The Braindump Blog

Prepare yourself for the ITV sketch show “Deep Fake Neighbour Wars”, the first mainstream UK TV show based on deepfake technology (as far as I know).

Appearing on ITVX on the 26th January, it’s a comedy sketch show seemingly showing people living their everyday mundane lives. Except these aren’t either characters created for the show or actors doing impressions of other people. They are ‘real’ megastar celebrities - well, real in the sense that they look and and sound like them, even though the celebrities concerned haven’t been anywhere near it.

Instead, the show was first acted out by less well-known actors. StudioNeural - “the world’s first provider of synthetic media for long form TV” - then used deepfake technology to replace their faces with ultra-realistic visages of actual bigtime celebrities.

From a summary of the preview:

We meet loved up Nicki Minaj and Tom Holland who are not happy with Mark Zuckerberg next door, Idris Elba gets a shock when new neighbour Kim Kardashian starts making her presence known in their communal garden, Harry Kane’s perfect patio is damaged by upstairs neighbour Stormzy and dental hygienist Billie Eilish clashes with neighbour Beyonce when she starts working from home.

Mainstreaming deep fake technology for entertainment like this does feel like a potential turning point for popularizing this technology. It’ll allow things to be done that never otherwise could have been. Up until now deepfakes have usually been discussed as in the context of nefarious use-cases - fake news, fraudulent political persuasion, personal attacks or revenge porn. But even for entirely benign uses, as the Guardian notes, there’s not really much in the way of established etiquette or guidelines for the use of this very new technology yet.

What is fair in the name of comedy, vs what is some kind of unethical exploitation? Whether this be of the celebrities or the relatively nameless actors who are hidden behind the fakes (until the end of the show anyway in this particular case).

Unless a message is constantly superimposed over the broadcast that this isn’t real, what are the implications in a world where it’s extremely common for short clips to be taken out of videos and shared on social media?

To borrow an example from the same article, Spitting Image was an extremely funny satire (the original one at least), but how would it have come across if instead of using caricature puppets the show used representations of the people being satirised that were basically indistinguishable from their actual IRL selves?

Nadine Dorries, admittedly someone who one might argue has a strong agenda of her own, was worried that the This England TV drama which purports to document a dramatised version of how the UK government dealing with Covid-19 (amongst other things) was dangerous:

Admittedly, the producers put a disclaimer before each episode, stating that the drama is fictional, based on true events. But the fact that scenes are interspersed with real news footage makes it very deceptive. Also, many scenes involving politicians and civil servants are eerily convincing.

How much more convincing would it have been if Boris Johnson was played by his digital doppelganger as opposed to Kenneth Branagh?

📺 Watched season 1 of The Traitors.

A reality show where by day a group of strangers complete missions to build up a prize pot, and by night they viciously accuse each other of treachery in order to eject them from the show entirely.

Which is fair enough, because a few of them are in fact traitors. Claudia Winkelman secretly assigned them that role at the start. The viewer knows who they are, the participants do not. They have to figure it out by whatever means they can. Each night they must vote out the person they collectively believe is most traitorous. Of course, to maintain their subterfuge the traitors also have to pretend that’s what they’re doing too and put their public votes in too.

If the “faithful” vote out all the traitors then they share the prize pot. But if even one traitor remains by the end of the series then the surviving traitors get it all.

Each night whilst the others sleep the anonymous traitors also get to metaphorically kill one of the contestants, kicking them off the show without the ability to defend themselves.

Honestly, it feels a little grim and exploitative to watch. I really hope there’s a pile of expert psychologists behind the scenes to help the players cope with the virulent suspicion, deception, mistrust, arguments, paranoia, confrontations and the rest of it.

But watching the participants - the genuinely legit and the traitors trying to appear as such - try to figure out who the traitors are provides incredible examples of all sorts of cognitive biases - confirmation bias, the halo effect, salience bias, a kind of pareidolia, overconfidence, the gambler’s fallacy and a ton of herd instinct to name but a few. And all this at the same time as being put into an unfamiliar place with unfamiliar people.

It’s such a fascinating example of all these psychological processes going on, some that we can probably recognise very well in ourselves if we stop and think about it for a minute in between screaming at the TV, that it turns out to be compulsive viewing. Even if it’s probably not exactly great for most of the folk involved.

It’s getting on for four months since Mahsa Amini, who had been arrested in Iran for not wearing her hijab in the style the authorities prefer, died when in the custody of the Iranian police after being beaten. The resulting protests are ongoing, at incredible personal risk to the brave souls who take part and their loved ones.

