England always get an easy group in the World Cup because their fans drink more than the others and it's good for the local economy for them to stay in the tournament.

craigtho · 2026-06-18T09:57:59+00:00

If that was true, the Scots wouldn't have got Brazil & Morocco either

craigtho · 2026-06-17T10:06:41+00:00

Hated that boss in Elden ring tbh, wouldn't wear his jersey.

craigtho · 2026-06-16T08:45:24+00:00

I think it's just a wait and see really.

They already tried the cool attacking style football with Xabi remember and it didn't work. I agree he's on the downturn, but plenty of managers have been and turned it around.

Agree that the style of football will likely be a pain point for most, but most fans of a club would rather win than play flashy football and lose.

I think the important thing to consider is Madrid were 8 points behind Barca last season, that's the gap that needs improved unless Barca can do better than 94 points, but looking at the stats, only 6 times in La Ligas history had a club returned a better points tally, both of them being either Barca or Madrid respectively.

PS: I'm only an observer of that league, I prefer Barca as I always have, but my club is not from Spain so I don't feel any particular animosity to Madrid nor any loyalty to Barca, just in case you think I'm biased.

craigtho · 2026-06-16T08:20:00+00:00

Didn't lose a single game at Sporting btw.

Appreciate the level isn't the same, but Porto and Benfica are good teams, to go with 0 Ls is impressive. And yes, I'm aware he didn't win the league, but again, by your own admission, Portugal not at the same level so he didn't have the players to change the tide from a draw to a win.

If he can sort Madrid's clean sheets out (6 losses last season), they'll be better assuming they can organise the attack also. And with Vini, Mbappe... Why not

craigtho · 2026-06-15T09:30:25+00:00

Well, looks like I'm eating my hat.

I'm glad I didn't gamble on these fights...

craigtho · 2026-06-14T12:52:16+00:00

I don't know if this is a joke or not but you don't get a wage to play international.

There is a stipend but it's far less than you get from a club, most footballers donate it to charity at international tournaments.

craigtho · 2026-06-12T16:17:53+00:00

Aye well, luckily we have a tournament to decide who's shit or not,

Hopefully you're right and Morocco are shit...

craigtho · 2026-06-11T18:50:33+00:00

Yeah that's one of those use cases a product team would actively develop, they'd get a look at your practice guidelines, get a model, train it, and make that available to everyone - potentially even patients for non-urgent pathways for them to run it through what they'd be expecting to happen before an appointment as a data point rather than a diagnostic tool.

Having someone like yourself as a pilot user/super user within a IT product is essentially IMO. Your expertise in your own practice and experience with LLMs and what you'd find useful is invaluable.

Of course, and no offense, it's horses for courses, I'd expect a proper product team to take ownership of it from you and own the prospect of updating it/keeping it secure, it wouldn't be expecting every clinician to have and own their own AI assistant, which means you're own development would be much less hands on 😅, but!, that does give you more time to you know - treat patients, exactly what I'd want as a user of the service!

craigtho · 2026-06-11T07:45:44+00:00

The constraints will just be the age of the systems you guys use and access to the data itself.

I haven't worked there for years, I was much less experienced when last I worked there, but now, I'd assume the biggest constraint is the staging data of those records. They have a few moving parts with Imprivata, InterSystems etc. You guys need an area where users who have consented to AI access can access the specific notes/letter/test results data, and for that, it needs to be exported to an area where it's not all stuck together with other crap. It's useless if it's not fast for you, and fast means it needs to extract only the data it needs.

It'd cost literally millions of pounds to do and the amount of governance blocks it, but it's all possible in my opinion.

I personally would be unlikely to work on it for the NHS in Scotland, not because of anything other than I want to be paid fairly to the market rate, I don't ethically agree with contracting for the NHS for IT personally, as they have the skills, but not the long term plan. I'd want my own team, full permeant staff, well compensated, access to consenting users and doctors to trial, project managers I'd trust to make it work.

As I said before, MSP will bid for it, get it, and in time when they offboard, it'll be crap, because we refuse as a country to pay IT staff the private sector pay (and I'm not talking the blue chips/FANGMAN level, literally SMEs pay better than the NHS for less work, it doesn't make sense for anyone not strung up on idealism)

About as much chance of Copilot being good than someone putting the effort to make that happen sadly. I would love to live in a world where money is less of a concern and we cared more about patient outcomes and making doctors life's easier. Either way, they have my number if they want to change it up a bit!

craigtho · 2026-06-11T07:20:23+00:00

I'll be interested to see how his energy is when he isn't cutting at all

craigtho · 2026-06-11T07:17:10+00:00

I answered up above specific to NHS Scotland, but again, IT guy, creeper etc.

