to give it requirements?
For that to be true we either need to move engineering closer to the business where they subsumed most of the product organisation, or chop engineering and massively skill up the product organisation. Otherwise we have all the humans and now tokens to buy too..
If the AI is going to tell the consultant what to tell me which way to go, why can I not just ask the AI and burn the consultancy?
Bye Bye McKinsey, PwC etc all, time to reap what you have sown for decades, it seems.
In financial markets there's a moment of capitulation where everyone fighting against the start of the direction change just accepts it. It's a necessary precursor for the direction change.
I've gradually given up on rational arguments against AI. It's just not stopping no matter how much I think it should. Will the bubble burst? Eventually yes. Will it go away after? No, not now, but it would change.
I want you to be right, I really do, but I've finally capitulated and accepted you won't be. The sooner you join me the sooner this shit show can change direction.
That would be the absolute sweet spot for me. Recently retired by then, come back for a last blast couple of years on a contracting gig at insanely high day rates to finish teaching millennials and gen z proper architectures and coding in a post AI world.
I'm not holding my breath mind. What we want in life is so rarely what we get. At least once you're 40+.
Literally none of the best & brightest people I've ever met would consider a job in the public sector. Its not the pay. Its not even the public. Its your colleagues and union barons - as above, demotivated, jaded, lazy, and committed to provision of truly awful levels of service, if any.
Intelligent people that expect to head a department don't want to do so with a malingering union steward trying to undercut every change, every efficiency, every attempt to deliver something better. They just don't.
I lasted less than a year in the public sector and swore I'd never go back. The whole thing needs a root & branch clear out at all levels, and of all the antiquated ways of working. That way 30 years ago and its only gotten worse since.
Personally I'd much rather deal with an AI than many of the public servants I meet who are bored, jaded, burned out, and inefficient. That's before we get to stroppy, surely, and moody.
There's a reason most of us keep our interactions with the state to a bare minimum.
In fairness, the company employed tens of thousands of people. You're always going to get a few clowns sneaking through at that scale.
That said, holy shit. The claims made are essentially that every rookie error in the book has been made and then gone undetected in any internal review, every internal audit, and the damage caused will be many years in the fixing. Holy shit.
That's precisely the problem though, isn't it? Lessons won't be learned until heads have rolled.
For this level of data breach it would be impossible for all the senior folks to stay in harness in the real world, and its time public bodies like TFL were made to take accountability. Lose millions of records in a hack, your CISO gets sacked and your CEO gets warned. Second hack the CISO number 2 gets sacked and the CEO with them. Rinse and repeat until secure.
That's the problem I think. Like a lot of people I simply don't look closely enough at everyone in a room to know there's a pair of these there.
Maybe we could legislate to make them saleable only in hot pink, a shade reserved so no other glasses come in the colour. Knowing there's a pair about is half the battle.
I can see a use for augmented reality that takes a nice camera feed, but it's really time the privacy laws in the UK were updated.
Recording, either as pictured or video should require consent, and it's beyond certain that permission must be required to upload someone else to social media.
The alternative is clout thirsty brainouts treating every interaction with anyone else as content. The works had changed since our laws were written, when being photographed in public mostly meant the background of someone's holiday snaps, not being targeted for monetized humiliation.
Its you who choose to slant it that way to mark anyone as antisemitist.
If it walks like a duck....
The real question for folks of your ilk, is why you despise being called out for your antisemitism, instead of just learning not to be antisemitic in the first place. It might help, no?
So Israel is just incompetent then?
Careful, careful to not kill civilians.
You really are defending bombing civilians for more than a year?
They've been bombing Hamas. Can you have a guess at why? Or do Jewish kids not count?
You really are a sorry example of a human
Right back at ya champ. I don't know how you people sleep at night.
"Provoked", seriously?
You'd have to be dangerously antisemitic to not consider October 7th as provocation.
Palestine was a very brief British invention that ended more decades back than ever it existed for. Your obsession with it is illogical. I mean, are you campaigning this hard for Yugoslavia? Czechoslovakia maybe? If not, why not?
The land was never "Palestinian" except when Britain made it so.
The Jews are a very distinctive ethnic group, tribe if you like. If their land is not Jerusalem the where is it you think they come from?
