Was listening to Radio 4 on the way in, Nick Clegg being asked about Meta’s ML Language Model and… I can’t believe I agreed with Clegg throughout 🤮
The correct phrasing is “I agree with Nick”, thank you.
Is it worth digging up on the iPlayer? What sort of time was it?
It was around ~8:20. I don’t know if I’d say it’s worth listening to, but it’s refreshing to hear someone working with AI/ML talk realistically about what they’re presenting to the world - as opposed to bigging it up for investors or deriding it as a plague onto the world. Cleggers was simply talking about how LLAMA (their new ML system) is practically glorified auto-fill, and discussed the merits around open-sourcing ML stuff in the industry.
So catching up on yesterday’s goings on and have the Tories just given up on any semblance of representing normal people and not absolute nutters now?
Jenkyns tweeting in support of possible sexual predator Wooton and the PM wading into the Farage banking story. What is happening?
I’m trying to get my workplace unionised, but I have this one colleague who keeps insisting that Unite has shareholders and the biggest shareholder is Blackrock and Vanguard and it’s all a plot, etc etc. I was like ??? Unions have shareholders now?
So I did a bit of searching and it seems he came across a website about a private real estate company that’s also called Unite who does indeed have shares owned by Blackrock and Vanguard.
I’m not going mad, am I? Unions don’t have investors and shareholders, do they? He really did conflate this separate company with the union? I just need to put his conspiracy theory to bed so I can try to get our place unionised.
No, they’re either a doughnut or being disengenuious due to their political beliefs regarding unions. Unions funding all comes from the dues they receive, they’re only as powerful as their members let them be.
Just seen the council I work for, in greater London, is adding emissions based parking charges soon in addition to the ULEZ.
Glad I don’t work for the parking team as they’re going to have some of the worst kind of people calling up to whinge about that, lol.
On top of the ULEZ? That does feel rough, is it actually double-dipping or is it entirely complementary to the ULEZ?
Well the ULEZ money goes to the GLA and this will go to the local council so it’s more two different parties dipping than double dipping.
I’m not a big fan of that. End result for the citizens is that you’ve got one bit of local government stinging you in one spot and another bit of local government getting you on top. Given there’s nothing stopping another London council from putting in place another ULEZ-adjacent levy, it’s going to make driving into London confusing as fuck. I’d rather the ULEZ charge was just higher. Better a single centralised cost. Yeah, your colleagues are going to be getting some very angry phone calls.
I mean, I assume the goal is to stop driving in and around London being an option bar the essential journeys.
Is this lemmy affiliated with the subreddit?
None affiliated. No mods here are Reddit mods, we’re just a community, some of whom have evacuated Reddit, wanting to discuss UK politics. The megathread is here to make us /r/ukpol types feel at home.
Alright so there’s no fash mods here yet then? Any future plans for that?
I ask because I mod /r/greenandpleasant and our experience with the ukpolitics modteam was that they made excuses for multiple fascists existing on the team in the name of “diverse representation of the UK political spectrum”, which was bullshit because they also refused to have any marxists on the modteam.
The unbiased space it presented itself as it was not, and the left on the site boycotted it accordingly outside of election periods lending a considerably right lean to it.
I’m not averse to engaging in a space that genuinely seeks to engage all corners of our country’s politics in good faith.
Definitely a few mods I don’t miss from /r/ukpol!
Yeah, as a former ukpol regular I am aware of the problematic nature of some of the moderation there. The following is all my personal thoughts (@NuPNuA may chime in, neither of us are particularly dictatorial in how this place is run but we haven’t disagreed yet) but hopefully gives you the gist of what I hope the community will be.
- Because of the small size of this community right now, moderation is very light touch. Lemmy gives you the tools to block and hide threads as you see fit so mods right now are for clearing spam and stickying mega threads and not much else. That would only need to be reviewed if and when the community gets to a much more significant size.
- Because of 1), additional mods would only be appointed if there was a need. If a Reddit ukpol mod came to this board, they’re quite welcome, but they would not be given mod permissions just because they had them on Reddit. If we decide there’s more mods required, we’ll have an open discussion with the community about filling that need.
