Posts by Steve Button

Re: Er, What?

Haven't you yourself just posted something which isn't "critical" and therefore have contributed to energy usage? Who gets to decide what's "endless bullshit", and what's actually needed?

Re: Not a Trump thing.

NOTE TO SELF: Stop trying to correct all the people who are wrong on the internet.

Re: Not a Trump thing.

Did you read the actual article?

Very much making it a Trump thing.

Re: Not a Trump thing.

You were doing quite well right up until "some pet drugs for eliminating parasites". That's drug that's been administered literally billions of times to humans, and is one of the safest anti-parasite drugs with a seriously low side-effect rate. Don't be CNN. Be better.

Re: Not a Trump thing.

Being a biologist you might well be subject to heuristic driven bias or the Baader–Meinhof Phenomenon? (Frequency Illusion)

Re: Not a Trump thing.

Seriously? After all this time I'm not going to convince you, and you aren't going to convince me. They stopped using ventilators because they were killing more people than they were saving.

Anyway, the article was about data sovereignty and authoritarian governments. Covid was just an example of how that can go wrong.

Re: Not a Trump thing.

ANYWAY. Let's not re-hash old arguments. If you disagree with me on this, that's your right and I respect that. We can have a difference of opinion. I'd still have a beer with you down the pub as a fellow geek. I've been a lockdown sceptic since about halfway through the very first one, when I worked out it just can't work.

The actual point here is that all governments eventually want to get all authoritarian and, for example, clamp down on those pesky protests by people who object to things they don't like the government to do. Trump would love that power, and so would Starmer and The Conservatives before him. It would also be nice to control the press, so they can just get on with the worthy task of running the government without all that pesky scrutiny. It's all for the greater good, don't you see?

Re: Not a Trump thing.

"many of the mitigations for dealing with a pandemic need to be authoritarian to be effective"

They weren't effective. Full stop. We didn't lock down in the UK Christmas 2021, and the disaster that many predicted never materialised. China had a truly "authoritarian" lock down, which was effective to a point, but was totally unsustainable. You can't live like that. Is that what you would recommend for everyone? Because anything short of that just doesn't seem to work.

"assumed the vast majority of people were trustworthy and honest."

A lot of people didn't want that particular vaccine. They had already had Covid. They were concerned about side-effects. They felt it was a new and untested technology. That's their right. It shouldn't stop them from flying or eating in restaurants or driving a truck.

Re: Maybe people will start listening now?

You think you are "Anonymous" but this whole forum is (or used to be) written using some custom Perl scripts. It's probably hackable / hacked and they don't even know.

Re: Not a Trump thing.

Are you saying you are fine having the government spy on you illegally, as long as they do it secretly?

Re: Not a Trump thing.

Only at the beginning. The whole "vaccine passports" furore was later on when it all got a bit dystopian. Hopefully now the dust has settled a bit folks can see what an authoritarian nightmare that was? Or are y'all still bought into that narrative?

Re: Wow

Accurate, but 9 or 10 years is quite a long time to wait for payback. Also, I've had to pay to get the lichen cleaned off mine as they were pretty well covered, so not really zero maintenance. I tried to do it myself, but it's stubborn stuff and I'm not good on ladders. Also, it depends on the pitch of your roof + which way it's facing, trees nearby, and what part of the country you are in. Probably West of the Pennines, not so much as it's always bloody raining. And Scotland, forget it.

I personally think solar is a "good idea". But I'm getting over 70p per unit as I put panels on my roof during FiT. The idea was to encourage people like me to put them up and kick-start the industry. Once it's kick-started it should not need to be propped up for decades, otherwise it's clearly not a "good idea". ;-)

Solar on data centres might also be a good idea, but I don't believe the rest of us should have to pay for that. If they are truly "cheap" as the article seems to suggest, then the data centre operators can pay for them and enjoy the free energy for years to come. LOL. Will need more than just their roof though to power the high density racks underneath 24x7, and then of course this time of year you'll only get a few hours of sunlight in the Northern hemisphere.

Re: Wat will Grok take down ?

I never said it would be as easy. Just that you could do it. And I'm sure with some work you could make in convincing.

I don't believe the law makes a distinction. Just what you do, and what your intention is. I don't imagine a judge would let you off for unconvincing nudes.

Re: Wat will Grok take down ?

Statistics say that out of those 10 people, 11 of them are strongly in favour of government censorship.

Re: Wat will Grok take down ?

Thanks for the show of support, and for all the upvotes. ;-)

I wasn't even thinking about when he was DPP, and I didn't mention that. I was simply keeping in mind that he and most of his party strongly opposed a national inquiry into the whole thing. This was last year. When he was PM. The Conservatives were just as bad when they were in power. The whole saga is pretty sickening, and is way way worse than nudifying images.

And for context, I don't even really dislike him. I think he's mostly trying to be a decent person, but he's just way out of his depth and is not a natural leader. I'm sure he was a probably a perfectly good human rights lawyer.

Re: Wat will Grok take down ?

