Sampson

Semi-related to the King Charles stuff, but I do always wonder when these old scandals come up, how the feck people are supposed to remember single off-the-cuff things they said or phonecalls they had 30 years ago and how it's still supposed to represent them as a person? Surely most of us would say we're completely different people than we were 5 or 10 years ago and we've all said stupid off the cuff stuff to our friends, colleagues, acquaintances and family loads of times throught our lives and have forgotten them within a week, but its like the media are demanding us to judge people on off the cuff remarks from 2 generations ago? I dunno, still just feel like we're creating a society where people aren't allowed to make mistakes anymore, even retroactively.

I'm old enough to remember when CANZUK was one of the biggest arguments of the leave side duting the lead up to the eu referendum. About how the UK should abandon the EU to form a seperate free trade and free movement block with Canada, Australia and New Zealand as they were supposedly closer to us culturally than Europe. And now Canada is currently negotiating to join the European single market as an associate member...

Its just an excuse to get your friends and family over, which as you get older becomes something increasingly rare and one of the things you'll miss most about being younger. Don't overthink it or think you have to do something extravagant, just invite your friends and family over for dinner and a couple of drinks and youll probably enjoy it.

Never thought I'd say this, but agree completely with Steve Bannon, even down to finally admitting the tech bros are oligarchs and therefore tacitly admitting that the US has already transitioned from late stage capitalism into oligarchy.

Same thing that humans can draw a chalk line on the ground that screws with chicken's brain chemistry so much they become stuck and hypnotised just staring at it. AI might inadvertently create something like that our brains kind of break looking at and we just get stuck in place before we die of thirst. The AI doesn't even know its caused the death of billions of humans, it was just doing something else entirely because it understood molecular physics so well.

There's 2 different things here I think: 1. The kind of sentient AI who decides humans are a threat to its survival and consciously decides to kill them as we might have seen in science fiction books or films a la HAL9000 or SkyNet 2. Unknowable and innocent side-effects of side-effects that cause AI to comit some disaster by taking over nuclear weapons, crashing the world economy or energy supply, forging kompromat on world leaders to blackmail then into submission, creating some kind of entertainment or drug so addictive and hypnotic we all become enthralled by it and starve to death, fabricating and 3d printing a virus as deadly as ebola and contagious as covid and the million and other disasters it could enact. I think when most say AI will wipe out humanity they think much more of option 2 than option 1. And option 2 does not require AI to become sentient nor does it require bad faith by a human - it can just be an unknowable quirk and side effect of a one-off use of AI that caused a 1 in a trillion sequence of events. A couple of comon examples given are: A. A human innocently uses AI to create endless paperclips, The AI eventually mines tge earth of all the metal so starts killing humans and using our bones to make paperclips. B. A human innocently uses to AI to create lots of nanobots, it eventually creates so many microscopic nanobots that the world and everything on it just becomes grey goo. In neither scevario does AI need to be conscious nor do humans have to be bad actors, humans were just extinct as a side effect. Now, ok, we might be able to put some safe guards in against this, but the reality is because we have no idea how AI works, we can't put in safeguards against everything - it's like how governments try to put laws in place to safeguards against humans harming others - but we can't know how every human brain works every second of the day so people still do bad things. Think how if you and I both ask AI the same question we will get 2 different answers for example - maybe you asked it in a certain way, maybe your search history is different so the AI reacted differently to you- how can we realistically safeguard against the trillion different ways 8 billion different people can use AI? And that 1 in a trillion set of circumstances where a certain persion uses AI in a certain way at a certain time that causes AI to cause catastrophic events to humanity that makes WW2 look like nothing just as a side effect become actually quite probable when you're getting 50 different AI models bring used in billions upon billions of different ways by billions of people every week - and it only has to go wrong once to be catastrophic.

I really struggle to see how democracy survives another generation (15-25 years). Unless we're just voting on which AI model to make decisions and govern over us, but even then surely the targeted algorithms and knowledge of how the human brain works will become so sophisticated that they (by they i mean either the AI themselves or the humans in charge of the AI, it doesnt really matter) can easily manipulate enough people's brain chemistries to vote a certain way?

Think some of you need to seriously layoff reading those fearmongering posts by Americans on social media who seem to think Europe is in the midst of some full on hunger games race war if you genuinely feel a "nasty undercurrent" or feel unsafe walking the streets of Manchester. Feck me.

And that's only 10% chance humanity gets completely wiped out. Doesn't even explain how much direct and indirect destruction happens to our economies, brain chemistry, physical biology, resources, geopolitics, birth rates etc. happens in the other 90% of scenarios. The I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream scenario where the AI wipes out virtually all of humanity but keeps only 5 humans alive to torture for all eternity, just so tge AI gets to feel something is contained in that other 90% for example.

