4 ms·

Would be great to see this sort of thing for all political parties, or at least Labour and Conservatives.

fy20 2y ago
I was thinking the same thing. I'd imagine a LLM could do a pretty good job after you crawl the data from companies house.
- cjk2 2y ago
  Hammer meet screw. Companies House is already a large graph of companies and ownerships. You can do this with naive methods easier.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
aaa_aaa 2y ago
Not that I care politics but one should think why reform and why the label "far right"? Why now?
- cjk2 2y ago
  Why not?
- aflag 2y ago
  Is it not?
- Ylpertnodi 2y ago
  Channel 4 News: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLRCY5fSM7s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLRCY5fSM7s At my time of writing 202406282043 - I'd consider that 'now'.
  - epicureanideal 2y ago
    [flagged]
- lucasRW 2y ago
  By 2024 standards, saying that a man cannot be pregnant, or that illegally coming into a country is... well, illegal, is enough to be "far-right".
  - asbintch 2y ago
    Interestingly one of the very few other political parties that understand women to be female and men to be male - the Party Of Women - is also a limited company, just like Reform is: https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/15524954 https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c... Maybe this is the new standard for parties of protest against the neoliberal consensus?
walthamstow 2y ago
No other political parties are constructed as a limited company controlled by a single person, that's what's so interesting about Reform.
- cjk2 2y ago
  That is true. However The Conservatives have a lot of satellite companies run by politicians. There are some fairly well known ones even though it's not obvious they are run by party members.
  - specproc 2y ago
    Yeah, but then you get into disambiguation hell. My first serious coding project was an insanely ambitious attempt to do something like this with CH data. Great punt for a Masters thesis, but not the sort of thing I'd base proper research on. Love the look of the library they used to do this, in considerably better shape than my attempt. https://github.com/ribenamaplesyrup/sugartrail https://github.com/ribenamaplesyrup/sugartrail
    - cjk2 2y ago
      Not research, but I spent 5 years writing matching algorithms for data for financial companies which was entered from random crappy mainframes driven by the lowest bidding data entry workers. This tied together the financial relationships of millions of people. The dumber it was the measurably more accurate it was. Hell even some of it used soundex scoring and a naive z-test to work out the confidence that two names were matching.
- yardstick 2y ago
  Maybe I missed something in the article, but it goes through the companies office finding companies based on the names of key Reform UK members. Couldn’t the same be done for other major members of the other major UK parties?
  - pjc50 2y ago

fy20 2y ago

I was thinking the same thing. I'd imagine a LLM could do a pretty good job after you crawl the data from companies house.

cjk2 2y ago
Hammer meet screw. Companies House is already a large graph of companies and ownerships. You can do this with naive methods easier.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

aaa_aaa 2y ago

Not that I care politics but one should think why reform and why the label "far right"? Why now?

cjk2 2y ago
Why not?
aflag 2y ago
Is it not?
Ylpertnodi 2y ago
Channel 4 News: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLRCY5fSM7s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLRCY5fSM7s At my time of writing 202406282043 - I'd consider that 'now'.
- epicureanideal 2y ago
  [flagged]
lucasRW 2y ago
By 2024 standards, saying that a man cannot be pregnant, or that illegally coming into a country is... well, illegal, is enough to be "far-right".
- asbintch 2y ago
  Interestingly one of the very few other political parties that understand women to be female and men to be male - the Party Of Women - is also a limited company, just like Reform is: https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/15524954 https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c... Maybe this is the new standard for parties of protest against the neoliberal consensus?

walthamstow 2y ago

No other political parties are constructed as a limited company controlled by a single person, that's what's so interesting about Reform.

cjk2 2y ago
That is true. However The Conservatives have a lot of satellite companies run by politicians. There are some fairly well known ones even though it's not obvious they are run by party members.
- specproc 2y ago
  Yeah, but then you get into disambiguation hell. My first serious coding project was an insanely ambitious attempt to do something like this with CH data. Great punt for a Masters thesis, but not the sort of thing I'd base proper research on. Love the look of the library they used to do this, in considerably better shape than my attempt. https://github.com/ribenamaplesyrup/sugartrail https://github.com/ribenamaplesyrup/sugartrail
  - cjk2 2y ago
    Not research, but I spent 5 years writing matching algorithms for data for financial companies which was entered from random crappy mainframes driven by the lowest bidding data entry workers. This tied together the financial relationships of millions of people. The dumber it was the measurably more accurate it was. Hell even some of it used soundex scoring and a naive z-test to work out the confidence that two names were matching.
yardstick 2y ago
Maybe I missed something in the article, but it goes through the companies office finding companies based on the names of key Reform UK members. Couldn’t the same be done for other major members of the other major UK parties?
- pjc50 2y ago