As of yesterday, Iran has now formally executed 4 protestors, the latest two likely having been tortured beforehand. But the overall death toll is far greater, with at least 516 demonstrators including 70 children known to have died. Almost 20,000 others have been arrested, hundreds of whom may face the death penalty.

Today’s Observer reports that:

NHS trusts with record waiting lists are promoting “quick and easy” private healthcare services at their own hospitals, offering patients the chance to jump year-long queues

This, whilst not a new thing, does not feel good in the midst of a growing NHS crisis, particularly if it’s on the rise. The private services that are provided - whether a £300 MRI scan or a £10,000 hip replacement - supposedly don’t impact the services the NHS provides under its public funding. But they often take place in the same premises with the same staff that you would get if you made it to the top of the public waiting list.

I’m sure there’s some technicality that allows them to say it’s not sucking resources from our still much loved public health system. But, simplistically, at the end of the day it surely is potential life-or-death British medical capacity that is exclusively available to the rich rather than the person that needs it the most.

The ideal of course would be that the NHS working conditions and funding was improved such that there was no incentive for hospitals or medical staff to operate a private practice at all. For now though, we’ll have to decide whether to laugh or cry at the Shalborune Private Health Care website’s claim that “We believe quality healthcare should be readily accessible.”

After repeating the same vote 15 times over the last week, the US House of Representatives has finally managed to elect a speaker, Kevin McCarthy.

It’s been the longest contest for the position since 1859, preventing any of the real business of the House taking place whilst the battle continued.

But if it felt like a long time, it was certainly no 1855. That contest stretched on for two whole months and required 133 ballots to take place before a speaker was selected.

In the end they temporarily changed the rules so as to accept a plurality of votes as opposed to the standard absolute majority rules that require the victor to have gotten the support of at least half of the voters. This allowed Nathaniel Banks won the contest with 103 votes from a possible 214 electors.

The repeated election attempts over the past few days apparently became so tedious that the representatives elect started bringing in comics, books, iPad games and their own children in order to keep themselves entertained. Perhaps my favourite photo of the event was the below one, taken by Anna Moneymaker, showing U.S. representative Katie Porter’s research into how to live the good life.

Finished reading The It Girl by Ruth Ware 📚.

A thriller set in the grounds of Oxford University, the kind of backdrop that usually appeals to me. A popular rich girl that everyone knows was murdered by a creepy college porter…or was she?

You can probably guess the general answer to that, but I didn’t figure out the specific solution until very near the end. A compulsive read with satisfying twists and turns, if not particularly challenging. Just what I needed for the holidays.

Watched season 5 of The Crown 📺.

Starting to get into the years I actually remember something about now. I love this as a way of accidentally learning the country’s history. The only problem is it seems a lot of it isn’t true. John Major seems to be particularly annoyed at it.

The show does admit to being fiction. But not knowing which bits are true makes it hard to know what to take from it. Though an article in the Atlantic is probably right to conclude that “the show is so popular that its interpretation of history will become the definitive one for millions of viewers.”

From the NYT:

Without a speaker, the United States House of Representatives essentially becomes a useless entity.

Entering day 3 of the US not really having much of a government.

Perhaps the rules on electing a speaker need revision for the future. The job is different in the UK, but here if there’s no majority for the speaker we remove the candidate with the lowest number of votes plus any with minimal support before trying again.

The Financial Times looks into why the UK’s NHS is in such a disastrous condition at present. It turns out it’s not all that complicated to understand.

• There are currently lots of ill people - a new wave of Covid-19 is once more sweeping the nation, and the flu (amongst other infectious diseases) is also surging. A real twindemic.
• We don’t have enough hospital beds. This is partly because we haven’t built enough capacity in the first place. But also because the lack of anywhere to discharge patients who still need some amount of social care (but not hospital-level care) to means that thousands of people are unnecessarily stuck in hospital.
• There are not enough staff. All parts of the workforce have staff shortages. Those that are there are exhausted, demoralized and in recent times are occasionally on strike or leaving for better opportunities elsewhere. To be clear, these problems started way before the current spate of strikes were on the agenda.
• There has not been enough investment. This is nothing new, it’s been going on for at least a decade. NHS demand is constantly rising at present, so funding needs to rise substantially beyond inflation just to maintain performance. This hasn’t happened for at least a decade. The UK has amongst the lowest healthcare capital spending as % of GDP of it’s peer countries, leaving us with fewer beds, MRI scanners, CT scanners and so on. The chart below, also from the FT, may provide a clue as to why.

There’s a widely held belief that younger people tend to start off being politically left-wing (or liberal, socialist, whatever one wants to call the axis). Then, as time goes on and they start to age, they end up with more conservative views and political preferences.