70,000+ dead in Gaza
Yeah, no. All we know about the numbers is that hamas lie and massively inflate them. Also apparently no terrorists have died, if you believe hamas.
Remember the hospital bombing where they claimed 500 died until it was shown to be their rocket, where miraculously, the number dropped to 50. That's a big miscalculation somewhere.
It's done nothing to minimise civilian casualties
Lol. Aside from leaflet drops, supplying aid, safety zones, evacuation corridors, and withholding their biggest weapons from use. Aside from more than any other military in history you mean? Facts after man, start using some.
Genocide? In Gaza? Lol, no.
If Israel wanted to kill Gazans there would be millions dead. They're actively trying to avoid it more than any military in history.
You've clearly absolutely no idea what genocide actually means. Again, I ask not to insult you but to understand, but are you still somewhere in the school system? Only, I'm wondering if you're just too young to know what a real genocide is.
The NHS death toll isn't all that far behind the IDF, so they can't be trying all that hard.
Why on Earth would you be worried about Israel having nukes?
Everyone knows they have nukes. They have been provoked to the extreme by Gaza, and still did not nuke them, in fact they went extensively out of their way to reduce and minimise civilian casualties in Gaza. Two big bombs would have wiped out about 80 to 90% of Gaza's population at one stage, quite without using nukes. Israel isn't the problem.
The problem is the last 8 years of ambitious advancement of Iran's nuclear capability. As we've seen the last few days, they're completely unsuited to nuclear weapons, or half he middle east would be gone this week.
Keith already managed to get the UK involved
As much as Starmer is an absolute cretin who has been a disaster in every job he's ever had, and does always chicken out (SACO), it's hard to blame him for this one.
There's no way any war this close to us doesn't end up using our bases at some stage, and Iran have mindlessly lashed out at everything in reach, including us and our allies (Israel and the USA). There's nothing else he could do but allow our bases to be used.
Given the widespread distribution of attacks over the weekend by Iran, which can only reasonably be described as mindlessly lashing out at everything in reach, is that really a regime you'd be happy to see achieve nuclear capability? Really?
Negotiation totally failed. They've had decades to come tot he table, and were not many months or years from a nuke. This had to be done, and done now. Its genuinely astounding that you don't seem to see that.
The problem here is the incentives aren't aligned. Embracing AI as an employee comes with risks of cost reductions on one side and a lot more work in the more optimistic view.
What it doesn't come with is less work across the same people or a pay rise for the same work over fewer people. So what's the grunt level logically going to do? Slow walk AI.
America isn't a regime.lol. Hilarious.
America is our most important global ally. It just is. And all the bile from the usual suspects in these parts isn't going to change that. Even in the earliest days where we all ended up on a labour watch list because of the extreme leftist reactionaries that made up the commentariat back then.
AI can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear! And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead!
AI isn't a Terminator. Needs just a little tweak at the end there:
AI can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear! And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until your career is dead!
Just switch the damn things off
I'd love for that to happen, but I've reluctantly come to the conclusion that it's never going to happen.
AI will only play a larger role in our future than it does in our current day, with what is likely to be large scale job losses through increased automation. I've got about a decade left in my career, and I'm switching all my future upskilling to working with AI because, sadly, its that or get crushed by it.
Think about all those 20 deep hierarchies in the public sector - most of you are in one - once you remove those at the coalface in public facing roles, and you remove the top tier interacting with ministers etc, its probably most of the organisation. All of those roles are massively at risk, because their main function is writing reports which get incorporated into the next level of reporting above. That can all be readily automated now. Its not just the number of jobs in the public sector at risk though, its all those career paths folks assumed they'd have that won't exist in what has to now become a much flatter hierarchy.
Out in the private sector, the job losses, at least in tech, are well in train already. Linked in is full of folks that haven't worked in 12+ months due to not being able to find the next job thanks to greatly reduced hiring. The tax base is very likely to be meaningfully smaller over the next decade and so that will further force the state to cut its cloth according to its means, because we can't default on the massive public sector debt we're carrying already.
There's gonna be hard times to come, so yeah, I'd love to just switch the damn things off for a few years, but its not going to happen.
