Posts by LucreLout

Fewer than 3 in 10 register for HMRC's Making Tax Digital shake-up

Re: MTD = Making tax difficult

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.

Re: MTD = Making tax difficult

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.

AI went viral among attorneys. We have the numbers on what happened next

Re: It's not just the lawyers

Looking closer to home there was a case recently where the judgement was essentially a massive hallucination so shot full of holes it calls the entire case into suspicion.

Artemis II astronaut: 'I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those are working'

Re: Linux,

Lol. Have we reached the year of Linux on the desktop yet? Been waiting since the 90s and it looks less likely to happen now than at any time before.

Android yes, proper Linux no. The desktop is dying out now so if it's ever coming out beds to be quick.

Remote or not, workers are drifting back toward the city

Re: Driving doesn't scale

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.

UK wants to know if banning under-16s from social media does anything useful

Banning stuff

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.

PwC will say goodbye to staff who aren't convinced about AI

Re: A completely rational stance for a CEO

Isn't avoiding responsibility the non-ignorance reason c suites buy consultancy output in the first place?

McKinsey told me to do it etcetc....

Re: It is not about AI!

I'm genuinely not sure we shouldn't replace judges with AI. Juries no, but most judges are shades of hopeless to gullible with a lot of irrelevance in between.

Re: It is not about AI!

If you don't see PwC etc all as useful it's because you're reading it wrong.

Instead of reading their output from a position of competence and experience, try reading it from a position of ignorance. It is, after all, aimed at the C suite, not your good self.

Re: It is not about AI!

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.

AI still doesn't work very well, businesses are faking it, and a reckoning is coming

Sure, but we've always had legions of people that thought they were coding ninjas that regularly shat the bed. AI, no AI, same thing in that regard.

Re: re: AI still doesn't work very well

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.

Re: The next year 2000?

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+.

Brits fear AI will strip the human touch from public services

Re: worried that AI will dehumanize public services

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.

Re: worried that AI will dehumanize public services

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.

LexisNexis confirms data breach at Legal & Professional arm, some customer records affected

Re: LexisNexis fails cybersecurity risk assessment services

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.

Transport for London says 2024 breach affected 7M customers, not 5,000

Re: Make 'em pay

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.

UK watchdog eyes Meta's smart glasses after workers say they 'see everything'

Re: What a surprise

Africans. & Indians. AI keeping it real.

Re: Key takeaway

The problem is when you're having a piss in the pub toilet and one of these wankers walls in.

The people filmed aren't always the terminally online.

Re: Who would wear AI glasses during "extremely private moments" ...

Hi Clarence, I noticed you're trying to smash Chlamydia. Would you like a little help?

What would be infinitely better would be ensuring those in the content, owners or not, can delete content featuring themselves. Better yet, give folks an automatic right not to be filmed and enforce mandatory blurring of all who select it.

Or is facial rec not good enough for police use yet?

Re: describing the allegations as "concerning."

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.

Re: describing the allegations as "concerning."

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.

Iran all but vanishes from the global internet amid US-Israel strikes

Re: Another war for oil

the difference between anti-semitism and anti-

I've already explained, in practice there isn't any difference. Same people, same hate. You know this already though, don't you?

Re: Another war for oil

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?

Re: Another war for oil

Or the same people with the same hate for non-Jews use anti-semitism as a dog whistle to prevent any criticism of Israel

Quack quack oops. I'm neither Israeli nor am I Jewish.

Re: Another war for oil

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.

Re: Another war for oil

The problem with posts like yours, is that under the disgusting mask of antizionism always, always, lies the disgusting face of antisemitism. It's the same people with the same hate. Always.

Re: Another war for oil

Yeah, sadly it's totally true.

You again have no basis in fact for your post. It's just school playground rhetoric.

Re: Another war for oil

"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?

Re: Another war for oil

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.

Re: Another war for oil

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.

