Jerry_Atrick

This week, I decided to stay in London two nights instead of one for my commute as I hadn't ridden in for a while and wanted to ease myself back into the commute: This is my autumn/winter route as the shorter route is all A roads except for the last 50 or so ks and I don't like the idea of a much larger chance of bumping into wildlife. So, on Monday night at around 7:30pm I took off on that route and headed for a motoway services Travelodge in Heston, which is on the M4 a little close to London than Heathrow. It is probably closer to the vertical red line on the left than the red mark on the right, but somewhere between the two. I got there at around 10:30 from memory, but I was taking it easy. Up at 5 and on the bike at 5:30, was in the office by about 6-ish. London has 20mph limits everywhere except the A4 (which is a continuation of the M4) - at least until Earls Court (used to be the Antipodean capital of London), where everything turns 20. It is probably the most exceeded speed limit in the world, except where the speed cameras are. Even the buses usually do around 30 - at least at that time of the morning. On the Wednesday evening, I intended to leave the office at 5pm sharp, but as usual, something came up, and I didn't get out of it until about 9:00. I had to stop for fuel, so left it as late os possible as the bike only has about a 170 mile range for "normal" motorway riding. Filled it up with as much as it would take, and I was off. The traffic out of London, which pre-covid at that time of day would still be solid, was flowing nicely. I was on the A4 and M4 in very good time. Then it was the long slog to Bristol. But, I had to stop at a services just east of Swindon as the old bladder ain't what it used to be. Feeling a bit peckish, I had a chocolate bar as all the fast food outlets had closed, and the WH Smith food looked decidedly unappetising to me. Back on the bike, and a car overtook me at a great rate of knots, so I decided to follow it.. we were averaging 90 (except at speed cameras around Bristol). I figured he will light up any deer (although it was really too late in the night for them to be a problem) and he will brake if there are police on the side of the motorway. As it happened, he turned left at Bristol to join the M5 and head south. Excellent. In the M4 and M5 immediately around Bristol, there are speed cameras, so it was slower, but once outside them, the driver of the car sped up, so I followed. He turned off at Bridgwater which meant I only had one junction to go to Taunton where I turned off. I slowed down as the motorway side barriers, which generally seem to keep deer off the motorways are patchy at best.. although I am yet to see a dead animal on the side of a motorway like you see on A roads which don't have the barriers... I nipped in behing a car doing slightly less than 70mph, turned off at Taunton, and arrived at home at midnight on the dot. It was a great ride. I have to do a camera setup one day.

I read Albo is promoting a nuclear non proliferation type agreement for AI development between USA and China at the UN.. Hmm not long after it was suggested here. Is Albo getting his policy ideas from these great fora? 🙂 The above is really interesting and tech bros wouldn't be the first and won't be the last to buy favourable regulatory treatment. It isn't right or fair, but that is life. Interestingly, from a legal perspective, at least in Aus and UK, the calling by the owners/controllers of AI for moderation or slowing of AI due to its potential dangers can be seen as admission of holding something dangerous and could well backfire. And if it escapes and causes harm by those who own it or have control over it (and saying it has got that dangerous or evolved so they lost control is no defence), they accordingly to the principles laid down in the case of Rylands v Fletcher, which is taught in High School legal studies, they will be strictly liable for it. Of course that case dealt with dangerous substances escaping from the land, but it has been successfully applied to other cases of dangerous items causing damage. This should be no different.. And given most US states are common law based (Louisianna being the Exception as a French colony) and, like Australia, often rely on older English cases for legal principle and law, they should actually keep shtum. The word processor defence is a furphy. We don't ask a word processor a question and it provides an answer without any further input from us; we simply see what we type. However, AI companies now footnote most of their initial responses with a caution that AI responses may be wrong. They may well do better to protect themselves by making sure that those disclaimers are much more prominent.

Glad its over with. Hope the recovery goes well. Hospitals should allow a BYO Food option, or maybe a deliveroo service.

Well, that is my Saturday deflated. Good win to the Lions against the Hawks in the prelim today. In all honesty, the better team won, as when they put the jets on in the third quartert, the Lions were unstoppable. They would have had less legs than the Hawks as the Hawks had a week off. Still, for the Hawks, so close, yet soooooooo far...

