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.
For some reason I read this as "Wilfred Brambell" and got somewhat confused.
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...
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:
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...
Hey Siri, show me why markets are irrational, stupid, and easy to fool simply by saying "we're an AI company now"
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.
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.
Some lovely examples of "patriots". Why do they always look like this?
"More business friendly" is an interesting way of saying "letting criminals get away with it " giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticl...
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.
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...
New RSA journal arrives and I open it up. Then go AHHHHH! @pluralistic.net.web.brid.gy
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...
Please my brothers and sisters at @wired.com , stop doing this to your RSS feed.
And absolutely no idea which former defence secretary he might be referring to here.
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...
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. ...
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)