Mike O'Neill @incloud

🔥 On Mon Oct 12th, MPs will debate the UK applying to join the EU. The responsible govt minister will respond. This is not a vote - but it’s the first time since the Burnham speech on “options” that we’ll see where the MPs actually stand.

Only one of Anthropic’s seven founders holds a qualification in any kind of engineering or computer science.

Gary Marcus @GaryMarcus

7 hours ago

Ooh!!! @SpeakerMenin asks the tech firms to testify under oath that their systems will comply with their safety instructions. And they can’t! Why? Because the tech is a sloppy mess.

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🙌🙌 Exciting times. Everything is changing - and Britain must be part of it 🇬🇧🇨🇦🇪🇺

Canada in EU 🇨🇦🇪🇺 @Canada2EU

2 days ago

The #CanadaEU Summit will take place in Montreal on 29-30 October. For media wanting to cover the visit, find out more about the accreditation process here: canada.ca/en/global-affa…

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Asking Jews to pass a purity test and renounce self-determination according to a perverse interpretation arbitrarily applied, isn't just an extreme position, it’s a racist one. That’s before we consider the Green party is now backing violent dismantling of Israel.

Today’s vote at the Green Party Conference crosses a line and is rightly being condemned across the political spectrum. Labour will continue working to ensure Jewish communities are safe and have their rights upheld. We must rid our society of the scourge of antisemitism.

This is touching the north border with russia… Belgorod oblast. 🫡🫡🫡🫡💙💛

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57 years ago

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BREAKING: Bridget Phillipson responds on behalf of Labour to the racist and antisemitic motion today. It’s strong and she doesn’t mince her words to be fair. Bridget Phillipson MP, Chair of the Labour Party, and Minister for Women and Equalities, responds to the Green Party’s vote on Zionism at the Green Party Conference, said:   “It is shameful to vote against a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine and to condemn the vast majority of British Jews and Jews around the world as racist for supporting Israel’s right to exist. It is fundamentally wrong and the leadership of the Green Party must make clear that this will not be their position moving forwards.   “The Labour Party has always been clear that criticism of the policies of the Israeli Government is not antisemitic, and the Labour government has condemned Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank. But today’s vote at the Green Party Conference crosses a line and should be condemned across the political spectrum.   “This vote underlines how important it was that we changed the Labour Party from top to bottom and ripped out the scourge of antisemitism from within the party.    "The Labour Party and the Labour Government will continue working every day to ensure our Jewish communities are safe, feel safe and have their rights upheld, as well as making sure we rid our society of antisemitism once and for all.”

Polanski can’t continue to hide from the cesspit of his party’s conference decision. Cowardice not leadership.

Pippa Crerar @PippaCrerar

a day ago

Greens have issued an updated statement to include Zack Polanski (who didn't vote), his deputy Rachel Millward (who voted against) and - presumably, though bizarrely - co-deputy Mothin Ali (who voted for). The statement feels like an attempt to disassociate - or at least

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Labour chair Bridget Phillipson: "It is shameful to vote against a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine and to condemn the vast majority of British Jews and Jews around the world as racist for supporting Israel’s right to exist." huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/greens-b…

In 1980, I was among the anti-authoritarian leftists who cofounded the world's first Green Party in Germany + became their president for 4 yrs. We could never have imagined that there would be an antisemitic Green Party in the UK. I despise jew-haters. They are preparing pogroms.

Hen Mazzig @HenMazzig

a day ago

BREAKING: The UK’s Green Party has officially voted to declare that "Zionism is racism" with 1022 voting yes and 813 voting no. This means that every British person who doesn’t support the destruction of the Jewish nation is going to be considered racist. This is not 1930.

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Do you own a mobile phone? Then you’re paying the ‘app tax’. It’s a racket and it’s time the UK faced Apple and Google down, to ensure real competition in the aps we all love. My piece for @guardian theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

🚨 This is the statistic Britain should be talking about 👏 @dsmitheconomics Real GDP per head has risen just 9% in 18 years. In the previous 18 years, it rose 43%. Brexit did not cause the whole of Britain’s growth problem 👉 the financial crisis came first. But we responded with damaging austerity and then chose to erect new barriers with our largest neighbouring market precisely when our economy could least afford another structural shock. Now we are paying the price for years of weak investment, weak productivity and strategic complacency. You don’t fix a growth crisis with austerity and by making trade harder.

California’s 5% billionaire wealth tax is THE most important ballot initiative in the country. At a time of massive income and wealth inequality, the billionaire class must start paying their fair share of taxes.

For the Tories to have a hope of recovery they need to pivot on Brexit and climate change. It isn’t tenable to continue to support isolation from European allies - in trade, defence, energy and more, nor to continue to deny the climate emergency, and expect public backing.

