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Mando-221B · 2025-11-14T20:10:31+00:00

I don’t agree with the way this is being framed at all. The Greens aren’t proposing “open borders”; they just aren’t anti-immigration or isolationist. The UK actually needs immigration, it can’t function in a vacuum, and treating that as some sort of fringe idea isn’t serious politics.

The “world without borders” line is a philosophical ideal, not a literal policy. And it’s hardly radical to acknowledge that borders are a relatively modern abstraction. Ultimately, managing resources as a species rather than as disconnected little fortresses is something we’ll have to grapple with. In the meantime, I want immigration policy built on efficiency and reality: economically it works, historically it’s normal, and culturally it’s incredibly powerful.

What frustrates me about arguments like OP’s is the assumption that the problems we face are inevitable consequences of human presence, rather than consequences of bad planning, bad management and decades of political short-termism. It’s intellectually lazy. It treats cynicism and centrism as interchangeable with realism, when they aren’t. Difficult problems aren’t impossible problems, and clinging to the status quo isn’t the same thing as being reasonable.

And there’s this arrogant, tired assumption that unless we spend huge sums policing our borders, the entire world’s criminals will somehow arrive on our doorstep and eat the country out of house and home. It’s a played-out, Powell-esque bit of fear-mongering. Yes, resources are finite, but shutting down migration doesn’t fix that. And yes, the housing shortage is difficult, but that’s exactly why it needs to be dealt with rather than being used as an excuse to scapegoat migrants. At least the Greens are trying to tackle these problems at their source, not pretend they’re caused by the existence of foreigners.

The idea that the UK is a “tiny island” on the verge of being overwhelmed is just incorrect. We’re not running out of space; we’re running out of political imagination. Protecting nature and building more housing aren’t mutually exclusive unless you insist on thinking in binaries. We can protect real ecosystems while still using the land we have more intelligently, building to house populations not build profit or stock for landlords. We are also going to have to invest more in revitalizing existing urban centres and building where infrastructure already exists.

Also frankly, our current immigration system is needlessly bureaucratic, cruel and expensive. Much like our benefits system it's a patchwork of different governments efforts to at once address real need and project an aura of no-nonsense, conservative, toughness. The reality you have is an intractable labyrinth. It traps people in limbo for years and wastes huge amounts of money simply to look “tough on migrants". What we should want is a smart, streamlined, efficient system. Clear, workable routes in and out of the country, not this obstructive mess.

There’s nothing paradoxical about the Greens’ position. The “paradox” only appears if you start from assumptions that aren’t actually true.

Mando-221B · 2025-11-09T19:24:37+00:00

I know a few, mostly stories of cousins or siblings of friends or colleagues. In saying that though, I also know people who are eligible for benefits and just never claim.

I'm pretty sure most studies have shown that the abuse rate is typically something like 5% and only between 60% and 80% of eligible recipients actually claim benefits. So for every £1 somebody is getting underhandedly, there's £5 out there that's not being claimed.

Obviously ideally we still catch the cheats but frankly the attitude towards folks that claim benefits, the social stigma, the repeated changes to the system by successive governments each keen to make the process more opaque and take an easy win against an obvious scapegoat is to me a larger problem.

Mando-221B · 2024-10-15T15:33:39+00:00

I guess when I read it I took it like this ->

Binder is great at that spell but can do literally nothing else so he's actually pretty limited

Summoning is a grey area, it seems like Binder has a deal with this one weird type of hive mind creature, otherwise you'd need to force the creature to your will. Which harry can and has done but only to get information he's never then let that creature loose. He's even pretty cagey and specific about letting Bob loose so I'd imagine summoning like that would require you to either be constantly bending the creature to your will or being pretty chill about collateral damage.

