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Interesting discussion, but mostly about bad things that are happening. Short on telling us what should be done instead. If Europe is currently sleepwalking to disaster, will it be any better off if it walks wide awake into disaster?

Article on the Homicide Prediction Project, a brilliant British take on Minority Report as fact rather than sci-fi. Another impressive use of AI...

New article at Judith Curry's on geothermal electricity not being a silver bullet. As usual, there's lots of energy, the trick is harvesting it.

https://youtu.be/oxPFg8uatqs

tomo,
Brazil deserves to be up there with the famous dystopias. I don't think dark/light is the best axis to measure them along. They tame their people in different ways: 1984 is by raw power; Brave New World by numbing their senses; Fahrenheit 451 by stunting their intellects; Brazil by making them servants of the bureaucratic machine.

All are in play here and now; Gilliam's arguably most.

Those "cosmetic" results... the mind boggles. I suppose it comes from platitudes like don't be ordinary. Mission accomplished, but this is one case where middle of the bell curve would be a better choice: be ordinary.

Daily Sceptic article on the discovery of more fantasy weather stations courtesy of the Met Office. I suppose this has them on the way to a meteorologist's dream: that the weather forecast and weather report will be equally reliable. You can't trust either.

tomo,
The pattern of that article on the Lucy Connolly case:

...she said ... she posted ... she said ... 12 months in prison followed by probation

I'll stay old school on this one. No matter what she might have said, the offence is carried out by those who may have heard/read those words and decided to act illegally.

That seems to be the way they treat child porn. Far more of the consumers are punished than producers. Still, we shouldn't expect consistency.

Didn't think too much of that Douglas Murray interview. Interviewer wasn't my cup of tea (what was that strange thing with the drinks?) Still, I see he has 3.5 million subscribers which outpaces me quite handily. I suppose we were witnessing an influencer at work.

And yes, *that* Brazil. As so often with Gilliam, never mind the big picture, look at the details. The climate models have nothing on him for seeing the future.

tomo,
Lucy Connolly was mentioned in a Brendan O'Neill podcast recently and I read the story a few days ago. Just outrageous. I'm always banging on about the "three axes": freedom, fairness, tradition. This case gets a terrible score on all three. Starmer is right that it sends a message, but why on earth would you want to send *that* message?

Of course his background is as a human rights lawyer. Did that make him this brutal, or did it attract him because he was already a brute?

I think the people glad they'd had the vaccine are trying to hold the faith. In the midst of the COVID shenanigans I posted here about a syndrome I called margaretmeaditis. Mead, when confronted with evidence that her research had been wrong, simply accepted it. But many of the people who'd been educated according to the Mead doctrine refused to let her change of heart change theirs. For her, it was logic, for them, it was belief.

Biden's broadband: heavens! Kafka if you like, though I have a soft spot for Brazil.

Mailman,
Yes, AI is likely already in a good enough state to take a couple of dozen people doing a fairly useless job and replace them with one person guiding the AI to do a similar useless job for all of them. The problem is that that's not how technology gets applied. It won't be the low-value HR department that shrinks, instead we'll be replacing skillful people with useless people augmented by AI to do important jobs.

This happened in Victoria something like 30 years ago. They stopped staffing the ambulance emergency line with experienced ambulance officers. Instead, the phones were manned by unskilled people with a standardised questionnaire. This was deemed a "success" because it was so much cheaper and the appropriate dispatch evaluations only slipped from 98% to 94%, which was described as a mere 4% slip. Of course Blind Freddie can see that it was actually a *tripling* of inappropriate dispatches. People were dying and it became a festering scandal after a few months.

You can bet the same sort of nonsense is going to happen with AI.

I suppose it comes down to the fact that boneheads are cheap, so use AI to replace the eggheads.

Now we're in full election mode, and I've been unable to avoid occasional glimpses of our PM. Prior to getting elected, he had his crooked teeth straightened up. Arguably, this made him more photogenic, but unquestionably it worsened his speech impediment. Seeing him now in campaign mode, it looks like he's lost some weight (fighting fit and all that, I suppose), but the effect has been to make his head look larger and rounder. I'm wondering if he's trying to transform himself into Elmer Fudd.

I doubt AI is going to kill much…at the moment.

Using it quite heavily at work but does require time and effort to check its output once generated but it’s definitely got potential to remove humans altogether from some applications within my work place.

Also this;

https://dailycaller.com/2025/04/04/court-delivers-massive-blow-famed-climate-scientist/

There is a god! 😂