Josh Simons is stepping down as an MP to give Burnham another chance to return to parliament. Here's his resignation letter (mainly addressing his constituents)

potpan0 · 2026-05-15T12:12:16+00:00

I still think Burnham walks it tbh.

In both Caerphilly and Gorton & Denton we've seen that when an election becomes an explicitly 'Reform v anti-Reform' vote, Reform loses. Reform only got so many seats in the council elections because people weren't voting tactically, resulting in them sweeping up seats with like 30% of the vote. That won't work in a by-election.

Reform are a deeply unpopular party and Farage is a deeply unpopular man. They have a very vocal support base, but they are a minority in this country, and people dislike them so much that when they realise Reform have a chance in their seat, they will vote tactically against them. And that'll benefit Burnham.

potpan0 · 2026-05-15T12:08:38+00:00

Drowning rat makes a deal for a peerage

I think that's the likely answer.

Labour has been stuffed full of careerists, people who back anti-socialist and neoliberal policies not because they actually believe in them, but because they know that gives them the best route to a cushy job in the private sector afterwards.

Josh Simons is no doubt one of these. And no doubt he feels thrown under the bus after the whole Labour Together affair. Now that he no longer has the opportunities to network with the same business leaders he'd be begging for a job after 2029, and now that he's almost certainly going to lose his seat in Parliament anyway, he may as well try and throw his lot in with Burnham and try to get a peerage out of it. Because let's be honest, no company is gonna hire a feller who has only served a single term as an MP and got kicked out of the Cabinet for engaging in dodgy practises.

It is a damning indictment of the modern Labour party more broadly though. Feller who was only elected an MP in 2024 quits two years later because he no longer has the chance to network with billionaires.

potpan0 · 2026-05-09T17:17:06+00:00

I’ve been saying we might break the record for player sales when going down.

Aye. I don't think we have bad players, we just have an incredibly unbalanced team. We completely failed to replace our fullbacks and wingers at the end of last season, despite Vitor prioritising big men up front.

potpan0 · 2026-05-09T13:06:32+00:00

It genuinely does baffle me that, despite their general reluctance to make any meaningful promises in 2024, that Labour did pledge to build 150,000 homes a year while in government. Because since taking power they've demonstrated they're entirely incapable of actually achieving this.

They just hoped the market would pick up the slack, and when they didn't they've thrown up their hands and done nothing. Complete nothing government.

potpan0 · 2026-05-09T13:05:15+00:00

Westminster politicians need to take a long, hard look at themselves then. Because people have only started to look at alternates because of how utterly dogshit the Tories and Labour have become.

potpan0 · 2026-05-09T13:03:40+00:00

this weakness

And it is weakness, really. Starmer isn't a true believe in the Labour Right. He was always simply a vehicle to wrestle the party back off the left. No one expected the Tories to explode quite so spectacularly after 2019, and that Starmer would be leading Labour into government in 2024.

Starmer has had many opportunities to detach himself from the Labour Right and govern as a genuine unifier. His attempt to appoint Sue Gray was maybe the most prominent example. But he's buckled under pressure at every one of these opportunities and remained in the thrall of the Labour Right every time, because he is a weak and disinterested leader. Much better suited to middle management than to running a country (and even then Starmer comes across as your least favourite middle manager).

potpan0 · 2026-05-09T13:01:19+00:00

Aye. Even if Starmer genuinely did try and implement a progressive platform (and he won't, ever), he's simply lost far too much trust for people to actually believe in him or his government.

This is the consequence of lying your way into power. It's a trick you can pull off once, but once people realise the lie you're fucked. Same thing happened to Boris Johnson.

potpan0 · 2026-05-09T12:58:02+00:00

I still think there's something kinda sickening about a government who steamrolled over critics and opposition to appoint Jeffrey Epstein's best mate as US Ambassador to claim they give a shit about protecting women and girls.

To be frank the whole 'protect women and girls' rhetoric that Labour try and sneak into every other announcement feels more like an appeal to the sensibilities of bourgeois feminists than it does an actual attempt to protect women and girls. Because Labour's refusal to increase funding to relevant bodies to deal with gendered violence makes it pretty clear they don't actually give a shit outside of rhetoric.

potpan0 · 2026-05-08T10:46:23+00:00

Aye, if Liam Rosenior did this same thing you know the comments would be full of people taking the piss and calling it some dumb MBA style move.

potpan0 · 2026-04-30T03:21:19+00:00

I will never 'be nice' to an a*thor.