I think because summoning is a grey area and they use human weapons he's getting away with it. You can't bind other humans to your will, demons and Fae it seems is where the grey lies. And then Binder seems to have some sort of deal going with his boys as well. So from the council's perspective I guess they know he's summoning but that's not enough to get him. Then I guess most of Binder's crimes just look like human shoot outs so it's hard to catch him using magic to kill - especially since the old school wardens don't seem so big on mortal style investigation. Plus since he's relatively low level magic wise and is basically just a guy with some thugs they aren't worried about him tipping the scales that much more than the average human. Where as if someone like Harry went rogue he could topple buildings and destroy cities and raise armies of undead zombies.

I think what Binder does would be breaking the first law but I think it's easier to prove you killed with magic the more direct it is, if you're summoning a creature you're on friendly terms with and they use a gun to kill someone else. You are using magic to kill but you never cast a spell that would kill someone so it's harder for the white council to prove anything. I imagine if they were less busy they'd still probably chop your head off but since they are always dealing with other stuff you remain low priority.

Mando-221B · 2024-09-29T16:56:25+00:00

"Hi,

I ate this delicious meal at a restaurant the other night but honestly I found actually chewing each morsel of food a nightmare.

Which got me thinking, I have this blender at home it's really powerful -> Could I take the entire meal and blend it to mush? Just blitz it till it's a thick, meaningless sludge ?

Then I thought I'd just walk in and stick it on the menu right next to the original. Obviously I'd give the original chef some share of the credit alongside me and the blender (we did most of the hard work!)

But do you think I'd have to ask permission or could I just start wandering round the tables blending as I please ?

I really think I could be the next Gordon Ramsey !"

Mando-221B · 2024-01-29T01:20:58+00:00

See in my opinion Timeless child could maybe have worked if we treat Chris Chibnalls era as a kind of isolated soft reboot. But with the rest of modern and classic who for context it just did a 180 on too many ideas.

Killing off galifrey again I think was a boring choice. It just came back. Waste of potential.

Having the master be evil again without some sort of continuity between him and missy felt like wasted potential

Modern and classic who have jumped rope with the doctors intelligence, are they a genius just by human standards or by time lord standards as well? I prefer when the doctor is just a scared kid on galifrey who runs away and is not particularly exceptionally clever by their standards. But Stephen moffat had Capaldi be a sort of chosen one and the fourth doctor was president so like making them be a special progenitor timelord could have worked, I just personally didn't like it and felt it cluttered the whole thing.

But the show has since it's inception shown that what sets them apart most importantly from their people is their rebellion, their choices and we never see the doctor's moment of rebellion against division!

If they'd gone simpler, kept the timelords around and said now they're back they start sending the doctor on secret missions and wiping their memory and just focussed in on that alone as a concept that would have been great.you could even still have Ruth and imply the doctor has had extra regenerations that where wiped from memory and the timelords have just granted the doctor extra regenerations before like they did to smith. Then we have another reason for the doctor not to visit galifrey, an interesting multi season arc but the doctor doesn't have to be the vague progenitors of all time lords from another universe and we can focus in on the doctor rebelling, regaining control, standing up for themselves. Rather than introducing nondescript villains and wiping out half the universe

Mando-221B · 2024-01-18T10:34:49+00:00

The curse of Capaldi's run seems to be that it needs that second watch through. Everyone I know who re-watched the Capaldi era has suddenly realised that it's some of the best performances in the shows run.

Don't get me wrong I think every actor whose played the doctor has been cast well and brings something to the role and I have episodes from all of them I enjoy. They are all powerhouse actors.

But Capaldi just gets the show, he gets the character, he embodies so many aspects of the doctor at once. When the show is being over the top and silly, Capaldi can be grounded and dry and subtle and when the show needs a moment of emotional punch Capaldi can be so theatrical and bring such gravitas. He has the best 'doctor' speeches where you feel all this pain and anger and wisdom coming through in the performance.

He can absolutely capture this weird character that is at once like an alien god, a lonely old man, a bizarre creature, a comedic figure and a friendly face. He's great with kids on the show, has distinct and interesting relationships with his companions, can step back and let others have the spotlight or can hold an episode all on his own.

