• 0 Posts
  • 12 Comments
Joined 7 months ago
cake
Cake day: July 14th, 2025

help-circle



  • Unfortunately the old favourable terms are gone and won’t come back. Too toxic in Europe and only 1 country would need to veto it to stop it. Iit’s very unlikely the UK will rejoin in the near future as the Common Agricultural Programme remains broken, and signing up for the Euro would remain very toxic. Those are the two big exceptions we had. And of course, free movement of people remains politically toxic in the UK, and we’d never get an exception to that.

    I was strongly in favour of remaining, and I’m leaning in favour of rejoining but I’m not massively keen. The reason being Europe was very politically controversial in British politics for decades and Brexit dominated politics for years over all other issues. I am in favour of rejoining the customs union; but even that will be a big ask in the UK and in Europe.

    The right wing in the UK are against regulatory alignment and “taking orders” from Europe. And our broken first-past-the-post electoral system gives them disproportionate power in this country. European neighbours would rightly be risk-averse for signing a deal with the UK which another right wing government could just come along and tear up.

    The UK should focus on electoral reform before ever considering rejoining the EU. We need true representative democracy, instead of the joke elections we have had such as Boris Johnson getting a huge majority in parliament. He got 44% of the vote and got 56% of the seats, forcing his version of Brexit on the country. And within that parliament the right wing had power within his party because there were enough of them to deny him his majority - their deal or no deal. So we got a hard Brexit. And any deals other governments make can be unpicked in the same way - a small extreme right wing minority can dominate the discourse.

    So forget rejoining; push for proportional representation. Our democracy is backwards and stuck in the 19th century.



  • The article is very biased - it basically suggests young people are unwilling to read, that AI is a good thing and that the wikipedia contributors are being unreasonable. It goes on to talk about how AI has “extracted value” from Wikipedia in an unquestioning way - no mention of compensation to the project, just talking about what a triumph Wikipedia is a source for AI to train on.

    The “Simple Summaries” situation is less to do with the summaries and more to do with the risk of AI slop being introduced into Wikipedia unquestioned. The summaries were unchecked and unverified, which add a real chance that wikipedia started serving up inaccurate summaries and undermined it’s own reputation.

    In addition that idea that younger generations don’t have the concentration span to “read a wall of text” is pernicious and patronising nonsense part of a general media bias against Gen Z and Gen Alpha. There seems to be this barely questioned narrative that they have short attention spans and are unwilling or even unable to read, just because they grew up in the era of social media like Instagram and latterly Tik Tok.

    I’ll give a better hypothesis for why younger generations spend less time on wikipedia: the big tech giants like Google have stolen all the information people have put on there and serve it up in their own summaries on the search engine (preventing click throughs) or through their own AI slop engines. They don’t want people clicking through to Wikipedia, they want them clicking through to an ad. The problem is not Wikipedia, and the problem is not Gen Z or Gen Alpha; the problem - as is frequently the case - is the tech mega-corporations who steal everything (including wikipedia) and sell it back to us with ads or via AI slop.


  • Both sides announced this to boost their share prices as they’re both growth stocks. Growth stocks are a trap - no company can keep on growing forever.

    This announcement is a sign the AI boom is probably soon to end. Nvidia quietly announcing the $100bn deal isn’t going to happen, is Nvidia trying to reduce it’s exposure to the bubble popping. Unfortunately for Nvidia, it’s already way way too deep into the mess, and the vast majority of it’s value is speculative. The question is have they damaged their core business by chasing the AI bubble, and what liabilities will they be left with if their customers go bankrupt and don’t pay them for their product.