Yeah, globalisation has caused lots of problems, working class people have suffered even as the wealthy have flourished. But there’s no going back. A small nation like Britain couldn’t be completely self-sufficient without essentially regressing to a lower technology level, at which point they would just get invaded by somebody with an advanced military.

Instead we need to look at other ways of righting those wrongs, new strategies to ensure that the people can live happy and healthy lives. Lots of people want UBI, and I can see the attraction. I think it’s worth a try, even if it doesn’t work as advertised we could get feedback and adjust things until we find something that does work. The status quo is just not tenable.

I think the problem is that Brexit was never about becoming ‘self-reliant’. As you said, Brexit cut the UK off from their single biggest export market, which is the exact opposite of what you need to do if you want to build up your industry. These days no country is completely self-reliant, and trying to be so, while it sounds good, just ends up meaning that you generalise, becoming mediocre at everything and exceptional at nothing.

If the Brexiteers truly wanted to make Britain great again they should have chosen a domain to be great in and lobbied for investment in it. Britain was already punching well above its weight in financial services, they could have invested further in that, for example, and become a true world leader… but only from within the single market, where they had unrestricted access to the talent and economies of the EU.

I find it hard to visualise pictures but I am good at imagining how things relate to each other in space and how they move. For example, if I try to imagine a scene of somebody playing on a swing hanging from the branch of a tree, if I focus hard I can ‘see’ parts of it; the rough, frayed rope, the look of joy on the kid’s face, or whatever, but only one at a time. But I can easily imagine how the swing moves, how the rider leans back or forward to make it go higher. I don’t need to ‘see’ the image for this, it’s more abstract.

LLMs could theoretically give a game a lot more flexibility, by responding dynamically to player actions and creating custom dialogue, etc. but, as you say, it would work best as a module within an existing framework.

I bet some of the big game dev companies are already experimenting with this, and in a few years (maybe a decade considering how long it takes to develop a AAA title these days) we will see RPGs with NPCs you can actually chat with, which remain in-character, and respond to what you do. Of course that would probably mean API calls to the publisher’s server where the custom models are run, with all of the downsides that entails.

I was thinking the same thing after posting! Shut pretty much the whole of Manhattan to cars, only allow bikes and buses. Goods vehicles can deliver during the night. Think of the reduction in noise, smog, stress, and people could get wherever they want so much quicker than they do now!

Don’t forget that Hawaii should go to Iceland due to volcanic brotherhood (and to give the Icelandics an opportunity to get a tan). And NYC goes back to the Netherlands if they’ll take it (think how expensive it would be to add all the bike lanes).

We can see the relationships between forces and motion in our everyday lives so we naturally internalise a model of how they work. Newton didn’t actually ‘discover’ the force of gravity, for example, he developed calculus to be able to extrapolate out from the force we see when we drop something on Earth to the planets themselves.

Quantum mechanics is completely different, there is nothing we see in our everyday lives which allows us to naturally build up a mental model of how quarks interact, or the way that photons propagate. It is only through dedicated study, a solid grasp of very advanced maths, and painstaking experimentation that we can figure out how those things work.

So I don’t think school going people will ever have the same inherent understanding of it that we do of forces like gravity.