I think most EU members have looked at the UK over the last few years and gone “know what? i think we’ll stay”

“People find the right-click menu overwhelming, so we’ll reduce it from 23 options to 19 options. That’ll make it less confusing and won’t annoy the people who now need an extra click for basic functionality “

The thing is, Let’s say that there’s a foolproof system in place which makes you press an “ok” button every time is going to take an action on your behalf…how many people are actually going to check everything that it’s going to do every single time it asks? And for those that do, is it actually going to save them any time?

Just look at cookie pop ups. I have Consent-O-Matic and when that fails i manually reject and on those sites where you have to individually untick 100 boxes I just find another site, but i can’t tell you the number of people I’ve seen just accept everything because it’s quicker. That’s exactly how most people would treat a “do you want me to do this?” prompt from an agentic AI without checking what it’s actually asking to do.

Yeah, that’s the significant thing for me here. Not what’s being said, but which paper is saying it.

WhoCouldHaveSeenThisComing.gif

They’re generally treated as different animals, but toads are actually a subset of frogs. All toads are frogs, but not all frogs are toads.

I’ve thought before that if i were to be dropped back maybe 200 years ago i could maybe do okay for myself by passing off existing stories as mine. You’d have to change some details here and there, but you could absolutely write the terminator as a book and pretend it was your idea, for example. And people would never have read anything like it.

I don’t think you’d become rich and famous, because success is as much about time and place as it is ideas and talent. But I’m sure you’d be able to get them published and thus sell well enough to pay your bills on ideas alone.

Not true for something like Tolkien. Those need to be his words for the books to work. But Alien? Psycho? The thing? The day the Earth stood still? Forbidden planet? Arrival? You could sell those on ideas alone.

Tall people were born tall.

The tallest baby ever born was 28 inches tall. That’s 2’4”.

I’m not tall, but I’m taller than that.

I put it to you that babies are born short and grow over time.

At Labour conference in September, Mahmood promised to “do whatever it takes” to regain control of Britain’s borders

…except creating safe legal routes for asylum seekers, investing in processing claims to clear the backlog and speed up the process again, or keeping a record of who leaves the country so we can actually know how many people are here. Because for some reason this nominally left-wing government seems to think that their best approach to policy is to try to court Reform voters.

They should also ban tall people from playing basketball. They have a potential physical advantage over short people.

The promise of passkeys when i first grad about them was that it would be quick and easy - that you wouldn’t need to enter a username or use 2fa. The reality appears to be that this is that it’s used ** as** 2fa

Here’s a fun fact: phone manufacturers know this. So what they call “100%” is not actually 100%. Your phone will not charge your battery to full. Battery charging is already designed around this.

I’m not sure if this kind of thing is just about enriching himself. Of course that’s a big part of it. But he also wants to be a great man of history. He wants to be the person who saves the world. He wants to be forever remembered as the greatest hero who ever lived.

He won’t, of course. Because he’s a clueless idiot. A clueless idiot who managed to fuck up his own PR so hard that he’s burnt away the reputation as a genius that he used to have.

But he really does want to be adored.

A lot hinges on the exact definition of “limited“. I could launch a limited attack on NATO today.

Yes, I’m sure giving him a gift of money for behaving how he currently is behaving will make him re-think his current behaviour and start behaving differently.

A journalist who is often a regular on a podcast I listen to has a theory on why Musk is seemingly obsessed with the UK - he’s up late (due to ketamine, although she doesn’t go as far as to say that explicitly), and people in the US are asleep so he’s got no tweets to react to. We’re awake here in the UK, though.

I don’t disagree that it’s troubling how mainstream choking is in modern porn. It’s definitely been a huge shift. There’s nothing against it as a fetish, but it being a fetish with potential harmful consequences suggests that it should be in the same category as BDSM - something which can be problematic unless it’s done as an exercise in trust between partners with full informed consent.

And there have been plenty of seemingly not agenda-led studies which suggest that teen boys and girls are both picking up a lot of what they consider to be “normal” about sex from porn.

And not even talking to each other about it. IIRC, there was one such study which had both boys and girls engaging in a particular behaviour (I forget exactly which, maybe even choking), and neither party actively enjoyed the behaviour, they were just doing it because they thought that’s what you do and therefore what their partner wanted.

But is the solution to ban porn which features choking? Firstly, I don’t see how this could in any way be effective. How would you possibly enforce it? Are police really going to raid people’s homes based on suspicion that they’ve got a nowadays-vanilla porn video on their harddrive? The police literally don’t have enough resources to investigate and prosecute everybody creating and sharing child porn. And now they’re supposed to go after everybody who visits PornHub?

Secondly, we’re basically talking about a de-facto porn ban because, as the consultation itself noted, that describes pretty much all porn made in the last 10-15 years.

I’m not sure what the solution is. I mean, talking about the difference bewteen porn and sex is something that should be part of sex education at school. But I kind of assume it already is? It would be weird if it weren’t in 2025.

Perhaps it would be worthwhile to engage with creators themselves? I know that several porn companies used to put disclaimers before their videos saying that there’s a difference between porn sex and real sex and talking about consent. Several BDSM porn producers also have pre and post-shoot interviews with the performers and make sure they talk on camera about safe words & gestures and consent.

But then that’s something that’s probably not going to be terribly effective in any case and which would require absolutely everybody to get on board, which would have been basically impossible back when it was only really studios producing content, and 100% impossible now that OnlyFans etc are the way that most performers make and distribute porn.

I don’t think it’s an easy question to answer, TBH, but I’m pretty sure that “ban all the porn” isn’t the correct solution.

This is the kind of thing that a dude who’s never been in a relationship with a woman thinks

There’s a former nurse here in the UK called Lucy Letby who’s currently in prison for murdering several babies and attempting to kill more. There’s a campaign to get her released based on basically 3 strands.

The first is the fact that there’s no actual evidence that any of the deaths were not of natural causes. The second is the statistical argument. The third is that the police enlisted the help of people who worked with Letby to assess the evidence. As one person put it “how can any fair investigation be even partially carried out by people who the police should actually be treating as potential suspects?”

I have no ideas whether or not she’s guilty, but since i had previously heard of cases like the one you describe I’m definitely of the opinion that there should be a retrial.

It’s tricky business. The idea has to be plausible enough to attract investors, but implausible enough not to get looked at too closely by clever investors. Similarly, you have to drum up enough publicity to get interest, but not enough to get scrutiny.

Get the balance wrong and you get Theranos.

I once read an interview with a white hat hacker. He said that people expect him to try to remotely connect to their network and try to brute force his way in. The first thing he actually does is put on a suit, visit the company’s headquarters, walk in the front door, start a conversation with the receptionist, and see how far he can get.