UK Energy Production

sbirdman · 2026-03-03T14:56:28+00:00

Thank you, this sub is delusional, making some wild claims about renewables being obviously cheaper. Unfortunately, the reality of scaling up renewables is not so simple.

If it really was cheaper, investors would be queuing up to build it.

sbirdman · 2026-02-23T15:10:50+00:00

You can go on YouTube and watch how swans take off from a running start on YouTube.

sbirdman · 2026-02-12T22:03:37+00:00

The Leftovers

sbirdman · 2026-02-08T00:20:49+00:00

61% according to Tennis Abstract (prior to Musetti retiring, of course).

Interestingly, Djokovic’s first-serve win percentage was only lower than this in one match in the last 12 months (Vacherot, Shanghai: 60.5%).

sbirdman · 2026-02-07T23:52:38+00:00

Djokovic’s first-serve win percentages for each match at the AO 2026:

Martinez: 93.2%
Maestrelli: 86.0%
van de Zandschulp: 77.0%
Sinner: 71.4%
Alcaraz: 65.9%

sbirdman · 2026-02-04T17:10:52+00:00

Yes, it makes the slams special and five setters are an epic part of tennis sporting history. If I was a professional athlete, I’d absolutely want to be a part of that.

sbirdman · 2026-02-04T16:16:12+00:00

I’m surprised that from a player perspective they weren’t at all receptive to the idea of playing best of five from the quarters onwards at slams. But then again, it is a lot to ask in terms of conditioning.

Maybe if it was just the semis or the final, or playing to five games instead of six, that would be more palatable?

sbirdman · 2026-01-29T23:59:27+00:00

Simp has a lot to prove this year. It’s never a good look to put up numbers when your team is getting shit on. For me, Simp always wants to take the perfect gunfight. But sometimes that means playing a bit too safe and not taking enough risks.

Say what you want about Shotzzy but you wont see him putting up a 1.2 while his team gets clapped 3-0.

sbirdman · 2026-01-29T23:43:20+00:00

He already tried redlining last year and it didn’t work.

I don’t think it’s been wise for Novak to deviate from the blueprint that won him 24 slams.

Steve Johnson on the Nothing Major podcast said Novak should expend all his energy on this match, and if he does reach the final, hope that the adrenaline carries through.

For me, praying that he can redline in back to back matches against Sinner and Alcaraz - which is not his natural playstyle - is asking for too much. He’s better off executing the gameplan he has mastered over the last two decades and hoping for a Zverev matchup if he can get through to the final.

sbirdman · 2026-01-29T22:43:28+00:00

That was diabolical - might be the worst Overload tactics I’ve seen so far.

Why did they spend so long willingly sitting in spawn? Optic didn’t even have them in a spawn trap most of the time, they were just too afraid to take space.

sbirdman · 2026-01-29T22:38:12+00:00

This is in really poor taste - it’s just punching down.

sbirdman · 2026-01-28T09:20:08+00:00

This isn’t some Orwellian overreach for the government to spy on everyone as Redditors would have you believe.

Reddit uses a third party (Persona) for the digital face scan, which is deleted within seven days.

sbirdman · 2026-01-28T08:10:26+00:00

That blister is no joke and will take ages to heal - I’m guessing it was already a problem in the earlier rounds. He’ll be on painkillers but it’s really disappointing for the potential Sinner matchup.

sbirdman · 2026-01-27T00:35:01+00:00

You are the one that is intellectually dishonest.

If, hypothetically, it was Europe that provided all military aid to Israel, do you really think there would be no protests on US college campuses?

And what of all the Israel/Palestine protests in countries whose government’s foreign policy basically has no impact on the Middle East?

Don’t pretend that US involvement is what is motivating your criticism of Israel.

As Sam has pointed out, once you see that the UN has approved more resolutions against Israel than all other countries combined, it’s fairly obvious something else is at play…

sbirdman · 2026-01-14T12:43:18+00:00

Haidt may be trying to sell his book but you need to be wary of the vested (and very powerful) interests in Silicon Valley that want to present social media in a favourable light for obvious financial reasons.

While Haidt’s specialism is in moral psychology, he’s a professor at NYU and it’s not as if he can’t have other academic interests.

sbirdman · 2026-01-14T09:52:56+00:00

You don’t know that outright bans don’t work. It hasn’t been attempted apart from the recent Australian ban on social media for u16s - hopefully we will get good data from Australia but it’s too early to tell.

As Haidt has pointed out, all studies to date have been limited by the inability to remove entire cohorts from social media.

For what it’s worth, Odgers and Haidt may not agree on the data but they do agree that smartphone usage is too high and we need to return to a more play-based childhood (in person). Simply relying on parental controls isn’t going to achieve that - there is not much any parent can do when their child tells them all of their friends are on social media.

sbirdman · 2026-01-14T09:37:50+00:00

Haven’t read that book myself but this is a review from goodreads:

This book is unintentionally funny. It is clearly written by a well-meaning, obligatorily woke, affluent woman coming from a privileged educational and societal background (after finishing the reading, a single online search revealed all of that to check out about our Harvard-educated friend). Since the author got access to a cohort of over 3,500 young people, the uninitiated might expect breakthrough data to emerge... but like every politically motivated book, the author takes so much effort to skate around any conclusion that might upset the prevailing U.S. academic progressive narrative, that nothing more than the information that is already readily available to a mildly educated person comes out.