Re: "the good sense to leave the US & Israel to slog it out"

Lol. That's just factually incorrect. They're the only democracy in the middle east and our only strategic ally in the region.

Re: There are elections later this year

So you don't care about Iranian citizens? Or you do but this was just too much of an opportunity to dump on your favourite hate objects? I'm genuinely unclear which message you want us to understand.

Re: Another war for oil

You're not going to come here and try to pretend Iran wasn't developing nuclear weapons, are you? That would be really quite incredible given its satellite tracked activity at its nuclear mountain base.

Re: Another war for oil

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.

Re: Just Weird

That would have to be the weirdest and probably the most innocuous conspiracy theory I have encountered in a very long time

Its not a conspiracy theory, its a fact.

You have google, you can literally google this and see for yourself. It's been widely reported for a while now.

Re: "the good sense to leave the US & Israel to slog it out"

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.

Re: Another war for oil

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.

HR may have to cajole and soothe reluctant employees to get them to use AI

Misaligned incentives

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.

Re: Clarification needed

In English, get HR to help managers automate webinar workloads.

US struck Iran with copies of its own drones

Re: Proof this was long planned

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.

AIs are happy to launch nukes in simulated combat scenarios

Re: > AI's seem to come to the same conclusion.

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!

Re: > AI's seem to come to the same conclusion.

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.

Denizens of DEF CON are 'fed up with government'

Re: Benjamin Franklin and human rights

Nobody has excused it, its simply that its of far lesser importance than his later actions in life. In terms of scale you're comparing the temporary small scale impact against the permanent everywhere in America impact.

Again, the UK did financially well out of trading slaves, but the union jack is and forever will be the ultimate symbol of abolition of slavery. Its just not at all about excusing or apologising for the fact the country did it. Its just that it has comparatively absolutely zero relevance compared to the impact of our then abolishing it world wide.

We did it. It happened. It wasn't good. What we did after, by abolishing it globally forever matters so much more, and it always will. Same goes for Benny F. Which bit you struggling with? Try to use facts rather than emotion to express your response.

Re: Benjamin Franklin and human rights

Lol. People disagreeing with you aren't apologising for anything or anyone. They just think your take is laughably wrong.

I don't mean this in a bad way, but are you still in school? I ask because all you've done is show up, hyperfixate on one very badly made point, stamp your feet and abuse anyone that doesn't agree with you. Which on the face of it appears to be pretty much everyone. It's the sort of mentality you find in school common rooms.

At one point Britain was balls deep in slavery before we pulled out and abolished it everywhere. The fact we chose to end slavery in the world is of far greater importance to the modern world than the fact we used to make money off it.

Not all historic facts carry equal weight, and Franklin's later life carries more importance than his youth. It just does.

By hoarded do you mean saved and invested?

Trump orders purge of 'woke' Anthropic from government

Re: Kathy Burke said it best...

While I can see what you're saying, this bit is highly unlikely to be reasonable:

if the BBC (and presumably others) had used their broadcast delay properly to edit the outburst out

The tic is the result of a disability, not a choice, not an opinion. Would you pixelate a wheelchair? Blur out a facial disfigurement? Voice over someone with a stutter?

The only correct response to his verbal tic is to accept it for what it is and choose to be understanding instead of choosing to be offended.

Removing it is totally out of order. He's there representing a film about literally this problem.

Re: Kathy Burke said it best...

Liberals are centrist or slightly left of centre and believe that people should be left to get on with their lives but that the state should be there as a backstop.

That's accurate only in so far as it's what the center right believe. The center left believe in the state as a partner in their lives, not a backstop.

All socialism is about control because you cannot have socialism without first establishing control of the people. Nobody will accept equality of outcome without it, a core belief of the left. Note the difference between equality of outcome and equality of opportunity, which is a right wing belief.

Re: Kathy Burke said it best...

Also history, that their entire concept was created by the literal stasi.