@rodwhiting
Account based inUnited Kingdom
About this account
- Account based in
- United Kingdom
- Connected via
- United Kingdom App Store
Account-level information from X, not a live location or the device used for a specific post.
Broadcaster @BoomRadioUK | Writer | Military roots 🎙️ Host of Fault Lines - exploring resilience, security, and the battle for truth | Member RUSI |
Lincoln
Joined January 2009
- Tweets15.7K
- Following2.3K
- Followers3.7K
- Likes28.3K
Rod Whiting retweeted
Older people are now reading "a lot of chatbot rubbish" and that's "dangerous."
After four decades at Private Eye, Ian Hislop tells #Newsnight it's not just young people falling for disinformation and why it "is always worth correcting."
The phishing email is changing.
Instead of sending a dodgy link and hoping you click, AI can help attackers research you, start a conversation, and build trust over several days before anything malicious arrives.
But there’s a lot of hype around AI and cyber threats too.
Jamie Collier of Google Threat Intelligence Group joins me on Fault Lines to separate what AI could enable from what adversaries are actually doing. '
AI and the New Cyber Threat' Full conversation:👇
faultlineswithrodwhiting.buz…
Rod Whiting retweeted
One thing I note here (courtesy of @TheIFS) is that if we had avoided just the increase in spending on Personal Independence Payments for people of working age over this decade there’d be plenty of money to get defence to 3% GDP. That’s a real choice/trade-off.
Yet another difficult budget ahead. Lots of big tax rises already legislated, on top of recent big increases. After big increases over last two years most public service spending due to fall towards end of parliament. What’s a chancellor to do?
thetimes.com/article/15014fe…
Rod Whiting retweeted
Problem with this headline. Scrapping triple lock *might* “pay for” social care in, say, 20 years. But definitely won’t much sooner, and probably won’t even then.
Ministers could scrap pensions triple lock to pay for social care
thetimes.com/article/401fc5c…
Rod Whiting retweeted
Video shows Kimberly Guilfoyle, US ambassador to Greece and former fiancee of Trump Jr. meeting privately with the leaders of Romania's Social Democratic Party on March 31st, in a Bucharest hotel.
Just 6 Days later, the Social Democrats allied with the pro-Russian extremists from AUR and filled the motion that collapsed the Romanian government led by PM Bolojan, which strongly opposed purchasing US gas at above market prices.
In a WSJ article yesterday, sources present at a meeting between a Greek minister and Guilfoyle stated she bragged about having collapsed the RO government for its refusal to buy US gas, warning the US can do the same in Greece.
Rod Whiting retweeted
In occupied Oleshky, Ukrainians are beginning to eat their dogs; according to the city's military administration, the Russians have not allowed food into the city since May.
The Russians intend to starve 6,000 people to death.
"A few days ago, I heard for the first time that there are indeed cases where some families are eating dogs. Just a week ago, I denied such reports, but now someone from there has confirmed it to me. There is literally nothing to eat. The situation is deteriorating not just day by day, but hour by hour.
And there is no prospect of rescue. People face two paths: either they starve to death, or they are killed by a drone or artillery fire. There is no third option. The likelihood of surviving there without food is zero," explained Tetiana Hasanenko, head of the Oleshky military administration, as reported by *Ukrayinska Pravda*.
According to the head of the military administration, there is no disparity where some families in the city have food while others do not; everyone is starving.
The last food delivery to Oleshky took place on May 26. Every subsequent attempt has been unsuccessful.
If human-generated data is what AI needs to avoid disappearing up its own recursively generated backside, the answer seems pretty straightforward: pay us for it! A discounted subscription would be a start. 🤷🏼♂️
ChatGPT has now a big problem.
Researchers at Oxford and Cambridge exposed a massive threat to large language models.”
They call it “model collapse."
Internet ecosystem is rapidly changing, and generative AI will soon contribute much of the text found online. This forces us to consider what happens to future iterations like gpt-n when they are trained on data scraped from the web that was already generated by an llm.
According to the research, indiscriminately using model-generated content in training causes "irreversible defects" in the resulting ai. the model loses the "tails of the original content distribution." in other words, it begins to forget the creative, fringe, and unique nuances of actual human writing, collapsing into a repetitive echo chamber.
This isn't just a chatgpt issue.. the researchers built theoretical intuition showing this collapse is ubiquitous across learned generative models, occurring in large language models as well as in variational autoencoders and gaussian mixture models.
Tech companies rely on scraping the internet for large-scale data to build smarter models. However, the paper warns that if we want to sustain the benefits of training on web data, model collapse must be taken seriously.
