dofm

Explain to me why a British political party needs to take an extreme, polarising position on Israeli politics it has absolutely no influence over, at a cost only of its domestic support.

The entire concept is tinged with antisemitism, it lacks a nuanced understanding in the religious belief in the restoration of Israel, and it encourages very simple, very straightforward reactions like "these people are all children who have no grasp of politics and shouldn't be near power". Which is my position.

Netanyahu is a horror (and a crook). The current Israeli government is engaged in a cycle of violence that is enabling illegal settlements etc.

It doesn't mean that a British political party should inject itself into a nearly 150 year old cultural/faith position that has its roots in the experience of antisemitism in Europe and the USA.

It's not that different to having a political platform position that Catholicism isn't true Christianity, or that only Sunni Islam is true Islam. Sensible multi-faith parties seeking electability and a broad power base don't do fucking stupid things like this.

A simple true statement? No.

I concede it is somewhat unfair to compare anyone to Caroline Lucas, who really was one of the finest MPs of her time; a generational talent.

But he is not up to her standard, and they have MPs in office who show Polanski to be just a silly lightweight (and one who appears to be unable to take responsibility).

(It still blows my mind that his excuse for why he couldn't vote was that he had to campaign. In St Pancras. Which is literally only an hour and twenty minutes away from Brighton by a really nice easy direct train. And he could have voted online.)

Top tip: make your instructions actually readable.

Your LLM has used text with too low contrast, the absolutely pointless and annoying webkit-smoothing: anti-aliased, with text that is too small, cramped and squeezed into place.

People with eyes that are getting over forty years old will start to find this difficult to read.

You might want to consider making important instructions stand out, left-align the text, etc.

And then consider writing them with clarity and simplicity yourself rather than letting the LLM write them. The instructions are crucial. You should own that.

FWIW, narrow column widths with relatively fewer words per line provably improve readability.

Which this site needs because its marketing is Claude slop and is therefore operating under a readability penalty (not least because of typical AI small font, webkit-smoothing: antialiased, lowered contrast text.

Ugh.

The weird thing is that we learned this lesson in the dot com era, and then there was a reactionary shift to self-funding, and now we've forgotten; I guess that's just the nature of human generations.

The really odd, undelivered thing about LLMs is that if they are as productive as they seem, software people simply should not need VCs. Because you can self-fund a massive team of AI developers, you should be able to get your product ready for market in absolutely no time, and you should more or less be able to roll it out with nothing more than a tiny amount of seed capital and a suburban garage.

As a side note, I find it interesting the way people will write explicitly about their job experience at companies like this, naming where they work, dropping anecdotes about the CEO, about colleagues.

To borrow John Cale's rephrasing of a proverb:

"Meet me on the staircase on the way down; we'll see if there's been a mistake".

I talk about where I have worked; I have in the past written about it. But I find it interesting how people don't seem to grasp that often you should change the names to protect the incompetent or guilty, and should probably avoid simply spilling out anecdotes that an LLM will thread together.

Don't get yourself a reputation for being indiscreet simply for a blog post.

Tragedy of the pavements on which you used to be able to walk to the Common.

I am wondering if there is something significant written with Go in their system stack (Go uses MPTCP by default on listening sockets, it seems)

Seems plausible, yeah — certainly seems like something that would have been on their minds even five years ago.

I couldn't find an story suggesting OpenAI broached this subject with the Biden administration.

Whereas it's actually possible that the whole "sovereign wealth fund" idea Trump has (shaking down companies for a share) might have got into his head from the AI people.

That this is only "may not" is the shocker.

The UK is pretty far north. We tend to forget this here because the weather is mild, but we're further north than anywhere in the lower 48 US states.

It is not yet the beginning of November and sunset in London is at around 4:37pm. An hour and a quarter earlier than New York. It will be like this or darker until February.

Sun intensity by the middle of the day even on a bright day like today is not very high. For example, compared to New York, the sun intensity at noon on the clearest possible day at the beginning of November is about half as strong. Compared to LA, getting closer to a third.

We also eat fewer carrots than we used to! And we're increasingly deficient in selenium for food globalism reasons; selenium and vitamin D are synergistic AFAIR?

A fair number of people will have been rescued from vitamin D deficiency by the incredible summer we have had, but it is absolutely a thing and we do not hear enough about it.

Sam Altman has been pushing for the US to own a chunk of OpenAI since February 2025. Literally the earliest he could get back into the Oval Office after the inauguration.

A bailout is part of their planning.