Jon Skeet

Now that my commute includes the Elizabeth Line, the Bakerloo line feels hopelessly outdated. On the plus side, the reason for travelling on it is to see Hadestown again. (And maybe Beetlejuice tonight...)

Rewatching the last episode of The Diplomat S3 in preparation for S4. I'd forgotten how wonderful it is to see Allison Janey and Bradley Whitford together. (Whole cast is phenomenal of course, but only those two take me back 25+ years...)

Separately to my other thread about the Reform donations, I don't hear much talk about genuine dilemmas around party donations. There was some discussion about what's legal on Newscast yesterday, but I it's worth thinking of the donor perspective, not just the ultra-wealthy, and not just politics.

As an example of where I suspect this has been happening outside politics, my guess is that over the last few years since Methodism has started allowing individual churches to celebrate same-sex marriage, there have been large donors who disagree with their local church's policy.

Separately to my other thread about the Reform donations, I don't hear much talk about genuine dilemmas around party donations. There was some discussion about what's legal on Newscast yesterday, but I it's worth thinking of the donor perspective, not just the ultra-wealthy, and not just politics.

Now imagine there's a debate on nuclear power. Maybe there are technological advances which are enough to convince other people, but not you. The party decides to support nuclear power as a policy. What do you do? You still believe in most of the Green party agenda, but this is important to you.

Separately to my other thread about the Reform donations, I don't hear much talk about genuine dilemmas around party donations. There was some discussion about what's legal on Newscast yesterday, but I it's worth thinking of the donor perspective, not just the ultra-wealthy, and not just politics.

Let's take a hypothetical but concrete example of what I mean. Suppose you're broadly in line with Green party ideals, and you really dislike nuclear energy. The current (UK) Green party policy is for nuclear power to be phased out, so you're fine with that, and you make donations to the party.

Separately to my other thread about the Reform donations, I don't hear much talk about genuine dilemmas around party donations. There was some discussion about what's legal on Newscast yesterday, but I it's worth thinking of the donor perspective, not just the ultra-wealthy, and not just politics.

Basically there are principles which each sound reasonable but can end up conflicting: 1) It's fine for someone to want to support an organisation which shares their broad philosophy; 2) It's fine for an organisation's detailed policies to change over time;

One aspect I haven't seen discussed about the big Reform donations is what impact it has on the "ordinary" members. General membership is £25 a year. Not a huge amount, but not insignificant if you're really struggling.

The Reform membership page says "Your contribution helps fund our election campaigns across the country." But does it really? Let's say Reform has 300K members and they're all general members, that's £7.5M - so 10.4% of the donations of the last couple of days.

"Passengers on this train, I'm the driver - please accept my apologies and rest assured that I'm as confused as you are." I'm not sure that we have a shared understanding of "rest assured".

Reading all the posts about Tim Curry, and I just keep thinking that my dad will be sad - because they used to play Monopoly together as kids. (Apparently Tim *always* won, but it's possible that's apocryphal.)

There's one aspect I don't understand about the AI data centre location conundrum (leaving aside whether they should be built at all). There's a lot of talk of "we really need to build them near population centres" but I don't see why. In my experience LLMs really aren't low-latency.

(Compare this with data centres running online FPS games, where the interaction loop is much, much shorter. There I can see how having data centres with really low latency to the consumer is important.)

There's one aspect I don't understand about the AI data centre location conundrum (leaving aside whether they should be built at all). There's a lot of talk of "we really need to build them near population centres" but I don't see why. In my experience LLMs really aren't low-latency.

So, I now own election.uk (new) as well as election2029.uk (existing). I need to decide which I should make the canonical domain... I'm guessing election.uk is the right move, especially as I have basically no real users at the moment. Weirdly I sort of feel bad for the old domain though.