Dr Who is shite. Sorry, but it really is. It's literally the kind of thing we're talking about. It was a trash sci-fi from the 60's that didn't go "cult" until what... the 00's? It's like people going ape over a Thunderbirds remake.

The BBC produced some of the best programmes in existence over the years - not churning them out constantly 24/7 for decades, that's impossible, but it produced a LOT of great stuff that other channels wouldn't touch.

Literally, the BBC Micro was invented to go along with BBC programmes to teach kids in the 80's how to use this new fangled thing called a home computer. They commissioned many series of programmes, the actual hardware (the BBC Micro, giving rise to Acorn/ARM's fame! The chip that's INSIDE YOUR PHONE NOW) , etc.

Schools showed BBC programmes directly during the day for lessons. Entire generations grew up with BBC programmes in their classrooms, then went and learned BBC BASIC on a BBC Micro.

The OU literally has millions of degree-level graduates who owe their degree to late night lectures on BBC2 that NOBODY else would dedicate air-time to, and the BBC basically funded them, gave them the facilities to make them, and put millions through university who couldn't afford it, have time off work to go to university or get the materials any other way.

BBC iPlayer was also ground-breaking. They invented their own codecs to make it work.

Not to even mention the World Service, etc.

Sorry, but if you think that Dr Who shit was what the BBC was about, you've already fallen for the con they want you to.

The BBC and licence fee were operated mostly on the basis that they wouldn't fall foul to just "crass entertainment", but carry educational programmes (e.g. the entire Open University lectures for decades), fund insightful and non-commercial programmes (e.g David Attenborough for decades), do the things that paid-for commercial channels wouldn't do (e.g. Children In Need, intellectual quizzes like Only Connect, etc.) because everyone else just wanted to appeal to your eyes, not your brain.

It's drifted away from that just in my time of watching it, let alone of late where it seems to be accelerating.

And - a bit like the NHS - the current government want it to look bad so they can justify scrapping it because it's an expense. Paying to educate the riffraff for free?! So they want to scrap the licence fee, force it to produce inane content and turn even an intellectual format into nothing but yelling, the same dozen comedians and nob gags (e.g. QI), wait for it to die, remove funding, force it to compete, then kill it off when it's not profitable.

a.k.a. let's dumb down everything to celeb shite, so that our core purpose of existing (to educate the populous, and not dumb down) and the reason for our funding is completely destroyed once and for all.

I mean, one day the BBC will be gone. I just hoped never to have seen it. But to be honest, broadcast TV is dead.

I could have one of those diagrams for the past 5 years.

Letters: Council tax bill (paid automatically and electronically anyway). One every... three months I think.

And I got a Jehovah's Witness hand-written piece of indecipherable junk posted through my door today.

That's it.

The graph wouldn't be very illuminating.

How many AI trials didn't result the same? How many trials of non-AI origin were there? What percentage of trials, where the same amount of variation was allowed, could have been similarly successful by just randomly joining chemicals etc. together the same way that the AI did but without claims of it being intelligent?

AI is just brute-force statistics, in effect. It's not a demonstration of intelligence, even if it was a useful tool. It was basically a fast brute-force simulation of a huge number of chemical interactions (and the "intelligence" is in determining what the criteria are for success - i.e. how did they "know" it was likely going to be a useful antibiotic? Because the success criteria they wrote told them so).

Intelligence would have been if the computer didn't just blindly try billions of things, but sat, saw the shape of the molecule, and assembled a molecule to clip into it almost perfectly with only a couple of attempts because it understood how it needed to fit together (how an intelligent being would do the same job). Not just try every combination of every chemical bond in every orientation until it hit.

Great for brute-force finding antibiotics, the same way that computers are in general great at automating complex and tedious tasks when told exactly what to do. But not intelligence.

Well, Russia really achieved their aims there.

I want it to happen just to see what the fuck Russia does in that first 10 seconds where Ukraine officially becomes a NATO country.

Because though it might showboat right up to that point, and even try to attack just before to try to prove some kind of point, the second that becomes a NATO country, they'd run like fuck and stop everything for fear of triggering the infamous clause.

I'd comment on this but... meh... who cares...

I see that the left-hand hyphen is slowly migrating, trying to join his other pal.

That's EXACTLY what's happened.

It's what people said about CPU speed... that's not going to stagnate right? How's your top-of-the-line modern-day Xeon CPU that does 2.7Ghz (and "can overclock" to 4Ghz)?

Compared to the 2013 Intel CPU that first attained 4GHz?

To paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke:

Any sufficiently advanced <statistics> is indistinguishable from <intelligence>.

Right until you begin to understand and analyse it. And that's the same with <technology> and <magic> in that sentence instead.