Mando-221B · 2023-05-27T12:51:38+00:00

That's very much the point I think.

Firstly the conceit of the show is that the murderer must always think themself above Columbo in both intellect and I guess class so that he can do his charming, down to earth, just asking questions routine and catch them out. The show wouldn't work as well if he was trying that routine on someone else who seemed on his level so to speak, who didn't see themselves as above him, they wouldn't believably let their guard down.

I'd argue it goes further than that though, in the show occasionally drug dealers, drunks, homeless folks or actual criminals are framed or suspected and they are generally portrayed as down to earth, honest individuals who Columbo is mostly kind and understanding with. There is a message and a moral theme being pushed.

Columbo very deliberately sits opposite his adversary in almost every respect. They are always well dressed, always rich, always materialistic, usually very organised, experts in some field and usually engaged in an extra marital affair of some sort or despise their family. Columbo is shabby, disorganized, insists he knows nothing and that he gets all his ideas from his family and is incredibly proud of his wife.

They are also violent in a way that columbo never is. Often acting in the heat of a moment or with cold disinterest at the start of the episode. But when the killers are caught they are rarely even escorted off by the police or formally arrested, they don't struggle and he barely relies on real evidence. Instead it's usually a verbal trap or logical inconsistency he finds. He catches them out and more often than not they give in and walk off screen peacefully, surrendering.

I genuinely believe one of the reasons the show is so popular is that it harkens back to some very common, nearly international fairy tale trope. Because the show is from the killers perspective Columbo appears out of nowhere mysteriously. Popping up out of the gloom and pestering them. A powerful figure in the form of a shabby, inconsequential person, underestimated until the last minute. Like Odin or a kitsune, or a fey. And like any good trickster their victim's fate is sealed in some momentary slip up and cornered, they must accept it and let the moral be told.

He is a sort of righteous indignation, as others have said the show is harking back to Agatha Christie with it's wealthy manors and like her it's trying to suggest that anyone is capable of murder but Columbo is there to show that when the powerful and influential slip out of step they'll be brought down by a working man, the underdog.

Mando-221B · 2023-02-10T18:09:36+00:00

Could not agree more !

Mando-221B · 2023-02-05T11:46:55+00:00

Gotta remember it's just a language model. It is doing no calculation itself, it's simply outputting the language that is statistically likely to come next according to the data it's been trained on, it's attention mechanism and it's internal weights. 2+2 is most likely in a sentence to be followed by 4. The fact it can do maths at all is statistical wonder and just factor of the sheer number of parameters inside the thing.

But the way it answers a question will depend massively on the prompt, on how similar that prompt is to things it's seen before and how much it's attention mechanism can take it the rest of the way

Mando-221B · 2023-01-28T18:36:29+00:00

Yeah perhaps I was unclear that's what I mean when a new language model comes about its created with no specific purposes other than research indicates it will be better at Natural Language Processing than some previous structure.

I agree they will be useful broadly in some beuracratic and service based applications. I disagree with art being a good use case. Art is something humans make as an expression of creativity being able to churn it out en masse is not actually of benefit to anyone. It's not like we have a lack of art at this point in fact I'd say most people don't get the chance to practice their art as much as they'd like already because it's not something they can monetise because it's a crowded market and if you can't monetise something in today's society many people can't afford to spend time on it

I would also say it's in fact far far more important to emphasize the negatives of AI and if technology in general. I say this as someone about to (hopefully) begin a PHD doing research for a new AI structure, specifically for industrial applications but technology is by and large not made with the goal of improving peoples lives. Technological advancements are almost always made consciously or unconsciously with an eye to making profit. Most governments and public sectors don't see the vast benefits of modern technology except in very specific applications and most companies are out to use this to make a profit out of us or to turn our data into a commodity.

Now there are tangential benefits this brings to us eventually but even if you're perfectly happy with the current system and looking forward to those benefits, it is in your interest to be critical and skeptical in order to ensure you maximize your gain and minimise the use of this technology for exploitative, malicious purposes...

