The effect of this would be extremely minimal. Almost all empty homes in the UK are homes that are temporarily empty pending sale or between renters. Having empty homes is actually extremely normal, you can’t really not have empty homes, as people are always moving.

With rare exceptions, empty homes aren’t just sitting there empty for years, like this article implies. The landlords would much rather rent them out and make money.

The UK has far fewer empty empty homes than anywhere else in the developed world. Our housing stock isn’t enough.

There’s no other option but to build more. I hope Labour’s plans can help with that, but who knows. And it’d need to be sustained.

NIMBYism is killing this country. We have the smallest available housing stock in Europe by some margin. Labour are right to be trying to make a dent in the issue.

Authoritarian arrest?! They broke into an RAF base and crippled multiple planes, FFS.

Why do you want Farage to win so badly? He’d be awful for the country. Do you not see the damage he’s already done?

No, the majority are not questionable. Every single one of those are unambiguously left wing moves.

People are falling victim to the anything to the right of me [socialist] is right wing.

Labour are objectively a centre-left party, and I just gave evidence of that. Saying “well all of that is left wing… but it doesn’t count!” isn’t a legitimate argument.

Of course defence is important. How separated from reality are you for you to think it isn’t?

Sabotaging UK defence is obviously a bad thing, and it shouldn’t be taken lightly.

Come on, “throwing around red paint” is quite misleading, no?

They poured it into the engines of multiple RAF jets, destroying those engines. That’s several million in damages, and a lot of downtime.

And legally speaking, it absolutely was a terrorist act.

Honestly the above comment infuriated me.

They would not be defending this person if they were a man.

Having lower expectations of women isn’t progressive, it isn’t feminist. It’s infantising. It’s misogyny of lower expectations. “Oh you can’t expect women to understand the difference between right and wrong.”

A woman who is happy to support Elon is every bit as bad as a man that is happy to support Elon. Supporting a nazi is supporting a nazi.

You keep saying Labor, are you from the UK?

And tbh, while Labour is far from socialist, they’re doing some left wing things:

• Nationalising rail. Seems left wing to me.

• Nationalising steel. Seems left wing to me.

• Nationalising parts of our energy sector. Seems left wing to me.

• They’re increasing workers rights in a bunch of different ways. Seems left wing to me.

• They’ve significantly hiked minimum wage. Seems left wing to me.

• They’ve implemented a windfall tax targeting profiteering energy firms. Left wing.

• Placing VAT on private schooling. Left wing.

• Means testing WFA. Left wing.

• Placing taxes on non-doms. Left wing.

• Invested a great deal more in infrastructure. Left wing.

• Capped public transport costs. Left wing.

• Implementing stricter rules for landlords. Left wing.

• Essentially restarting SureStart in all but name. Left wing.

• Changing inheritance tax to squash loopholes surrounding buying up farmland. Left wing.

• Ending the use of offshore trusts as a way to avoid inheritance tax. Left wing.

• Bringing the NHS back under direct public control. Left wing.

• Expanding green energy. Left wing.

There’s probably more I’ve not thought of, too.

Putting everyone in the “neoliberal” group as if they’re the same isn’t productive IMO. Labour, Lib Dems, SNP, Tories, and Reform aren’t all the same.

People also need to be realistic about what the electorate overall wants.

Farage could not have asked for better news than this. Ugh.

E: do the downvoters think that vote splitting is not a thing? This is the best news for Farage in a long time.

I will never understand why people think FOSS is or should be apolitical.

FOSS has always been political. It’s literally never existed in any other way.

Reading into this, it seems like there’s actually a lot going on right now when it comes to sorting out our decaying (ha) dentistry services.

Good.

If this gets well and truly sorted, this will be a visible, tangible thing people can point to and say they’ve done well there.

People can’t really conceptualise the less visible things like “wages have gone up by 2% more than inflation this year”, “inflation has dropped by 0.3%”, “infrastructure investment has been raised by X%!”

