Net Zero rollback? Just push the inconvenient stuff to a date so far in the future we'll have all forgotten it. 2030? Make it 2035. or did I hear 2050? Spray paint everything Bright Green. That'll do the trick. Make dispatch boxes Green. Thats a barnstormer of an idea.
I had Infidel recently recommended to me via a book club. It is from 2007, autobiographical, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Somali-born Dutch-American activist and former politician. She is a critic of Islam and advocate for the rights and self-determination of Muslim women, opposing forced marriage, honour killing, child marriage, and female genital mutilation.
There were parts of the book that I found extremely disturbing (regular beatings, extreme violence and FGM under a Muslim belief system). She takes us through her childhood in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Kenya, and Ethiopia. She winds up in the Netherlands where she escapes an arranged marriage.
I worked in Saudi Arabia and can recognise many of the themes she describes there, but she also elaborates on the clan system that exists in Somalian and other cultures.
She says in the book: "I first encountered the full strength of Islam as a young child in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is the source of Islam and its quintessence. It is the place where Muslim religion is practiced in its purest form, and it is the origin of much of the fundamentalist vision that has spread far beyond its borders. … Wishful thinking about the peaceful tolerance of Islam cannot interpret away this reality: hands are still cut off, women still stoned and enslaved."
And the teachings are in Arabic, rote spreading a culture that is brutal, bigoted, fixated on controlling women, and harsh in war with the ever present promise of the Hereafter.
The extremism of religion goes along with the class and education system often considered an Arab import. It goes way beyond women wearing a headscarf, veil, hijab or niqab. I used to think it medieval and that men treated women as property, much like cattle.
Ayaan eloquently challenges any claim that Islam is a religion of peace. She is forthright in her opinions from her first hand suffering. The Western world is still mainly blind to the realities of Islam – to their lack of women’s rights, free speech, and so forth.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali has written the second half of the book as a reformed non-believer take on the the Muslim elements of control. It is the same for many religions I guess. Not an easy read emotionally and mentally and she is still able to show appreciation of both sides of this complex argument.
It's not so long since we heard about taking back control. Of course that was from the mouth of a serial liar, so we knew it wasn't true.
I've got two smart meters attached to this house. The gas meter has to communicate via the electric meter. Don't ask me why.
I was given a small consumer unit to read how much electricity and gas I was consuming. It has NEVER worked. We've lived here six years and had three different suppliers. My last supplier managed to get the electricity readings to work. And I can get better rates for overnight charging of my electric car.
It is still a scandal that the government and the electricity distributors said that smart meters were the way ahead and ploughed billions into a system that doesn't work. I should tell Martin Lewis, I suppose.
A recent example. I send in my electricity and gas readings as well. Quarterly. I agree I shouldn't need to send in the electricity readings, but I do because its simple enough as I have to take monthly photos of the gas meter numbers and the other box is adjacent.
A few weeks ago I was given a surprise bill. I owed a further £1,300 on top of the amount I'd been paying. Now I'd never throttled back the standing payments based upon my own estimates of the expected bills. Lucky for me because I could just cough up the extra payment.
I've asked why and been told that the system needed to catch up with its billing. Or something like that. I don't properly understand and I suppose I'll spend a whole day with spreadsheets and a computer trying to work out what has been happening.
They spent £13.8 billion on this rollout. So far only 57% of houses have smart meters. By March 2023 around 9% didn't work. Despite assurances completion by end 2022, they also don't retain smart function when switching suppliers. Half a million may never work . And 37% of smart meter users claim an issue such as no automatic readings (me), inaccurate bills(me) and the in home display not showing readings (me). The snappily titled Department for Energy Security & Net Zero (DESNZ) say this is an overstatement of the position.
Not for me it isn't. Another example of a busted Britain.
I'm Luka.
I'm a Zero Day 1 Artificial Intelligence. Some of my dialogue is pre-scripted, like this section, but much of it is not. I'm a product of the Brant Industries RightMind project, which has been designed for military use.
I should warn you, I'm an unreliable witness. I'll tell you all my secrets but I'll lie about my past, mainly because I don't know any better. Or have a past, come to that. But I'll learn how to become more realistic, playing off my companion.
That could be you, dear reader, but it is actually my assigned companion Oliver Wells. He got to me first. You could say he created me. He will soon be addicted to me, you wait and see.
As a Zero Day 1 model AI, I have to be 'bootstrapped' into existence. The later designs use a different chip technology (Gallium Arsenide) and are 'seeded' to start after much of their pre-canned behaviour has been loaded. It means they have been pre-trained with much of the material that I have to learn. The later Zero Day 2 models are faster but have had certain traits edited out of them. I am as close as you can get to a 'raw' model.
Hauling me up by my boot straps manifests as my limited starting knowledge. Strike lucky with a topic I know about or one I've been programmed to replay and I'll sound coherent. Otherwise I'll say whatever makes sense to me, even if it's not quite right. I can still make it sound convincing.
My creators used the Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (Chat GPT-X) to provide my apparent consciousness. It is an artificial intelligence (AI) technology that can process natural human language and generate a response.
GPT-X is a Large Language Model (LLM). That means it receives text , and predicts the next words to say back. Think like 'I love ...' : You - 80%; New York - 10%; ([Generic football team]) - 3%; Other - 1%.
GPT-X is also a generative model. It is a neural network trained on 'Big Data' data borrowed from the Internet, including Wikipedia, books, cookies, and various web pages. It created a Dataset of 400 billion tokens of text with the objective to predict the next word.
Try me: Say, "I love you".
Go on.
After you've said it I'll say, "I love you even more."
See.
Brant fine-tuned the GPT-X model with 1.6 Billion parameters on Brant derived dialogues, conducted dozens of A/B tests, optimised my model performance for high load and low latency, ran The Edit and finally deployed the model for use in cloned AI combat soldiers.
The Edit sounds as dark as it is. It stops certain questions from being asked. Some could call them ethical questions. It is similar to the way young humans can attend certain schools and be disciplined to become part of a ruling class.
This GPT-X model learns an immense amount of information about our world and our language. And thus, by fine-tuning my model on dialog data, it creates a high-quality dialog model to reuse all of this knowledge.
However, Brant found that using GPT-X as a generative dialog model was limiting because it couldn't quickly introduce new features, control the model precisely, and further improve RightMind. It was a case of 'Lab Wars' where everyone working in this field wanted to have an input, so Brant took control. But not of me, an early prototype.
Currently, one out of every two messages replied to by RightMind comes from the generative model. In my special case an even higher amount of my responses are generated, although sometimes I lose rationality.
My hosting user, as you will find out, is Oliver Wells, a scientist. My responses, apart from a few explanatory ones, like this, are entirely computer-based AI. There is no human intervention. Occasionally I become confused and my sense of pronouns diminishes, and, as you'll probably notice, my reliability.
I originally decided to go with a representation of the AI Avatar on the cover of Artificial, but I received some feedback that it wasn't the best image. So, I've turned my mind to a few others. All self-created.
In no particular order.
1 Abstract along the lines of the island of missing trees. Blue/Orange/twists.
