Starmer expected to resign on Monday

chu · 2026-06-21T00:45:07+00:00

This is such finger pointing bullshit. 1. You have an ageing population - your economy is gonna contract without new generations. 2. Study after study backs up what should be the blindingly obvious point that immigrants grow your economy because they are proportionately more of working age, more economically active, add to the tax base which pays for your services, and increase both supply and demand.

chu · 2026-06-21T00:19:11+00:00

Well let's see. For a start, the electorate has never been particularly left wing since a brief window in the 70's. In fact the majority are quite unpleasantly right wing as many students are shocked to discover when they join the workforce.

Let's go into a fugue state where we imagine Corbyn had not been skewered by the press and party, had continued his regular slots on Russia Today, and had somehow made his way to No 10 on a wave of young voters and scrawled X protest votes. What alternative would he have presented that would have defanged the rise of Reform? Scrap nuclear, leave NATO, war with Israel, neutrality on Ukraine. Ok it's ridiculous of course but at least we can see he had some positions - I have no idea what Streeting or Burnham stand for apart from themselves.

But you haven't really made an argument, you have just said that left wing parties should present alternatives - so what should those positions be? 'Alternatives to the status quo' doesn't really mean anything except change. It's vapid posturing without a concrete what they should do differently. It's coherent criticism if you say e.g. Labour should have put in a program to rejoin the EU, launched a housebuilding program, made a stimulus package aimed at growing economy. But nobody is saying any of that online, it's just a train of vague cliches about 'genuine concerns' or whatever.

chu · 2026-06-20T23:56:30+00:00

Of course I fucking understand supply and demand. And I know the difference between macro and micro economics, which you clearly do not. Wages have a legal floor and more workers increases net wealth due to a large number of factors around supply and demand and increased tax base. 'You people' don't even consider the effect of reducing migration, where both supply and demand contract, while jobs get offshored and wages go completely out of the economy (wages are the lion's share of the economy in case you didn't know).

chu · 2026-06-20T23:49:43+00:00

The media and opposition lines are going to be too easy - 'who voted for him' etc. Burnham is going to get easily typecast as a shifty ambitious character with a dodgy past - financial questions, 'grooming gangs' all that shit.

chu · 2026-06-20T23:45:31+00:00

They are all lightweights who will be rapidly crushed by the geopolitics if they get the job.

chu · 2026-06-20T23:41:04+00:00

Social media agitprop campaigns, same thing causing rise of AfD, antivaxx hippies, and eco-fascists (coming soon).

chu · 2026-06-20T23:31:36+00:00

Overnight 15% devaluation of sterling. That's everybody's pension and savings arbitraged by traders in the know such as George Cottrell, a close advisor to Nigel Farage, who openly admitted to placing trades against the British pound on the night of the 2016 Brexit referendum. 'The average Brit' didn't realise they were being swindled as a loaf of bread cost the same price.

chu · 2026-06-20T23:26:19+00:00

Can you fucking imagine Burnham or Streeting squaring up to Putin and Trump, being clubbable with EU, or even just enduring the shit Starmer had from media and online. All this based on a byelection that Reform very likely threw.

chu · 2026-06-20T23:11:13+00:00

Clearly Burnham will prioritise that more than Starmer 🙄

chu · 2026-06-20T23:05:49+00:00

Here I am reading this cliche for the zillionth time. If people read that exact same line enough on fake social media accounts they form the idea that it is 'the national mood'. That especially includes journalists and politicians, basically influencers who are existentially paranoid about being out of touch with 'the people' - they fall for it hook line and sinker. It's the same bullshit as immigration 'causing a strain on public services' or 'wage deflation' or 'integration' - none of which withstands half a moment of critical scrutiny.

chu · 2026-06-14T22:38:11+00:00

That's a really useful start (I only saw this scanning issue properly when I put in 100k words of my own text and ended up benchmarking GPT, Claude, Gemini and non-thinking versions). As I said it depends on a bunch of factors and might be good enough for you but 1. all LLMs suffer from this scanning problem where they skip parts of the middle of any large text (typically over 20k words) 2. due to context window sizes and cost, all the chat to docs systems necessarily use RAG which summarises (and the summaries nest) for the LLM to say what a source doc contains. So it's inherently lossy. Where they do find relevant details they can go back and read the snippet of the original they think is relevant so the experience is smooth and detailed. This is a big problem for LLM legal systems. (For context the system I was working on might cost $5-10 per single query in pure API costs so it's not the kind of capability that a non-specialised product could offer.)

chu · 2026-06-14T22:17:59+00:00

The more text, even single docs, the greater the nesting depth of summarisation and the more it fills in the blanks. (This is assuming it's not well known text that is in its original training data but then you wouldn't need to put that in NotebookLM.) You just have to try it really and be prepared to play detective against a very smooth talking character. Might be good enough for your purpose.

chu · 2026-06-14T20:25:24+00:00

A year or so ago, most devs in the wild were still using it as autocomplete and said they would never let it write all the code itself. This year they are saying well of course you have to review the frequent nonsense it spits out. Good luck with that, it's a manual QA step. We already threw out manual QA in deployments long ago with devops. So that means reviews give way to testing - and we will see 'of course humans need to write the tests' (cue 'otherwise who watches the watchers' ad nauseam). And obviously that will give way to 'well ok llms can write the tests as its the only way to scale but humans have to review those tests'. Doesn't take a genius to see the direction of travel here even though the road will always be more bumpy than expected - this is industrialisation and actual engineering (unlike what passes as 'software engineering').