You are missing the point. I totally get that they want to ban people from nudifying images. Children or adults it's despicable. But I feel that they are using that as an excuse to try and ban twitter completely. It's the only place that I read about Iran two weeks before everyone else woke up to it. It's also the only place I read about the massive fraud in Minnesota, which was eventually and reluctantly picked up by the BBC. And even then they tried to downplay it. It's a useful source of world events. It's a bit raw and unedited though, which is why you need to be very careful and keep that in mind. I don't want it shut down completely.

Re: Wat will Grok take down ?

"Is there a reason you have singled him out "

Yes, because he's currently the PM (for now) and is the one who really wants to ban Twitter.

Re: Wat will Grok take down ?

This is not a hill I'm willing to die on. You could be right. But the cynical part of me seems to think that the Labour government would REALLY like Twitter / X to just go away, as they get so much abuse on there. Is not even a possibility in your mind?

Re: Wat will Grok take down ?

You make some good points.

"There are a lot of image generators, and the vast majority of them have guardrails in place to prevent this very specific issue. "

I've heard... On X, that this is not true and you can just as easily generate the same thing on other platforms. But it was on X, so of course I take it with a pinch of salt. There's certainly a lot of misinformation on there.

I think possession of those types of images is a crime in itself, not just generating them. I haven't tried though, and I'm not going to start now.

Re: Wat will Grok take down ?

I've seen images of both Musk and Starmer in a bikini on my X / Twitter feed in the last week. That's what we're talking about here when they say "nude" BTW. Obviously people are taking the piss out of Starmer from the Right, and Musk from the left, but both have been allowed.

It does feel like this is more about an excuse to censor Twitter rather than any actual moral outrage. Starmer was absolutely livid about pictures of children in a bikini, but when it came to Grooming gangs he was silent for years, and then eventually came out to denounce it and reluctantly announced an enquiry.

Of course you could do the same with Photoshop, if you were so inclined.

"Well that's a cop out."

You are referring to Minority Report, right? The camera detects that Anderton has escaped and the AI camera senses him and detects "Well that's a cop, out"? At which point he gets targeted adverts for various products while on the run from the other cops. This is our inevitable future, and it's a good thing. Am I rite?

On a more serious note, I've been trialling AI descriptions on my Ring cameras for the last month. Yesterday it said "someone is acting strangely in your yard". Firstly I don't have a yard as I'm English. It's the front drive. Secondly, it was my son kicking snow off the front of his car. I guess that might be useful if someone else was kicking my car. Perhaps someone who reads my other comments on this very forum, and has found my home address and wants revenge (climate sceptic, lockdown sceptic, thinking Orange Man is only wrong *most* of the time not *all* the time, supporting freedom of speech, a free press, anti censorship, not being left wing enough) - so I guess it might actually be useful. On the other hand I'm getting fed up with "two people and a dog are walking in your yard" so I don't think I'll be paying the extra once the free trial has ended.

Re: Scamdemic

We did indeed have a plan but Dominic Cummings was convinced he knew better and therefore tore it up. We'll never really know what would have happened if we'd stuck to that pan. Perhaps more like Sweden or perhaps worse. It's hard to guess really. If there were ten Swedens then it might be clearer but they went it alone.

Also Boris was scared into full lockdown by the unions threatening to strike and by others in his cabinet+ the media "why didn't you lock down sooner prime minister?". Also by labour who wanted to lock down harder.

Re: Wasting my taxes

So, Doctor if I go to my GP and ask them about prevention will they give me the time of day?

Re: Scamdemic

Doesn't that kind of suggest that The Great Barrington Declaration was right all along? Shield the elderly & vulnerable, but allow society to continue pretty much as normal.

Also bear in mind it's not just about lives lost. If an 86 year old dies with Covid they might have only had one or two years left anyway. If a 20 year old dies because of the impacts of lockdown, they could well have lost 60+ years. That's why the concept of Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALY) is important here.

One thing I think most people agree with is that many countries, including both Sweden and the UK, failed it's older people very badly by releasing people from hospitals back into care homes without any testing.

Re: Scamdemic

That word "could" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

I *could* have won the lottery last week. It's very unlikely though, but it could have happened.

Sweden fared pretty well after a couple of years compared to neighbouring countries.

Also, Christmas 2021 when many many people were screaming that we must lock down again or we'll have huge excess deaths. Were you one of those people? We didn't lock down. The wave peaked and then went away, just like all the other ones did.

Can you supply some evidence to back your assertion, or just a gut feeling?

Re: Scamdemic

Have you looked at the stats recently? I know Sweden fared worse in the short term, but a bit better after a couple of years compared to their neighbours.

https://academic.oup.com/eurpub/article/34/4/737/7675929

Re: Scamdemic

When you say scam it sounds like you are suggesting a conspiracy. Looking at the evidence it looks more like a cock-up.

Re: If only there was an alternative OS

That's kinda funny. Was meant to be funny right?

"Plummer's complaints boil down to two main areas: a desire for a hardcore mode that optionally removes all the fluffiness added to the operating system for the benefit of non-technical users, and a combination of transparency and an end to the 'Microsoft knows best' attitude that has plagued recent releases."

I mean, there is another freely available OS which does fit that bill quite nicely. I've heard it's the future. Can you guess what it is?

Clue: It's not OS/2 and it's not FreeBSD.