A little thread drift, but an associate member of the EU hasn't been defined, so knowing the EU it may take a very long time, although the desire to move away from the USA may speed things up a little. But there will be hurdles. There are three freedoms that are preserved across the EU: movement of capital, movement of goods/services, and movement of people. Will these have to be included in an associate membership? If so, then your control of immigration from any EU country goes out the window. So, given Australia's very tight grip on immigration compared to other countries, the preservation of this free movement may well be a problem. The EU will need to think about things very carefully. There sort of is already associate membership - it is the European Economic Area. It allows Iceland, Norway, and Lichtenstein to basically be in the EU without being in the EU, and they are required to comply with most of the obligations of the EU. Yet they don't get to vote on the EU rules they need to comply with. Switzerland has a similar arrangement through a bilateral agreement. And of course, after the messy divorce, there is this country called Britain, which tried it's own bilateral deal, but all was offered was Switzerland's deal. So, the EU has some existing memberships and deals, that if they give special treatment to Canada in this Associate Membership status, might peeve off a couple of these others, and may trigger a whole round of renegotiations of these arrangements. And given the rising anti-EU sentiment within the EU and the rising right, if Canada gets some sort of cushy deal, well, there will be individual countries coming under pressure to leave the EU and join a cushy deal, too. Outside of a free trade agreement or similar type of bilateral arrangement, I can't see this one being negotiated and agreed upon anytime soon. These are not insurmountable problems, but the political risk for the EU is very much there.

Not the only cynic:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8vgy3pq5ywyo There are the first steps of Canada and EU becoming very close by Canada becoming an associate member of the EU. What that means, I am not sure, but Chump's reaction was yet another tantrum. Howver' Carney's speech to the EU was priceless as it basically was the most polite sticking up of two fingers I have seen. go to 3:10 of this video: Of course, Chump came out with threats and basically throwing his toys out of the pram. But, the USA doesn't need Canada nor Europe, so he really shouldn't care.

Good point.. that still provides 66 per shift... which still seems high. Hardware doesn't fail that often and it will have fail over redundancy; and can later be swapped out.. so i was still being generous with 20 hardware and network engineers.. In addition, if there is a catastrophic failure, requests will be handled by other sites. And of course what is the balance of full time v part time. I still think 200 full time employees is on the high side to be directly employed at the site to give the region the boost it claims to. I have been to data centres and there aren't many people around

I am not sure how that translates to pilots having to undergo more rigorous foreign conversion process than a doctors.. but I may be missing something

200 ongoing jobs seems a bit high unless they include indirect employment. The compute side can be remotely managed; there would need to be a number of hardware and network engineers - probably in the order of 20; 180 maintenance and security people with a few admin staff seems high.. but i guess they are large sites

I think I do have a clue of airline pilot conversions and ongoing checks.. We are talking about recognition of foreign qualifications and I would suggest you have no idea of what it takes for a doctor (especially consultant) to be able to practice in Australia when qualified overseas if you think an airline pilot undergoes a more rigorous approach. Let's stop the personal attacks and pissing match baits. And yes, I would like both professions to be rigorously assessed before being allowed to practice.

Doctors. They are tested as much.. if not more. Ask my sister in law what she had to and continually has to go through. Some "lesser" professions they do not accept and you have to start all over again

Robotics technology coupled with AI will eventually come after blue collar workers, but outside specific functions, e.g. car manufacturing, drainage cleaning and the like, where robotics is already in place, the dexterity and processing capabilities of robots has a way to improve before you will see one up on your roof or re stumping a house.

