Ben Taylor @VoxDei@social.cleverlibre.org
Software Engineer, Trade Unionist, Gamer, Geek, Dad. Lives in Devon
Joined Nov 2022
Ben Taylor
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Ben Taylor
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Just in: July 3rd was the hottest day ever measured in human history.
We are in a climate emergency.
IPCC: We need "rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society" — and you are part of the solution.
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This pretty much describes the extreme left and right perfectly.
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It's oddly impressive how many genuinely mediocre generals the Union had in the early years of the Civil War.
It's like they were doing some kind of gimmick run on Twitch.
"Win a Civil War without using leaders"
Ben Taylor
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Stormy looking on Glastonbury Tor this morning.
#glastonbury #glastonburytor #somerset #stormy #storm #cloud #cloudy #darksky
I really don't understand this. This article mentions in passing that Asda was fined £30,000 twice for failing to respond to information requests and for being unable to explain how being taken over affected its fuel pricing policy. In the same paragraph it mentions that Asda is acquiring a fuel business for £2.27bn.
Asda has enough money to be able to make acquisitions of businesses that are not its core business costing in the billions. A fine in the tens of thousands is literally not even noticeable to them. What is the point? I accept the CMA may not have power to impose a greater fine (I don't know), but what's the point in a regulator that either cannot or will not impose fines that actually hurt their targets?
It happens all over the place, companies being handed fines that aren't even negligible, they're just not actually noticeable. Nobody will follow the rules if it costs substantially less to break them than it does to follow them.
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To anyone thinking about joining BlueSky, especially artists: everything you post is used to train generative AI models.
BlueSky uses AI to label content for moderation, and to do that they use a company called https://thehive.ai. If you look through their privacy policy, you will see that they use all content sent to them to train models for all their services, which include generative AI for both text and images.
It’s a built in “feature” and cannot be turned off.
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Well that's more like it. Sunrise this morning on Glastonbury Tor.
#glastonbury #glastonburytor #somerset #landscapephotography #sunrisephotography #sunrise
Ben Taylor
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As we head towards a(nother) #JuniorDoctors #strike... once again its worth emphasising that this is a strike that has been directly caused by the #Tories defunding of the #NHS, their callous attitude to the well-being of others & their strategy of driving (rich-enough) #patients into the arms of private #healthcare.
If #RishiSunak or #SteveBarclay actually wanted to reach a deal with the BMA/Junior Doctors they could, but they are choosing not to.
"Sir John Armitt told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “By 2050, the Environment Agency and the water companies believe that about £50bn needs to be invested to get sewage overflows down to an acceptable level."
Right. My local water company, South West Water, is paying £112M in dividends this year. There are ten water and sewerage companies in England, if we assume they're all about that level then that is £1.1bn per year. Counting 2023 and 2050 there are 28 years to go on that clock, so there's ~£31bn right there.
I'm sorry, water companies should not be paying dividends at the same time as a) breaking the law over sewage discharges and b) arguing that bills need to go up massively to pay for fixing that. They've got the money, they need to (be forced to) spend it on regulatory compliance before kickbacks to shareholders.
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Hearing more and more about marketers using GPT-type "a.i." for SEO and marketing copy, and every time i talk to these people, none of them seem to understand/care that they're in an algorithmically-defined self fulfilling confirmation bias feedback loop.
And i mean, marketing's ALWAYS had something like this problem, but the uncritical gpt/"a.i."/"ML" feedback processes are going to make it a goddamn flat plastic nightmare.
I sweatr, the way some people are willing to cede their preferential and decisional criteria to something that crystalizes and amplifies THE WORST processes of human cognition just TERRIFIES me some days.
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Economics: Humans only value things monetarily.
Sociology: Uh, I don't ...
Economics: Humans are always rational and value is calculated by a complex inner calculus.
Sociology: Uh, Psy, can you help?
Psychology: That's not how humans ...
Economics: ALSO MY SYSTEM WILL GROW EXPONENTIALLY FOREVER!!
Physics: *drops teacup*
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'Britain has for too long presented one face to the world while concealing the awful truth...'
Aditya Chakrbortty summarises the work of a research group at Manchester University which aims to show how our delusional #politics is contributing to our #economic decline...
a depressing but vital read - its worth a few minutes of your time.
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A rock bonus for your hard work https://www.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/14kdc0g/a_rock_bonus_for_your_hard_work/
Ben Taylor
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I spent 5 hours in A&E yesterday. (I'm fine.)
After triage I had bloods taken + blood sugars (separately), an ECG, a chest x-ray, a head CT scan, and two sessions with a doctor. I left with a prescription for two weeks of meds and a referral to a specialist unit.
Total cost to me: £0.
Fuck the government and what they're doing to our health services. Fuck privatisation. Fuck the fact the staff are underpaid and overworked. Fuck the Tories. Support your #NHS.
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Why am I standing in the #UxbridgeAndSouthRuislip by-election? And why should the wonderful people of that constituency vote for me? I present the 2023 Count Binface Charter. #VoteBinface #BinItToWinIt
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I asked ChatGPT about primes ending in 2 to make it prove a point and it proved the point far better than I could have hoped for.
Please do not be a fool who trusts ChatGPT with anything outside your field of expertise, and even then double or triple check what it tells you if you must use it.
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The Russians can do what they like in sorting out how their rebellion goes. Mostly it's a question of which unpleasant dictator is in control. If Putin wins, presumably little changes other than that Russia has spent a load of resources fighting itself.
There are two questions I care about, if Prigozhin wins:
1. Would he continue the war in Ukraine? He's already said the pretext was false, so maybe less likely than Putin?
2. If he does, is he more or less likely than Putin to escalate to a direct confrontation with NATO?
I want the Russians out of Ukraine and I want not to have a nuclear war in the process. I'm rooting for whichever side makes that more likely.
Software Engineer, Trade Unionist, Gamer, Geek, Dad. Lives in Devon
Joined Nov 2022