Gavin Barwell @GavinBarwell

2 days ago

The Conservative Party cannot claim it is the pro-business party and simultaneously opposed *any* attempt to reduce barriers to trade with our nearest neighbours. This is anti-business policy It is also out of touch with the views of many Conservative voters

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Arguing that "consciousness arises from a computational substrate, and since AI models are computation, they are likely conscious," is as meaningless as arguing that "living creatures are made of atoms, and since this rock is made of atoms, it is likely alive." Everything is computation. Sometimes incredibly sophisticated computation, like a chess engine, AlphaGo, google3, or the Linux kernel. That does not make it conscious. A rock being made of atoms does not confer it any of the properties we associate with living things, also made of atoms. Likewise a static input-output program that has *none* of the properties we associate with conscious beings (e.g. information integration, interoception, temporal binding, embodiment, etc.) has no more reason to be presumed conscious than a rock has to be presumed alive. Humanity has not yet created a conscious computer program, and there are no signs we are close to doing so. When we get close, the case for machine consciousness will be backed by evidence and corroborated by consciousness science (which is a thing), not by evidence-free wishful thinking and cargo culting.

🚨 Diesel has exposed the problem. Gas could prove how deep it really is. Britain spent decades inside highly integrated European energy markets while running down spare domestic capacity. We then left part of that European architecture without rebuilding enough national storage, refining or resilience to replace it. Now we are discovering what that means in a world of war, disrupted shipping and increasingly transactional trade policy. Diesel, gas, fertiliser and food are not separate problems. They are parts of the same national resilience system. Gas is not just about heating homes. Gas makes ammonia. Ammonia makes nitrogen fertiliser. And synthetic nitrogen fertiliser supports roughly half the world’s population. Boris Johnson’s government had an opportunity to help keep the Ince fertiliser plant operating. A consortium sought a bridging loan of up to £10 million to buy it. The government refused, and the plant closed. Britain subsequently became more dependent on imported ammonia and fertiliser. Defra’s own food security assessment records that domestic ammonia production was permanently closed and that the UK now imports both finished fertiliser and raw materials to meet demand. That dependence matters far more when gas markets, shipping routes and geopolitics are unstable. If gas supply becomes insecure, fertiliser becomes vulnerable. If fertiliser becomes vulnerable, food production becomes vulnerable. You cannot call yourself sovereign if your essential supplies depend on somebody else always being willing and able to sell them to you. Food security. Energy security. Fertiliser security. They are one national security problem.

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Liz Webster @LizWebsterSBF

2 days ago

🚨 Sky News @danwnews came to the farm to look at what the diesel crisis means in the real world. Farming is completely dependent on fuel 👉and when diesel prices surge, farms and hauliers feel it first and those costs then work their way through the food system. ‼️ But there

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Intelligence is a system that receives input from the world and uses the laws of physics to calculate the best way to change the system to ensure the continued survival of the system. This feedback loop of encountering input and using the universe to calculate an updated state is what we call learning. When I make a specific sound in the kitchen—the crinkling of a cheese wrapper—my dog will immediately come running based on a calculation derived from a tiny change of air pressure that reaches her ears. The air pressure is converted through movements in hair cells to voltages that trigger chemical reactions in neurons which spike a signal to the motor cortex which cause her to come begging. If I give her cheese, this reinforces the neural pathways by physically changing the cells to be more receptive to this sequence. None of this is calculated. None of it is digital. There is no separation of memory and processing. There is no separation of hardware and software. She doesn’t update a hard drive. She is a physical system using the laws of the universe to change herself in a way that improves her chances of continuing to exist as a system. That’s incredibly intelligent. Digital computers can’t do this. Ever. They ignore the best computer ever created—the laws of physics—to recreate a crude simulation of physical laws which only does arithmetic on a set of 1s and 0s. Digital AI cannot learn from the world or experience it because they are not in it. They are patterns of bits recycled from the detritus of mankind—pushed through silicon by sheer brute force. The future of AI is intelligent matter—neuromorphics, memristors, and photonics. AGI will emerge from technologies which can actually learn and use physics to calculate new directions. It will not come from our old ideas, digitized and sold back to us as slop. Remember this post. GPUs, transformers, and LLMs are a dead end. They are not answering the right question. The correct question is not “how do we best simulate what intelligence produces?” The correct question is “how do we configure the right set of physical matter in which intelligence will arise as a result of the laws of the universe?”

Finally, not only are Burnham’s Europe instincts right — the public is warm for Rejoin and this is the key to uniting the Left. But they agree on the implicit part of his strategy — half the country wants an election within a year. Britain is ready for a snap election.

Worth digging into this megapoll to see just what a validation the findings are of Burham’s approach to Europe. This is a thread of what I felt were the key findings on Europe.

Language is not fundamental to human consciousness. In terms of evolution, it arrived only recently on our timeline. Consciousness evolved over millions of years through sensory awareness, emotion, and the embodied survival instincts of our tribal past; our capacity for empathic engagement and community. Syntactic language only emerged around 100,000 years ago. This is exactly why Large Language Models (LLMs - so called AI) are the wrong pathway to true artificial consciousness. They try to replicate the late-stage "output layer" of human intelligence without building the foundational, embodied awareness that actually generates it. Statistical text prediction is a mirror of thought, not the spine, the guts, the nerves and the subconscious, empathic ability to connect with other living beings. LLMs can never feel, let alone think. We have been sold a trick, not a pathway to superintelligence. LLMs are fraudulent. Their capabilities have already peaked and we are being sold lies about their future potential. Lies with the goal of companies reaching IPO and tricking investors out of hundreds of billion$.