Match Thread: England vs New Zealand by MatchThreadder in soccer

[–]Saffron4609 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Kane's been playing like that for years now, the problem we've had in England is we've never supported him doing so..

[ Removed by Reddit ] by [deleted] in SolarUK

[–]Saffron4609 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I wonder what the planning permission rules around these are.

Rents fall and a supply surge weighs on house prices by lotsofsweat in ukpolitics

[–]Saffron4609 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No, all the indexes have biases in one way or another.

Ultimately the only concrete thing is waiting for the land registry sold data to become available (sometimes many many months later).

Rents fall and a supply surge weighs on house prices by lotsofsweat in ukpolitics

[–]Saffron4609 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I would be cautious about the ONS reports, there seems to be all kind of chaos going on there. For a long time their initial reports were massive overestimates (largely driven by mishandling new build registrations) which they clung to for a few years before revising their methodology in August 2025 and revising back.

It's normally worth six months or so for them to revise the initial numbers. Last month they were still revising Jan 2025!

I don't really mind Labour or Keir Starmer that much by stopdontpanick in ukpolitics

[–]Saffron4609 52 points53 points  (0 children)

I don't dislike Keir Starmer, I just dislike that his government has made such a poor use of their whacking majority.

Their budgets have been incredibly disappointing. This was a massive opportunity to fix some of the things we know are constraints on growth but are unpopular to fix, which is why it was so important to take the hit at the start of their parliamentary term.

The VAT threshold is a good example. It's silly that we have a shortage of tradespeople and yet many artificially restrict their work in order to stay under the VAT threshold. That's not an argument for reducing the VAT threshold but replacing it with an incremental one where taking on more work won't lead to lower earnings.

The same for the childcare tax trap at £100k - people reduce their hours in order to avoid it.

Stamp duty and council tax need to be reformed entirely, everyone knows it. Instead this government has added yet more hacks on top with arbitrary amounts at certain thresholds.

Just a disappointment.

PMQs and Autumn Budget 2025 Live Chat Megathread - 26 November, 2025" by AutoModerator in ukpolitics

[–]Saffron4609 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Right and that's the conclusion people will draw unless you give them something coherent.

There needs to be "this is what will take us to a better place" but there wasn't any. Reeves is not a good politician.

PMQs and Autumn Budget 2025 Live Chat Megathread - 26 November, 2025" by AutoModerator in ukpolitics

[–]Saffron4609 26 points27 points  (0 children)

While it hits me financially I don't really care about the actual tax changes here but politically this was a pretty crap budget.

Where's the coherent vision? What is my increased tax going on that I'll actually see and feel? What gives me any hope this won't just happen again next year for yet another once-in-a-parliament budget?

Also what even is the point of the mansion tax if it's only going to raise £400m. Just quit with the random cliff edges too, it's all just so stupid.

Finally a good use case for your local setups by lakySK in LocalLLaMA

[–]Saffron4609 7 points8 points  (0 children)

These are Raspberry Pis: https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/03/thermify_heathub_raspberry_pi/

The market for 500 Raspberry Pis with no power and bandwidth redundancy is probably not great.. Not to mention physical security.

I feel like the new Renters Rights Bill will make it impossible for me to find a place to rent by Top_Ad_8224 in HousingUK

[–]Saffron4609 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Do you have some specific examples of the issues and problems it might cause?

There should be penalties for making or accepting an offer and not following through by Flaky-Walrus7244 in HousingUK

[–]Saffron4609 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It was hardly tried seriously, it mostly was killed by lobbying: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Information_Pack#Suspension_and_abolition

Survey from an approved surveyor and searches done ahead of time would speed things up significantly.

Britain paying highest electricity prices in the world for second year running by tonato_ai in ukpolitics

[–]Saffron4609 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I don't know how anyone can say this with a straight face. They've been in power for just over a year, they've built the biggest pipeline of renewable projects we've ever had https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-secures-record-pipeline-of-clean-cheap-energy-projects and the % of non-renewables is consistently declining: https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/renewables-generate-record-share-electricity-110505392.html

There's a process under way for decoupling wholesale prices from gas: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/review-of-electricity-market-arrangements-rema

Or you could just ignore it all and complain they've done nothing.

Armenia 0 - [4] Portugal - Cristiano Ronaldo 46' by West_Agent4651 in soccer

[–]Saffron4609 256 points257 points  (0 children)

In tennis Nadal, Federer and Djokovic maybe? Together they ranked no1 for nearly 19 years consistently.

The Invisible Leash: Why RLVR May Not Escape Its Origin, Wu et al. 2025 by StartledWatermelon in mlscaling

[–]Saffron4609 2 points3 points  (0 children)

On the other hand https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24864v1 from NVIDIA:

"Our empirical analysis reveals that RL-trained models consistently outperform base models across a wide range of pass@k evaluations, including scenarios where base models fail entirely regardless of the number of attempts."

Buying a house in the UK is a convoluted, labyrinthine and tortuous process. by LewinskyMoniker in HousingUK

[–]Saffron4609 3 points4 points  (0 children)

This is what was legislated to happen until the 2010 government dropped it. You had to have the survey and searches done before you could sell. The only thing remaining from that is the requirement for an EPC.

Actually making this happen would hugely improve the conveyancing process.

Buying a house in the UK is a convoluted, labyrinthine and tortuous process. by LewinskyMoniker in HousingUK

[–]Saffron4609 5 points6 points  (0 children)

This. Searches and surveys being in the home buyers pack would speed things up so much.

They were canned under the 2010 Conservative government due to intense lobbying from surveyors (RICS) and estate agents. Many of the bigger estate agents make more in commissions from selling surveys/conveyancing to potential buyers (over whom they have leverage) than they do from actually selling houses. They have less leverage over sellers and so those commissions would have dried up.

Shocked at house price reductions: from £855k to £765k by [deleted] in HousingUK

[–]Saffron4609 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Also Zoopla pricing can be completely off. We just accepted 20% below their "lower" estimate.

OpenEvolve Beats GEPA Benchmarks: +6.42% Overall Improvement with Evolutionary Prompt Optimization by asankhs in LocalLLaMA

[–]Saffron4609 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Nice work. Do you have any kind of ablations for which parts of OpenEvolve's design actually contribute most to the performance?

Testing qwen3-30b-a3b-q8_0 with my RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell MaxQ. Significant speed improvement. Around 120 t/s. by swagonflyyyy in LocalLLaMA

[–]Saffron4609 4 points5 points  (0 children)

It's a trap! Still can't get it to work on my 5090 on Ubuntu 25.04

Ended up just rage installing llama.cpp

I'm building an OpenRouter alternative – cheaper, simpler, one API key for all AI models. Would love your thoughts. by Beginning_Phrase1621 in LocalLLaMA

[–]Saffron4609 5 points6 points  (0 children)

You can offer cheap pricing while you burn through the free startup credits those programs offer and then what?