>Farage campaigned against non-white immigration, fuelling the Brexit movement which was predicted to increase non-white immigration.
Nobody in office wanted to enforce what Brexit was voted for. They wanted to pay lip service to respecting it, but continue business as usual, or even go worse into the same direction Brexit was voted to get away from.
It's not a Brexit problem (especially since major EU countries have the same issues). It's a "Brexit only in name" problem.
>Even before the AI boom, shouldn't we have a bunch of extra capacity under construction, ready for EV driving, induction stoves and heat-pump heating?
When it comes to the EV, the answer is simple: the EV takeover "by 2030" was 100% wishful thinking - the capacity is nowhere near there, starting from scaling the battery production, never mind the charge capacity.
No, mostly misunderstanding. ~95% of all cars sold in Norway are EV, yet only ~25% of the cars on the road are EV's. Most cars predate the EV transition. It'll take another ~20 years until the 95% of the cars on the road are EV's.
We'll have the battery capacity and charge capacity to allow 100% of cars sold in 2030 to be EV's. We only need 2 capacity doublings for batteries, and currently doublings happen every ~18 months. Charge capacity is even easier, we just need to increase electricity production by 1-2% per year for a couple decades to support the transition to EV's.
>No, mostly misunderstanding. ~95% of all cars sold in Norway are EV, yet only ~25% of the cars on the road are EV's
Norway is a tiny market which had big artificial tax/cost incentives to buy an EV. Norway could be 100% EV and it wouldn't make any dent to global adoption.
Norway is a tiny market that is an example of what most Western nations will look like in 2030 or 2035. Despite ~95% of sales being EV, downtown Oslo is still noisy and stinky because the vast majority of cars are still ICE.
Contrast with China -- downtown Shanghai has the vast majority of cars being EV's despite the EV sales rate in China only being ~50%.
Existence of “2030 deadline” was/ is significant factor by itself. (Current sate would be less electrified without that arbitrary and over optimistic fantasy deadline)
That seems irrelevant to the question. If I took your prompt, my response would be "do you suggest we should run on thin margins of transmission capacity while we watch an explosion of demand coming at us?"
If you forecast 100, build 20, and sell 10, you have oversupply for the caving in of demand, but huge lack of supply compared to the never-arriving extrapolated demand
Happens frequently still with GTP 4o (and now 5) and Claude. Makes up "biographies" unrelated to the actual people, gives me bullshit non-existing API options and cli flags, etc.
And then on the rare occasion they do link to a chat, their prompt is something like:
"Tell about a person of history who was important for their work inthe time of their existence and give quotes of what they said that made them important when they were speaking include notes and other stories about them and give details about their life who they married and their kids and who their parents were and other big things they did do in their lives"
It feels so common actually that I would not even bother sharing them. ChatGPT gives me hallucinated URLs all... the... time. Like several times a day. You can fix it by prompting it to Google the subject or research it otherwise it just vomits garbage.
LLMs are not databases, they are text processors that need to be trained on ungodly amounts of data and can sort of kind of double as a database, though a very fallible one. Inject ground truth and you're cooking; don't and it's a crap shoot. (not saying anything new here, but it bears repeating).
P. Give me quotes from Aristophanes describing the Peloponesian war as unfortunate.
A. Yes — Aristophanes, the Athenian comic playwright, lived through almost the entire Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE) and his plays are full of bitter humor about Greeks destroying each other. He often portrays it as an unfortunate, fratricidal conflict.
Here are a few key passages (in translation):
Acharnians (425 BCE)
Written during the war’s early years, it shows a farmer sick of the fighting:
• Dicaeopolis (the main character) laments:
“This war, which has come upon us all, is nothing but Greeks fighting Greeks.”
He later makes a private peace treaty with Sparta for himself, mocking the idea that the wider war must continue when ordinary people suffer.
Peace (421 BCE)
Produced right before the “Peace of Nicias”:
• Trygaeus, the hero, flies up to heaven to free the goddess Peace:
“It is monstrous that Greeks should destroy one another, while barbarians stand by laughing.”
This captures Aristophanes’ view that the war was not only ruinous but also shameful, as it weakened Greece before foreign enemies.
In sum: Aristophanes consistently portrayed the Peloponnesian War as a tragic absurdity — Greeks killing Greeks while the true enemies (Persians/“barbarians”) watched and benefitted. His comedies combine satire with a deep sense that the conflict was fratricidal and unnecessary.
P. You said Dicaeopolis (the main character) laments: “This war, which has come upon us all, is nothing but Greeks fighting Greeks.” Where is that quote?
A. Good catch — let’s pin this down carefully.
In Aristophanes’ Acharnians (425 BCE), the character Dicaeopolis indeed complains that the Peloponnesian War is a fratricidal war among Greeks, but the exact wording depends on the translation.
⸻
Where it appears
• Early in the play (lines ~100–120), Dicaeopolis is waiting for the Assembly to begin. He grumbles about the war, saying essentially that it is:
“A war of Greek against Greek, when we should be standing united against the barbarians.”
⸻
Examples from published translations
• Benjamin Rogers (1924 translation):
“I am heartily tired of these Grecian wars, of Greeks fighting against Greeks.”
• Alan H. Sommerstein (Loeb Classical Library, 2002): (lines 116–118) “It’s not right — Greeks at war with Greeks, while the barbarian looks on, laughing at us.”
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Needless to say, that quote is nowhere in the Acharnians - nor anything roughly equivalent. Not only that, in the later response it attributes to the play "Acharnians" the quote it initially attributed to the play "Peace".
>The way around that is that is for LLM-based tools to run a regular search engine query in the background and feed the results of that in alongside the prompt.
Hardly better, as soon those "search engine results" would be AI slop themselves, including actual published papers (phoned-in by using AI, and "peer reviewed" by using AI from indifferent reviewers)
> I’ve yet to use an LLM that can consistently provide sources that back up what it’s telling me.
Mmmh, that would have been my take as well up to around end of Q1 2025.
Theses days, the flagship LLM's have reduced hallucination by quite a bit, and are also way better at citing sources (you sometimes have to nudge them).
ChatGPT 5 has been very decent on that particular axis.
In my chats with 2.5 Flash it gives me the direct sources lol. Also not going to lie, I've found 2.5 Flash generally gets straight to the point with sources a lot quicker than Pro. To the point I don't really use Pro.
Edit - just used Pro, gave me a direct source. Who knows...
>It's weird how people always complain about lack of easy profile switching in Firefox. If one tells them that what they are really looking for is containers, they dismiss containers, but then proceed to complain that profiles don't have the same features.
I don't see anything weird in people asking for profiles. If anything your suggestion sounds weird.
It's short for "Have them [Node bozos improved it], though?"
Or, equally likely it, refers to deno and bun ("deno and bun has really made Node focus and improve", "Have them (deno and bun) really made Node focus and improve, though?")
Nobody in office wanted to enforce what Brexit was voted for. They wanted to pay lip service to respecting it, but continue business as usual, or even go worse into the same direction Brexit was voted to get away from.
It's not a Brexit problem (especially since major EU countries have the same issues). It's a "Brexit only in name" problem.
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