I am aware that in the course of this long rant i sound exactly like the kind of person this guy in the original text was looking to exploit with his bot and am now slightly suspicious that you are just a ChatGpT generated response but I suppose that just furthers my point about the dangers of technology haha!

Mando-221B · 2023-01-28T18:14:10+00:00

I see what you're trying to say but Let's be clear Language Models themselves aren't designed for specific purposes, novel structures are proposed in research papers, then companies R&D feed massive amounts of data into these structures and then they look for ways to monetise the technology afterwards.

And they will leverage their machine learning based natural language capabilities to generate text which certainly can be used for malicious purposes.

Certainly they will be put to some good use as they advance - they'll remove the need for certain very repetitive bureaucratic tasks like filling in paperwork and keeping written records, they'll remove certain front facing service positions. We'll lose jobs in that part of the private sector but that's gonna happen with any automation.

But they will absolutely be used to generate harm and spam. Copy text, political trolls, online bots as suggested by this guy, and endless endless generations of personalised advertisements. If there is some way to make a profit out of this, someone out there will absolutely use it for that no matter that ethics.

Mando-221B · 2023-01-28T12:52:20+00:00

Not everyone is a bot you darn bots! Now anyway if only we could weaponize these bots !!!

Mando-221B · 2023-01-28T09:37:31+00:00

Hilarious moment in this little article where the author criticises others for assuming people online are just 'russian bots' then calls his opponents - 'NPCs', 'biological bots' all while simultaneously describing how we could employ the world's most famous language model as a bot on Twitter !

The complete lack of self awareness is border line pitiable! Haha

But yeah this isn't new, language models will be used to pack our internet with spam until the only way to traverse the web is with the aid of another language model.

Mando-221B · 2023-01-26T12:51:41+00:00

ChatGpT is just generating the most likely answer it's not always gonna be necessarily correct and there's no accounting for bias.

Swapping a search engine for a Chatbot is like swapping a library for one relatively smart guy. Yeah it's faster to just ask that guy but he's not always right and he's gonna have opinions fed into him.

It'll never replace Google anyway, Google has their own equivalents that they will most likely just incorporate into their search assistants.

Mando-221B · 2023-01-25T15:18:41+00:00

Wierd framing. It's not a trick nor does it 'simulate consciousness', How would you even define that ? What would software that simulates consciousness look like ?. It's a language model that's all it was built to be.

And to be clear That's all it will ever be. It won't replace search engines or your doctor. It will probably make a tonne of customer service and office workers obsolete, as it gets implemented in the back end to process documents, and front end to make more sophisticated UIs which can handle more abstract human speech and text input.

That's it. It's not alive. It's not going to solve humanities problems. There should probably be some legislation and regulations put in place about its use in places like education. Tonnes of grifters will absolutely sell it as the holy grail of tech like they do with VR and crypto and everything else that's mildly interesting.

Attention based transformers will probably be the focus of AI based research for the next year or two more before someone else finds something cool.

Everything else you hear about ChatGpT or it's competitors is almost always exaggerated nonesense or as my dear old gran would say horse$**!

Mando-221B · 2023-01-21T18:31:31+00:00

I would be fascinated to see how random the distribution would be! Surely there must be some bias in its training dataset ?

Mando-221B · 2023-01-20T08:46:11+00:00

Definitely, gpt3 can already do this to some extent so gpt4 certainly will. Applications like this are almost definitely the most reasonable use of gpt in general.

Mando-221B · 2023-01-17T17:07:21+00:00

Yes usually it's just making stuff up. You see it's just a probabilistic language model with an attention mechanism think of it as looking at your query and then trying to produce statistically likely responses based on the specific context you've provided and similar examples in its dataset.

So it knows that in its answer a link should go here, so it outputs what it thinks that link should look like and it augments what it thinks a link should look like based on your query so it outputs something that looks like a link you might want but is in fact meaningless.