Ultimate takeaway? data collected from genuine human interactions is going to become increasingly valuable in a web filled with ai content.
Rod Whiting retweeted
Britain's first reservoir for 30 years has been delayed another five years.
Now, Heathrow 3rd runway delayed until 2039
Why? The regulatory purgatory that imprisons UK growth - and will imprison Burnham unless he reforms.
My Times column:-
times-comment.com/hs2
Rod Whiting retweeted
TRUMP JUST ARMED THE MILITARY AND POINTED IT AT DEMOCRATS
Not a metaphor. Not hyperbole. National Guard troops in Washington DC got a directive to start carrying loaded sidearms on the street. That happened on a Sunday. Like it was nothing
The executive order is titled about a "DC crime emergency." The actual text expands National Guard deployment powers NATIONWIDE
Read that again. Nationwide
And which cities is Trump "considering" for this armed rollout next. Not Tulsa. Not Boise. Every single city floated so far is run by Democrats
Memphis already got the treatment. Now Russ Vought is asking for over 10 billion dollars to build it into a permanent machine — more Park Police, more federalized boots on the ground, funded through fiscal 2027
That's not a crime emergency response. That's a standing occupation force built to punish blue cities and Trump gets to pick the targets himself
No debate. No vote. No city council asked. One man decides which American cities get treated like hostile territory and which ones don't
Meanwhile actual violent crime data doesn't drive a single one of these decisions. Political maps do
This is the same man who spent four years screaming about federal overreach turning federal troops into his personal enforcement squad against his own political enemies
Armed National Guard on American streets, deployed by zip code of who didn't vote for him
They are not stopping at DC
This is the blueprint and Trump just showed you exactly how it works
Share it before they figure out how to make this look normal
Rod Whiting retweeted
BREAKING!! 14 senators, including Shaheen, McConnell and Cornyn, are pressing Trump over reports that Putin was invited to the G20 summit in Miami this Dec.
The bipartisan group urges Trump to rescind the invitation and bar sanctioned Russian officials from G20 events.
👇
Rod Whiting retweeted
日本首相高市早苗联大发言直击联合国痛点，联合国宪章至今仍然将德国和日本定为敌对国家，而二战后仍侵略成性屠杀生命远超二战的中俄仍是安理会常任理事。 一个对屠杀活摘渗透施毒迫害无视的联合国编造气候多性别全球化来欺骗世界，只能欺软怕硬，活像街头小流氓恶棍。
联合国成了最失败的组织。
Credit where credit’s due. It’s the small, tangible stuff that people notice, rather than grand statements that leave no trace beyond the next day’s headlines.
We've all walked past them.
The empty shop that's been boarded up for years. The old cinema gathering dust. The building everyone says, "someone should do something about that."
Well, that's exactly what I'm doing.
We're investing £210 million to help bring neglected high street buildings back into use - turning empty spaces into community hubs, health centres, shared workspaces, cafés and the local services that people actually want to see.
The funding will also help communities save spaces like pubs and sports clubs and support co-operatives so local people can share directly in their area's success.
People don't measure growth by looking at a spreadsheet. They measure it by looking at their local high street.
That's how we restore pride and bring hope back. Not by telling people things are getting better, but by giving them the power to see and feel the difference where they live.
More cuts to BBC Local - fewer genuinely local programmes, fewer specialist correspondents, and another 90 jobs set to go.
But this is about more than the future of the BBC.
If something serious happened in your community tomorrow, where would you turn for information you could trust?
In Fault Lines, Steven Lacey and I discuss why strong local media should be regarded as part of our national resilience. (Link to full episode in comments).
🎧 Watch or listen to the full conversation with Steven Lacey here:
youtu.be/jAGamK2bOKk?si=Tn7g…
Precisely. The BBC has spent years chasing audience metrics while progressively cutting many of the things that made it distinctive. By scrapping services others won’t provide in order to compete for clicks on the things everyone else already does, it risks rendering itself obsolete.
Local radio is a good example. Done well, it helps hold communities together. That matters when communities are fragmenting, and if government is serious about national resilience, it will need to step in and save the BBC from itself.
One of the warmest - and most hopeful - conversations I’ve had on Fault Lines. Why rebuilding trust may start much closer to home.
My wife is eternally grateful to @thetimes for finally motivating me to tidy the summerhouse.
Great read in @thetimes this morning @BoomRadioUK but way too many pictures of @rodwhiting :-)
thetimes.com/business/entrep…
Rod Whiting retweeted
Following Trump's repugnant invitation to war criminal Putin, we must demand that the leaders of free world countries boycott this G20 summit. If they have guts and principles, of course.