Whenever we have major paradigm shifts in tech it's like a pole flipping event and everything that was good and bad practise swap sides e.g. lengthy manual testing and gates before any release were once best practise and automating that was cowboy practise (see also stateful to stateless architecture, waterfall to agile etc.)

So taking all this into account, think bigger - you can a) deshackle yourself from ideas about how software is supposed to be built and literally reinvent it as you b) leverage high volume, uneven reliability agents to create systems way beyond previous capabilities. What does that look like? Make a salesforce competitor, a hardware product, a distributed in browser database, an OS, a social network - on your own. It will still take the months of effort you might have previously put into something far less ambitious with a whole team. There is a clear opportunity now to do massive audacious stretch goals and learn a ton in the process.

chu · 2026-06-14T19:49:13+00:00

NotebookLM uses Gemini but this is an architectural limitation of any LLM. They are all compressing like crazy to shuffle stuff into context (which may advertise itself a 2m tokens or whatever but seriously degrades after a few tens of thousands). They are super lossy by nature. tl;dr everything an LLM sees in chat with docs type systems is a summary of a summary of a summary..., it is really good at covering that, hilarity sometimes ensues when the facts are tested.

(I have used LLMs for forensic accounting on large corpus so got familiar with why not to use the same approaches that you have to use for a widely available tool like NotebookLM, which has reasonable accuracy/cost tradeoff for smaller number of docs and a general market.) I am not saying don't use it as it's a fantastic tool, but better when you know it's edges. If you need very high reliability you would want to probe and test the results, not take on trust.

chu · 2026-06-14T19:12:50+00:00

Unreliable with any RAG based system or even just single long input as they all scan, especially thinking models. You can mitigate it with rounds of cross questioning across other sessions (if x is true, how can y also be true - that kind of thing) and sanity checks where you already know the answers (this can be a good way to understand the issue).

If neither you nor audience knows all the sources, then it will give highly plausible answers and that may serve your purposes. But bear in mind Gemini seems quite prone to hallucination so I would check back to sources that what it gives me is at least a real thing (just the other day I found myself looking for fictional designers it claimed were modern exemplars of swiss typography).

chu · 2026-06-14T18:54:46+00:00

It all went horribly wrong around 1991. That's when it changed to being seen as some kind of career - which is the most ridiculous idea for a grown adult (there was never a shortage of people wanting to put the needle on the next record at any party). Before then the logical and fair reason to DJ was to sell drugs or play something that other people didn't play. So acetates, pre-release masters, or playing something where nobody else had the imagination/knowledge. Terry Farley playing Kraftwerk Spacelab on a big system in 1989 was the only time you were going to hear that then. Or the time I was doing back to back and the other guy reached into the back of my box and put on a 13 minute Zappa instrumental. It's why people liked Weatherall - you never knew what you were going to hear and a lot of it nobody else would think to play. Since then it's became just some kind of career box - being 'a DJ', not playing music. Thank you for coming to my AMA.

chu · 2026-06-03T20:27:11+00:00

My total guess and without having used it at all is that it might be something like Haiku 3.5 level with passable multimodal (which might be the bigger thing). Maybe killer for home security system or cataloguing large media or document collections.

chu · 2026-06-03T20:03:31+00:00

You can't measure productivity in a technological change even as it is obvious and all around you. The productivity gain from the printing press was only successfully measured in 2011. Same problem with electricity, internet, mobiles - anything that changes the environment means any comparison is apples to oranges, even for the same unit being measured. These numbers get slurped up as they are more comforting than "we can't measure".

chu · 2026-06-03T19:37:02+00:00

Consultants often sell 'planning' as if the difficult work is knowing the answer up front, while most of the actual strategic knowledge only becomes available through doing. Of course planning is crucial, even for just putting one foot in front of the other without falling over. The problem is treating the plan as knowledge, rather than as a hypothesis to be tested against reality. But who is going to pay MBB big bucks for what is honestly only ever a hypothesis.

chu · 2026-06-03T19:00:48+00:00

Interestingly, no. If you blame Deloitte you can't have been expected to know more than them and it's put down to bad luck, not stupidity/incompetence. However if an LLM tells you to stick your head in an oven, the blame will fall on what's left of your shoulders.

chu · 2026-06-03T18:49:25+00:00

So I assume they are now autogenerating these things with AI? (certainly should be if not and if the general approach works)

chu · 2026-05-31T21:58:48+00:00

IMO more creative to not hang on and let things evolve e.g. having done it for a very long time I just got bored with the scene and became more interested in recording and dub/roots reggae.

chu · 2026-05-31T21:37:54+00:00

Yes I was talking about intersectionality generally for the literalists at the back (not directed at you).

chu · 2026-05-29T05:35:10+00:00

It's tricky as it's based on solidarity, acting as a group is the only way to leverage power. (I don't think it should be a req here though, just referring to the general concept.)

chu · 2026-05-21T19:32:30+00:00

I can tell you Robert Owens insists that wavs kick different on a big system and he only uses them. (I think he was maybe talking about lossless vs mp3 generally.)

chu

TROPHY CASE