Policy Soup stir the pot ALPHA

Nitrous oxide drivers are causing chaos on London's roads

Scottish police do not know where their sensitive data is going, because they trusted it to an American multinational (Microsoft) which simply refuses to tell them. Remember this when the US screams about Europe wanting to regulate the big tech players.

Reposted byAlex Hern

Jim Waterson@jim.londoncentric.mediaAug 30(source)

Nitrous oxide driving, with drivers using balloons behind the wheel, feels like it’s on the rise in London - backed up by what medical experts told us about referrals. But the scale of the issue is obscured because of how crashes are recorded in police stats. www.londoncentric.media/p/nitrous-ox...

Plus: Did Reform nominate a dead woman for mayor, which big TV series is pretending to be called "Dark Train", and will the Central Line ever get the upgrades it deserves?

I remember going to Blizzard for a Hearthstone event and deeply wanting to nerd out with the designers about the card game space and they wouldn’t even acknowledge Magic the Gathering exists

Joshua Rivera

@jmrivera.bsky.social

journalists can only do so much to convince readers that games are made by people, at some point companies need to let their talent talk about the industry they’re in, to communicate as if they are not in a vacuum where the only game that exists is the one in front of them

Just wind the sea backwards

Downsides: • Criminals can steal your car with a laptop • You can drive off without your keys Upsides: • don't have to put your hand in your pocket

keyless ignition is one of the all time worst technological trade-offs ever

Jim Waterson

@jim.londoncentric.media

Today I learned, through an unfortunate chain of events, that it’s possible to start a car with the keys on the roof, have the keys stay on the roof for five miles, ask “what’s that clunk” as they fall off, continue for a further 20 miles, then find you can’t lock your car and it won’t restart.

_this_ feels like the key one, yeah, and goes back to a problem that _is_ about the intelligence rather than the tokenisation: how do you teach the systems to reliably recognise their own inabilities

Yeah, I think "different class" rather than "very narrow" is a better way of talking about it. I haven't actually looked at whether LLMs are good at Regex, and how they deal with tokenisation when they're doing it

i'm not an ai

"London, Paris, New York and Tokyo are the four best holiday destinations in the world"

this is the closest i can get to getting my head around why "count the Rs in strawberry" is a fundamentally different class of problem from almost every other LLM weakness, because it is bound up in tokenisation rather than the neural network itself

If I give you a katakana keyboard and a katakana dictionary and use the syllabary to write phonetic English to communicate with you, you would be able to perform most knowledge work to a high quality. You would also be unable to count the number of latin characters in an arbitrary word.

I think it’s perfectly possible to run something like Character.AI at a profit on a $5/m subscription, particularly if post-bust there’s oodles of spare GPUs being let out to cover the cost of electricity!

It’s tempting to read stories about ChatGPT-driven psychosis and think that OpenAI is as irresponsible as it’s possible to be in this space and oh boy that would be nice

A bubble popping probably would get rid of lots of the annoying “do this in AI” buttons that have metastasised across tech. But it would also mean the only people left doing AI research are smaller firms without resources or inclination to do a modicum of responsible development

Think a lot of people assume that if the AI bubble bursts, the things they hate will go away, and I worry that’s almost exactly the wrong way around

Stared at this for far far too long trying to work out what @gshowitt.bsky.social had rebranded to

It’s not the norm for unincorporated sole trades, no. I cannot buy a new laptop on credit and then offset the payments against my freelance income

I was in New York magazine as a Bro Who Likes Taylor Swift before the kids next to me at the Eras Tour were BORN

A lot to say about this but one thing to note is that spacex cannot in fact put a man on the moon

Mike Masnick

@masnick.com