This trend is encapsulated in a maxim whose origin and exact wording is much quibbled over but often turns up in this sort of form.

A man who is not a Liberal at sixteen has no heart; a man who is not a Conservative at sixty has no head.

Personally I hope and trust the implied value judgement isn’t true, otherwise, sorry, looks like I’m just getting stupider as I get older.

But, treating it as purely descriptive of a trend, the idea that people tend to get more conservative when they get older does usually seem to be true. Of course it isn’t necessarily their age that causes these changes; it may be to do with the fact that people’s wealth, status, position in life, psychology and so on tends to alter in an on-average predictable way as they get older.

However, John Burn-Murdoch of the FT notes that it’s just not happening that way for UK and US millennials.

They started off liberal as other generations did. But now, even though the older ones are now 40+ years old, they’re still very liberal, compared to the rest of the population at least.

Why so? Burn-Murdoch hypothesises that this is a cohort effect due to British and US millennials entering adulthood during the aftermath of the financial crisis. They emerge into an economic environment where generating enough wealth to, for example, own a home is often a ludicrous pipe-dream.

The primary UK and US conservative party’s respective fixation on culture war topics probably also doesn’t help them much. The typical conservative side of the relevant arguments tends to be less attractive to more academically educated folk, and millennials are the best-educated generation at present.

Morten Støstad produced some follow-up work that showed that this trend also exists elsewhere, particularly in English-speaking countries like Australia, Canada and New Zealand. His first chart looks at English speaking countries and shows similar findings to Burn-Murdoch’s original graph.

In the second though, Støstad finds that in many other non-English-speaking countries, for example Germany, France, Italy and Spain, the millennials do seem to be behaving “as normal” and becoming more conservative over time.

Played The Pharaoh’s Tomb from Exit: The Game 🎲.

The Exit advent calendar was so good we couldn’t stop. This one, from the same makers, is a one-session game where you attempt to solve puzzles to free yourself from an ancient Egyptian tomb. It’s rated as one of the harder ones, perhaps because you need to figure out what the puzzles even are and which order to solve them in as well as the puzzle solution itself - but we got there in the end.

Played the The Mysterious Ice Cave advent calendar from Exit: The Game 🎲.

This is an advent calendar that gives you a puzzle to solve each day of advent. The answer to each one tells you which door to open next in your attempt to escape from a catastrophic mountain avalanche.

We actually ignored the entire premise and completed it over two lengthy sessions. The puzzles were fun and varied, some harder than others but most of them felt very fair.

Something happens towards the end that was one of my favourite ever twists in these kind of games. Even more fun than a chocolate calendar for anyone that likes puzzle escape room kind of things, highly recommended.

Just remembered the time when The Beano comic issued a cease-and-desist letter to MP Jacob Rees-Mogg on the basis that he was appropriating the characteristics of their intellectual property, Dennis the Menace’s number one enemy Walter Brown, in appearance and personality.

Disappointing TIL: Drag queen superstar Ru Paul and his partner George LeBar own a ranch upon which fracking takes place.

To be fair it’s probably just the norm where they are, but it‘s a shame that even being a progressive multi-millionaire superstar isn’t enough to stop it.

A recent paper provides a systematic review of studies on the link between the COVID-19 mRNA vaccinations and myopericarditis in young people.

They find that there’s a low but positive association between the vaccination and later myopericarditis, particularly in males after the second dose of the vaccine. The ovreall rate of developing myopericarditis after vaccination is estimated to be between 0.3 and 5 cases per 100,000 vaccinated people.

But - and this is a huge but - this risk is far lower than the risk of developing the same condition after being infected by Covid-19 itself.

So whilst it’s important and true that there is a risk of myocarditis after the mRNA vaccines (and no conspiracy theorists, no-one sensible is covering this up - here for example is the UK government’s published advice on this matter) when making our decisions we need to remember that you’re more than 3x more likely to get myocarditis if you’re infected by Covid as opposed to if you take the vaccine and it prevents you getting Covid.

The authors also find that the severity of outcomes associated with developing myopericarditis was lower if it was associated with having developed after vaccination vs if it had developed following Covid-19. No-one in any of the surveyed studies

To me, this is all about considering which the correct baselines are for any given decision. Vaccines are not entirely risk free. But given almost everyone in the UK appears to have had Covid-19 at some point and it continues to circulate nearly 2 years later, it is usually more sensible for the average person not literally living in a bubble to compare the risks associated with the vaccine to the risks associated with getting Covid, rather than some fantasy lifestyle where there is no risk to not having the vaccine.

