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Post Office victims tell Starmer ‘get your act together’

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Victims of the Post Office Horizon IT scandal have urged the prime minister to “get his act together” and sort out compensation for sub-postmasters still fighting for it to be made whole.

Former sub-postmasters told the BBC they are waiting for final settlements to be agreed, years after hundreds of them were accused of stealing money, later discovered to be the fault of an accounting system.

A report from an official inquiry found that people who sought compensation had “formidable difficulties” and the entire scandal has had a “disastrous” impact on those wrongly accused.

Sally Stringer said Keir Starmer must tell MPs to see sub-postmasters in their constituencies and “get it sorted out”.

Appearing on BBC Breakfast with fellow Post Office victims, Ms Stringer told Starmer: “We’re all getting old and decrepit and your time in office is dependent, frankly, on how you sort this one out.

“Get your act together,” she said.

Ms Stringer, who ran Beckford Post Office for 20 years, agreed with other former sub-postmasters that the compensation schemes feel designed to make them give up.

Maria Lockwood, who operated a Post Office in Huddersfield, said compensation for victims could have been settled “a long time ago”, but instead it is a “cruel, cruel” process.

Tracy Felstead, who went to prison when she was 19 years old, said she had now been asked three times for a medical report.

“How many more medical reports do you need to prove what’s happened? They know what’s happened to us,” she said.

Former judge Sir Wyn Williams has been chairing a long-running inquiry into the Horizon scandal, and on Tuesday released a report looking at the impact on victims, as well as the fairness and speed of the compensation process.

Sir Wyn criticised the “formidable difficulties” around the delivery of financial redress for victims, which is currently organised around three different schemes.

He recommended:

  • A mechanism to deliver redress “to persons who have been wronged by public bodies” should be established
  • Free legal advice should be extended to claimants on one of the schemes – the Horizon Shortfall Scheme.
  • Close family members of people who have “been most adversely affected by Horizon” should be compensated

Sir Wyn estimates that there are currently 10,000 eligible claimants in three compensation schemes, and that number is likely to rise by at least hundreds, if not more.

Scott Darlington, who was sub-postmaster of Alderley Edge Post Office, was doubtful that the government will act on the report.

“Will they take any of the recommendations? They’re not obliged to, and their track record shows that they’ve tried to avoid things that they have to do.”

The first volume of the report, published after a long-running inquiry into the scandal, set out in full the devastating impact on people’s lives.

At least 59 people told the inquiry they had contemplated suicide at various points, of whom 10 attempted to take their own lives, some on more than one occasion.

Families of victims said at least 13 more people had killed themselves.

Many victims suffered psychiatric and psychological difficulties with some detailing how they had abused alcohol due to the stress of the situation, while a number said they couldn’t sleep at night without drinking first.

One postmistress said she “went to rehab for eight months as the Post Office had turned her to drink to cope with the losses”.



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AI Coding Tools Could Decrease Productivity, Study Suggests

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AI code editors have quickly become a mainstay of software development, employed by tech giants such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.

In an interesting twist, a new study suggests that AI tools might actually be slowing experienced developers down.

Experienced developers using AI coding tools took 19% longer to complete issues than those not using generative AI assistance, according to a new study from Model Evaluation & Threat Research (METR).

Even after completing the tasks, participants couldn’t accurately gauge their own productivity, the study said: The average AI-assisted developers still thought their productivity had gained by 20%.

How the study was set up

METR’s study recruited 16 developers with large, open-source repositories that they had worked on for years. The developers were randomly assigned into two groups: Those allowed to use AI coding assistance and those who weren’t.

The AI-assisted coders could choose which vibe-coding tool they used. Most chose Cursor with Claude 3.5/3.7 Sonnet. Business Insider reached out to Cursor for comment.

Developers without AI spent over 10% more time actively coding, the study said. The AI-assisted coders spent over 20% more time reviewing AI outputs, prompting AI, waiting on AI, or being idle.


A graph from METR's study is pictured.

While participants without AI use spent more time actively coding, AI-assisted participants spent more time prompting and waiting for AI, reviewing its output, and idling.

METR



A ‘really surprising’ result — but it’s important to remember how fast AI tools are progressing

METR researcher Nate Rush told BI he uses an AI code editor every day. While he didn’t make a formal prediction about the study’s results, Rush said he jotted down positive productivity figures he expected the study to reach. He remains surprised by the negative end result — and cautions against taking it out of context.

“Much of what we see is the specificity of our setting,” Rush said, explaining that developers without the participants’ 5-10 years of expertise would likely see different results. “But the fact that we found any slowdown at all was really surprising.”

Steve Newman, serial entrepreneur and cofounder of Google Docs, described the findings in a Substack post as “too bad to be true,” but after more careful analysis of the study and its methodology, he found the study credible.

“This study doesn’t expose AI coding tools as a fraud, but it does remind us that they have important limitations (for now, at least),” Newman wrote.

The METR researchers said they found evidence for multiple contributors to the productivity slowdown. Over-optimism was one likely factor: Before completing the tasks, developers predicted AI would decrease implementation time by 24%.

For skilled developers, it may still be quicker to do what you know well. The METR study found that AI-assisted participants slowed down on the issues they were more familiar with. They also reported that their level of experience made it more difficult for AI to help them.

AI also may not be reliable enough yet to produce clean and accurate code. AI-assisted developers in the study accepted less than 44% of the generated code, and spent 9% of their time cleaning AI outputs.

Ruben Bloom, one of the study’s developers, posted a reaction thread on X. Coding assistants have developed considerably since he participated in February.

“I think if the result is valid at this point in time, that’s one thing, I think if people are citing in another 3 months’ time, they’ll be making a mistake,” Bloom wrote.

METR’s Rush acknowledges that the 19% slowdown is a “point-in-time measurement” and that he’d like to study the figure over time. Rush stands by the study’s takeaway that AI productivity gains may be more individualized than expected.

“A number of developers told me this really interesting anecdote, which is, ‘Knowing this information, I feel this desire to use AI more judiciously,'” Rush said. “On an individual level, these developers know their actual productivity impact. They can make more informed decisions.”





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Why Chuck Robbins and Jeetu Patel believe Cisco’s AI reinvention is working

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Just days before Nvidia stormed past $4 trillion market cap, setting off another frenzied rally around artificial intelligence (AI)-linked stocks, a quieter, less meme-able tech giant, Cisco Systems, was building a case for relevance, led by its top brass, Chuck Robbins and Jeetu Patel, in the heart of Mumbai. Long seen as a legacy stalwart of the dotcom era, Cisco today trades at a market cap of $272 billion, a far cry from its 2000 peak of $500 billion. But for its CEO Chuck Robbins and president and chief product officer Jeetu Patel, the story has only begun to play out now.



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Martin Lewis' trick for haggling with a call centre

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Contract ending or ended? Try this if you’re renewing your broadband/TV, mobile, car/home insurance or breakdown cover.



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