steve_gh

Went to see it with family last night. We loved it.

My point is that the technology exists, for good or ill, and we cannot put the genie back in the bottle.

What we can do, and should do as a society, is decide on how that technology should be used. And that means regulating it, in the same way that we regulate other technologies. For example, we regulate cars. Not just who can use them, but how they have to be constructed too. And we also place limits on how the authorities can use them, for example the rules that the police must obey when in an emergency response situation.

We are a democracy, so these rules are made by the people we have elected. so when it comes down to it, yes, this is what we as a people have asked for. And we are responsible for the conditions that the police can use this technology under.

FWIW, the capabilities and resources that the police have to track us 24/7 are an order of magnitude less than Google or Meta has. And they are an awful lot less accountable.

How does that make us not a democracy? You are confusing the constitutionally based US system with the parliamentary based UK system. They work differently. We have elections typically every 4-5 years and elect a new government. That's the democracy bit. The laws that our elected representatives make are sometimes good, and sometimes bad. But they are made by the people we elected.

It's a technology. What you could do with it, and what you should do with it are completely different things.

If you follow the links there is a lot of information about the trial, including a whole series of documents identifying the legal framework that authorises LFR, including rationale under GDPR, Data Protection etc.

Of course, this technology could be used for bad purposes. But within a democracy, policing happens with the consent of the people, expressed through various channels including legal (parliament and local government) and police commissioners. What is interesting is the way that these frameworks are used to constrain the purpose and extent of this processing. For example, at the moment the images on the watchlist can only be drawn from custody images.

The police already have powers to seize CCTV and door-cam imagery in order to investigate crime. They need a warrant from a judge - so it isn't justified without good reason such as serious crimes. This is the way you constrain these things - you put the regulatory framework around them. You can't put the technology back in the box, so you put rules and expectations around how it is used.

Absolutely true, but (and importantly) the friction (i.e. effort) required to do these things were so much greater.

I think it takes time for demand to build. Certainly cities like London have seen huge growth in bike use. In my own home town(which is by no means flat) I'm seeing lots of cargo bikes, especially around tge school run.

To your point on bike owners not contributing to the economy. They probably have a similar income, and are paying similar taxes. They are still buying groceries. But where they choose to spend their money is different. It's all still economic activity though.

So for context. Nigel Farage (Populist right wing UK politician, leader of the Reform party) has been accused of not following parliamentary rules around disclosure of donations - which are designed to ensure transparency of decision making and potential influence. Basically, he received £5M from a crypto billionaire. He claims that it was (a) a personal donation (not needing to be declared according to the rules), (b) before he was in parliament, and (c) he was not involved in politics. His opponents say that personal donation rules are meant for family members, and that while he might not have been in parliament he was President of the Reform party at the time.

So the whole thing is in front of the Parliamentary Standards Ombudsman who will report to the Parliamentary Standards Committee. That committee can recommend a penalty of a suspension from parliament (which is then voted on by the House). If he is suspended for more than 10 days, then a recall petition can be launched - and if that gets more than 10% of the registered voters in the constituency (which it would), then there is a by-election to decide whether he is fit to serve.

So Farage has announced that he is resigning his seat (causing a by-election), in which he will stand. he claims that he is accountable only to the voters in his constituency (Clacton). All the other major parties have announced that they will not field candidates against him, claiming he is trying to avoid / pre-empt a suspension and a recall by-election. The only other announced candidate is Count Binface - a 'joke' candidate.

Interestingly, it also turns out that at least theoretically (and with a precedant from 1842) his resignation could be blocked. You cannot actually resign your parliamentary seat between elections - you can only be disqualified. And due to UK history, the main reason for disqualification is holding an appointment from the Crown (i.e. the King, not the more general sense of "the Crown" as the government). So if you want to resign your seat, you apply for one of a couple of reserved crown appointments - the usual one is Bailiff of the Chiltern Hundreds. That disqualifies you, and then there is a by-election. Now it turns out that these appointments are controlled by the Treasury, which is part of the Government (which of course is just the majority faction in parliament). There is a case from 1842 of the Treasury refusing to make a Crown appointment to stop a by-election. It has been suggested that parliament could vote to stop the appointment (and therefore the by-election), at least until the Parliamentary Standards Committee report has come out.

Looks interesting. What would be the pros and cons against a fully featured web framework like Rails?

But remember that "efficient" in terms of P and NP is about scaling. P == NP doesn't necessarily mean that a practically efficient algorithm can be found. The polynomial exponents involved may be large: O(N^1000) does eventually scale better than O(e^N), but that doesn't mean it is practically useful!

One correction I'd make to the article's taxonomy: Ruby is an object oriented language not an Algol. Its inspiration is Smalltalk, and much of the standard library naming comes from that route (eg collect rather than map).

Ruby is object oriented from the ground up. Everything (and I do mean everything) is an object, and method call is conceived as passing messages to objects.

While Ruby is most often compared to Python (an Algol), they come from very different evolutionary routes, and have converged towards the same point in the ecosystem. I think of Ruby as a cuddly Alpaca compared to Python's spitting camel.

How does this help? 99% of the population aren't technically minded enough. Most people just buy a wifi router, plug it in (maybe having read the instructions) and that's it. They have neither the skills nor the inclination to update firmware.

The real problem is: assuming that firmware can be updated, how do you run a nationwide update programme overcoming a population that doesn't really care or have the skills to do it.

Vehicle safety standards (mandated annual safety checks like the UK MoT test) is the closest analogy I can think of - in the UK you can't insure your car without a valid MoT. If you were serious, then maybe tying ISP access to updated router firmware would be the way to go.

Are there are other flavours of proton still to be discovered? Can you (theoretically) build a proton with any two quarks selected from {up, charm, top} and one selected from {down, strange, bottom}?

Lovely tales. I'm a keen climber - one of these stories has just explained to me why the fantastic sea cliffs at Gwennap Head are known as Chair Ladder.

Is the LLM acting as my agent? If the LLM has been exposed to the source code then have I been exposed to the source code? So in that case is a "clean room" implementation possible?

Brilliant! Loving it as an idea.

Maybe what it needs is a testing framework - Σωκράτης (Socrates), that will demonstrate to you that everything you thought you knew about how your programme would behave (or the thought underpinning it) was at best problematic, or at worst just plain wrong!