Some British women now find themselves in a Kafkaesque situation where the UK home office refuses to renew or grant them a UK passport, because their foreign passport is under a different name. (Greece and Spain are mentioned in [1], but I know people in France affected by this)
Where previously these women could at least travel to their birth country to visit dying relatives on their foreign passport, they are now locked out waiting two months for a £600 entitlement certificate. Meanwhile, non-British visitors can just pay £16 for an ETA on this whizzy app.
While this is a real problem and I do have relative who had this issue like this there are ways to get new UK passport without paying £600 or changing legal name in other country.
It's just take digging in government rules and arguing. As long as it's not the first UK passport it's doable.
My friend went round and round and sent many documents back and forth for over a year trying to renew her British passport, to no eventual avail. UK authorities were extremely unsympathetic and unhelpful. The offending "misnamed" foreign passport was long expired and French authorities required a valid British passport to renew it - she was left without any passport at all for over a year, until the French took pity and provided an alternate path to renew her French passport.
Hey. I will ask how exactly it was solved and try to reply here in a day or two. My relative is woman so problem was that she had her original name in a passport from country of origin and UK passport had her name after marriage.
CVSS 8.8 (High) | Actively Exploited in the Wild | Renderer RCE (Sandboxed)
A use-after-free vulnerability in Google Chrome's Blink CSS engine that allows a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code inside the browser sandbox via a crafted HTML page.
I'm not on a vulnerable user, but I'd prefer not to run RCE's on web pages I'm browsing which aren't presented as containing the RCE, even if they are doing it to notify me of the vuln.
"Is Claude Code junk food, though? ... although I have barely written a line of code on my own, the cognitive work of learning the architecture — developing a new epistemological framework for “how developers think” — feels real."
Might this also apply to learning about writing? If have barely written a line of prose on my own, but spent a year generating a large corpus of it aided by these fabulous machines, might I also come to understand "how writers think"?
I love the later description of writing as a "special, irreplaceable form of thinking forged from solitary perception and [enormous amounts of] labor", where “style isn’t something you apply later; it’s embedded in your perception" (according to Amis). Could such a statement ever apply to something as crass as software development?
I haven't heard writers make any kind of stance on software engineering, but Brandon Sanderson has very publicly renounced AI writing because it lacks any kind of authentic journey of an authors own writing. Just as we would cringe at our first software projects, he cringes at his first published novel.
I think that's a reasonable argument to make against generative art in any form.
However, he does celebrate LLM advancements in health and accessibility, and I've seen most "AI haters" handwave away its use there. It's a weird dissonance to me too that its use is perfectly okay if it helps your grandparents live a longer, and higher quality of life, but not okay if your grandparents use that longer life to use AI-assisted writing to write a novel that Brandon would want to read.
a lot of artists don't mind use AI for art outside their field
I was in a fashion show in tokyo in 2024.
i noticed their fashion was all human designed. but they had a lot of posters, video, and music that was AI generated.
I point blank asked the curator why he used AI for some stuff but didn't enhance the fashion with AI. I was a bit naive because I was actually curious to see if AI wasn't ready for fashion or maybe they were going for an aesthetic. I genuinely was trying to learn and not point out a hypocrisy.
he got mad and didn't answer. i guess it is because they didn't want to pay for everything else. big lesson learned in what to ask lol.
Art has two facets. First is if you like it. If you do, you don't need to care where it came from. Second is the art as cultured and defined by the artistic elites. They don't care if art is liked or likable, they care about the pedigree, i.e. where it came from, and that it fits what they consider worthy art. Between these two is what I call filler art: stuff that's rather indifferent and not very notable, but often crosses over some minimum bar that it's accepted by, and maybe popular among average people who aren't that seriously interested in art.
In the first category, AI is no problem. If you enjoy what you see or hear, it doesn't make a difference if it was created by which kind of artist or AI. In the second category, for the elite, AI art is no less unacceptable than current popular art or, for that matter, anything at all that doesn't fit their own definition of real art. Makes no difference. Then the filler art.. the bar there is not very high but it will likely improve with AI. It's nothing that's been seriously invested in so far, and it's cheaper to let AI create it rather than poorly paid people.
Commercial art has literally nothing to do with art, and everything to do with commerce. Art is not stored in freeport bunkers and used as collateral for loans.
All art aspires to the condition of music. It evokes an emotional reaction. If it does that, it doesn't matter where it came from.
> If it does that, it doesn't matter where it came from.
Personally, it matters to me quite a lot where art comes from, especially music. I have a hard time "separating the art from the artist". If I find out a musician is a creep/abuser/rapist, I can't enjoy their music anymore.