We’re bad at understanding numbers like that and visualising what impact they will make on our lives over a longer period of time.

The difference between “I’ve not been able to get a dentist appointment for 4 years” and “I can trivially have one booked every 6 months” is something that everyone will notice and appreciate.

Excellent move.

One of the multiple improvements I’ve seen Labour make where I’ve thought “wait, that wasn’t the case before?! Why the hell not?!”

Really frustrating that children are 3x likely to be in poverty as pensioners, yet a disproportionate amount of money is redirected towards pensioners, the richest demographic by a long shot.

And as has been made clear, any attempts to address that will not be tolerated by media or by the electorate. Labour couldn’t even get the original WFA cuts through, despite the poorest still being entitled to them!

Labour restarting SureStart in all but name will surely be a big help for young children and new parents, as will things like the sizable minimum wage increases, and the expansion of free school meals. But it won’t be enough to fix this problem entirely.

Same. I have to tinker with it a lot to make it less frustrating to use. I like how customisable it is but man I don’t really want to customise everything anymore.

I want a UX that is great out of the box in terms of theming, functionality, and ease of use. I want sane defaults.

Having artificially generated news anchors seems so bizarre to me.

It’s one person that in a country like china will be seen by tens or hundreds of millions of people. Is it really worth it to axe that job and put some uncanny valley CGI figure in their place? The per viewer cost saving must be fractions of a penny, and it risks putting off a not insignificant amount of people.

Now, if initiatives like this can be used for things like generating a figure that can do sign language in the corner of a screen that would be an amazing development, but this? I just don’t see it.

I even get it for broadcasting to a very small audience, such as languages with almost no speakers. E.g. having an always-available Welsh language presenter. But this? Nah.

LLMs are an interesting tool to fuck around with, but I see things that are hilariously wrong often enough to know that they should not be used for anything serious. Shit, they probably shouldn’t be used for most things that are not serious either.

It’s a shame that by applying the same “AI” naming to a whole host of different technologies, LLMs being limited in usability - yet hyped to the moon - is hurting other more impressive advancements.

For example, speech synthesis is improving so much right now, which has been great for my sister who relies on screen reader software.

Being able to recognise speech in loud environments, or removing background noice from recordings is improving loads too.

My friend is involved in making a mod for a Fallout 4, and there was an outreach for people recording voice lines - she says that there are some recordings of dubious quality that would’ve been unusable before that can now be used without issue thanks to AI denoising algorithms. That is genuinely useful!

As is things like pattern/image analysis which appears very promising in medical analysis.

All of these get branded as “AI”. A layperson might not realise that they are completely different branches of technology, and then therefore reject useful applications of “AI” tech, because they’ve learned not to trust anything branded as AI, due to being let down by LLMs.

Women are underrepresented in CEO positions, although perhaps not for the reasons people think.

The average age of a CEO is 55. Many are far older. You get to that point by being in management positions within an industry for decades. Outside of fringe cases, it takes a long time to become a CEO.

Obviously, that filters out some women due to them choosing family life over chasing job position above all else, as well as things such as in the past there being an even greater disparity in the difference between maternity and paternity leave than there is today (and it’s still not great today either!), as well as past sexist attitudes in having women in managerial roles.

IMO, there being fewer women in CEO positions is an indicator of sexism in the past, not sexism in the present.

Nowadays there are far more women in managerial positions, it’s not seen as weird anymore in the slightest, and that will naturally translate to more CEOs. It will just take time for that influx of managerial-position women to reach the CEO-level.

Will it be 50/50? Eh, probably not. The fact that women give birth means there will always be a not insignificant amount of women that take a significant amount of time out of work and prioritise family life to a greater extent than men.

I miss the internet being a wild west.

It certainly had its downsides, but it felt a lot better than the nonsense that’s been happening over the past decade+.

Absolutely grotesque and evil. It boggles my mind how some people can be this hateful.