exasperaited

> grooming children into "queer" lifestyles

… is a deliberate bad faith characterisation.

Isn't bad faith argument immoral?

They have been reporting on this trend for a considerable time. Confirmation bias is obviously a risk but I don't see any particular reason to doubt their reporting because they are reporting on organisations who do long-term tracking and saying so. Reporting what concerned and informed people say is still one of the jobs of journalism after all.

They do some data-oriented investigations with partners but their budget is very finite as an organisation.

> they are better at empathy and conversation than most.

Do you know actual people? Even literal sociopaths are a bit better at empathy than ChatGPT (I know because I have met a couple).

And as for conversation? Are you serious? ChatGPT does not converse in a meaningful sense at all.

Tech people imagining their own preferential boogeyman harms that might flow from any action intended to reduce the harms of their products. Again.

Swindon is not a village, it’s a fairly large town. About 180,000 people live there. It is a very old town that has a slightly undeserved reputation for being grey and boring and too far from anywhere fun.

Sandford is inspired by Wells and Wimbourne, though neither of those are villages either. Wells is tiny, but actually a city.

> Everything we do today might be scrutinized in great detail in the future because it will be "free".

s/"free"/stolen/

The bit about college courses for future prediction was just silly, I'm afraid: reminds me of how Conan Doyle has Sherlock not knowing Earth revolves around the Sun. Almost all serious study concerns itself with predicting, modelling and influence over the future behaviour of some system; the problem is only that people don't fucking listen to the predictions of experts. They aren't going to value refined, academic general-purpose futurology any more than they have in the past; it's not even a new area of study.

> Who is going to do that?

An administration-linked tech corporation. Or failing that, the lowest bidder.

FIFA's comical attempt to bribe him with a bauble might be a lot about them trying to persuade him not to do this, among other things that will mean nobody will want to attend games.

We were going to visit!?

The government will be able to bury the impact of its international tourism pariah status in some sort of claim about people not wanting to fill this in. But the reality is visitor numbers are going to tank no matter what.

People from the UK in particular visit the USA because it is the USA: brash, welcoming, colourful, vibrant, thriving, free, fun. It's a holiday from being reserved and quiet. Things are louder, bigger and brighter, less apologetic, more colourful.

I guess it is low on the administration's priority list, but Trump is building a USA that no one from the UK in particular will want to visit. You should see the comments on the increasingly desperate attempts to advertise discount flights on Facebook. We'll go elsewhere.

Yeah — quite a lot of "let's get the gang back together to fight the old enemy which is reorganising with the new enemy" films borrow quite heavily from it, I think. Especially because there's almost always a newbie who has heard all the stories (some of them untrue, some of them edited) — someone's recently disclosed lovechild, some kid who was kept safe in prison by one of their dead friends, etc.

Some of my recollection is reinforced by the movies, I must confess, because I remember them more than the book, which I think I read a bit too young. I should read it again now I am an old bloke.

The films make more of the musketeers' slow ruin, I think, than the book does. But Porthos is vain and a bit dim, Athos drinks like a fish, etc. If I remember the book right, the films also tend to make a bit less of D'Artagnan's naïvete and tidy up his personal morality, and Athos is usually a loud, drunken, loyal powerhouse in the films rather than an alcoholic.

The fundamentals of the films are usually right: the musketeers are aimless and in need of direction, aware they serve a pretty weak monarch, mostly powerless to deal with the corruption around him. Everyone has their own motivations.

Weirdly, the delightful eighties Dogtanian and The Three Muskehounds series is pretty close to the book — it's toned down rather than bowdlerised. D'Artagnan really is a feisty puppy, basically.

And now I have that song stuck in my head.

I think what I should actually do is read the book again while rewatching Dogtanian, because that sounds fun and I read the book largely because of it!

The whole point of The Three Musketeers is that they are men out of their time, in an end-of-epoch story, surely.

Nobody drinks and carouses like they do, nobody has their sense of chivalry, artistry and old-fashioned justice. The world has lost its colour, its joy and its sense of fairness, and they are loyal to an institution which is itself corrupted and whose time is clearly ending. And so they are lost: they have no cause and they are slowly destroying themselves.

This is why they are portrayed as musketeers who think muskets (representing callous modernity) are clumsy and uncouth. It underscores that the three don't even feel they really fit with the rest of the musketeers. They know muskets have their place. It's just not with them. So there's no reason to explain them away logically. It's a literary device.

The second point is that D'Artagnan is there to remind them of who they were and could be again. D'Artagnan is the hero of the story because he has not been corrupted by life experience.

The third layer is he's also a proxy for the reader who wishes they were there. He is there to get life lessons on the reader's behalf: that stories don't tell the whole truth, that people begin to confuse themselves with their own personal mythologies, that fame isn't reality, that there are risks in meeting your heroes, that adults will let you down, that no institution is better than its people, etc.

This trope has been parodied in various ways since, not least I think in the form of "person who confuses actors for the people they play and convinces them they know as much about the job as the characters they play". Which has itself been parodied in Three Amigos! and also in Galaxy Quest.

And the trope of guns being impersonal compared to swords and knives turns up everywhere.

I'd be impressed if a Debian release took less than eight months to develop, that's for sure.