- That said, and I am about to go all centrist dad here, I personally am as uninterested in moderating a hard left community as I am in moderating a hard right community. Lemmy has no shortage of hard left spaces already (including, I believe, an /r/greenandpleasant spinoff) and this will not be one of them as long as I am a mod. Right now we don’t have any real rules (woo yay anarchy) because we haven’t needed to get strict with anyone. If this place starts getting filled up with soapboxing, hate speech, any kind of *-phobist behaviour, or generally becoming an unpleasant place for me to discuss my tedious centrist views, I will push for us to have rules and for them to be enforced.
If I had to articulate what I’m after, it’s a BBC / Guardian / Financial Times comments section with shitposting and more political nerdery and without the spEak You’re bRanes brigade.
I’m the same here, the goal is not for this to lean in anyone direction but for people to discuss and debate and even argue as long as it’s respectful. I’ve already made the mistake of wondering into the Lemmy.ml and Behaw news communities and angered the tankies and I don’t want that here.
Oh I have another question.
Are unions politics?
Yes, I’d say so.
Is there really any need to import stupid school playground drama from reddit?
No. No, there is not :)
I kind of want Optivo to turn up and rant about Corbyn just so I can ban him for a laugh. Lol.
You are expecting us not to do politics in political communities?
You’re keen to do “factions” (your word).
That’s not politics. That’s the problem with politics.
The “i don’t want factions” faction is as much a faction as all the others. Would you prefer I not say the word faction? Would you prefer the word ideology? Everyone has an ideology, whether they are aware of it or not. These ideologies result in political factions. The core ideological factions of the UK are the socialists, the neoliberals and the fascists. There used too be a faction between the neoliberals and the fascists but they basically collapsed with David Cameron followed by Brexit.
These groupings exist because they have irreconcilable differences in ideology. Socialists want to abolish private property whereas the other factions do not. The fascists (or at least part of them, complexity occurs here) want an anglo ethnostate and to stamp on the neck of the workers with hierarchical power while the other factions do not. The difference between ideologies is that create factions is in the policy beliefs where there is no middle-ground, where things become irreconcilable. There is no middle ground between the existence of private property and not. There is no middle ground between an anglo ethnostate and not.
If you believe in property and I do not we are naturally going to be in opposing factions. How do you propose eliminating that? Trying to claim this is a problem only because of people who acknowledge the factions exist is just refusing to accept the real differences that create them.
The “i don’t want factions” faction
Which you’ve just invented. No such animal exists unless you insist on comprehending the world in absolutes. It’s an unhelpful choice.
irreconcilable differences in ideology
There are none. When you choose an ideology that claims there are, then you are de facto giving up on politics in favour of fighting.
The reason we as a species gradually invented politics over the last five or ten thousand years is precisely to reconcile differences of opinion that would otherwise lead to conflict. A refusal to partake in it would be base barbarism, in my estimation.
I’ll be honest, I noticed that in my last few months of using the UK Pol on Reddit that the mod team seemed to lean in a particular direction politics wise. I realised after reporting transphobia a few times it was actually comeing from a few of them.
I’m happy to allow all sides here as long as it’s respectful. I’m not going to give much truck to right leaning ideas myself but nothing is banned.
I’ll be honest, I noticed that in my last few months of using the UK Pol on Reddit that the mod team seemed to lean in a particular direction politics wise.
I’m glad it’s at least become visible. It was quite hard to see it at one point because there was still some participation occurring from the soft-left. We did an awfully large amount of work at gap to create conditions that make it more visible.
The biggest problem on reddit is that subreddit moderation is a black box. It is extremely easy as moderators to moderate along ideological lines and hide that from the userbase, I say that because we moderate ideologically in many subreddits and it’s completely hidden. Not because we want it to be hidden of course (I am happy to speak openly about it) but because that is just how it is on reddit. It’s impossible to make it clear or visible that it’s happening and you can’t actively inform the userbase of a community who are unaware of it from within that community when the modteam is actively suppressing it.
A few times we tried to address this with r/ukpol, even explicitly offering to have marxists join the modteam for more balance and to represent the 33% or so of the UK that isn’t currently represented there. This was rejected most likely because it would have given access to the history of their moderation, automod rules, etc etc and made clear just how bad it is. 3 or 4 times we went through the motions of trying to achieve this kind of thing and it ended up being wasted effort every time.