In summary: I believe this study suggests taking the vaccine makes it more than 3x less likely you’d suffer myopericarditis if you got the vaccine as opposed to getting Covid. Furthermore if you do contract it post-vaccination, it’s less likely to be severe than if it followed Covid. However it is slightly more likely that you’d develop it than if you went through life having never had either the vaccine or Covid-19.

Incoming disillusionment for anyone who somehow managed to convince themselves that when the US, UK et al asked the Taliban to please guarantee the protection of women after they chaotically withdrew their troops that it would actually mean something. The Taliban administration said yes, sure, of course, we’ll respect women’s rights.

In reality, so far the women of Afghanistan have been banned from attending middle school, high school, universities or certain types of religious classes. They’re also prohibited from most forms of employment. They can’t visit parks or gyms, and are obligated to wear full-coverage clothing in other public areas. There’s a concern this is a dismal journey towards even more absolute rights-stripping, such that Afghan women may soon be prohibited from leaving their homes more generally.

📽 Watched The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause.

Naughty Jack Frost tricks nice Santa into giving up his Christmas duties. Comedy evil ensues.

It was fine. Didn’t enjoy it as much as the previous one, tho it was after Christmas dinner so I probably slept through some parts.

Behold the Lego piano! An incredibly clever piece, taking me the best part of a year to build. I love it.

It has a ton of ‘working’ parts, perhaps providing some insight into how pianos work. You can even play tunes on it when linked to your phone, no musical skill required.

An aspect of the eternal insufficient UK housing supply crisis that I hadn’t been aware of before: housing for university students.

…there is a shortfall of 207,000 student beds, and 19 towns and cities where there is more than a 10% undersupply of beds.

One of the drivers of the huge number of strikes the UK is currently in the midst of is that many employers are not offering annual pay rises that allow for a wage it’s possible to live a decent life on, let alone keep up spending parity with last year. Pay is not the only reason for the strikes by a long stretch, but it is a key one for many strikes.

One argument the government often respond to the public service sector strikers' pay demands with is “Hey, we don’t set the wages, we just do what the independent Pay Review boards tell us to do. Blame them!”.

The role of Pay Review Boards is to give advice to the government on pay for certain public sector workers. They cover about 45% of all public sector staff. The boards include:

• Armed forces’ pay review body (AFPRB) 
• National Crime Agency remuneration review body (NCARRB)
• NHS pay review body (NHSPRB)
• Police remuneration review body (PRRB) 
• Prison service pay review body (PSPRB)
• Review body on doctors’ and dentists’ remuneration (DDRB)
• Review body on senior salaries (SSRB)
• School teachers’ review body (STRB) 

One immediate critique of the government’s claim that any disagreement is all the Pay Review Board’s fault is that governments don’t actually have to implement the board’s recommendations. Their output is advice that in theory the government can do what it likes with.

Whilst the norm is to follow the advice, it’s easy to find examples of where they haven’t. For instance the latest advice from the Prison Service Pay Review Body and Senior Salaries Review Body were only partially accepted. The Government has the final say so could alter the parameters if it wanted to.

But perhaps more problematic is that the government can exert a lot of influence over what the advice is going to be in the first place, to a level I wasn’t really aware of until recently.

For a start it’s the government who appoints each of the board members in the first place, with the Prime Minister being responsible for appointing the chair. But we don’t need to get into the realms of the personal to see how constrained the boards are.

Each year the relevant government minister sends a remit to the board concerned, alongside their the pay changes the government already decided it wants to make. The remit tells the board which factors they should focus on when making their decisions alongside any constraints that the government has already decided to enforce that they must bear in mind.

Sometimes the constraints are such that they exclude many of decisions the board in theory could make.

For instance, between 2013 and 2017 the public sector pay growth was limited to an average of 1%. The constraint was imposed by the government, not the pay review board. In situations like these the boards can only give advice on how to distribute that 1%.

Likewise during 2021-2022 there was a general public sector pay freeze ordered by the government for most public sector employees. The pay review boards could then only give advice on how to implement rises for types of workers the government had decided were eligible.

This year the NHS remit letter tells the board that:

…the NHS budget has already been set until 2024 to 2025. Pay awards must strike a careful balance – recognising the vital importance of public sector workers while delivering value for the taxpayer, considering private sector pay levels, not increasing the country’s debt further, and being careful not to drive prices even higher in the future.

In the current economic context, it is particularly important that you also have regard to the government’s inflation target when forming recommendations.