I'm not entirely certain that humans and even most animals are limited to what's possible to express in a Turing-complete machine. However I am sure that all computers are limited to Turing-complete actions. There isn't a single exception in the latter that I'm aware of - even quantum computers are Turing-complete, as far as we can tell. They're just *very* fast to the point of being effectively instantaneous even on the largest problems (QC just replaces time as the limiting boundary with space - the size of the QC that you can build determines how "difficult" a problem it can solve, but if it can solve it, it can solve it almost instantly).

And if you look at AI since its inception, the progress is mostly tied to technological brute force. I'm not sure that you can ever just keep making things faster to emulate "the real thing". In the same way that we can simulate on a traditional computer what a quantum computer can do, but we can't make it work AS a quantum computer, because it is still bound by time unlike a real QC. In fact, I don't think we're any closer to that emulation than we ever have been... we're just able to perform sufficiently complex statistical calculations. I think we'll hit a limit on that, like most other limitations of Turing-complete languages and machines.

All AI plateaus - and that's a probabilistic feature where you can get something right 90% of the time but you can't predict the outliers and can't change the trend, and it takes millions of data points to identify the trend and billions more to account for and correct it. I don't believe that's how intelligence works at all. Intelligence doesn't appear to be a brute-force incredibly fast statistical machine at all, but such a system can - as you say - appear to emulate it to a degree.

I think we're missing something still, something that's inherent in even the physics of the world we inhabit, maybe. Something that's outside the bounds of Turing-complete machines.

Because a Turing-complete machine couldn't, for example, come up with the concept of a Turing-complete machine, or give counter-examples of problems that cannot ever be solved by a Turing-complete machine, for instance. But a human intelligence did. Many of them, in fact.

There is absolutely no evidence that animals or humans function as just statistical machines of any complexity.

It's a fallacy to think that way. You can find statistics and probabilities in human actions, yes, but that doesn't mean that's how they are formed. Ask enough people to guess the number of beans in a jar, take the average and you'll be pretty close to the actual number of beans in a jar.

But that doesn't mean that any one human, or humans in general, are intelligent or not intelligent. The intelligent animal would open the jar and count them. Even the humans that are guessing are not basing their guesses on statistics or their experiences or their genetics. They are formulating a reasonable method to calculate the necessary number to solve a very, very, very narrowly-specified problem.

That's not where intelligence is visible or thrives.

Anything sufficiently complex system, even physical, mechanical, unintelligent, rule-based, etc. will confirm to similar probabilistic properties. That doesn't prove the creature isn't intelligent, nor that the intelligent creatures are based on those statistics.

In fact, it also falls somewhat into the gambler's fallacy - overall enough data points will conform to average out the reds and the blacks almost perfectly. But you can't rely on that average, or your knowledge of statistics, to predict the next colour the ball will land on. That's not how it works.

If you can get an AI to ask a relevant question at a relevant point that's not just a programmed threshold or response (a heuristic, in effect), then you'll have made proper, true AI.

All AI plateaus.

No AI actually shows intelligence.

They are sophisticated statistical machines, but there's no proof that that correlates with being intelligent (which is an unfixable definition in itself) in any way.

As soon as the AI gets out of its comfort zone (i.e. doesn't have training data), it will make up nonsense because it's just acting statistically, even when the statistics are in the margins of error rather than any kind of statistical significance.

Intelligence does not do that. Intelligence knows enough to not give any answer, that it doesn't know the answer, or is able to reason the answer in the absence of all training data. In fact, "innovation", a major part of intelligence, is entirely outside the bounds of all such "training data" (i.e acquired experience).

"AI" necessarily ends precisely where intelligence starts. Pretending that AI is intelligence is just nonsense. It's just heuristics, statistics, and hysterics.

No matter what happens to housing prices, there's upsides and downsides and the winners almost universally are those with money.

When house prices are low, rich people can snap up lots of housing and just hang onto it and wait for it to go high - they have no mortgage, they don't care if it takes ten years. Literally every penny in rent is income, and their only expense is whatever it takes to keep the house rentable and maybe a council tax bill.

When house prices are high, rich people can sell off their housing portfolios while also being the only people who can afford a house themselves.

When house prices are low, poor people can't afford houses because the rich people are outbidding them every time and snapping up dozens of them.

When house prices are high, poor people can't afford houses.

It doesn't matter how you look at it in terms of the economy at large, or forecasts, it's about how many toys you let people gather and cling onto with almost no consequences, while others have nothing.

I just bought a house. I don't really care if it "drops in value". There's nothing I can do about it, one way or the other, and unless I decide to sell it it makes no difference.Even when I do, selling my X bedroom house will give me enough money to buy... an X bedroom house in a similar area.

My mortgage costs the same whatever and will actually be going UP in cost no matter what I do, eventually.

