A very Happy Birthday to you (but not eternal recurrence !)
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BREAKING: A jury has found Live Nation and Ticketmaster to be an illegal monopoly that overcharges fans.

After the federal government settled the case, 34 states kept pursuing the giant ticket and concert company.

Now, the states have won.

Unlike Musk, Bezos or Zuckerberg, Altman was not a fixture in the crossover sphere of famous tech billionaires until quite recently. His sudden appearance at the top of the world’s rollcall of fleece-wearing founders came around the end of 2022. To outsiders, it may have seemed like he’d parachuted in from nowhere, in the manner of a new cousin suddenly present in the ninth series of a flailing family sitcom, one whom you are bidden to pretend has been there all along. This was due to his company OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT, the large language model released in November of that year, which had barely uttered its first chirpy, bullet-pointed answer to a recipe query before its name had become shorthand for the entire profusion of LLMs which followed. Soon, Altman was everywhere, prognosticating on all the ways AI could, would and should, transform, improve and/or destroy the world. He has, at different times, claimed AI would achieve superhuman intelligence by 2025, wipe out jobs that aren’t “real work”, turn intelligence into a utility that OpenAI sells to an increasingly stupid populace, and/or destroy humanity entirely. He has also expressed concerns that the entire AI market could be in “a bubble”. On that, at least, we agree.

In case it’s not already clear, I don’t care very much that these people have deluded themselves into thinking the lovely wooden doll they’ve made is a real, live human boy. What’s more relevant is what they do with that delusion, and the degree to which said delusions are taken seriously as claims, let alone as breathlessly reported fact, by the media we task with explaining the complex world of technology to us. A media that has responded to these people’s addiction to headlines by becoming similarly addicted to printing them. Like many a teenaged radical, I used to moodily resent the unseen world of business barons who kept in the dark and managed our lives from the shadows. Now, I want to thank them for their service: for sparing us the sight of their faces in our news feeds every hour of every day. Say what you want about the Koch Brothers and their media influence. But they weren’t doing speaking tours about the Antichrist, or keeping us up to date on the frequency and strength of their night-time erections.

Moreover, those of us who do not believe Altman’s $1 trillion word-guessing programme is going to save, rule, or destroy, the planet any time soon, boggle that so much uncritical coverage is given to a company that is very far away from making a product that works usefully as a search engine or a calculator, let alone an all-knowing superintelligence that will remake the modern world. A technology so riddled with errors and hallucinations that ChatGPT has itself become a byword for unchecked work that is hastily and lazily cobbled together by scammers and morons. And it is ultimately made by a company that has already leveraged the greatest capital expenditure and computing power ever assembled in one place to deliver a technology which cannot reliably tell you how many “R”s there are in the word strawberry, or refrain from telling you to clean your home with chlorine gas. It is also a company whose finances are so worryingly opaque that it is very hard to know where the truly gigantic and ongoing investment will come from in order to let it keep losing money ad infinitum. (At this point, failure to do so would also likely crash the global economy.) All to make a product so programmed to peddle convincing nonsense to its users that ChatGPT’s leading contribution to mankind thus far has doubtless been the harrowing catalogue of tragedies in which it has been directly or indirectly involved, from messianic breakdowns and psychotic breaks to several real-life murders, suicides and at least two mass shootings.

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'Party which has done absolutely nothing to improve the socio-economic fortunes of its base, aside from offering much more-of-the-same, is quite understandably, drubbed out of office'

Listen to this from @abbyinnes.bsky.social
podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/p...

Government to lift paywall from large parts of the Land Registry Exclusive: finding out who owns land will become simpler under plans to make the best use of green spaces and hit net zero targets

VICTORY! Government to open up the Land Registry - bringing to an end a thousand years of secrecy shrouding who owns England.

I’ve been campaigning for this for ten years: the new Land Use Framework, published later today, makes it government policy. 1/

www.theguardian.com/environment/...

London, San Francisco and Beijing achieve ‘remarkable reductions’ in air pollution Cycle lanes, electric cars and other interventions have helped 19 global cities slash levels of pollutants by more than 20%

They said it would take 193 years to clean London’s air. We did it in nine. 💨

London has now met legal limits for nitrogen dioxide air pollution.

