Interesting Links for 10-05-2025

[andrewducker]

1. British Property Management Firms Are Helping Russians Avoid Sanctions

(tags:uk russia OhForFucksSake )

2. Amazon's warehose robots can now stow items faster than most humans

(tags:robots amazon )

3. Trans Labour councillor quits and accuses Starmer of 'throwing transgender people under a bus'

(tags:transgender lgbt labour )

4. Why the rich paid less tax in the 1970s - despite 98% tax rates

(tags:tax uk history )

5. "Letting AI make up cases" hits the UK legal system

(tags:law ai fraud OhForFucksSake uk )

6. The House of Lords wants opinions from autistic people (diagnosed or undiagnosed), or people who care for them.

(tags:autism houseoflords )

7. Scientists turn lead into gold at the LHC!

(tags:materials gold lead )

8. Always, always check the answers the AI gives you.

(tags:comic genocide funny ai )

9. Video Essay Condescendingly Reads Wikipedia at You

(tags:funny satire videos )

10. American men who refer to themselves as 'moderate' or 'centrist' score basically the same on values and opinions as people who identify themselves as 'conservative'

(tags:USA politics )

Comments

[simont]

Of course, #8 is an older joke than the modern notion of "AI", and indeed doesn't need AI at all. Even traditional optimisation techniques like gradient descent, simulated annealing or genetic algorithms will do well at finding the outcome you didn't at all want but your cost function forgot to rule it out!

[dewline]

3. I am currently convinced that Starmer is doing exactly as he's been accused of. No matter what the rest of the Labour membership may want to do.

6. Interesting to know this.

7. So all that the alchemists were missing were the proper tools?

10. A worrying thing, this. Deeply worrying. Long suspected, as noted by others.

[calimac]

8. A couple things about this mystify me. One is, whether AI generated the fake citations or not, where did they come from? But second and more important, why didn't someone note this earlier? I spent enough time working at a law school to pick up some of the lingo and principles, and one thing I picked up is that, when citing a case, you always check to make sure it's still current law, i.e. not been overruled by something subsequent. In the US this is, or was back then, called "shepardizing," because it meant to look it up in Shepard's Citations.
But I guess Shepard's would only list cases that have been cited, so if it's never been cited it wouldn't be there, so non-existence wouldn't ring an alarm.

[conuly]

10. American men who refer to themselves as 'moderate' or 'centrist' score basically the same on values and opinions as people who identify themselves as 'conservative'

Not so surprising. Have you ever read The Authoritarians?