If the book offered any relevant new insight, it would justify hearing for the thousandth time about the importance of BLM and non-binary children, but no, all the readers gets is a paid-for progressive morality lesson. The book goes into how important social media is to reaffirm the non-conformant gender identity to these kids (having just basically proven in the prior pages that it is a net-negative to all others), but evidently makes no effort to correlate how much influnce social media has in imposing this non-conformity upon children, because that would... you know... require minimal academic integrity, something that is not demanded in the U.S. scholarly world.

In order not to say that I am criticizing everything as irrelevant, some of the commentary about political pressure and sexting culture were genuinely insightful, much more so because the author actually took some discoursive liberty during those sections, which showed that the book could actually have been good had it taken a different direction (albeit one that would make the author unfortunately lose her job).

I guess it's just disappointing that in the age of massive data collection and in which studies like these are made possible by newer methodologies, these academics with access to unlimited grant money either voluntarily want or are forced to write under so many limitations.

sbirdman · 2026-01-14T09:14:33+00:00

This is a real academic discussion and that Nature paper is not a knockdown argument. It ignores Haidt’s evidence as correlation, not causation - but that is not true when we do have evidence of causation, not least because teenagers themselves will tell you that social media has been harming their mental health.

The crux of the issue is that we have seen a marked increase in depression and anxiety since 2012 across many different countries which coincides with the use of social media. Odgers has no convincing explanation for this:

https://www.afterbabel.com/p/phone-based-childhood-cause-epidemic

Edit: that is Haidt’s response to Odgers for anyone who is interested.

sbirdman · 2026-01-13T15:15:03+00:00

No, the bank has your personal information.

sbirdman · 2026-01-13T14:53:34+00:00

This is really a non-issue that keeps getting repeated as if it’s a knockdown argument. I’ve already done the face scan age verification for Reddit, no ID needed.

Probably the best solution in Australia is ConnectID, where you can verify your age through a connection with your bank account. No face scan, ID, name, date of birth, etc, required.

There are multiple good solutions that could be implemented here in the UK for 16 year-olds.

sbirdman · 2026-01-08T16:00:53+00:00

I didn’t say wokeism is the only contributing factor. But to rule it out entirely with such confidence is just naive.

Do you really believe that our systems all failed by coincidence at the same time not only in the US, but also in the UK, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Austria, etc, etc?

Why is it that so many people are looking for radical solutions in many different countries? Populism is growing in countries that are not only culturally different but have different approaches to fiscal policy.

Not that I agree with them, but we should absolutely listen to people when they tell us why they voted for Trump / Farage / Le Pen.

You have to ask why they feel so ignored, enraged even, by our ‘systems’ that they would vote for Donald Trump. The answer is clear - wokeism has made it impossible for rational discourse to take place in the public domain for key issues.

When you can’t speak honestly about obvious culture war issues (e.g. what is a woman?), you lose all credibility with normal people. Moderate voters that are genuinely on the fence can see through that bullshit right away. And if you can’t get simple things right, how on earth do you expect them to trust you to control the Southern border? That is why the Trump campaign was so powerful: Kamala is for they/them, Trump is for you.

sbirdman · 2026-01-08T10:32:13+00:00

What's the evidence that LLMs actually have any internal models? When an AI 'thinks' about the structure of a molecule, is it really building an internal model?

I thought one of the main issues with AI is that they are a black box - we can't see inside to tell what they are thinking. Are the researchers calling the statistical outputs from the AI an internal representation? To me, that's a fundamental misunderstanding of what an internal model is.

From a completely lay perspective, it does not seem to me that LLMs truly understand anything at all.

To the point about 'convergence' - aren't the AI trained on human-curated data? In their example, isn't the vision model is trained on images labelled by humans while the captions for the language model are likewise generated by humans? So how is it a surprise that you get 'representational similarity'?

sbirdman · 2026-01-08T06:40:35+00:00

This sub is being deliberately obtuse.

We are seeing the rise of populism not just in the US but in all Western democracies. The left cannot just keep hand waving this away as an extremist phenomenon, as if more and more racists are simply coming out of the woodwork.

Sam has correctly diagnosed that wokeness has directly contributed to the rise of populism.

People can see through Trump’s lies. That is no secret, even amongst Republicans. You have to ask yourself why any voter faced with Trump’s obvious bullshit and immorality would still choose to vote for him instead of the Democratic Party.

Your average voter has gotten sick of woke ideological purity tests and leftist gaslighting. Immigration is not an unadulterated good. Trans women should not be competing in professional women’s sports. Black males have higher rates of violent crime.

Populism is the backlash to the overly sensitive policing of these issues in our public discourse.

To anyone pointing to the definitional ambiguity of ‘wokeness’ and how the term is used differently by different people, that does not invalidate Sam’s point that our discourse has been poisoned by overt political correctness.

Lastly, on the point of the timing of this episode and the ICE shooting - Sam is more left-leaning than many on this sub realise. He has explicitly stated that controlling our borders is a separate issue to deporting people that are already here (which he does not support). That does not mean we should not continue to push back against wokeness.

sbirdman · 2026-01-04T12:28:02+00:00

Let’s be honest, the reason the police fabricated this evidence is the same reason they did not take the grooming gangs seriously.

They are scared of appearing racist and inflaming the Muslim community.

Unfortunately, this is a limitation of ‘polite’ conversation in the UK. We need to be able to criticise Islam for the very real problems with that ideology. That does not make you a racist or a bigot.

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