Posts by notyetanotherid 131 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jan 2019
> Seems that no matter what Micro$oft product you are using you WILL be forced to use their "AI" enshittification
Indeed. If you try to visit office.com on a mobile now, you now seem to just get a page telling you to download their 'AI' Coprolite app. No more just using the Office web-apps (unless you use the mobile browser’s 'desktop site' option').
And for those that don't know... in the UK you can now just call 159: tell the call handler which bank you want to speak to and they will connect you. No other numbers to remember or look up. https://stopscamsuk.org.uk/our-work/159-phone-number/
> He's already saved two thirds of the US population from death by "fentanol", I gather. Can't the guy have a day off?
... and don't forget the 200 trade deals that he's negotiated: https://time.com/7280114/donald-trump-2025-interview-transcript/
That sort of hyperbole doesn't help a rational debate.
The thing is that, as commentards above have noted, observational studies are performed all the time without the subjects being aware or consenting. An anthropologist wants to study natural behaviour, and they are not going to get that if they inform people beforehand, e.g. you couldn't accurately study whether English people apologise when they are bumped into (I have read the outcome of such a study: mostly they do) if you told them it was going to happen.
Now you might argue that this study would have been better had they told the channel that a sort of A/B study was happening and some posts would be human and some from LLMs, but would that modify the subjects' behaviour? Would some run posts through a supposed LLM-detecting LLM to try to work out which were which before responding? That outcome would surely invalidate the study? And of course you have the difficulty of sourcing a suitably experienced or qualified person able to argue cogently in a consistent style on the particular subject at hand for the human posts, whereas you can get an LLM to confidently spout plausible-sounding billhooks in a similar format on pretty much any subject you like... e.g. You can't lick a badger twice.
> brontosauruses did not
A specimen-level phylogenetic analysis and taxonomic revision of Diplodocidae (Dinosauria, Sauropoda) would disagree: "Of particular note is that the famous genus Brontosaurus is considered valid by our quantitative approach."
For what it is worth, Perplexity seems to get the right answer now:
"The Maythorn Way is an ancient track described by W.B.Crump in Huddersfield Highways Down The Ages (1949). It runs from Marsden to Penistone via Meltham, Holmfirth, Hepworth, Maythorn, and Thurlstone. ...",
citing yorkshiremilestones.co.uk as its primary source.
This ain't true. The UK tax rules have not changed for individuals, you have always been required to declare 'trading' income over the Trading Allowance (unchanged at £1000).
What has changed recently is that the trading and online content sites, like ebay, vinted, airbnb, TikTok etc, now have to report directly to HMRC anyone who makes more than 30 trades or earns more than €2000.
> So in the UK, we have the dreaded tax return, which ever increasing amounts of the population will have to complete as they're pushed into the tax bands that trigger it. They're posted out with the persons name and address on the envelope, but HMRC can't print that on the tax return forms. Then the person may have to copy & write data HMRC's already sent on P11 & P60 notes, do some calculations and for PAYE employees, send HMRC back the data they already have. Which is an expensive and generally pointless exercise vs sending tax payers the data HMRC has, and asking if there's any other income (or expenses) they'd like to declare.
You might have had a point if this was in fact the case, but I think it is for the greater part complete billhooks. Most people with a salary and no other source of income don't need to fill in a tax return at all irrespective of which tax band their salary falls into. Of the around 12 million Self Assessment tax returns that are submitted in the UK, over 11.5 million of them are filed electronically, and certainly if you use the HMRC online service it prefills the employment section with the stuff that you noted it already knows about you. I haven't received in a paper tax return for about 20 years, but your assertion that paper forms arrive from HMRC without the taxpayer's name and address preprinted doesn't fit with my recollection and seems especially odd given that the second 'question' on the first page is "Your name and address – if it is different from what is on the front of this form, please write the correct details underneath the wrong ones and put the date you changed address below"...
Indeed.
Real-terms (adjusted for inflation) spending across the Osborne austerity years was pretty much flat overall, falling slightly over the coalition years before rising again once out of coalition. Heath and pensions spending rose slightly across the period, education and welfare spending fell, etc.
