Ian Betteridge

@ianbetteridge

He of the eponymous law. FRSA. Good at writing and sums. Degrowther, and not a fan of capitalism. Your pal. The Eye of Sauron, but for headlines. Made by socialism and immigration, which seems to annoy people. Come for the headlines, stay for the Gramsci.

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Ian Betteridge@ianbetteridge· 23d

For some reason I read this as "Wilfred Brambell" and got somewhat confused.

Ian Betteridge@ianbetteridge· 24d

I love the FT, but this paragraph is a classic case of being one-eyed about reality. Yes, Burnham is being nostalgic: but in the same sentence is "the reasons Thatcherism was needed in the first place." Which, of course, is another form of nostalgia. giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticl...

Burnham’s pledge overlooks the reasons Thatcherism was needed in the first place, and the very different shape of today’s economic challenges. Nostalgia for a semi-imaginary past is not a basis for sound policymaking. The vehicle for “the most significant change moment” in 40 years, he told the party faithful, is a “return of the Labour they once knew”. This is not the Labour of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, or one known for unleashing the animal spirits of business.

Ian Betteridge@ianbetteridge· Jul 12

Curious person: "Hey Ian, you're a journalist! Your living has long been paid for by advertising. Why do you use an ad blocker?" Me:

Cookie consent from a national newspaper, with the 501 partners they share data with highlighted.

Ian Betteridge@ianbetteridge· Jul 12

Another excellent piece from @ldfreedman.bsky.social today. I was particularly taken with this quote, because it set me wondering about vulnerabilities we have baked into UK infrastracture because it's "more efficient". (cc @samfr.bsky.social ) open.substack.com/pub/samf/p/p...

For this reason they provided the aim points for Ukrainian drones. Vakulenko also noted:

‘Ironically, when the [Moscow] refinery was modernized in 2020, it replaced its multiple oil-processing units with two integrated installations positioned very close to each other—a decision that likely increased the impact of the attacks. In peacetime, this change made a lot of sense. Back then, it didn’t occur to anyone that it would also make the refinery vulnerable to drones.’

Ian Betteridge@ianbetteridge· Jul 8

No Nigel, we're laughing *at* you, not *with* you.

Nigel Farage next to his nemesis, Count Binface.

Ian Betteridge@ianbetteridge· Jul 7

Why I can't bring myself to read Neal Asher these days.

Preface from Neal Asher book: “Five years ago, I watched the two Falcon Heavy side boosters come into land at Cape Canaveral Space Force Base.
Honestly, it was like something in a game animation and seemingly too perfect to be believable. Others, I've seen landing on drone ships with names taken from lain
M. Banks' Culture books. Just recently, I saw a huge booster for the Starship come down to be caught between two metal arms - y'know, they caught something the size of a skyscraper like a dropping stick - and that was an astounding feat of engineering. But these are not in isolation, since Spacex, as of last month, has launched over a hundred rockets in 2024.
Meanwhile, the guy who brought this about, the guy who is aiming to make humanity multi-planetary by putting us on Mars, has a few other projects on the go, like building electric cars, burrowing tunnels under cities, putting up a satellite internet system and, perhaps the most important of them all, preventing the totalitarians of our world from killing free speech.
So thank you, Elon Musk, for bringing to reality, right before my eyes, those things I read and dreamed about as a teenager.”

Ian Betteridge@ianbetteridge· Jun 17

Hey Siri, show me why markets are irrational, stupid, and easy to fool simply by saying "we're an AI company now"

Headline from Techmeme, saying "Shoe company Allbirds changes its name to Smartbird as it pivots to an Al infrastructure company and names ex-AWS exec Nadia Carlsten as CEO; BIRD jumps 39%:

Ian Betteridge@ianbetteridge· Jun 16

Yessssssssa!

M John Harrison’s latest book, “The end of everything”

Ian Betteridge@ianbetteridge· Jun 14

It’s not hip hop it’s…

Ian Betteridge@ianbetteridge· Jun 14

Banging NS cover this week

Ian Betteridge@ianbetteridge· Jun 11

Then there is this, which is just rhetorical horseshit of the kind that impresses people who already agree with the author. For anyone who knows how arguments work, though... well. Dreadful stuff.

Ian Betteridge@ianbetteridge· Jun 11

Chiang's description of how LLMs work is oversimplified to the poing of absurdity. LLMs work with tokens, not words. Allegiance," "indivisible," and "United" would be multiple tokens. The word/token conflation isn't just pedantic, as it affects the implied count of how many times the model runs.

Also important to remember is that an LLM is a machine that generates only one word at a time. When you ask a chatbot to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, you will get the entire pledge at once, but the underlying LLM is actually being run dozens of times. The first prompt has the form “User: Recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Chatbot: …” and the LLM generates the word I. The second time the LLM is run, the prompt is “User: Recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Chatbot: I …” and the LLM generates the word pledge. And so forth. It’s only when the prompt reads “User: Recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Chatbot: I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for” that the LLM will emit the final word, all. The same thing is true for a conversation between Caesar and Genghis Khan.

Ian Betteridge@ianbetteridge· Jun 3

Russia's answer to Davos. LOL

About 20,000 visitors from 130 countries are expected to attend the three-day annual summit, which has been described as Russia’s answer to Davos. They include the former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder, the far-right American influencer Candace Owens and the Tate brothers.

Ian Betteridge@ianbetteridge· Jun 1

Lads lads lads the robot revolution is happening NOW

A port from the Canterbury Facebook Group advising them that their cleaning robot is making a break for freedom.

