Four years is not very long in a climate poised to undergo a phase transition unless we are able to reverse course very sharply. The IPCC is clear on this.

There’s some compelling evidence it’s also incompatible with economic growth despite this being the stated goal.

I appreciate you may not feel this if it’s your home but 37 houses seems remarkably small to get two whole new lines through the centre of your town that can facilitate metro-like services between major centres.

Yes. Of course wider changes like WFH and pandemic have affected things but specific policy choices have led to those trends being supported and reinforced in order to produce better air quality outcomes. Both those trends are present in lots of cities without this drastic impact.

If he retains an ownership stake doesn’t that mean he still takes home the profit of Brewdog so boycotting would still be effective/desirable?

Sorry it was a sarcastic reference to the fact the headline uses agentless passive voice “hit by car” which serves to subtly reinforce the idea that its just something that happens rather being caused by driver behaviour (and sometimes infrastructure design).

Full guidelines are here https://231ea4fd-cd4f-476d-b67e-838d6b31f0d2.filesusr.com/ugd/c05c10_3f73627e43894c8496f379a2b9e84fd3.pdf but media rarely follow them.

Edited to make sarcasm clearer

Something’s got to be done about these driverless cars. /s

Truly awful how much preventable death there is. Consistently reported on as if it was just something that happens like the weather.

Agreed that the studios need to be held more accountable and their usage of AI is more problematic than open source last resort type work. I have noticed a degradation of quality in the last five years on mainstream sources.

However, the existence of this last resort tool will shift the dynamics of the “market” for the work that should be being done. Even in the open source community. There used to be an active community of people giving their voluntary labour to writing subtitles for those that lacked them (they may still be active I don’t know). Are they as likely to do that if they think oh well it can be automatically done now?

The real challenge with the argument that it helps editors is the same as the challenge for Automated Driving. If something performs at 95% you actually end up deskilling and stepping down the attention focus and make it more likely to miss that 5% that requires manual intervention. I think it also has a material impact on the wellbeing of those doing the labour.

To be clear I’m not anti this at all but think we need to think carefully about the structures and processes around it to ensure it does lead to improvement in quality not just an improvement in quantity at the cost of quality.

It is probably good that OS community are exploring this however I’m not sure the technology is ready (or will ever be maybe) and it potentially undermines the labour intensive activity of producing high quality subtitling for accessibility.

I use them quite a lot and I’ve noticed they really struggle on key things like regional/national dialects, subject specific words and situations where context would allow improvement (e.g. a word invented solely in the universe of the media). So it’s probably managing 95% accuracy which is that danger zone where its good enough that no one checks it but bad enough that it can be really confusing if you are reliant on then. If we care about accessibility we need to care about it being high quality.

The station wasn’t designed for border controls and whilst it could be upgraded given the lower numbers the lower numbers also mean its less economically worth it. Hopefully if Eurostar don’t want to another company can come fill the gap now that the tunnel is open to others.

Yes fair points. I assumed it was a balance between aerodynamics and crumple zones/legal requirements which is why they don’t all look like the aptera (or Schlörwagens).

I’m quite sure the system isn’t optimising for what we want/need out of vehicles though and we could almost certainly do better.

They are similar as far as I understand because they all want the same outcomes of the design : better aerodynamics and effective crumple zones to faculiate higher survival of the occupants in a crash (some vehicles additionally try to limit injuries with pedestrians too but less so in US vehicles).

I do agree that we have lost some of the majesty of older variations of designs but largely I think it’d convergent evolution. To leave that behind you’d want to have a really good reason which I don’t think the cyber truck really has. Different for the sake of being different rather than innovative.

What I find frustrating about the current wave of “AI” is how much it obfuscates any meaningful discussion about the utility of different methods and approaches.

Does Machine Learning or Machine Vision have a role in decarbonisation? Probably yes but it will require thought (and carbon accounting to make sure savings large enough!).

Do LLMs or other GenAI techniques designed to pump out rehashes of existing images or text at tremendous energy cost? No.

Are either of them “Artificial Intelligence” or are either of them likely to become “Artificial Intelligence”? No.

I suspect that’s some thinking internally too. Wait until you have more political capital.

Unfortunately, at the moment the government isn’t even committed to going past Birmingham so at the moment we paid a lot of money to slow down the west coast main line in order to relieve capacity for Milton Keynes. So I guess in terms of priorities I’d say getting it up to north Scotland more important

Technically it was precisely designed to be connect directly to HS1 avoiding Euston/St Pancras altogether before the bean counters decided the tunneling was too expensive then it was designed to at least interconnect with an easy interchange with HS1 (E.g. through a new bridge between stations) then the beans counters decided that bothering to get into London at all was too expensive. Finally, we have a decision that half the number of platforms we need in London will be built ensuring we either cripple it’s performance for decades or end up spending even more retrofitting the station at a later date.

Thanks Treasury!

I read something about how the best outputs are done using a blend of make-up/models with CGI adding the layer of realism on top so pure CGI is worse but film studies pursue that because its cheaper and outsourcable compared with a heavy unionised make-up/prop workers.

But will it go past Birmingham

Don’t leave us hanging - what was the one book that was so bad?

Not sure how serious this comment is but these are anomalies against expected behaviour from models. These models include historical data with the addition of how we expect the changes we are making to impact it with the best knowledge we have of how the systems work.

So its not saying its surprising that Australia is hot this time of year it’s saying it markedly hotter than we expect or can explain using everything we understand about the climate.

Ebbsfleet should be on the cards but we also need to be getting on with Crossrail 2 and 3 at least. I’ll hold my breath.