Per-capita spending at 2019 prices in 2011 (first full year of Cameron coalition) was £13,908 and in 2019 was £12965.
And anyone who has happened upon the Lock Picking Lawyer videos on YouTube will doubtless know that many of those mechanical button locks are fairly quickly decoded by feel.
A bit of learning that was successfully put to the test when my OH's last employer was locked out of a room and the site maintenance guy had gone without noting the code...
> The defining feature of socialism is that the state own the means of production.
Close, but no cigar. That might be said of some interpretations of communism, but the defining feature of socialism is (as the name suggests) social ownership of the means of production, which is not the same thing as state ownership...
Wimbledon uses just shy of 300 line umpires, the BBC version of this story says that they make up to £200 per day plus expenses, and the Championship plus qualifying lasts for 18 days, so my back of a ripped up beermat calculation makes that around a million quid.
And they already have Hawk-Eye installed on all the courts to deal with the line-call challenges, so this is more of an upgrade than a fresh install.
I am gonna guess that Live ELC will cost them more than the current 'non-live' ELC, but if my million guestimate is anywhere near the true figure that can be saved by getting rid of the line umpires...
Well, at least they were only zeroed and not put into massive debt, https://www.newsweek.com/woman-checks-49-billion-debt-bank-account-night-out-1602883
You could try https://int.bahn.de/en. In the past I have found it to have a better grasp of UK train timetables than any UK site.
Many of the Biggles books are available on the Internet Archive, but "Once is happenstance" does not seem to appear prior to Goldfinger in the texts available there.
However, "Once is an accident, two a coincidence, and [...] the third time it’s a habit." appeared in the Washington Post in 1926 (https://archive.org/details/per_washington-post_1926-06-22_18268/mode/2up?q=%22Once+is+an+accident%22), so versions of the quotation have certainly existed long before Fleming used it, as indeed the context in Goldfinger alludes to, "Mr Bond, they have a saying in Chicago:...".
The trouble is that this use is a horrible bending of language. Nominal exists in many languages (not just French as noted above) and is derived from Latin meaning 'in name', thus "the Chancellor is the nominal head of the university", "I was only charged a nominal fee for the repair", "an AA cell is 1.5v nominal", etc.
With that derivation, "a nominal landing" means it landed in name only, not in reality. Whereas what they are trying to convey is that it performed in close accordance with nominal engineering values. Which is what they should say, rather than torturing the word 'nominal' to mean almost the exactly the opposite of what in means in every other common usage.
> Beef is derived from the French word for cow, but in English refers to cow meat.
Surely...
"Beef" is derived from bœuf, the French for ox and also for beef, itself derived from the Latin (for ox), bos or bovem.
The French for cow is vache, also derived from Latin (for cow), vacca.
If you're not using RCS, why not just dump Google Messages full stop and use something like Textra SMS ... and stop phoning home your message data to the mothership, https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/21/google_messages_gdpr/?
> Then he gives directions to the jury that they are to find Trump guilty no matter what the evidence.
Since you headed your post "Just a reminder, you know, facts"... for anyone interested, of course, the court transcripts are online and the judge's summing up can be read in full here, https://pdfs.nycourts.gov/PeopleVs.DTrump-71543/transcripts/5-29-2024.pdf
"It is not my responsibility to judge the evidence here. It is yours. You are the judges of the facts, and you are responsible for deciding whether the Defendant is guilty or not guilty."
Took three months before it was claimed!
... context is provided by the linked story earlier in the week: https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/08/google_cloud_misconfiguration_takes_australian/
... or perhaps depending on pronunciation of the 't', as Dabbsy suggested: "Pussy, I farted"... https://autosaveisforwimps.substack.com/p/pussy-i-farted-what-else-would-you
> I'm sure it had spaces...
No, definitely hyphens, see e.g. https://flic.kr/p/VjZdQz
> ... triggered the collapse of Lloyds Insurance?
Wires crossed?
Lloyds of London, the insurance market, did once nearly collapse, but that was back in 1991 following exposure to liabilities over the Piper Alpha oil rig disaster in 1988 and reinsurance of (mainly US) health policies which were paying out asbestosis claims.
