Wee Ginger Dug contra BBC
Paul Kavanagh notes the BBC is pushing bullshit anti-Scotland stories:
When BBC Scotland gives huge prominence to a thinly sourced story about something that’s never going to happen, but which provides the anti-independence parties a platform from which to attack the Scottish Government, and moreover does so just days before the ruling is published in a court case which has the potential to destroy the traditional foundations of Scottish Unionism and wipe out the generations long claim that the United Kingdom is a voluntary partnership of nations, it would be wonderful to live in a Scotland where we could look on in bewildered perplexity and ask ourselves, “what were they thinking? and for that to be a genuine and not a rhetorical question.
However in this Scotland where we actually live, we all know exactly what they were thinking. They were thinking that they had a convenient stick with which to beat the Scottish Government and to scaremonger about the ability of Scotland to sustain the health service as we have always known it.
Aircraft carriers vulnerable to hypersonic missiles
Steve Hsu notes that $10 billion aircraft carriers are vulnerable to hypersonic missiles.
I would also note that there have been plenty of NATO naval exercises where large aircraft carriers were successfully crept up on and "killed" by submarines.
Europe successful at naval shipbuilding exports
Perun points out that European countries have been more successful than USA, Russia or China in selling warships:
On victims
Saying you're a victim is inversely correlated with being one, according to Rob Henderson:
Generally speaking, people who have gone through real shit are extremely reluctant to talk about it. Unless they have done a lot of inner work. In which case they rarely cast themselves as a victim of misfortune. If you are in an unsafe environment, signaling victimhood will attract social predators. Bravado and bluster is a way of warding them off. But if you are in a particularly safe environment, cultivating signs of victimhood will not attract danger, and will often bring benefits. Weirdly, in environments where victims of misfortune are prevalent, few would identify as one; but in environments where victims are scarce, many people are eager to be one.
Wings over Scotland flies again
Dormant blog Wings Over Scotland has restarted, and is being crowdfunded to the tune of £5679 a month:
Not only is that more than twice what I paid myself in Wings’ heyday, amusingly it’s also more than the £5,555.17 a month that Karen Adam gets to thoroughly embarrass the Scottish Parliament on a daily basis. So I’m just here to say a big “thank you” – obviously mostly to you, Wings’ remarkable and astonishing readers
Dangerous working conditions for Boohoo warehouse workers
The Times sent an underground reporter to the Boohoo warehouse in Burnley, where working conditions are dangerous, with workers forced to keep working in 36 degrees C.
This sort of thing needs to be clamped down on, with repeat offenders facing a large fine (e.g. 10% of turnover) or their companies nationalised without compensation.
Europe gets serious on semiconductors
Deloitte reports:
The European Union is mobilising over €43 billion to make itself more self-sufficient in semiconductors this decade.
The European Union’s bold goal is to double its share of global production capacity to 20 per cent by 2030 from ten per cent in 2021. As the worldwide semiconductor industry is expected to double its output by 2030, if the EU were to double its share, it would need to quadruple its semiconductor output.
I've said before that it makes sense for the EU to become fully independent in computing and communications infrastructure (e.g. here and here), and it's nice to see the EU making steps in that direction.
ChatGPT biased to be woke
Brian Chau notes that OpenAI's language model ChatGPT has been programmed to be woke:
these standards embed social progressive dogma into the output of language models such as ChatGPT, even when it contradicts scientific results. It denies differences in crime rate, inserts talking points between summaries of conservative books, and refuses to produce art based on political ideology.
Scott Alexander notes that the woke biasing of AIs doesn't always work, which is bad because of the AI alignment problem:
Ten years ago, people were saying nonsense like “Nobody needs AI alignment, because AIs only do what they’re programmed to do, and you can just not program them to do things you don’t want”. This wasn’t very plausible ten years ago, but it’s dead now. OpenAI never programmed their chatbot to tell journalists it loved racism or teach people how to hotwire cars.
If you're not worried by this, you ought to be because out-of-control AI is the biggest risk of human extinction this century.