It's the third house I've bought in my lifetime (and had to sell the previous one each time), and it's going to be the last I'll ever get. I was driving 150+ mile round-trips to view houses. I had "no chain". I was being outbid by everyone - like me - who was moving out of London because they can't afford it, and I had to go THAT FAR OUT to stand a chance of viewing things that weren't sold by the time I could drive there.

I was able to get my parents to put down a deposit (I'm 40-fucking-3 and couldn't afford it! Mainly because I was renting for years) and that's never going to happen again until they both die and my brother and we sell their house and split the proceeds (neither of us could afford to keep it).

I got a 1-bed former-council bungalow, 40 miles from where I work. Because that's literally all I could get, on a single income. The mortgage is paid over 24 years because I'm too old to have a 25-year mortgage. That's only EVER going to get worse.

I've actually got a way-above-average job, but I can't secure anything on my own, and I was pushed out of buying everything else I saw. I had an elderly couple at a viewing tell me that "young people like me..." (FORTY FUCKING THREE!) "... should just rent a flat in the main town near all the noisy nightclubs" and leave them to look at the suburban homes in reasonable areas for their downsizing for retirement.

Housing is only ever going to get more expensive. It's only ever going to be the domain of the rich. It's only ever going to get worse. Until something absolutely drastic changes... like literally charging tax for second homes so humongously that only the extreme elite can afford to have one.

We're growing in population all the time. We're not building ANYWHERE NEAR enough housing. And we need to build it 20, 30 years in advance at least just to be able to catch up to demand.

Until rent control is a thing (so that being a landlord isn't that profitable), or owning a second property is taxed to the hilt, or people are forced to occupy all their properties at least 90% of the year either by themselves or a paying tenant, or someone builds tens of thousands of houses all of a sudden, it's never going to get any better and no "economy change" is going to make any difference to the poor staying poor and renting (which makes them poorer) and the rich staying rich and being landlords (which makes them richer).

Until the rules change, you will always lose. Unless you're rich.

Even my house - it was original a council house built in the 60's for disabled and elderly and SOME TWAT decided to let someone buy it for a pittance several decades ago. So now there's less suitable council housing for people in need like the disabled and elderly, and the guy who happened to be allocated it by the council made a fortune out of it for doing almost nothing, and I can *barely* afford to live there as the only private homeowner in that part of the street, among a bunch of people who are all council-tenants: retired or on benefits and have no money themselves living in all the bigger 3-bed houses around me. Hell, my parents are living in a £600k 3-bed house, with garage and huge garden, just the two of them on their own. They bought it on a single working wage, with only one of them in a minimum-wage job and it's been paid off for the last 10 years. Since I was 20, I've earned more in any given year than my mum and dad ever earned COLLECTIVELY in any year they ever worked in their lifetime - even adjusted for inflation. I know, because I dug out all the statistics and did the maths to show them.

And somewhere there's someone else like me in a tiny bedsit somewhere paying rent through the nose who can't get a council house because there aren't any, and can never stand a chance of buying a house.

And in 20+ years time when I finally pay my house off, and come to retire, I'll likely have to work through retirement to pay the basic bills, and the house will eventually sell for proportionally a pittance that probably won't buy a 1-bed flat anywhere in the country.

It's not the economy that's to blame. It's the way that the division is inherent in the rules and the separations between haves and have-nots, and things like NOT BUILDING ANY FUCKING HOUSES, unless they are designed to be permanent rent-traps for rich landlords.

That's why you tax electricity.

"Red diesel" is dumb because you expect people not to abuse an untaxed official product.

If you just taxed "all diesel", then offered registered farmers a rebate on their diesel tax receipts, it would actually make FAR MORE SENSE.

Similarly, if you just taxed "all electricity" - which you're already doing, with consumer tax rates on electricity being as high as charging at a service station - they're saving nothing.

The loophole is the people with their own solar power supply capable of fully charging the vehicle. The tax from purchasing which is significant anyway. And it's also encouraging the exact behaviour you want - people to use less oil, less road facilities (e.g. service stations), and generate less pollution.

People installing solar is exactly what you want to encourage, however.

And the people who save any significant amount of tax by doing so would need fields of the damn things to keep up with their own demand.

P.S. As a commercial venture, it wouldn't work as in my scenario I taxed "electricity intended to charge cars". As a private entity, you'd be paying a ton of VAT etc. on the solar panels in the first place.

Plus, powering a car entirely off-grid means far less demand for motorway services, fuel stations, etc. Win-win.

In time, yes, you may have to adjust the rules slightly, of course. But by then the world is an entirely different place.

Yep.

And I bet if it wasn't for the energy crisis, they'd be adding a huge percentage to everyone's electricity at the same time to make up for loss of fuel duty.

You tax the energy contained in the fuel they use.

Anything else is dumb and will result in manufacturers trying to cheat the system by having smaller, denser tyres, etc.

