A historic day however you look at it, and whoever you backed in the leadership contest. We now have a leader of Scottish Labour, an SNP leader and a UK prime minister who are all from Asian backgrounds (for better or worse in some cases).

As it happens, Yousaf got my first preference, and Forbes my second. I didn't allocate a preference to Regan, for a variety of reasons.

It wasn't an easy choice between Yousaf and Forbes. Both have their strengths and some decided weaknesses. A couple of considerations tipped it for me.

Yousaf gained far more endorsements from SNP MSPs and MPs - many of whose opinions I respect - and that probably signals the possibility of more unity among the members of both parliaments, if not necessarily among SNP members as a whole. Portrayed as "the continuity candidate", I was pleased to see him defend the SNP government's achievements in its time in office.

The fact that Forbes chose to trash some of that record during the course of the hustings counted against her. It's one thing to be healthily critical of party policies and achievements, it's quite another to parrot some of the tired claims of unionists and the bulk of the media. On a similar consideration, I didn't appreciate Forbes's tendency to rewrite the party's manifesto on the hoof and sound unsettlingly like she might try to pull the party to the right on some issues, both social and economic. She's very self-assured as a media presence and undoubtedly talented, and I hope future cabinets manage to harness her abilities and her appeal in certain quarters - one of her self-proclaimed selling points was that she had higher ratings than Yousaf among the electorate at large, though whether that means they'd actually vote for the SNP is quite another question.

There remains the vote in the Scottish Parliament on who should take over from Nicola Sturgeon as First Minister when she formally resigns. The Opposition will no doubt put up its own candidates as a formality, but with the backing of the Scottish Greens and no doubt the vast majority if not all of his own party, the job looks like Yousaf's.

That's his pen name, his real one is Paul Millicheap.

He wrote "Refugees" in 2016. Here's an extended BBC profile of him from that year: 'How I accidentally became a poet through Twitter'

Here's another of his:



Here's his website: https://brianbilston.com/

And here's his Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/brian_bilston

I've given his collections You Took the Last Bus Home, Diary of a Somebody and Alexa, what is there to know about love? to my serious poetry buff wife on successive Christmases, and she's loved them.

The resolution, which was overwhelmingly carried, called for Russian troops to immediately withdraw from Ukraine and for a comprehensive and lasting peace. The results:



For anyone using a text reader, that sums up as:

141 in favour

7 against

32 abstentions.

I'll just dredge this up from my scintillating DU journal (I have a little time on my hands tonight if someone wants to get into an argument about it - no takers when it was originally posted).

ChatGPT was hailed as one of 2022’s most impressive technological innovations upon its release last November. The powerful artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot can generate text on almost any topic or theme, from a Shakespearean sonnet reimagined in the style of Megan Thee Stallion, to complex mathematical theorems described in language a 5 year old can understand. Within a week, it had more than a million users.

ChatGPT’s creator, OpenAI, is now reportedly in talks with investors to raise funds at a $29 billion valuation, including a potential $10 billion investment by Microsoft. That would make OpenAI, which was founded in San Francisco in 2015 with the aim of building superintelligent machines, one of the world’s most valuable AI companies.

But the success story is not one of Silicon Valley genius alone. In its quest to make ChatGPT less toxic, OpenAI used outsourced Kenyan laborers earning less than $2 per hour, a TIME investigation has found.

The work was vital for OpenAI. ChatGPT’s predecessor, GPT-3, had already shown an impressive ability to string sentences together. But it was a difficult sell, as the app was also prone to blurting out violent, sexist and racist remarks. This is because the AI had been trained on hundreds of billions of words scraped from the internet—a vast repository of human language. That huge training dataset was the reason for GPT-3’s impressive linguistic capabilities, but was also perhaps its biggest curse. Since parts of the internet are replete with toxicity and bias, there was no easy way of purging those sections of the training data. Even a team of hundreds of humans would have taken decades to trawl through the enormous dataset manually. It was only by building an additional AI-powered safety mechanism that OpenAI would be able to rein in that harm, producing a chatbot suitable for everyday use.

https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers

I initially thought it was the nephew who cried.

I'm glad to find out I was wrong.

you can also hotlink some images hosted on other sites. I say "some" as different sites have different attitudes to hotlinking, as they may be sensitive to people effectively stealing some of their bandwidth.