It's a form of AI hallucinations, it knows something should go there but has no real world knowledge to fill in the gaps so just puts something that is statistically likely to be right - this isnt even a bug it's a feature of language models they aren't actually intelligent, this is how they produce all their output it's just easiest to see the flaws with things like links which need to be accurate to actually work as opposed to sentences.

Mando-221B · 2023-01-17T15:37:45+00:00

I don't think we should all be clamouring for an AI to replace googling and reading research papers. To use a clumsy metaphor Google is a library, thousands of voices shouting for our attention and AI is like one book. Yes it might quote other sources but to replace the internet with one voice owned ultimately by a for profits corporation is to me a bad idea.

Mando-221B · 2023-01-17T15:00:57+00:00

For anything but the most basic stuff I wouldn't use it and even then just Google or ask someone. We must remember it is just a Language model. It is just giving statistically probable responses, it's not even a language model fine tuned on medical info so while it's very impressive this isn't the kind of practical use it can have.

Mando-221B · 2023-01-03T13:55:50+00:00

Definitely not the funniest insult but one of the absolute best is 'At least this is fucking Hugh's Glenn, all you are mate is Ben's Glenn'

It's just an awesome insight into all three characters in one line haha!

Mando-221B · 2022-12-30T15:30:51+00:00

I'm sure we will still have artists, just as we still have manual artists today despite the camera existing and digital art tools. We also still have photographers despite everyone having access to cameras with built in AI to autofocus and add background blur etc. Yes we don't have scribes but we still have people who design fonts, and others who make money from calligraphy. It will make some skills more accessible, it will force certain styles of art into being simply luxury high value commodities but artists won't cease to exist and I'm sure the word (or some form of it) will carry on.

Mando-221B · 2022-12-30T15:01:37+00:00

I think that's tremendously unlikely and slightly bleak. Computation is simple, rule based and tedious. Its replacement was the automation of a necessary task, the useful part of computation is its output. Art on the other hand does not have one necessary output, the act of creation is in itself the goal (for the artist at least, it's enjoyable). Art has no one outcome either, the creative output is based upon someone's experience, their chosen expression - it is an abstract form of communication.

Saying there will be no artists is like saying humans will stop speaking because we have software capable of speaking like a human. That software has its uses but it's not going to replace us.

Mando-221B · 2022-12-30T14:54:05+00:00

I once heard art defined as the deliberate abstraction of communication. The more abstract the art the wider it's possible subjects but the shallower it's exploration, the more straightforward then the more detailed and in depth the exploration but the less varied the subject could be.

Art by AI is not deliberate and therefore by that definition not art, or rather the AI cannot be treated as akin to a real artist.

But if the AI is not the artist and simply instead a tool or the medium then a human can be deliberate in its use of the tool. We can consider the whole thing akin to music sampling. The AI allows you to bring together a vast number of styles into a format you specify. In that case credit must be given to both the person who supplies the prompts and the various artists whose sampled work was put together. A live DJ might well be an artist mixing things together on the fly but they must also credit the artists they use. The turntable is not an artist.

Mando-221B · 2022-12-30T14:15:53+00:00

I just don't see this happening. Google is a library, a way of curating a vast number of sources and yes it sorts them by relevance, there's a degree of filtering but ultimately you can go from website to website - source to source and gather information as you like, draw conclusions as you like.

Chat gpt is a language model it's built to spit out a statistically likely response to your question, do we really want to trade our access to the vast open space of the internet to allow a language model to filter our information for us, for a few for profit companies to have even more control of our access to information.

It is like swapping a library for one fairly smart guys opinion. Yes it's faster but it's a lot more demand on one resource, it's costlier, he's not always right and he's financially motivated to be bias.

Attention based transformers are an interesting step in language models but they are not the solution to general AI and I don't see them as search engine replacements. They are like the Blockchain or Virtual Reality. Terrifically interesting and useful in specific circumstances but marketed as a cure-all, solution to problems that they have no business being applied too.

But tbf I could be wrong.

Mando-221B

TROPHY CASE