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All these things happened to me in London today
I paid nearly £30 for a train ticket to take me into London from a town just 30 miles away —on a Saturday
The first person I sat next to, I think from India, decided to have a FaceTime conversation with his friend on speakerphone so we all had to listen to it
The train was late by 40 minutes due to unexplained “signalling issues”. It was also filthy.
I paid nearly £8 for a pint
I offered a woman my seat on the tube without realising she was with a man who intervened and said “no man”. He was not from the UK. I think he took my gesture as an insult.
I was asked for money by homeless people 3 times in one day
I noticed several people who are paid to give information to taxpayers and tourists over the tannoy on the London Tube cannot speak English properly
A cabbie told me “London is dead most nights”, unless you are the global high net worth set or top 1%
Restaurants are visibly struggling and often hideously overpriced
I had dinner in a neighbourhood where the average rent is £3,663 per month while half of all local social housing has gone to people who were not even born in the UK
I was constantly aware I should not get my phone out on the street as 80,000 were stolen last year
I also read on the way back while checking that stat that there were 90,000 shoplifting offences in London last year, up 54%
My train back —delayed—was suddenly changed at the last minute with all passengers on board. They were told it would no longer be stopping at all stops.
I bought a tin of instant coffee on the way home and it had a security tag on it
Maybe I’m in a bad mood and perhaps it’s amusing to think how somebody of my political outlook is “triggered” but to me there is a deeper point here
London is over —it’s so over
It’s a city in visible decline with deteriorating standards and no real sense of identity or belonging
Going in and out of our capital city is a truly miserable experience
Infrastructure is falling apart, as is the social contract
I’ve been coming in and out of London since 1981
I simply cannot remember a time when it’s been this visibly dire and when so many things just do not work as they should
https://x.com/GoodwinMJ/status/1936548371423961173?t=FK_sEE5MElzAbCYNdVRsew&s=19
If you're worried about ticks, put up an owl box.
The animal driving most Lyme disease in the eastern US is the white-footed mouse. Ticks that feed on them are far more likely to come away infected than ticks that feed on other animals. The bigger the local mouse population, the worse the next year's tick year.
A single barred owl pair raising chicks can take hundreds of rodents in a breeding season. Owls also don't carry Lyme. The bacterium can't survive their digestive tract, so an owl that eats an infected mouse is a dead end for the disease.
Researchers at the Cary Institute, the leading lab on Lyme ecology, have been explicit about this: "Landscapes that support predators have reduced Lyme disease risk."
One owl box on its own isn't going to fix a tick year. But a yard with owls, foxes, bobcats, and weasels in it has fewer mice, and a yard with fewer mice has fewer infected ticks.
If you have woods or fields nearby, a properly sized barn owl or screech owl box (different species, different ...
Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.
You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement.
I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.
But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.
Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to ...
Tonight, while you're asleep, several hundred million birds will fly over the United States in the dark. Most of them will pass directly over your house, a few thousand feet up.
More than 80% of North America's migratory birds travel at night. Warblers, thrushes, orioles, tanagers, sparrows. Birds that weigh as much as a few coins, crossing a continent between sunset and sunrise, navigating by stars and by the earth's magnetic field.
Mid-September through early October is the peak. On the biggest night ever recorded, radar picked up 1.25 billion birds aloft over the US at once.
And there's one thing standing in their way that you personally control: your lights.
Artificial light pulls night-migrating birds off course from as far as three miles away. Once they're drawn in, they circle the lit area, over and over, burning fuel they can't spare, until they either drop from exhaustion or hit glass. It's worst on low, foggy nights, when birds fly closer to the ground and the light bounces off the cloud ...
