Gideon David

"This place would be much nicer if there were more cars". Said by no one...ever! Opinions my own, RT/like not an endorsement etc etc

[Gideon David @ThatGideonDavid]

@thom74516530 North Wales is getting brand new trains and infrastructure upgrades to allow more frequent services.

[Gideon David @ThatGideonDavid]

@CardiffSpinster @cardiffcouncil I just came back from Amsterdam - beautiful and the trams add to it. They have had a transformational impact when introduced in other cities.

[Gideon David @ThatGideonDavid]

@CardiffSpinster @cardiffcouncil Buses just don't get people out of their cars in the way trams do. Trams in Nottingham, Edinburgh, Manchester etc have been very successful in drawing people to public transport

[Gideon David @ThatGideonDavid]

@CrisCardotyn @djleekee @cardiffcouncil Bear in mind the arena is part of a major redevelopment. The new trams bring big rail capacity and the new arena car park will link directly to a4232 and docks road so good road access too.

[Gideon David @ThatGideonDavid]

@djleekee @CrisCardotyn @cardiffcouncil I don't disagree with that. Trouble is that the prison is owend by the prison service, not the council and I doubt they have any motivation to leave. As we saw with companies house, some civil service departments just like to look after their own little patch

[Gideon David @ThatGideonDavid]

@djleekee @CrisCardotyn @cardiffcouncil It would take a lot longer to move them without the tram...

[Gideon David @ThatGideonDavid]

@CrisCardotyn @cardiffcouncil Each tram train can carry 250 people, so a 4 per hour shuttle will carry 1000. They can also run in triple, so 1500. Bear in mind also that the tram trains will also be running to queen st, also 4 per hour iirc, so if they were paired, that adds another 2000 people per hour

[Gideon David @ThatGideonDavid]

@cardiffcouncil Great that this is finally happening!

[Tom Westgarth @Tom_Westgarth15]

Laura Gilbert built 10 Data Science and the Incubator for AI, which have both pioneered the deployment of technology across the British state. Few people have contributed more to improving the UK’s state capacity in AI than Laura and the teams she was a part of.

10DS modelling reportedly informed the choice to prioritise by age rather than occupation. This is widely credited with saving lives versus the occupation-based alternative being lobbied for at the time.

10DS and the brilliant folks there did a lot of other great stuff, including building live COVID data that policy teams and the public relied on, as well as releasing a lightweight data sharing tool on GitHub where anyone can access it free of charge. Today, it has amassed over 200,000 public downloads, used by teams across government and industry to make data sharing easy.

Onto AI, where Zack has suggested that Laura doesn’t have lots to offer to public discussion. Whenever I speak with frontier labs, they tell me the U.K. now has the most ambitious and sophisticated approach to deploying AI in public services.

With Extract (which Laura’s Incubator for AI team developed), planning documents are now converted into digital records in 40 seconds, versus the 1–2 hours of planner time it typically takes manually, with higher accuracy. That’s roughly a 100–180x speedup, and is contributing to a 45% reduction in processing time to build the housing and infrastructure the UK is sorely in need of.

The public sector team who built Extract scaffolded Gemini so that it could orchestrate Segment Anything and pose estimation models to map geospatial information from text and diagrams in a way that even the GOOGLE DEEPMIND TEAM hadn’t worked out how to do at the time.

So rather than outsourcing to big tech, which I’m sure Zack and many others are more than sceptical of, Laura helped build true public sector state capacity that reduced our reliance on the private sector, while also delivering a world class public service.

Powerful AI systems are going to usher in a centuries worth of social and economic transformation within only a couple of decades. This requires a deep analysis of where capabilities will develop, an understanding of which externalities we want to mitigate, a vision of what a good life looks like, and amassing the people, tools, infrastructure, and institutions to build that vision. 

Of course Laura is precisely the sort of person that has much to offer in answering these questions. We should be cherishing the tireless civil servants and incredible technical talent that have built capabilities that many folks think the public sector would never be able to do.

[Gideon David @ThatGideonDavid]

@carwowuk I've warmed to it, a bit. Some nice individual elements, but the whole is messy.

[Gideon David @ThatGideonDavid]

@meadwaj Tbf, its aldi and lidl that have hammered morrisons and they've done so by offering cheap prices

[Samuel Hughes @SCP_Hughes]

~50 bays, 8 storeys, a massive slab of flats, 400 windows on one huge plane. And yet, this 1930s building looks pretty good. Why?

Part of the answer is the use of the classical language to visually structure and humanise the enormous bulk.

Vertically, the lower ground floor is distinguished as a visual 'plinth' with stone facing, and the upper ground is then marked off with a string course (a band of stonework). The middle three storeys are grouped as an 'implied order' between the string course and the cornice. Above the cornice is an 'attic' storey, and then there are two storeys in the roof.

No storey is an exact duplicate of another; each plays a different role in the ensemble. If you cut out any one of them, the proportions of the others would look slightly wrong.

Horizontally the facade is broken down into a five-part composition (only four parts are visible in the photo), with three 'pavilions' distinguished from the linking wings by richer ornamental treatment.

Again, this means that each bay plays an indispensable part in the whole. If you sliced off the final bay, the whole 50-bay building would look wrong. You might be able to cut a bay or two from one of the wings without people noticing, but pretty quickly the lopsidedness would become obvious.

At the time of its construction, this building would have been seen as extremely mechanical and monotonous relative to the kind of architecture then admired. But there is a sense in which the classical language is seen at its best in cases like this, where it makes a basically repetitive and monotonous building type markedly less relentless than it would otherwise be.

[Gideon David @ThatGideonDavid]

@GarethDennis Whilst undoubtedly expensive, Artemis famously freed up capacity on the Catlefield Corridor, so, you know, good value in the long term

[Gideon David @ThatGideonDavid]

@djjmilner Its a real shame. If the interior layout no longer worked then surely they could have at least retained the handsome facade?

[Gideon David @ThatGideonDavid]

@GarethDennis Congrats! 😍

[Gideon David @ThatGideonDavid]

@neiljmcevoy @cardiffcouncil Propel: the party of 0.3% of Wales

[Gideon David @ThatGideonDavid]

@JBTEvans Better buses needed definitely- bear in mind some of the burns recommendations is for better buses around Newport, hence the proposed changes to old green roundabout. A new rail station would benefit the area much more than a relief road though, even an imperfect station

[Gideon David @ThatGideonDavid]

@JBTEvans Not sure i agree re Somerton - big catchment area that, and if in future those stopping trains continued to Bristol (just need to ignore gwr's protestations!) then it would drag a lot of demand away from the m4.

[Gideon David @ThatGideonDavid]

@JBTEvans I get that, but with the right infra spend hopefully it works. Llanwern junction being a good example. Bear in mind also that hopefully a 4tph service would only need an extra 2tph as the existing 2tph Cheltenham trains can be changed to stoppers.