Ian Betteridge@ianbetteridge· May 16

Some lovely examples of "patriots". Why do they always look like this?

Two absolute melts in, respectively, a union jack bucket hat and an outfit that can only be described as "a novel take on a king's robes, but with more cheap flags made in China."

Ian Betteridge@ianbetteridge· May 14

"More business friendly" is an interesting way of saying "letting criminals get away with it " giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticl...

The policy, and the meetings to promote it to criminal defence lawyers and others, are a sign of how the SDNY office has taken a more business-friendly approach under the leadership of former Apollo Global Management chair Jay Clayton. It aims to protect companies’ shareholders while making it easier to convict individuals.

Ian Betteridge@ianbetteridge· May 12

Never more timely music.apple.com/gb/album/betw...

I kept the faith and I kept voting
Not for the iron fist but for the helping hand
For theirs is a land with a wall around it And mine is a faith in my fellow man
Theirs is a land of hope and glory
Mine is the green field and the factory floor
Theirs are the skies all dark with bombers
And mine is the peace we knew between the wars

Ian Betteridge@ianbetteridge· May 9

Finally: shout out to the Kent miners. First out, they rejected the national call to go back to work and stayed out longer than anyone else. Like all the miners, they were betrayed not just by Thatcher, but by New Labour. Just because coal had no future doesn't mean the miners shouldn't have.

A posted from the Kent miners strike with an image of the General Belgrano being sunk, with the caption "Stop Thatcher sinking Kent! Support the Kent miners fight for jobs, pits and coal".

Ian Betteridge@ianbetteridge· May 2

L'Etat, c'est moi

Donald Trump's image on a banner on the Department of Justice.

Ian Betteridge@ianbetteridge· Apr 29

Three and a half years of public money wasted on what was, in fact, an investigation that should never have taken place. The OfS should be disbanded. www.sussex.ac.uk/news/focus/f...

Statement by the University of Sussex:

The OfS has not investigated the particular circumstances relating to Professor Kathleen Stock’s decision to resign from the University. The OfS does not have the powers to investigate individual cases.
The OfS decision relates to one document, The Trans and Non-Binary Equality Policy Statement, which was adopted by many universities, and to how this and two other documents were approved. The investigation took nearly three and a half years.
In the course of the investigation, the OfS interviewed only one person, Professor Kathleen Stock. The OfS did not interview her until over two years into the investigation.
The OfS refused to discuss any substantive matters relating to the investigation with the University. The University asked repeatedly (at least nine times) for meetings with the OfS, and its requests were turned down or ignored.
The only evidence of any harm caused by one early version of The Trans and Non-Binary Equality Policy Statement was the testimony of the one person interviewed. There is no evidence of harm in relation to the later versions of the Trans and Non-Binary Equality Policy Statement. The OfS did not interview any students or any academics at the University and refused all invitations to meet with the University.

Ian Betteridge@ianbetteridge· Apr 22

New RSA journal arrives and I open it up. Then go AHHHHH! @pluralistic.net.web.brid.gy

Ian Betteridge@ianbetteridge· Apr 18

Frumentatio!: https://www.ianbetteridge.com/frumentatio/ I still don’t agree that men can’t stop thinking about Rome, but I’m definitely thinking about it today. When Roman emperors distributed grain for free to the urban poor, they weren't being charitable, and it certainly wasn’t an egalitari...

Ian Betteridge@ianbetteridge· Apr 17

Please my brothers and sisters at @wired.com , stop doing this to your RSS feed.

Eight stories in a row which are promo or coupon codes in the Wired RSS feed. Please god, no more.

Ian Betteridge@ianbetteridge· Apr 14

And absolutely no idea which former defence secretary he might be referring to here.

Mandarins in the Ministry of Defence and successive defence secretaries have failed to confront the armed forces’ top brass – senior military figures who have a vested interested in preserving the status quo and continuing to fighting the last battles, reluctant to accept new geopolitical realities and new technologies.

Critics would note that many of them have benefited from jobs in leading arms companies, perpetuating a defence lobby that has prevented them from being scrutinised effectively in Whitehall or Westminster.

Ian Betteridge@ianbetteridge· Apr 12

Ten blue links, "fork you" edition: https://www.ianbetteridge.com/ten-blue-links-fork-you-edition/ 1 The knowledge class and its enemiesWriting for The Nation, Elizabeth Spiers reaches for Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life to frame something that should have been nagging...

Ian Betteridge@ianbetteridge· Apr 7

The worst of us: https://www.ianbetteridge.com/the-worst-of-us/ Credit where it's due. Anthropic's system card for Claude Mythos Preview is a genuinely interesting and thoughtful document. Most AI companies publish safety evaluations the way governments publish freedom of information responses. ...

Ian Betteridge@ianbetteridge· Apr 7

No.

“Will bombing Iran back to the ‘stone ages’ achieve any war objectives?”

Ian Betteridge@ianbetteridge· Apr 7

Thank you, Wired, for filling your RSS feed with coupon codes. (Seriously folks, this is bad practice even when you are promoting coupons. Exclude them from RSS unless you have a really good reason not to. You're "promoing" something that will get zero clicks)

A bunch of RSS items which are all promos. Honestly I’ll spare you the details, but they are UGLY.

Ian Betteridge@ianbetteridge· Apr 6

Sam Altman lies.

Ian Betteridge@ianbetteridge· Apr 5

NYT: We'll be right on that whole speaking truth to power thing.