One reason we need to foreground art is so that people who would prefer not to engage in any self-reflection might understand that introspection has been central to the human experience for millennia. bsky.app/profile/dave...

‘It has changed my life’: How a dose of nature is treating mental illness A project in London is helping hundreds of people, providing a genuine alternative to traditional treatments

This is surely telling us something wonderful about the green transition: that done well - in built environments and housing and beyond - we could reconnect to the sources that let us relax back into our true natures…
www.theguardian.com/environment/...

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never, ever, ever, ever accept "how will you pay for it?" as an argument against social programs.

There's a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.

I feel confident that the sort of people who moved to Dubai to avoid paying tax would say that those fleeing war in other countries are not our concern and they should seek refuge in a neighbouring country. In this case I’d suggest Iran, which they can reach by small boat.

operation blowing up residential buildings because a dozen rich old guys got caught molesting teenagers in the 90s

"The Labour Party under Starmer will abandon its core idealism and principles and it won't even gain tactical advantage. It will be a party which gives no one a reason to vote for it, and nobody will, in fact, vote for it." . - David Graeber

David Graeber made a warning about Keir Starmer in 2020. They did not listen

excited to hear tech companies will now be allowed to build their own power plants for their data centers. i am sure the makers of "the app that tells kids to kill themselves" will responsibly operate coal plants

“The guy did a great job for a competitive rate. I’m really pleased with it”

Scientists Discover How To “Switch Off” Cancer Genes for Good A new study shows that targeting key epigenetic proteins may permanently switch off cancer genes. Scientists at Monash University, working with Harvard University, report they have found a way to perm...

Oh, my goodness, this is a huge breakthrough in cancer research. This is another example of why it is crucially important to fund basic scientific research.
Scientists Discover How To “Switch Off” Cancer Genes for Good share.google/WFhMJP5m3AK4...

19 people.

Oh more news - your girl features in the all new THE MUSIC IS BLACK exhibition upcoming at the new V&A East Museum.
Opening April 18, 2026 - It's the first ever exhibition at the brand new V&A East Museum in queenelizabetholympicpark, and it celebrates the impact of Black British music and culture.

Take Big Money Out of Our Politics British politics is awash with money from super rich donors. In 2023, two-thirds of all private donations came from just 19 people. These so-called ‘mega donors’ enjoy privileged access to political p...

A crypto investor just donated £9 million to the Reform Party. Right now, billionaires can pour unlimited money into our elections, effectively buying our democracy. Think that's wrong? Add your name to call for a cap on donations today: you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/ta...

Ebo Taylor and Afrobeat Academy LIVE at New Morning, Paris 2014 YouTube video by Obroni Outernational

Just seen the sad news that Ebo Taylor died on Saturday at the age of 90. Here’s the Ghanaian highlife and afrobeat legend in concert in 2014 #RIP
youtu.be/vBS6UAdFiEc

Just started doing new data analysis and I know I keep saying this, but: I really, really don't think people appreciate how much this moral panic was a deliberate and extremely expensive invention.

He had grown up in a country run by politicians who sent the pilots to man the bombers to kill the babies to make the world safe for children to grow up in.

In the overstuffed closet containing things about which I shall never give a listless fuck, the status of alternatives to nationally-backed currencies or recognized commodities will forever reside. These are Dutch tulips. This is a long-con pyramid game. Every rube should lose his last nickel.

Please, my magic bean, it is very sick

That‘s the spirit.

I'm sorry but it's very funny to me that the legislature of a G7/P5 country of 70 million is currently drafting the "Fuck This One Guy in Particular Act of 2026."

Also, imagine tolerating a system of privilege so entrenched you need to rewrite centuries-old rules just to get at one douchebag.

Tweet by Jatin @jatinkmalik The reason why RAM has become four times more expensive is that a huge amount of RAM that has not yet been produced was purchased with non-existent money to be installed in GPUs that also have not yet been produced, in order to place them in data centers that have not yet been built, powered by infrastructure that may never appear, to satisfy demand that does not actually exist and to obtain profit that is mathematically impossible