Thus the board is constrained to giving advice that if enacted wouldn’t increase the amount of budget the NHS would need to fulfill it. They’d also probably want to avoid using up enough of the pre-decided budget such that another aspect of the investment-starved service would suffer even more than it already is. The latter is something that can easily happen - there are many reports of, for example, the pressure schools are under to give their staff pay rises the government agreed to, but with the government failing to actually providing the extra budget needed to enact the raise. Thus some other critical part of the educational experience in this case must suffer.

The NHS remit letter this year also tells the board to ensure that their advice somehow focuses on the inflation target that the government set, rather than, say, what’s necessary for a happy, efficient, effective workforce.

This feels entirely backwards to me, and sometimes potentially impossible. How does one take the government’s inflation target into consideration at the same time as considering private sector pay levels, when the private sector is not constrained to take any note at all of the government’s inflation target in making its pay awards?

Naively, I had expected that the pay review board created its recommendations based on the need to recruit, retain and engage employees in the domain that they’re responsible for. They’d ensure that the employees have enough income to live a reasonable life, and ideally have pay roughly comparable to other similar job opportunities out there. Except of course if we’re particularly desperate to recruit and retain some roles (which we are - we’re desperate for nurses and teachers amongst others), in which case perhaps the pay or conditions would have to be improved to reflect that.

In this fantasy world, the board’s recommendations would then give input to the government to help them to figure out what budget they need to provide in order to fulfill the pay recommendations, in addition to any other investments or costs the service in question needs outside of the domain of the Pay Review Board. But in reality it looks to be more the other way around. The government can pre-set the budget and enforce constraints of its own choosing. The boards seem to be more advising on how to implement the government’s existing plans rather than enabled to provide an independent opinion as to what those plans should be in the first place.

📽 Watched The Santa Clause 2.

Shamefully I’m not a great fan of Christmas movies as a genre, They usually give me a big deju-vu feeling. But whilst this sequel-of-a-classic wasn’t very surprising, it kept me engaged and happy enough.

Plus Comet very much reminds me of our dog.

Listening to Love Sux by Avril Lavigne 🎶.

Astonishingly, it’s the 20 year anniversary of Avril’s classic album ‘Let Go’. There is an anniversary reissue but she also popped out a whole new album. Much of it might actually fit in well enough with the original, albeit this incarnation of her eternal pop punk teen angst seems a bit more up-beat and dancey in places.

If only we’d all manage to preserve ourselves as well over the past couple of decades. I mean, one of the titles even involves the word “boi”, albeit this time not a sk8r.

The recent Qatar World Cup final was apparently one of the best ever matches to grace the competition, although sadly I forgot it was even on.

Nonetheless, it’s hard to argue that the surrounding setup was anything other than a moral disaster.

Described by the Guardian’s Barney Ronay as ‘the most costly, carbon-heavy, bloodstained, corruption-shadowed event in the history of global sport’, the honour of hosting it was granted to an authoritarian government that routinely enables the abuse of human rights.

There are essentially no LGBT rights in Qatar, with prison sentences handed out for engaging in “homosexual practices”. Even just existing can lead to imprisonment, beating and harassment from the security forces. Anti LGBT legislation was followed to the almost-comical-if-it-wasn’t-real extent that you weren’t allowed to wear rainbow coloured clothes to the match.

The event’s multiple new stadiums and surrounding infrastructure were built in literally deadly workplace conditions involving near slavery in many instances.

The environmental damage is also likely to be absurdly huge, despite the incredible amount of greenwashing.

It’s particularly upsetting to reflect on the point that perhaps all this isn’t a weird aberration. The fact Qatar was selected as the host made the associated horror show particularly visible and disturbing. But, unfortunately, abusing desperate humans alongside the climate that sustains us all in order to put on a massively profitable and image-enhancing show is far more universal than that.

Back to Ronay’s article :

Qatar didn’t invent this world, didn’t invent migrant labour, didn’t invent global capitalism. It is simply the most zealous of late adopters, selling brutal carbon-fed hyper-capitalism back to the world in its final form

The whole event has the same ethos of “hardcore capitalism eating itself” that most cryptocurrency efforts to date often inspire in me. With that technology we burn the planet in order to enforce artificial scarcity over a made-up construct with the predictable outcome of further exacerbating chronic wealth inequality.

Health chiefs made the remarkable intervention of asking people to avoid getting drunk during the strike, four days before Christmas, as the potential for disruption in transporting people to hospital is so severe

Source

Concerned that public support for the strikes might plummet - is this a sacrifice too far for the Great British public?

Enjoyed seeing the pretty Christmas lights on a recent visit to Lincoln. Probably could have benefited from a spell check though 🤦‍♂️ .