The more people complain, the fewer people watching the show, the less chance it has of surviving.

have anything to do with it have completely failed to understand anything that made Doctor Who worthwhile in the first place - and what's currently destroying it. Even with shoddy sets, weak effects and needing to replace actors, it's the writers and the science-fiction that made the show the phenomenon it was.

You want to talk about "wokeness"? I don't care. I'm not here for the politics. The politics is a symptom, it's not even the problem, even if the politics have been dialled to 12 and rammed down your throat in a way that neither the classic series nor the books and audios between series ever did.

In 1966, the Doctor voice-hacked the "Trilogic" game to defeat the Celestial Toymaker. In 2023, he was defeated by two Doctors playing catch with a ball. And there's the best single example to illustrate the problem.

The show, like its showrunner, IS AN IDIOT. Davies is incompetent. He's incoherent and self-contradictory in interviews, let alone single episodes, let alone seasons, let alone the show's history.

The Radio Times 7 December 2023 quotes him: "The show is taking a sly step towards fantasy, which will annoy people to whom it’s a hard science-fiction show." and immediately follows that with "Episode two next year is wildly fantasy."

18 May 2024 he's quoted in The Verge as saying, and let me break the paragraph up for you:
"I think one of the strengths of Star Trek — and I’m a very big Discovery fan — is you’ve got to be the best to be aboard the Enterprise. You are the elite. You are the best of the best of the best." and
"Even the Lower Decks are very good. I think that’s true of American society, which is very aspirational. Star Trek always feels very demotic and down to earth ..."

And finally there, he said: "In a science fiction setting, the Doctor is always two steps away from pressing the right button and saving the day. But when you introduce a fantasy element to the equation — which is only in some episodes — it allows us to take away the buttons. There’s no computer or sonic screwdriver for him to immediately save the day with, and all rules are off, which means the Doctor has to think harder and fight harder than ever before, and I really enjoy that." ... so ignoring that now he has FANTASY AND BABY WISHES WITH WHICH TO SAVE THE DAY, now that all the rules are off, the Doctor hasn't really had to think since about 2005. With the false exceptions of Matt Smith's first episode pretending to be Moffat's "Sherlock".

In 1964, writer/story-editor Dennis Spooner was interviewed in the Daily Mail, where he said:
“The futuristic stories ought to be easier because the scope is endless but we have to set some limits to remain mildly plausible and we have found that many writers are completely lost with science fiction."

And first producer/showrunner Verity Lambert, what did she say?
"I have strong views on the level of intelligence we should be aiming at,” she told me briskly. “‘Doctor Who’ goes out at a time when there is a large child audience but it is intended more as a story for the whole family.
And anyway children today are very sophisticated and I don’t allow scripts which seem to talk down to them.”

And Davies selected Moffat as a successor, whose work was in the same ballpark of evil. And Moffat selected Chibnall, who threw out everything the show had been based on... paving the way for Davies's mutant-cerebrally-damaged return.

So Russell Davies is as intellectually retarded, self-contradictory and evidently stupid-and-delusional as, in the entirety of history, can only be seen elsewhere in the White House. If you defend "Doctor Who" as it has been since, let's say 2006, then you're both a symptom of the problem and an enabler of the cause.

I've been a fan, having watched and read the material every year since 1978. I've had pieces published in both fan magazines when they still existed, and a charity anthology fronted by Colin Baker... and yet, even I'm going to say "that thing out there wearing the Doctor Who skinsuit needs to be put out of our misery and laid to rest before it gets worse still. The disgusting THING running the show needs to be stripped of his monarchic orders of chivalry. Preferably, he needs to be jailed or better still, institutionalised some place with padded walls, no writing materials and more preferably, no access to the outside world ever again.

damnit damnit damnit logged in specifically to post this video link. Bless John Clarke and thank you Bryan Dawe.
... can you book me a cab?

"Once you have paid him the Trumpgeld, you never get rid of the Trump."

So, not American. But I have this "Internet" thing, I've been using a while, Slashdot's record of my oldest post here is 2009, my first professional account would've been about 1996, so I went a-searching for info on this "woke handout based on race" thing. ... BEAD classed eligible entities as "Puerto Rico, US Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, the DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA and ALL FIFTY STATES".

Apparently the "Whitest State in America" is Vermont (in 2015, the DC Planning office recorded a 99.9% white population and if you trust idiot AI hits, that's currently 95.6%").

So according to the Digital Equity Act Program, Vermont's Office Of Broadband had the Equity Planning Grant Program approved and recommended for award.

Y'know, hunting all this up took me about... three minutes?

So how exactly is ShitForPresident claiming any of this is "unconstitutional" or "racist"? ... how, how did any of you let this idiot into power a SECOND time?

You could carve it into a diamond plaque to embed into a granite wall.

The U.S. has a long tradition of protest. The Constitution protects our right to gather for protests (freedom of assembly) and speak out (freedom of speech). And these protections are not just for U.S. citizens – they also apply to international visitors who participate in lawful public demonstrations and protests.

- The McEntee Law Group

I want you to feel incredibly super ashamed that I live on the other side of the planet, in the southern hemisphere, and I know your stupid country's laws better than you do mouthing off on an international forum.