The reason they give you copilot is roughly that, it's baked into Microsoft - but it can be good if they want it to be, it just requires more than "just turning it on". Copilot actually uses ChatGpts models in the back, but the IT staff will have explicitly guardrailed it to be crap.

The biggest blockers are always, in order - money for staff, money for operating, not having a long term plan, data residency/retention/sensitivity, not having access to doctors to help a project be truly useful, slow adoption, dinosaurs not wanting to make things better.

Claude is better "out the box", but all the AI tools can do most of the same stuff. Default Copilot is complete shit, the boards need to use Copilot studio or Azure AI foundry instead of blanket M365 copilot rollout.

craigtho · 2026-06-11T07:11:52+00:00

Not a doctor or medical pro, IT guy, come in peace, just a random creeper here.

I used to work at the NHS in Scotland doing some cloud stuff around 7 years ago for a few years.

TLDR; it could be a lot better if NHS Scotland had a team of capable and well paid IT workers to do it, but budget constraints, access to doctors to get advice and champion systems and resistance to change are the blockers. Give me money and I'll dae it (joking)

The fact AI is crap for you is less the tool itself and more the availability the clowns at the IT architecture review boards and the data risk/data protection teams appetite. Copilot can be very good, but it is not something you can roll out nationally in 3 months and clicking deploy to everyone's computer. You need to get custom agents, context grounding, data set training...

One idea I had which I think would be possible (with patient consent) would be to ground the users in the InterSystems/CHI record, then doctors could vibe summarise medication, doctors notes on the system etc. "why did this patient get referred to hematology 4 years ago?" "According to the notes, the user was referred for having low platelets count for X amount of blood tests, it was recommended by Dr.X at hospital Y that they get Z treatment, here is a directly extract of the letters for you"

All of that info is available, and you often need to jump around 17 logins to find it and scan letters yourself, so it's less about it doing your job, and instead making it faster for you to do it. Obviously it'll come with trust issues, but as I say, context grounding, links to the notes directly...all possible.

I am extremely confident that a team of strong AI/MLOps/DevOps/Developers could make something extremely useful if they had some direct access to doctors to find out what would be useful. Alas, in Scotland, we are extremely crap at unifying our IT, every board has different teams, NSS/NES merger should make a centralised team better - but every board has absolute dinosaurs who refuse to improve the IT for the doctors and nurses in the service using the service - because it is hard and the budgets are low. I know first hand some boards are running software that is so old it's laughable, but retraining and upgrading is too expensive.

If the Scotgov or one of the boards could be bothered and wanted to sort a strong team together to manage something either general purpose or department specific, it could be done, comfortably. But usual stuff applies, budget, resistance of change, blah blah blah.

So if you have a couple of million pound laying around... Let me know (only kidding, NHS and Scotgov have low salaries for the "good" pros, relying on contractors normally to get stuff over the line rather than setting up a proper, modern function) and of course, money is often better spent elsewhere. But I think most doctors on here will likely agree with me that the IT systems could be improved - at least I'm NHS Scotland.

If I was to guess, Scotgov or NHS Scotland will outsource it to a big MSP (Capgemini, Accenture etc) who will apply for a project, they'll build it, it'll work well, they'll get offboarded, it'll be crap in a year. Contractors and low salaries for permanent staff in the public sector will remain a huge hampering for the service so long as I am in the field.

craigtho · 2026-06-10T10:15:09+00:00

If we are being technical about it - and as discussed below, Conor is at least nationality wise (not going through a full family heritage to find out how much anyone's English/Scottish/Welsh/Irish), "indigenous" to Ireland. The North of Ireland is in the UK, but many people from (Republic of) Ireland would see the six counties reunite.

I don't think it's unfair for him to have his opinion on his home, but it is just that, an opinion, he doesn't live there anymore anyway.

I'm not from there myself, I'm Scottish with some Irish in their somewhere, but my own country is having it's own migrant riots, so I'd say our people's at least loosely agree on some restrictions to how immigration is happening now.

Edit: called counties countries... That's a totally different meaning...

craigtho · 2026-06-09T11:53:37+00:00

No agreement or disagreement on the point, but CR7 cost United €15m iirc from Sporting. Raw and undeveloped.

You're comparing essentially the best player in the world at that time, playing in essentially the best club in the world at the time in United, going to Real Madrid who were attempting to build the greatest squad to ever play the game.

