• 0 Posts
  • 102 Comments
Joined 4 months ago
cake
Cake day: July 28th, 2025

help-circle



  • Fuck comms/marketing. They harrass me and misrepresent my work all the time, they swap out carefully selected words and distort meaning for spurious reasons. They bend over backwards for ignorant journo scum and feed their misinformation just trying to “spin” it. They sound like ai, i wish they were ai. I wish all fucking comms cretins would quit and get a real job, like a fucking cleaner or binman or something actually helpful.



  • We called them “charvers” or “a charva” up north as long as i can remember in school , certainly well back into the mid 1990s. I’d not say it was a middle class term at all though, more sub-cultural within lower classes. Probably the more vocal alt-types used it as an insult/provocation to the more obnoxious trev/sharon types. There’s a lot of subcultures and just different people within the lower classes especially at school. Middle class kids at school would keep their heads down and keep out of it for the most part. Upper class kids didn’t exist - i assume they were away off in posh schools suffering whatever abuse leads to people like michael gove…

    I’d agree that charvers were a small, but obnoxiously vocal, minority of the lower classes. Much worse at school though with kids being kids and all. But its also something people could grow out of in a few years, or just after a bit of cold turkey, more behavioural/immaturity than class.

    You could probably also trace it back to things like football hooliganism - a fairly easily avoided minority - but not imaginary. Maybe the press latched on to it after most of the football firms were locked up and they needed to fill some column inches.



  • You’d think the timing should reflect the typical terms of loans and loan volumes - so that sounds plausible. When the default rate of those loans begins to creep up and become notable to investors, then people will get edgy.

    I just hope it comes before our much loved and overpaid layers of incompetent management have destroyed all their manual production processes and replaced them with snake oil. If not a general economic downturn might start well before the ai bubble bursts.







  • Yes, maths and statistics courses in school, college, university would be the tried and tested route for learning the analytical and practical tools and techniques.

    Forecasting rare events with any precision is almost a contradiction in terms though. When you’re down to the 1/10000 type events you need such a large dataset/sample, that there are almost always unobservable sub-populations, or unobservable historical / environmental factors that your data is likely to be missing; something important that could materially change the forecast if you were to have had complete, unbiassed data on it for you whole sample.

    Practical forecasting though , i think, should be tied into the decision making, and trying to reduce the risk of choosing the course of action to take. The set of possible / feasible actions shapes the forecasting approach - you can’t really learn that pragmatic tradeoff in academic institutions - i think it’s just experience. Make some predictions, get them wrong, do a forensic analysis. Or collaborate with people who have done this for a living.

    In respect of the AI, you need to check it had a reasonable concept of the population of events you want to know about. Understands its sample of observations, how that sample was drawn (i.e. it wasn’t random), and the biases in that sample or sampling method. Then it should be easy to recalculate its output, then you come up with some scenarios of the bias, or adjustments see what changes those scenarios have. A competent forecaster should have addressed major/obvious sources of bias, with ranges / scenarios etc. " how wrong might this forecast be if we assumed, X, Y, Z instead?" I don’t trust anyone who asserts they have a representative sample, it’s impossible to prove that 100% - otherwise you’d not need a sample in the first place.



  • Law enforcement will seize and use computers and the data they hold as evidence to convict criminals, just like any other tool that they might be warranted to seize.

    Courts will examine the evidence of what it did to determine what role it played in the offence and whether it supports the allegation.

    Likewise police complaints authorities could do the same in principle against the police; if someone were to give them a warrant and the power to execute it.

    If a thing happens in public that was unwarranted and can be traced back to a police force or how they deployed any equipment, they can be judicially reviewed* for any decision to deploy that bit of kit. It’s more a matter of will they actually be JR’d and will that be review be just and timely. * - in my country.

    I don’t think it’s much different from how they deploy other tech like clubs and pepper spray, tear gas, tazers or firearms. If they have no fear of acting outwith their authority , that’s a problem.

    In some ways it might be easier to have an ‘our word’ vs ‘their word’ defense when they shoot someone, compared to a computer program that might literally document the abuse of power in its code or log files.

    “Oops i dropped my notebook”, is maybe easier than, “oops i accidentally deleted my local file and then sent a request to IT - that was approved by my manager - asking them to delete instead of restore any onsite or offsite backups”.