Read Microsoft starts boiling the Copilot frog: It's not a soup you want to drink at any price by Rupert Goodwins

I work with data in the UK public sector. For me, the accuracy of that data is paramount. I’ve certainly been in roles where the accuracy of the data was an unwelcome fact. While that’s not the case in my current role, I do have general concerns about the employment of AI in this area. This is along the lines of:

“We know it’s not completely accurate, but we also know no-one is really looking at it too closely, so what is the value of being accurate?”

Read Folklore is thriving on social media, says Charlie Cooper
The Bafta winner speaks about his new show and why young people are getting interested in folklore.

I like to think of it as a backlash against commercial and globalisation. It’s a popular refrain from the right that we’ve lost our British identity. I’m not sure which identity that is, though, and people that say it also seem to struggle to define it. Presumably an ideal from some point in the 19th century, when “red tape” and “wokeness” didn’t stop people making money. I can understand why reaching back before the “Age of Discovery” for some shared identity would appeal to people.

I feel similarly with paganism and the import of Christianity. When you consider the population of the UK was already 75% immigrants circa 400-800 CE/AD and you consider that Stonehenge was completed circa 1600 BCE/BC, it’s tricky to track down your cultural heritage.

The only sane response to the trolley problem is to do nothing. If you can be (philosophically) responsible for deaths by inaction, then we’re all guilty of that anyway.

eBay sent me an email detailing things I could improve in the listing. Said the descrption was no good… their AI wrote it.

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I’m a pretty big fan of Jurassic Park movies. At least as far as “man meets dinosaur” movies go.

But, as someone who actually read the original novel, something has bothered me from day one. The matter of small arms. No, not on the T-Rex. I mean the distinct lack of big guns. Let me get this off my chest…

In the first movie, the game warden Muldoon, rocks about with a shotgun. Just a shotgun. We later see this is loaded with shot rather then slugs when Grant shoots at the raptors in the control room. This might be adequate for anything up to a really big dog at short range. Problem is, for most of the smaller, dangerous dinos, short range is way too late. The larger dinos… might as well be throwing rocks.

In the first book, Muldoon at least insists on a rocket launcher, which proves to be highly effective (Muldoon survives). We also learn that Hammond has, naturally, effectively banned weapons on the island. At least the book features the right tools for the job. Sadly, this is never picked up in the movies.

Fast forward to Jurassic World and the “Asset Containment Unit” is running around with mostly non-lethal weapons you wouldn’t even try on a polar bear. Again, one has a shotgun. They do have a minigun, which would probably be highly effective with clear line of sight and a fortified position, but instead they put it on a helicopter and fly over a jungle with thick canopy. Derp.

Even the various groups of poachers and mercenaries show up with an assortment of assault rifles and shotguns. Except for two guys. Roland, the big game hunter in The Lost World. He’s got an elephant gun. Big tick. The other is a guy you’d barely remember from Jurassic Park 3, who has a Barrett .50 caliber rifle.

This seems much more like it to me, although I am no firearms expert. While it doesn’t do JP3 guy much good (he is wandering around the jungle with it), .50 caliber weapons are surely the way to go. A lot of watchtowers with rifle-armed guards, a few discretely hidden fixed heavy machine gun emplacements and a few of the same mounted on vehicles. I feel like that meets the minimum for worst case scenario. Hell, if I had the choice, there’d be armoured vehicles and I’d have the Costa Rican airforce on speed dial.

However, I get that the core theme of the franchise is human-kind’s hubris and not having the proper equipment is a big part of that. It still bugs me, though, in a “why didn’t the eagles just fly them there” kind of a way, you know?

“I’m only doing this on the precondition that I can lie, and no-one will call me out,” is definitely the way to run a democracy.

Hang on, so Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine is definitely an invasion but Israel’s “limited, localised and targeted ground raids” in Lebanon are… not?

Did this “common sense” survey.

With hindsight, I feel like there is a critical distinction between common sense and common knowledge. Most of these questions were related to common knowledge, so a statement of fact, which you may or may not know, or might disagree with.

To me, common sense is the ability to predict an outcome based on a broad awareness of previous outcomes. For example, if I am careless with a knife, the knife could cut me. Or, you can’t carry water (very far) in a sieve.

Common knowledge is something else altogether. For example, “the sky is usually blue during the day”, I would say is common knowledge. An example from the survey, “a grizzly bear is larger than a dog”, I would say is neither common sense or common knowledge. You may not know what a a grizzly bear is. “Water is a liquid” is probably common knowledge but, still, don’t you have to know what liquid means?

Either way, I don’t think you can apply any previous experience to these questions and predict the answer, so I don’t see how they could be described as common sense.

My co-workers want my collaboration on “a thing”, with no notice, today. They don’t like it if they don’t get it.

I want a yes/no answer from my co-workers on a simple question, that I have to ask them every month. Do you think I can ever get that one word answer?