Obama moved his deportation focus to recent arrivals rather than people who went on to build a productive life in the U.S.. See, again, it's not just that you're so pig-ignorant of your own damned country, but that you couldn't even be bothered doing something that a guy half a planet away did in like a minute. Are you feeling the shame yet? Silly, of course you're not, you're a Trump-defending-American.

> Because the article you linked does not do it.

On the one hand, that's true.

On the other hand, there're the creepy photos of him with his *daughter Ivanka aged 15* and we've absolutely heard his comments about "grabbing" and "they just let you", so is it really hard to draw that line?

I love how you can fail to see the difference in the state of your country between two years ago and the faeces-leaking rustbucket it is now.

I refuse to believe the gap period has ever been measurably long enough to allow such a template sign to ever be manufactured.

repeatedly.

Your nation supposedly got its start by rebelling against its king. You saw the French get rid of their monarchy. He's cutting your education, your reputation, your environment, your healthcare, your INCOME... while he builds himself a literally-golden palace and is getting himself a literally-golden literally-luxury literally-flying palace.

He's the thing who cozies up to Putin and loves Xi, tells everybody he's dealing with them while the whole of Xi's country sits back laughing and saying "no he's not". He's MADE your country the one everybody either laughs at or despises.

Although countries all around the word are now opposing him, banding together against him and excluding your country. People are talking about switching away from your currency and letting your market tank even harder. He's made your country officially, globally, drop down in the Freedom list. He's become more senile than any of you ever thought or said Biden was. ... but you're the country who's so proud of having more guns than people. Y'all did JFK. Threatened to do Biden, Harris and Obama. You're so proud of your damn Second Amendment and you keep bringing it up even when the argument has absolutely nothing about the "well regulated Militia" and you claim it's all about self-defence.

The Constitution is the document that's supposed to protect you all and he flat out said on camera he doesn't know if he has to obey the Constitution in spite of the fact 100 days earlier he publicly swore an oath to uphold it.

You are a messed up, confused, self-contradictory, suicidal people and after another bare-minimum 1352 days of this crap, what hope is there going to be left of you?

After another 1352 days of your reputation going to hell, the rest of the world ain't gonna miss you.

I would have agreed with you, right up until the point we started getting LLMs that were capable of inspiring the confusion and question in people. Even if some of those people are so far gone, they don't understand that their fantasies aren't reality.

And I say this as somebody with the episode transcript in front of me right now. I will point out right now, the episode does the usual dumb sci-fi thing of confusion "sentience" with "consciousness". But at least in that episode, they defined some kind of metrics for determining sentience/consciousness AND made a decision based on those metrics plus an individual-or-species context in a larger society. Therefore, that episode DOES HAVE SOME BEARING ON OUR REALITY NOW. ... but that's what good sci-fi did: prepared us somewhat for these difficult questions coming up right now. If there were a true general AI coming into play, I would welcome it. But these LLMs are just stupid goddamn over-aggrandised over-marketed over-hyped glorified autocompletes.

Then why does it have so much power?

> The problem is that we still don't really understand what consciousness is.

Well that's already wrong. It's a term we DEFINED: "Consciousness, at its simplest, is awareness of a state or object, either internal to oneself or in one's external environment".

Do we know what the MECHANISM of it is? No. Do we have a methods for testing it, testing for it? YES WE DO.

"Broadly viewed, scientific approaches are based on two core concepts. The first identifies the content of consciousness with the experiences that are reported by human subjects; the second makes use of the concept of consciousness that has been developed by neurologists and other medical professionals who deal with patients whose behavior is impaired. In either case, the ultimate goals are to develop techniques for assessing consciousness objectively in humans as well as other animals, and to understand the neural and psychological mechanisms that underlie it."

So saying something like

> You can blindly assume computers have no consciousness, but that's religion, not science. We don't know what it is, where it comes from, or how to identify it. So we should be really cautious about claiming computers do or don't have it.

is science-philosophy/education right out of watching 2000s-grade Star Trek. I think the horrific irony (yes including the Greek tragedy sense) here is your sig saying

> "I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."

... FINDING THE NEXT WORD IS NOT WHAT "AUTOCOMPLETE" MEANS??

What absolute garbage. What we do is build a model of the situation, understand it, then use language to DESCRIBE the model. That's how we can go on seemingly unrelated tangents. That's how we can make puns. That's how we can draw analogies.

So either you're an LLM, or you have a horrifying idea of how your own brain works.

I also followed your link AND had a look at the paper linked on that page. I note it reads "Though it’s difficult to quantify precisely, we’ve found that our attribution graphs provide us with satisfying insight for about a quarter of the prompts we’ve tried ... the discoveries we highlight here only capture a small fraction of the mechanisms of the model"... ... which means they know how the model works about as well as you know how your brain works.

"Transformer Based Language Models". Working on tokens. "... and output new tokens one at a time" which means it's still a glorified auto-fuckin-complete. So let's see how your "find the next word" model deals with this input: balls, balls, balls, balls, balls, what an utter load of nonsense balls.