The name was chosen in 2020, which you can find out from a good old fashioned google search.

https://wiki.debian.org/DebianTrixie

So a much better explanation of this "hallucination" is that Gemini thinks all "future" Debian releases are called Trixie.

I have a client who does this — pastes it into text messages! as if it will help me solve the problem they are asking me to solve — and I'm like "that's great I won't be reading it". You have to push back.

No, don't ban it. It's a useful signal for value judgements.

Widespread heroin addiction might cut military spending but would not be cheaper for health services.

Sure, in its clean form it won't kill you quickly, but it is a horrendously addictive depressant with significant medium-term and severe long-term neurological and physiological effects that would in themselves cause poverty through loss of work even if it was as cheap to buy as it is to produce.

It should remain a decriminalised controlled substance and every effort should be spent trying to stop people ever starting to take it — the Portuguese strategy. Not least because if it's cheap and freely available, many, many people will overdose on it.

> It’s interesting how rhetoric about “liberty” seems to practically serve oligarchy.

Because the USA confuses liberty and libertarianism.

You can tell this is almost universally the case because even libertarians don't think they need to vote for libertarians to reach libertarian goals. They will get them either way.

Well Europe had better hope this is true, because we are heading to a future where US SaaS products should be treated with at least the same level of suspicion as those Israeli fleet management apps that keep turning up on Samsung Android devices.

At the moment you can more or less, I suppose, trust that Microsoft, Google and Apple are not actively spying for the newly anti-European goals of a protofascist federal government, but I am not sure that trust should be extended to cloud service providers more generally, let alone social media companies.

Europe has maybe two years to find a new level of technology independence and it cannot wait.

Trump's government has made it text, not just subtext, that they intend to interfere with further European integration (which is also — coincidentally or not — Russia's top foreign policy goal).

The EU should assume that this is a declaration of cold war and act accordingly:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/09/donald...

Well how else are you going to pay for the AI they want?

You have to understand the basic consumer SaaA contract of the 21st century:

- We give them money and agree terms and they do things to us that we didn't ask for that they want to do

- They change the terms of the agreement to allow it, we occasionally spot their attempts to grab new rights in the process, and they back away a little as if it was just some sort of silly mistake.

- Repeat.

Well, London is a safe city by US standards.

But putting that aside, the biggest problems these things will have in the UK is a completely different conception of walkability even compared to, say, NYC.

People walk everywhere, pavements are cluttered and crowded, the vast majority of roads are not grid-structured almost anywhere in the UK, etc. So much so that when US firms do consider testing these things properly in the UK they will have to pick somewhere like Bath or Worthing or Hove: enough wealthy people to try it, and easy, grid-structured roads. Not many other good candidates.

The second problem they will face is the nature of protest. People won’t vandalise them. There will, however, be extensive civil mischief: people will box them in, mislead them, cover their sensors with googly eyes and woolly hats, put traffic cones on them, and generally make the whole scheme unworkable. And that is if councils don’t outright ban their operators.

More to the point, I think these things can't really replace delivery drivers until they can get there as fast as delivery drivers, which one would hope they don't plan to do on the pavement. Though I can see them pushing to go faster :-/

That’s… not many at all, really. You could do it in a year with ninety deliveries per day per location (well, 92).

Assuming a dozen robots per location, that's less than eight deliveries per day per robot (and even that might be beyond their upper bound, actually, given their speed and range).

But then they didn't do it all in one year. So… it doesn't feel like a stretch.

Given how many will be recurring customers with recurring journey routes, it feels barely enough to encounter all the possible unique problems.

Well, if there are fewer drivers then there is room for them on the road isn’t there?

Fewer drivers on the road because the pavements are becoming non-navigable because of robots nearly as wide as pavements does not sound like a benefit for anyone but drivers, and yet again demonstrates how messed up car culture is.

There is one overriding difference between US culture and European culture (and to a fading extent, British culture).

In the EU and UK, shame still motivates better behaviour.

Every single problem the USA has comes down to the fact that shame, in the USA, stopped functioning in the late 1970s.

Cash strapped, but also presumably more likely than the general population to be innumerate or have dyscalculia or dyslexia.

It's the same bullshit that allows discount prices on Black Friday or during January sales to be completely misleading.

In the UK we are much tougher on this kind of manipulative pricing, but you still find manipulative things, like being unable to find the price-per-100g on discounted items and "clubcard" items, or bulk buys that end up having higher unit costs and yet seem not to be errors.

> This just tells me you hate academics and want to hurt them gratuitously.

Well then you're being rather silly, because that is a silly conclusion to draw (and one not supported by the evidence).

A fairer conclusion was that I meant what is obvious: if you use AI to generate a bibliography, you are being academically negligent.

If you disagree with that, I would say it is you that has the problem with academia, not me.

No, it's not "as much".

The dominant "failing" here is that this is fraudulent on a professional, intellectual, and moral level.

Every single person who did this should be censured by their own institutions.

Do it more than once? Lose job.

End of story.

Right, but it's not more responsible is it? It's plainly kafkaesque with lots of impositions that always serve only to benefit the gatekeepers. Which is why they hated Obamacare, because it is less bad.

> Contrary to the USA where it's a much more responsible market,

This is satire? I can’t tell anymore.

I mean the USA is the only country where someone can allegedly murder a healthcare executive for denying treatment and popular culture is engaged in drooling about how well the alleged killer fills out a tailored shirt.