tomo,
I suppose it may not have been exactly consensual... a bit like Mugabe stealing a handshake from Jack Straw a while back. Starmer's wins on the revolting scale though.

As for the AI thing, I think (hope) it's the start of the bubble bursting. Was not greatly impressed with that fellow's explanation of Deepseek. Metaphors of "master craftsmen training apprentices" work well rhetorically, but what does it come down to in practical terms? Seems like it amounted to training on a smaller, more focussed and accurate data set.

That certainly helps for a narrow problem. Thing is, AI is being pushed as a giant leap forward from search engines: ask a question, here's the answer. Scaling up Deepseek's approach, we just need to bring up the quality of the global training set -- i.e. the whole internet. Quite a big task I think. What's more, once done, a plain search engine will be enough to reveal truth.

One kind of creature that appears in the horror genre is the shape shifter: the monster that uses your imagination so it can appear safe and unthreatening. The AI bubble is built on the same sort of thing. People have heard about neural nets, but those are a bit confusing. They assume others have checked it all out and just go ahead and use their own notions of "intelligence".

There are already some nifty things that have come from it, but I'm very confident there won't be anything to justify the amount of money being spent. Fortunes will be lost.

There was a comment at Jo Nova's yesterday about using AI to develop new silicon wafers for transistors. *Some* of them performed better than human-designed ones and the researchers couldn't explain why. Yes. Neither could the AI, I'm sure. The magic answers machine is worse than useless when its answers are sometimes bad. Croesus consults the Oracle: If you go to war, a great empire will fall. Not going to say which empire though.

Mailman,
Was perplexed wondering why you wanted to defend the US Office of Management and Budget, then it dawned on me who OMB was.

Some similes need to adapt with changing technology - a 5W LED bulb can actually be quite bright 😀💡. Certainly brighter than the MPs in the UK House of Commons last Friday who supported an insane eco-mentalist Bill designed to take us back to the halcyon times of the Stone Age. My MP (Lib Dum) was listed as supporting the Bill before the debate, as were most Lib Dums including their intellectual giant of a leader, Ed Davey.

Robbo,

Good! And I hope they all die in prison.

In regards to the EU's "unPRESIDENTed" (see what I did there ;) shift in climate catastrophilia one would think that with America about to enter a new golden age (thanks to all Biden's plans just happening to come to fruition during Trumps Presidency), that the EU would be setting itself up to benefit off all that lovely cash and oil and gas thats about to flood the American homeland!!

But no, these intellectual midwits who are about as bright as 5w lightbulbs, just cant help themselves when it comes to hating OMB and they'd rather spite their face by cutting their noses off than get in bed with the Orange One and also benefit off his economy. It's almost as if these lightweights hate their own people.

These people are going to buy American made cars and Trump is going to tarif the f88k out of BMW and the EU did this to themselves.

Mailman,
Sentences looked a bit stiffer than that. Starting around p7 there are minimum custodial sentences of 17y, 12y, 20y ... with the effective sentences being double these (i.e. remain answerable to parole board for 34y, etc.). Seem to be the right order of magnitude. Court seems to be doing its job; the corruption is in the original failure to investigate or prosecute.

tomo,
Photoshop surely?

Conservative Woman on rape gangs and Southport stabber and Starmer's inquiry/deflection. Yes, let's blame the knives.

In less depressing news: this year's Australia Day ceremonies showed some pride in the nation. Hitherto, the trend had been apologetic, call it Invasion Day; what John Howard described as the black armband view of history. Not sure if the lifted mood is due to Trump's return or to the strong "No" result in The Voice referendum. Whatever the reason, glad to see it.

Jo Nova reckons Trump *is* the reason for the EU starting to backpedal on green nonsense. Pretty sure she's right on that one.

Robbo,

From going through the court document I could make out that pretty much those Pakistani men got little slaps on the hands, being sentence to 7 years in total which means they are all out of prison now (and probably got out after a couple years being locked up with many of their fellow nationals so no real hard time being done.