This belief obviously isn't widespread given artists like Michael Jackson, Chris Brown, R. Kelly, and Jimmy Page are still wildly popular. But I assume I'm not alone in this.
As for AI music, it's hard for me to imagine an "AI Musician" ever becoming very popular because I reckon most humans want some human-ness in their music. And I think if an existing artist ever put out AI music as their own, they'd lose some fans pretty quickly.
No, fair point. I'm the same, I can't enjoy the music if I know the artist is not a good person. Though I do think this gets taken too far; I can enjoy Pink Floyd even though I have huge disagreements with Roger Waters' politics.
I'm not sure I could tell the difference between AI and human music already. In a few years I'm pretty sure I couldn't. This is the bit where I'm not sure it matters. I mostly listen to music for the nostalgic emotions now anyway.
My dude, there is no artistic elite deciding what art is. I think you just don't understand the critiques around this topic, and so it sounds like snobbery ("real art") to you
Thank you, this sort of insight is exactly why I've felt such kinship with what software engineers like Karpathy and Simon Willison have been writing lately. It seems obvious to me that there is something special and irreplaceable about the thought processes that create good code.
However, I think there is also something qualitatively different about how work is done in these two domains.
Example: refactoring a codebase is not really analogous to revising a nonfiction book, even though they both involve rewriting of a sort. Even before AI, the former used far more tooling and automated processes. There is, e.g., no ESLint for prose which can tell you which sentences are going to fail to "compile" (i.e., fail to make sense to a reader).
The special taste or skillset of a programmer seems to me to involve systems thinking and tool use in a different way than the special taste of a writer, which is more about transmuting personal life experiences and tacit knowledge into words, even if tools (word processor) and systems (editors, informants, primary sources) are used along the way.
Sort of half formed ideas here but I find this a really rich vein of thought to work through. And one of the points of my post is that writing is about thinking in public and with a readership. Many thanks for helping me do that.
I don't have a good answer to your question, but I do think it might be comparable, yes. If you had good taste about what to get Opus 4.6 to write, and kept iterating on it in a way that exposes the results to public view, I think you'd definitely develop a more fine grained sense of the epistemological perspective of a writer. But you wouldn't be one any more than I'm a software developer just because I've had Claude Code make a lot of GitHub commits lately (if anyone's interested: https://github.com/benjaminbreen).
> Could such a statement ever apply to something as crass as software development?
Absolutely. I think like a Python programmer, a very specific kind of Python programmer after a decade of hard lessons from misusing the freedom it gives you in just about every way possible.
I carry that with me in how I approach C++ and other languages. And then I learned some hard lessons in C++ that informed my Python.
The tools you have available definitely inform how you think. As your thinking evolves, so does your own style. It's not just the tool, mind, but also the kinds of things you use it for.
While "jab" is used almost universally across UK print and broadcast media to describe an injection, it's interesting to note the choice of accompanying adjective.
The Sun, The Telegraph, Daily Mail and The Times love to use "fat jab".
The BBC, The Guardian and The Mirror seem to prefer "slimming jab" or "weight-loss jab".
It is just the usual vice vs. virtue approach to things where 'the right' tends to point at vices which are in need of curtailing while 'the left' points at the virtue in those turning away from such vices. This also relates closely to 'the right' tending to voice support for punishing those who commit vices in some way while 'the left' voices support for rewarding those who turn away from committing them. Deeper down it points down to the preference for personal agency and responsibility on 'the right' versus collective responsibility and a related lack of personal agency on 'the left'.
Good question! I read two different Amazon press releases on this but still had to come here for the answer. It seems strange they don't want to advertise the ISA of a compute product - does marketing think it might scare people away?
It seems they don't document the ISA for any instance types. This could be deliberate (and unrelated to marketing) in case they decide to pull features from the instance types in a microcode update. Without any ISA specifics, previous customer commitments towards instance types would still apply.
The part under “Performance specifications“? That's not really a commitment to functionality, especially since there is no vendor specification (ISA reference manual) for many of those model names given. Intel even published a FAQ about missing specifications: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000...
Edinburgh Airport is also down, suspending all flights after an "IT issue with our air traffic control provider". Not sure if this is coincidental, but the timing is rather suspicious!
Not a safety-critical system but I know passenger information screens in at least some airports are just full-screen browsers displaying a SaaS-hosted webpage.
Annoyingly I wanted to fly a parcel from Edinburgh up to Stornoway, but it's looking like I'd be quicker driving the seven hours up to the ferry terminal myself.