You need to tax based on mileage, but you can't do that accurately, but a tax on fuels and electricity etc. are really easy to implement. You literally just add a tax onto the point of sale. Done.

Taxing tyres would be a nightmare of multiple classes of tyres, like classes of engine now, where manufacturers would produce a 184.99999 size tyre because the tax increases at 185 and so on.

Tax the fuel, including electricity for electric cars. If they want to charge at home, they're already paying domestic electricity rates.

More driving? More fuel.

Less efficient engine? More fuel.

Less aerodynamic? More fuel.

Larger weight? More fuel.

Worse driving? More fuel.

And all by saying "10% added tax on fuel or electricity used to charge cars". Done. The paperwork, administration is a significant cost and already in place.

The extra administration of your system, and also every car manufacturer and tyre manufacturer producing all kinds of expensive tyres to get the luxury cars through on lower tax brackets, etc. would outweigh any benefit.

Only a few of those things listed above would have any impact on your tyre wear, and the greatest impacts (pollution, oil usage, etc.) are completely ignored so you'd get highly inefficient and incredibly dirty vehicles (or vehicles JUST UNDER the maximum limit) with the right tyre and be paying almost no road tax.

"How to cause a panic for eggs", Lesson #1.

It's gonna be like toilet-paper COVID all over again, isn't it? Though I will laugh even more at the people who try to hoard eggs long-term...

Last time I bought an actual egg was about a year ago. There's a huge box of egg powder in my larder (yes, I have a larder! Even I think that's hilariously outdated!) though and I can promise you that powdered-scrambled-egg is the best I've ever had. Also, you can use it in cakes and stuff in place of an egg.

So I'm sorted, which is like the time I bought 96 toilet rolls on Amazon because there was a special deal (and toilet rolls don't spoil), and the next day the entire country were panicking about toilet roll shortages. Timed it perfectly, without even meaning to. Still have some of those toilet rolls, in fact. What's that? 2? 2 and half years?

So you can leave a union without abandoning all the free trade agreements you had?

Gosh, seems like someone could have mentioned that in the last few years...

It's almost like "there are no jobs" in that respect.

Strange... I've never had a single day not working in 25+ years. And I have literally walked out of jobs on the spot (with good cause, I might add). And, yes, I've worked horrible jobs in the meantime.

But I've never had a day in my adult life where I didn't have any job to go to.

However, to counter-act your story: In one place, I started work with four other people just to fill in a gap (I had a guaranteed job, already signed the contract, but it didn't start immediately so I just needed to cover the gap and though I could have just lazed around, I got a part-time job instead).

Not one of the people I started with actually wanted the job. There was nothing wrong with the job, it wasn't particularly arduous or horrible, and it paid in line with what you'd expect. They were all sacked within the first month, they just couldn't be bothered to hold the job down or do the very basics. I can't even fault the employer, they were actually handling it quite reasonably, but the employees just couldn't be bothered to just do a little basic work for some pay.

There are people out there who literally don't want a job at all, even if it means suffering and moaning endlessly because of it. I've known several of them quite well. They can't hold down a job not because they don't need to (they really, really do NEED to), but because they can't be bothered to do so. They don't like being told what to do, or they just get bored and lazy, or they ignore every warning they're given.

They're usually the same people complaining that they have no money, and that nobody (not even the state) is helping them. They do exist.

But equally, there are people who never have a day unemployed in their lifetime.

1. Buy an appropriate fire extinguisher and/or a fire blanket. They aren't expensive. And they're designed for it.
2. How do you start a fire just cooking? I've been an adult for 25+ years and I've never managed to do it.
3. Any fire in the kitchen... just leave it. It's on a heatproof/fireproof surface, surrounded by non-flammable material, possibly in a sealed box (the oven). Turn the power off (my country mandates cooker switches where you can still get to them if there's something on the hob, for instance). Cover it. Wait. Like when I was at a Scout camp and a kid was frying with the pan on a grill over an open fire and it caught light (not surprising on an open fire with children cooking!) and they didn't know what to do. You know what to do? Put it back down and walk away from it. Don't carry the fire around with you like an idiot on a sitcom.
4. Why do you use baking soda in the dishwasher? It's already in or has an equivalent in pretty much every dishwashing powder/tablet that exists.

It's more like they can shunt electricity around the country far easier and quicker without having to be constrained by the interconnects.

A child that identifies yet-another banana, after having been trained to do only that, isn't intelligent.

A child who gets given a plantain and isn't fooled but also realises that it's NOT a banana, having never seen a plantain before, might be intelligent.

Inference and determinations of fitness on unknown data are not entirely unrelated but are not as closely correlated as you suggest.

You mean Kwasi barely did as well in the job as a guy with a fatal heart condition?