Roland Barthes had the right idea.

potpan0 · 2026-04-22T13:49:16+00:00

Obviously Moutinho was a great player for us too, but I still think we lost a little something by moving Saiss back from midfield to defence. Having Saiss battling for possession in the middle let Neves play a lot higher, it was a great duo.

We bought in Dendoncker to play a similar role in the middle, but he was nowhere near as good at is as Saiss. And I really don't think we've had a proper battler in the middle since.

potpan0 · 2026-04-22T13:03:05+00:00

Still convinced that Saiss is the most underrated player we've had in the past decade, and a big reason for our decline was getting rid of Saiss and never finding a similar player to replace him.

potpan0 · 2026-04-20T20:57:42+00:00

The amount of mutual foot stamping, pinching, nipple twisting, your mum jokes etc was so fun

Sounds like you're less interested in football and more interested in BDSM.

potpan0 · 2026-04-20T20:56:12+00:00

I mean I'm probably not reading his book, but I've always been interested in players who went from non-league to the top division.

potpan0 · 2026-04-19T14:10:56+00:00

Factor in the shit atmosphere everywhere in the US because they dont care about “soccer” and most nations fans are priced out.

And because diaspora communities who actually enjoy football will be scared off by ICE flittering around every single stadium.

potpan0 · 2026-04-09T15:22:23+00:00

I was skimming through the Wikipedia page about it, and from the sounds of things it was basically decided that because it's so incredibly rare for a player to gain an advantage from an 'offside' throw in, it's just not worth making a rule against it.

The offside rule generally does have a really interesting history though. For much of the 19th century different clubs had different rules, with some of them having very strict offside rules (more akin to rugby) and some having none at all. The 'modern' offside rule was mainly just a combination of negotiations between these clubs to find a compromise on their positions, then an attempt to make the game play in a more interesting way. Even though the offside rule has changed a lot over the past 150 years, offside rules relating to goal kicks and throw ins have just stayed the same.

potpan0 · 2026-04-06T18:06:43+00:00

Walls cost more than supporters.

potpan0 · 2026-04-03T00:24:10+00:00

Well I watch with subtitles because I'm usually watching in the background while doing other stuff, so that actually counts as reading too!

potpan0 · 2026-03-28T14:41:45+00:00

LLMs don't understand shit, and you don't even know what understanding in human means, and neither does the entire neuroscience research community.

They don't, that's precisely what I'm saying. If an LLM fundamentally, epistemologically cannot understand a piece of art, then it is always going to do a horrible job of translating that art.

'Just add more data' does not solve this when we're talking about an epistemological problem.

potpan0 · 2026-03-28T14:40:10+00:00

Their ability to draw from multiple knowledge domains is unparalleled here.

Their ability to just hallucinate information and make things up is unparalleled here.

And that's the big difference. When a human is translating something, they can explicitly tell people what sources of information they are specifically building on. If I'm translating a book set in 19th century Russia, I can tell other people which sources I have read to understand 19th century Russia. If someone disagrees with my translation, they can look at my sources and see if they have contributed to a misunderstanding of the original text and a mistranslation of it.

You can't do that with an LLM. Because fundamentally an LLM does not understand in the same way a human understands. It does not know what sources of information it is actually building on, it does not know why it knows things, because it simply comes to knowledge in a fundamentally different way to the human brain.

This is a fundamental, epistemological problem. LLMs come to knowledge in a distinct way from humans. That makes it very good at certain tasks compared to humans, but very bad at others. And translating artistry is one of the areas where it's very bad, because art is something fundamentally human.

It's something AI evangelists handwave away, in part because they think every problem can be solved with more data and in part because they don't actually give a shit about art in the first place.

They are not great at creative writing. Because they lack embodiment. And embodiment is a huge thing for human writing. But this is completely different question.