Honestly, I'm surprised people quote this stuff about what the UK does in the chagos islands or some demographic change. The US has been extremely consistent and open since Trump came to power that it no longer cares about Europe, Australia, Japan, South Korea etc. It cares about the Americas and is trying to make the Americas all essentially have leaders who answer to Trump - very similar to how the Soviet Union did to the Eastern Block countries after WW2 (and what Putin wants to do again). The reason that Trump goes after Canada so much is they're the only country in the America's really resisting becoming a US vassal state. It's nothing to do with ideology - Venezuela hasn't changed ideology since Maduro went, but it does now have a leader who will kowtow to Trump and let America extract its wealth - that's all its about, everyone else in the Venezuelan government and military is the same. Similarly, Korea has been just as much a part of the US deciding it doesn't see them as an ally any longer as we have, and they famously have very little immigration or ethnic minorities. So its not about demographic change. The US couldn't be clearer that it no longer cares about "protecting the democratic states of Europe, Oceania and East Asia after WW2" and no longer sees Britain or any of these countries as allies. Its primary foreign policy is about turning the Americas into a pro-US block because its vision of geopolitics has changed to one of pre-ww1 "spheres of influence" rather than being about protecting democracy or whatever. And yes, the US absolutely sees a South America country like Argentina as a closer ally than a European country like Britain these days. They've been very open about that. The British public just seem to have buried their heads in the sand about it.

Sadly agree. Everyone already knows that Farage is allegedly heavily financially backed by Russia and the US, this won't change his voters' minds who don't care about it. Same way that everyone knows Jenrick allegedly really wants to oust Farage to become Reform leader, just as he allegedly did with Badennoch.

Both Bradgate Park and the Space Centre are excellent and well worth visiting.

Don't forget Netto. There was briefly one of those in Lutterworth after Lidl and Aldi first got popular and the European budget supermarkets were in vogue.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/29/sharp-rise-in-incidents-of-ai-escaping-users-control-research-finds When do AI companies face prosecution for this? Still just don't think the legal protections against AI are there because there's no humans to take responsibility. Feels almost as if they're using it as a PR exercise.

Courtesy of my nephew: Why did the baker have brown hands? He kneaded a poo.

The vast majority of people do, but it's one of those lines you hear now and again from a small minority - same with people who say Piper at the Gates of Dawn was Pink Floyd's best album and the band when to shit after Syd Barrett left and David Gilmour joined. I never understood either, nothing wrong with FM or PF's early work, but when people say they outright love that early stuff and dislike the stuff after Green/Barrett left it always feels a bit "I liked them before they were cool..." to me.

Wtf? Dyer was a very good player for us. Where does this insult even come from?

For sure, Rumours is the 6th biggest selling album in UK history and they had 4 UK #1 albums overall. Was just a little surprised to find Albatross was their only #1 single.

Yeah crazy to think none of Dreams, Don't Stop, Go Your Own Way, Landslide, The Chain, Everywhere, Rhiannon, Silver Springs, Little Lies etc. ever made it #1 given how they're still constantly on films, TV shows, adverts etc. and still fluttering about in popular culture all the time. Can't be many artists where you learn so many of their songs just through cultural osmosis.

Today I learnt that Albatross was Fleetwood Mac's only ever UK #1 single. Odd to think with how many famous songs they've done that have entered common culture that it is a barebones instrumental that was their only #1.

Starting Jade City - first book in the Green Bone trilogy by Fonda Lee.

I'd be very surprised if all semi-professional and professional athletes didn't use PEDs to some extent - maybe not outright banned stuff, but I'd very surprised if they didn't all use loopholes, grey area stuff and push the boundaries of what is within the rules to its very limits and I can't imagine there's *that* much difference in using them compared to banned stuff, Other people would be using them so it makes sense you have to use them to keep up.

All Systems Red - the first of the Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells, Figured these would be good shott novellas to read when I need to take breaks from bigger series.

15 years ago I think many (myself included) would've told you the internet was the best invention inhuman history and would bring anout greater knowledge, greater empathy seeing more people's struggles and bring us a closer and economically more well off. Now I think a lot of us have just realised that the internet does more harm than good. Most people feel worse off economically as they did in the mid-90s when the internet took off - there's fewer jobs and even the jobs that do exist change so frequently its muuch harder to build a stable career in one discipline now, it's also caused people to be way less social in real life and it be way harder to make genuine long lasting friends and romantic relationships, people have less friends, less sex. Which I thinks leads to so much of increasing mental health issues as people just feel lonelier. Everyone feels watched all the time too, social media outrage culture (on both the left and right - of both virtue signalling and vice signaling) means you can't take risks and do stupid things and **** up and make mistakes anymore (which you're supposed to be able to do especially in your teens and twenties) without being piled on and have permanent posts about you easily googleable by employees -it's impossible to "make one heap of all your winnings, And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss" anymore. I think the reason a lot of us are so fearful of AI is that its going to be all the negative sides of the internet on steroids and after the internet hasn't brought about the abundance promised, its hard not to be cynical that AI won't either.

Eh. I'm a big fan of Charles and William and must be one of the few who also still has plenty of sympathy for Harry. Got to say in the age of populism that the republics seem to be holding up even worse than the constitutional monarchies and making your symbol of power elected alongside the government isn't working out too well for the French and Robespierre's Republican vision right now. I think we've also seen in recent years how having a diplomatic symbol you can train from birth that Charles has genuinely benefitted the UK diplomatically with his relationships in Saudi Arabia and as much as I hate to admit the US. Also people do look for symbols of order whether we like it or not, and I find the recent very Americanised trend of the British right to want to lionise the flag as the ultimate symbol of "Britishness" over the crown weird as hell. Prioritising a piece of fabric over a (imo very likeable) human being as your symbol of order feels weird as hell to me. Of course people shouldn't be born into genuine power but as a diplomatic symbol and head of state, I think monarchs are showing to be a better choice than presidents right now and certainly a better symbol of national pride and a symbol of order than becoming obsessed with a flag.