I don't know if it is a pretty wobbly financial model.. I think it is a bit like the .com (or .bomb) boom and bust. As a nascent industry where there is a lot of promise, there are a lot of players coming to market, despite the costs. Investors can see the gravy trains, but need to bet on which ones will survive. It's almost certain there will be a bust and from the ashes, a few phoenix's will rise. The bets are anthropic, despite Chump's disdain for them are going to be one of them; Open AI - not so. The success or otherwise though, in this case, won't be the consumer, but businesses. They are the ones who will fork out the big bucks to automate as long as the payback is there. And it is already for a lot of them. I can't speak about our company specifically, but if you think from SMEs to large corporates the automation capability is there now, especially in sectors that rely on information processing or content generation. Anthropic has already moved to a token based billing system where tokens pay for units of work. I think there are different token costs for say art generation versus software development. Eventually this model will probably prevail because you can work out your costs per unit of processing and apply a profit accordingly. The typical investment banking middle level contract programmer will cost around £200K/year; a permanent will cost not much different when you factor in pension, health care, holidays, training, sick, etc. If AI if 15 more efficient then I would happily pay half of my salary/contract payment bill, which runs with well into the 7 figures per year to whichever AI company we would happen to use.. It also benefits the business by being quicker to market and keeping up or beating our competitors. One of my report's sons has a job in a hedge fund or something similar as an intern. We caught up with him a couple of weeks ago and the stuff he as an intern and a developer with I think it is Claude crank out makes me wince.

Are you sure?

From my time working in Abu Dhabi, which was admittedly very short you could probably find most of what is in the above prose and being frequented by locals. Men are men at the end of the day..

It's the qualification that is of interest; not the job title.

Serious question - in the absence of an Aussie core AI company, should the federal government proactively encourage/sponsor a local industry, legislating 100% Aussie ownership of our own AI companies?

Had to laugh,,, The thought of Chump in control means it is bound to not work..

Chump isn't known as one of the more responsible leaders of our time. Sadly he is at the helm precisely when we don't need him. Anthropic has for a long time called out the warning and put the brakes on or the use of offensive purposes by defence (now war) departments. That was the origin of the spat with Chump and, ironically, export controls of the model that had stronger guardrails than most. I did neglect to mention one of the issues of AI. AI mimics human intelligence - all things good and not good. Like humans, it self-propagates and evolves. Unlike humans, it does it a lot faster. But also unlike humans, it can be switched off.

I have to admit, I am not normally against people accumulating vast amounts of wealth. Again, that is based on an economic structure where the wealth did trickle down at least to those who participated - the labour force. However, the rules are changing. While I am sure if you asked one of the LLM/generative AI solutions to build you your own AI competitor, they would reneg, there is nothing in the core model that would not allow them to do it. In other words, in terms of product development, it is almost a perpetual motion machine already.. Of course, ti still requires people, but disproportionately fewer for the output - and significantly so. On that basis, trickle of wealth down will be slower than an old fella's pipe without the magic tablets they take. So, on that basis, again, the wealth will have to be forced to trickle down by outside regulation - so at some stage a) the clamps have to be put on or b) there is a point at which that wealth is taxed. Of course there will be cries that it is paper wealth and if they cashed it out it would impact the share price of investors which includes pension funds. Of course, it doesn't have to be cashed out. The government can automatically take a stake in the companies that exceed a valuation / employee ratio or something like that.

My daughter moved into a house in Exeter yesterday with two others ahead of the start of the new academic year. I decided to use the bike to deliver some odds and sods and go for my first decent ride in a couple of months - after the best summer we have had for riding for ages. It was about an hour each way, country lanes and roads to the motorway and then through Exeter to her house. The ride on the motorway was relaxed, maintaining around 70mph. A few groups of bikes passed and we all waved to each other - excellent comradery amongst UK bikers. From the motorway, travelling to and through the main part of Exeter is a pain as it is single lane, busy and has buses. It is often little more than a traffic jam. But with the bike, filtering between the two oncoming lanes was a breeze. Cars move out of your way and when passing or facing oncoming wider vehicles (buses mainly), one just zips back in and everything is OK. Passed two police cars who waved as I went past. On the way back, the traffic was a little lighter and I was a little faster on the motorway. Weather was lovely - sunny, little wind, and about 18 degrees, although a little humid. I return the rental car today. And will go for a ride again after that. Still smiling. The dark blue was the route I took

Yes.. but by my paralleing AI to guns, regulation is required to force it to slow down. However, emerging news is: https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/sam-altman-elon-musk-ai-safety-concerns-b3049217.html Which basically says there is a need to slow down. The other problem is you have China and no doubt Russia and other non-aligned countries who will not slow down any time soon.. so, again in an analogy of weapons, you're only as strong as the effectiveness of what you've got. There has to be some sort of verifiable global non-proliferation agreement. Ultimately, like everything else in a free market, it takes government regulation to manage the risks.

At the time, a conductor's wage probably was enough.