Lloyds Bank had to be bailed out in 2008/9 having been strong-armed by the gov into taking over HBOS, which was on the brink of collapse due to risky lending in the UK and a reliance on wholesale money markets where funding dried up after Lehman Brothers collapsed in the US.
Lehman Brothers collapsed into bankruptcy due to over exposure to US subprime mortgages and CDOs (mortgage-backed derivative investments); but not really directly related to insurance though.
Or have I missed something?
You mean this ruling (where the word continue does not appear at all):
78. The Court considers that, with regard to the situation described above, Israel must, in accordance with its obligations under the Genocide Convention, in relation to Palestinians in Gaza, take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts within the scope of Article II of this Convention, in particular: (a) killing members of the group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; and (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.
The Israeli Law Professors’ Forum for Democracy (at https://www.lawprofsforum.org/post/pp24-e) notes of the power sharing agreement signed on 23 February 2023, "The agreement is an overt and formal measure that gives validity to claims that Israel’s practices constitute apartheid, which is prohibited under international law."
It was you that equated criticism of actions of the government of the state of Israel with being antisemitic, the inference being that you seem to consider that the government of Israel represents Jewish people or Jewishness. Should we also infer that you would similarly consider criticism of the actions of Hamas to be Islamophobic?
> According to their own figures 45% of their membership earn more than £35,000/year
£35000pa being approximately the UK median annual salary in 2023. With 55% below that median, RMT members are thus relatively low paid.
> No argument that many MPs are overpaid for what they do, but so are train drivers.
> it's the usual question of supply& demand.
You have answered why train drivers are relatively well paid, and it has little to do with their unions. When the government, in their infinite wisdom, decided that the railways needed to be in the private sector following the dogma that competition would improve services and reduce ticket prices and cost to taxpayers, they (wittingly or unwittingly) created a market for train drivers. The train operating cos would rather poach a qualified driver from another company by paying them more, than to train up new drivers, creating a salary spiral chasing a limited resource.
It is rather worse that 736. That is just those convicted and does not include those who settled the money that it was claimed they owed without it going to trial. Last month on gov.uk was posted this: "The government has today [Tuesday 19 December] announced that circa £138m has so far been paid out to over 2,700 claimants across the three Post Office compensation schemes.".
For the last few years, the PO has had around 11,500 branches so basically the management appears to have been happy to accept that around a quarter of its branches' managers were on the fiddle without, as you noted, anyone seemingly questioning whether there might be an alternative explanation...
> Err, nope. Burning wind remains the determination of cost.
Electricity prices dictated by gas producers who provide less than half of UK electricity
You seemingly failed to attribute (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_incidents_of_political_violence_in_Washington,_D.C.) your copy and paste from Wikipedia.
As you will know, having presumably read that article, the stated aims of the 1971 and 1983 bombings were protest at the US bombing of Laos and the US invasion of Grenada respectively, so not really to do with trying to change the result of a popular vote.
But you did conveniently not quote other entries such as this one, etc:
August 19, 2021: A North Carolina man named Floyd Ray Roseberry parked a truck loaded with his attempt at an improvised explosive device near the Supreme Court and Library of Congress. He threatened to detonate his bomb unless Donald Trump was reinstated as president. He also claimed there were other bombs he had placed in the city
I would suggest starting at this wikipedia page and following the references as necessary.
"International Computers Limited was formed in 1968 as a part of the Industrial Expansion Act of the Wilson Labour Government. ... Upon its creation, the British government held a 10% stake in the company and provided a $32.4 million research-and-development grant spread across four years."
"ICL initially thrived, but relied almost wholly on supplying the UK public sector with computers. ... Until the 1970s launch of the 2900 Series, the UK government had a single-tender preferential purchase agreement wherever ICL could meet the requirements."
"The company had an increasingly close relationship with Fujitsu from the early 1980s, culminating in Fujitsu becoming sole shareholder in 1998. ICL was rebranded as Fujitsu in April 2002."
> Where I'm from they were called Fordigraph machines.
... in the UK the most common brand, to be found in most schools, was Banda.
Generically they are known as spirit duplicators, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_duplicator
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