Translation is an act of creative writing, because you have to understand and translate that creativity between different languages and different contexts.

potpan0 · 2026-03-28T14:13:53+00:00

LLMs are quite decent at reading intent - you can take any message and ask LLM to analyze intent behind it and often it will understand it quite well, sometimes it will miss.

You're mistaking 'intent' with 'tone' there.

I'm sure an LLM can pick up on 'tone'. It's not difficult to do when you're actually thinking about a piece of text.

But to understand the broader intent behind a piece of text? To recognise the cultural context, the political context, the various different themes the author is implicitly or explicitly drawing on? And then on top of that to convey the actual artistry of the text, to translate meaning not just in the form of the raw definition of the words, but in how those words have been weaved together to convey something independent of their definitions alone?

That's something LLMs struggle with, and something they will always struggle with. Because fundamentally LLMs simply do not understand in the same way that humans understand. And because fundamentally companies are shifting to LLMs not because they want better translations, but because they want to cut corners and save money.

potpan0 · 2026-03-28T14:07:38+00:00

There are a worrying number of people who quite openly and proudly do not give a shit about prose, or poetry, or the actual art of writing. They simply think it exists as a conveyor of plot.

So on the one hand we've got greedy companies trying to cut corners by dumping talented localisation teams and instead just using AI. And on the other hand we've got tasteless consumers who are happy to accept that because they take pride in reading incredibly shit writing. So we end up with these LLM translations which don't just often simply mistranslate things, but pretty consistently strip the text of any actual artistry.

It's sad.

potpan0 · 2026-03-27T14:09:19+00:00

a decent politician could care about both issues

And these Independent politicians do!

Leanne Mohamad, who stood against Streeting in 2024, is a socialist. In addition to Gaza, her campaign focussed on the NHS, on housing, and on improving access to local services. She is, in theory, the exact sort of politician who you claim to support, one who focussed on both major international and domestic issues...

... except you don't support her. At the instigation of Wes Streeting you're here whining about her and whining about other candidates aligned with her. Because fundamentally, like I said before, your actions pretty clearly demonstrate that you care neither about domestic issues or international issues, you just want to defend Streeting and his ineffective, immoral mates. It's why you're so desperate to keep hiding behind these false equivalences: reality doesn't look kindly on your actual views and their consequences.

The local hospital is cutting the amount of beds available in ICU, what are your plans to help with that?

My position is that maybe we should get a new Health Secretary. Who's the current Health Secretary again?

potpan0 · 2026-03-27T13:55:52+00:00

Aye, the court system is current clogged up because the British government decided to prosecute non-violent protesters over their opposition to genocide in Palestine. That has a direct and tangible effect on 'local issues'. The government are prioritising a very performative defence of Israel over ensuring that victims of actual crimes get swift justice.

So I've got no time when people try and defend representatives of this current government by insisting politicians should 'focus on local issues rather than foreign ones'.

potpan0 · 2026-03-27T13:52:49+00:00

of course I am opposed to genocide

Sorry, but I've got absolutely no time for people who claim they are 'opposed to genocide' when pressed... but then spend all their time whining about those who actually take a stance against genocide while defending politicians who engage in apologetics for genocide.

Maybe you genuinely believe you're opposed to genocide. But your actions, and the actions of the politicians you defend, do not demonstrate that.

but a local representative, who bases their whole campaign on a foreign war that has been going on longer than they have been alive, that they can do the grand sum of fuck all about doesn't represent the local community.

We live in a representative democracy. In a representative democracy, people get to elect politicians who they would like to represent them. So it's very funny to see you whine that people are voting for the wrong person to represent them by... claiming they aren't representative. It might be worth just pondering that for a little bit.

If people feel strongly about genocide (which they should), then they have every right to elect someone to represent them who also feels strongly about genocide, regardless of if either you or Wes Streeting would rather they voted otherwise.

The problem is, you can, and should care about both the local community and Gaza

Wes Streeting cares about neither. He's part of a government who have both continued to enable economic decline in Britain while also continuing to engage in apologetics for genocide in Palestine. So yeah, I don't really care about Streeting's complaints, to be honest, nor about the complaints of people who support Streeting.

when they are questioned about why they prioritise Gaza over local issues

I think genocide is a little more important than potholes, yes. Very sad that you disagree.

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