As long as the image ends in the suffix .jpg, .jpeg or .png it should display as long as the host site doesn't have hotlinking blocked. Some media sites carry images which can't be hotlinked in this way as their URLs don't end in any of those suffixes. As mentioned elsewhere in the replies, you need to use the post preview function to check whether the image will display on DU.

Twitter images can also be hotlinked, but it's a little more involved. If you see a Twitter image you want to post, say you're using Firefox, you need to left-click on the image so it displays in isolation, then right-click on it and a variety of choices will appear. Select Copy image link then you can paste the URL into the DU posting or reply box. Choosing a random image I found, you'll end up with a URL something like this:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FkavoqmWIAIh7W1?format=jpg&name=large

You need to delete everything from the ? onwards (including the ? ) and replace it with .jpg. It should then display like so:



Be aware that some on DU are sensitive to Twitter content, especially since Musk took over. They're unlikely to object to a simple image as nobody will necessarily be aware of where it's from.

Some GIFs will display on DU, but it's hit or miss whether you can find one that ends with the suffix .gif - some GIF hosting sites have sharing tools which will help.

You can also post YouTube content. You just need to copy the URL from your browser's navigation box and paste it, and it should embed and play when clicked on.

and that he identifies with one "side" over another and sees the other as some sort of an enemy says it all.

Nobody can serve as a successful moderator of a community with that dynamic going on, and he'll have an enormously tough time ahead trying to forge anything like a functional Twitter if he carries on like that (which he will, because I don't think he's capable of changing). Any successor will also face a huge task because Musk's poisoned the well.

With the majority of Twitter's active users seemingly utterly fed up (or worse) with Musk and paid blue-tickers rapidly gaining pariah status and being blocked by some on sight, it's not exactly a well thought out recruitment campaign for the paying customers he's fixated on getting.

Divisions obviously exist on Twitter, always have. But they're not as simple as that bipolar framing.

Musk pissed off a number of users he'd probably assume to be on his "side" with that stupid and shortlived scheme to ban outlinks to rival platforms. Opposition came from all quarters - and that's what you'd expect given the libertarian populist rhetoric he's been spouting.

It's like his commitment to free speech - the more you pay, the freer it is, unless he takes something you post personally, in which case you'll be forced to go take your speech elsewhere and be free with it.

It's been fun watching him trying to rationalize his decisive defeat in the poll about whether he should quit as CEO or not. Kim Dotcom (yes, he's still around) insisted it was down to liberal bot activity, and pointed out that Musk now had data from the poll to identify those bots and eliminate them. Musk's response was the reply "Interesting."

This on a platform where he was gloating a few weeks ago at having conquered the bot problem, posting a GIF of him gurning and gesticulating over a bot grave!

What he did when he posted that poll was fire the starting pistol for a competition between those who wanted him to remain as CEO and those who didn't. Both sides of opinion had access to similar tools to spread the word and mobilize votes. It just so happens that one side is more numerous on Twitter and has better networks (including DU). If the result came as a surprise to him, then he should take it as a wake up call. His reaction since doesn't convince me that the poll was a clever ruse to let him back away from Twitter gracefully. He's moaning that nobody who could fulfil the role wants to take it on. He's trapped himself, with nobody involved in any of his three main businesses happy with what he's doing, and like quicksand, the more he struggles at the moment, the more trapped he becomes.

So now you have his acolytes wandering around Twitter moaning after the event that they didn't know about the poll, that 12 hours was too short for it to run, that it was held at the wrong time of day on the wrong day of the week, etc. etc. Some have even been driven to frame the poll as a brilliant trap set by Musk to weed out users who're disloyal to him! Whether that means they think he's going to kick off those millions who voted to fire him, I've no idea, but some of them are crazy enough.

Most of Musk's angst at the moment seems to be to do with money (despite the fact he's a nominal multibillionaire), and more notably, Twitter's looming bankruptcy, which he's discussed openly with some on Twitter itself. It's almost like he has no pals or trusted peers to turn to in his everyday life.

It's incredible, but less and less surprising as we watch him flailing in action, that he didn't realize from the start that Twitter's been very good for many things over the years. It's just that making money hasn't been one of them.

If you mean active users, that 2 million figure is way wrong. These were the figures last summer:



Despite the exodus after Musk took over, the overall figures won't have changed much.