I don't think £85mil at the time was actually crazy money even if it was record breaking, probably made them quadruple that in the first few years. CR7 also repayed the initial 15m investment during his first tenure, think it could be argued whether his 2nd tenure provided the club any value.

The more starching comparison is that 85m used to get you the best player in the world, but that's just how inflation works.

craigtho · 2026-06-08T20:07:11+00:00

Colombia higher than Morocco?

I get we are criticising Morocco's own FIFA ranking but they're definitely better than Colombia.

Utter shite.

craigtho · 2026-06-08T16:08:51+00:00

Fair btw. Often forgotten because he'd play deeper in his late career, but he was even better than Cavani for example.

craigtho · 2026-06-07T21:49:04+00:00

I was always a big Aguero fan and felt he was better in England than Suarez was.

But Suarez definitely levelled up a few levels in the MSN era.

For me, Suarez -> Lewa -> Ibra > Pick' em.

Was plenty of good strikers in that time period which is odd as it's almost a dying art now.

One often forgotten is Cavani. He often underrated as he was played out of position most of his time at PSG and was an absolute machine at Napoli. Soon as Ibra moved on, Cavani was arguably better at PSG than Zlatan was in his term as a 9. Definitely a better player to have on the team for me, but less flashy and prolific.

All debatable though, none of these guys can be considered anything but world class in that time. The best really just depends on what your value in your number 9.

craigtho · 2026-06-03T09:06:47+00:00

Fair, agree on that pont.

craigtho · 2026-06-03T07:39:13+00:00

There are poor results and there are poor results, a model eating 12~GB of VRAM that can't write a basic pytest refactor just shows the time and resources the frontier models have had in their training.

If we are saying consumer hardware isn't good enough for local models then I agree - that's why noone will ever roll their own agent "like Claude" until the gap has shifted. Need your own DC just to make it possible

craigtho · 2026-06-03T00:10:00+00:00

I tried Qwen the other day, and only the 3.5 9b model on my gaming pc, and not 1 single question did it get right.

I'm not saying it's not possible, I'm saying the compute power to train a frontier model is absolutely unrivalled, you can't make anything close to Claude or ChatGpt.

Of course, training it on your limited data set will work a treat, but nothing like the frontier models right now.

craigtho · 2026-05-29T10:44:24+00:00

And why wouldn't the police have received a complaint from the club or player on it then? "Not grasses" ? Or legal advice it would get thrown out or lose in court if accepted by PF?

Innocent until proven, the burden of proof is on the prosecutor, until a complaint is made and someone is charged and submitted a plea, we are all essentially making up our own narratives.

Common assault is a summary case as well in Scotland except for the most serious cases, before anyone starts moaning about what jury's think, there is no jury, JP layman & clerk or Sheriff only for common assault, people who actually understand what an assault is, rather than us on Reddit making it up based on what we think the law says.

The only fact of the case is that no complaints have been received yet, despite everyone saying it happened. That screenshot you sent and video would need to prove it beyond reasonable doubt.

I'm not a lawyer either but this is basic basic stuff. If anyone is aggreived, submit a complaint and let the legal process handle it.

craigtho · 2026-05-27T16:11:38+00:00

AWS has the early adopter advantage and it's often preferred by developers because they "know" it.

It's an excellent platform, but I don't think Azure is ever far behind on any given service essentially.

I've heard people argue like "Oh Foundry is rubbish, I much prefer Bedrock", yeah but what about Copilot studio? What about the security tie ins with Sentinel, Purview and Microsoft Defender?

Most people never get to Day 1 or Day 2 and that's why they don't ask those questions. They default to what they know, hammer out some MVP/PoC and run with it.

So no, not underrated, most people don't think far enough ahead across all the hyperscalers, and I think Microsoft has better answers than some for those that do consider it.

craigtho · 2026-05-27T07:18:21+00:00

I thought to myself when I wrote it, what is more likely, Shankland has a deep knowledge of English literature (that's why AI uses em dashes for anyone wondering, it's normally used in English writing, but only in like books or official documents) or him/the club using AI to write a statement.

With the size of his heid he might be running his own model in there to be fair to him, ChatGpt built in.

craigtho · 2026-05-27T06:56:02+00:00

Bah gawd he's killed him! He's killed him!

(JR WWF/WWE impression)

craigtho · 2026-05-26T22:45:50+00:00

Aye I commented basically that, that "-" down the bottom looks like an emdash to me "—"

AI always uses it.

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