workday of doing fuck all

Oh fuck right off with this bullshit. I suppose you think the attractive secretary’s remarkable physique as exposed by their tight cardigan is just going to ogle itself? Presumably by the same magical fairytale critter that smokes all those cigarettes while knocking back a liquid lunch? And I suppose this wonderful creature takes care of water-cooler conversation as well, recounting golfing bon-mots, making sexist jokes and espousing low-grade racism while the man just does “nothing”? Get a grip.

Would a red light camera have saved her from a speeding car? No. Would a red light camera have stopped the speeding car from being a factor at all? Maybe.

Cars have to interact with pedestrians at some point. For every reckless act by a selfish driver that results in a child being murdered, there will be hundreds, thousands, maybe tens of thousands of similar reckless acts carried out by similarly selfish drivers that - purely by chance - don’t cause a child to be killed. If drivers were caught and punished acting like this the majority of the times it doesn’t result in a death, they’d be less likely to be in a position to slaughter pedestrians on the unlucky days in the first place.

Holy shit, cheques (as we spell it in the UK). I’d not seen one in decades, my bank stopped issueing chequebooks more than 20 years ago but they’ll still print a one-off cheque for you if you ask. Then I spent some time in France and they still use the goddamn things and it is an absolute ordeal - I swear they spend two solid minutes passing the thing back and forth between the customer and cashier, taking turns to make little amendments. I understand that in France a cheque has a lot more legal clout than in the UK.

That the saving grace of self-checkout lines; it tends to be one line for a dozen checkouts. So the dense fucker clasping their block of cheese to their chest - in the manner of fleeing refugee carrying a child - while the machine repeatedly begs them to “please place the item in the bagging area” only slows down the line a little bit, but the Hutt going supernova at the cashier because they can’t use a different supermarket’s app’s discount code for 15% off Kleenex on a 3L bottle of Pepsi and demanding to see the manager grinds everything to a halt until they’re adequately soothed.

A boomer coworker recently said something that made a lot of sense to me: Netflix is for 2020s TV what Motown was for 1960s music. They’ve turned the artform into a production line, constantly optimising to shovel out as much content as possible, hunting the minimum viable product, and occasionally, very rarely, producing something good almost by chance. L

• Ya

Not that exceptional.

Like most Brits, a Vauxhall (Opel) Corsa.

Imagine someone said “make a machine that can peel an orange”. You have a thousand shoeboxes full of Meccano. You give them a shake and tip out the contents and check which of the resulting scrap piles can best peel an orange. Odds are none of them can, so you repeat again. And again. And again. Eventually, one of boxes produces a contraption that can kinda, maybe, sorta touch the orange. That’s the best you’ve got so you copy bits of it into the other 999 shoeboxes and give them another shake. It’ll probably produce worse outcomes, but maybe one of them will be slightly better still and that becomes the basis of the next generation. You do this a trillion times and eventually you get a machine that can peel an orange. You don’t know if it can peel an egg, or a banana, or even how it peels an orange because it wasn’t designed but born through inefficient, random, brute-force evolution.

Now imagine that it’s not a thousand shoeboxes, but a billion. And instead of shoeboxes, it’s files containing hundred gigabytes of utterly incomprehensible abstract connections between meaningless data points. And instead of one a few generations a day, it’s a thousand a second. And instead of “peel an orange” it’s “sustain a facsimile of sentience capable of instantly understanding arbitrary, highly abstracted knowledge and generating creative works to a standard approaching the point of being indistinguishable from humanity such that it can manipulate those that it interacts with to support the views of a billionaire nazi nepo-baby even against their own interests”. When someone asks for an LLM to generate a picture of a fucking cat astronaut or whatever, the unholy mess of scraps that behaves like a mind spits out a result and no-one knows how it does it aside from broad-stroke generalisation. The iteration that gets the most thumbs up from it’s users gets to be the basis of the next generation, the rest die, millions of times a day.

What I just described is NEAT algorithms, which are pretty primitive by modern standards, but it’s a flavour of what’s going on.

You misunderstand. Phil’s abilities and agency are not in question. Phil can read. Phil chooses not to.