Furry boy has now got over his post holiday shun period being pissed off with me for going away. He's now back to being cuddly as fuck times. Cat cuddle olympics we are ready and waiting.

I've got 1 year of recordings from me starting drum practice to recently. It might be interesting and horrific to go through those early recordings. When looking back for ideas I only usually look a month or two back at most.

Government shutdown in US being so drastic a situation shows how badly designed the US is. Belgium didn't have a government for a year yet nothing bad happened. Only thing affected was making new laws (MPs job). Apart from that the administrative state just kept rolling on previously agreed rules.

Please note everyone. What’s leaving is not just a head count. It’s millions of person-years of accumulated informal knowledge and institutional memory. The federal government is being destroyed, not reformed.

One of my favorite anecdotes from THE PREHISTORY OF THE FAR SIDE: "That doesn't sound like the Jane Goodall we know."

I suspect that indeed they have just made this matter worse for themselves. The trouble with this statement from Adrian Smith is that it conflicts with the RS's Code of Conduct (e.g. below).

We are thrilled to announce that our NEW Large Language Model will be released on 11.18.25.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect had become pretty well known. I purpose increasing our familiarity with the Gell-Mann amnesia effect, because that's exactly what we have here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Ma...

New! Cassetteboy vs Keir Starmer. This took absolutely ages, so if you'd like to buy us a coffee at ko-fi.com/cassetteboy we'd really appreciate it. Thanks!

While I'm really glad unions are pushing back and making their voices heard about this stuff, it's also still hilariously godawful. The only explanation I can think of is that they tried to make the rest of the video as bad as possible to make Tilly look better: www.theguardian.com/film/2025/se...

unfortunately this rules

The level of brightness standardized in modern headlights is a known safety hazard. Regulators and insurance safety associations think the tests circa the 1980s don’t need updating. Auto manufacturers have perverse incentives and have found ways to cheat these tests.

The amazing thing about the hundreds of billions of dollars being spent on AI development is it doesn't even include all the externalized costs like higher electricity prices for hundreds of millions of people.

“To be clear, ‘Tilly Norwood’ is not an actor, it’s a character generated by a computer program that was trained on the work of countless professional performers — without permission or compensation.” @sagaftra.org @humanartistry.bsky.social

[shoulders through a throng of open anti-semites] "And you know what else bugs me about Blueskyism ...?"

Damn. Got someone set up on my online banking with wrong name. I accidentally used my own name. Weirdly there is no way to change payee name after set up. So it looks like I just send money to myself.

It was a nice 2 days away in Cornwall. We hired a bunk house the whole weekend. Works out really cheap if you can get 10 people together to mostly fill the place. Cookers and everything. We got very drunk and played music and dice games and walked.

Went away for a couple of nights. Left 3 days of cat food just in case. He ate only a tiny bit. He was starving when I got back & suddenly ate one & a half days of food in one frantic mega munch. Gorged himself & looked like he was going to puke but didn’t. Weirdo loves me to watch him eat so much.

Hermína Týrlová was a stop-motion legend -- and she used wool to create pure magic. Her wool animation was part of her career rebound in her 60s. We're exploring these wonderful films and what makes them so special: animationobsessive.substack.com/p/a-legends-...

fun how jk rowling going full scorched earth attack at emma watson was triggered not by watson attacking her, but by her giving some feeble wishy-washy statement about still loving her despite their disagreements

The same recipe for a booby-trapped flaming pig's head from two separate sources about a century apart. Proof practical jokes don't get old. www.culina-vetus.de/2025/09/29/f... #culinaryhistory #foodhistory #earlymodern #medievalsky #flambè

Weirdly, the “trademark sound” Goldie found wasn’t time-stretching at all. What the H3000 was doing was pitch scaling, retaining duration whilst changing pitch, which is the opposite of time stretching. Reason people called it time-stretching is that’s what producers guessed he was doing.

EARTH MUST DIE Featuring a load of my favourite comedians - too many even to fit on the trailer! Joel Fry! Martha Howe-Douglas! @alexhorne.bsky.social! Tamsin Grieg! @5teviem.bsky.social @mrholness.bsky.social! @misterabk.bsky.social! @rosieisaholt.bsky.social! MORE Please RETWEET and WISHLIST

I wrote a thing about digital ID cards. It’s rather long… paulbernal.wordpress.com/2025/09/29/d...

Preparing my notes for an interview on history of identity cards, back in the news because of proposals such as Labour Together’s Britcard (left). There’s a long history (see WW2 poster, right) Here’s a thread on recent (1980s-2010s) UK ID card history, showing how Tony Blair became keen on them

Ian McShane is 83 On how he came to be narrator on Grace Jones’ Slave To The Rhythm: ‘I was in a chip shop with my wife Gwen, & Trevor Horn came in, who I’d known forever. He said ‘Ian, what are you doing after supper?’ ‘Why?’ ‘Well, I need a voice & Orson Welles is dead.’ youtu.be/nAerTAjLpF0?...

A boat has sunk in the harbour of Hafnarfjörður. Which maybe shouldn't be newsworthy, except the same boat sank at the same harbour five years ago. The boat doesn't leak and they don't really know why it keeps sinking there.

Things I had not expected to see today: Deutsche Bank making a numbers based argument that "AI" is a bubble and won't last https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/deutsche-bank-grim-warning-ai-industry

Some of these business style reports seem like desperate marketing. Their suggestion to engineers thinking it’s crap always seems to be “must try harder” not “must improve product” because they know you can’t improve it much anyway or they would have.

Listening to @jonagar.bsky.social bring this great thread to life www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m... with the telling remark that ID cards are often mooted in response to the moral panic of the day. I pop up in the 2nd half talking @carefultrouble.bsky.social's research into public opinion on digital ID

I researched and wrote quite a bit on the history of UK ID cards when I was doing my Government Machine (MIT Press, 2003) project. Partly I was intrigued why such a big thing (1916-19, 1939-52) had been forgotten Main lessons, open access, here (Nov 2005): historyandpolicy.org/policy-paper...

🦟 🪱 🦠 25 tracks on a theme of infectious disease.... We start with a banger that's 24 years old, Four Tet's magnificent "No More Mosquitoes" (it's a rallying cry for this playlist 'cuz they're a vector for all sorts of diseases, like malaria and Zika) 1/25 youtu.be/l651f3mucXA?...

I've never understood why people go "be safe" when there's murky shit going on. Oh alright, cheers for that, I was going to blunder about like a right silly cunt but now you've told me, a grown adult, to "be safe" I'll have my wits about me.

I've seen AI-"generated" code merged that was clearly taken verbatim from Stackoverflow since it still included comments that referenced the answers above it.

At some point Labour might dare admit that immigration is good for the economy…

Hey theater companies: don't do this. (From @bcmerchant.bsky.social 's newsletter Blood in the Machine www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/artists-ar...)

Well don't I feel stupid

Nigel Farage of course seems to have been very happy to do his pro-Russian propaganda for free

Cilla '68

With 8 billion people on the planet that's $100 per person including all the little babies and people living in shacks. Yeah that makes total sense.

Can I just say how funny it is for one of the world’s richest most powerful people to introduce a new thing from his trillion dollar company and get people hype for it and to end up with 1,600 likes after a day

Big win. Now you can leave Bluesky AND return to their servers if you wanted to. Folks who migrated to blacksky.app, myatproto.social, and cryptoanarchy.network were taking a leap of faith move over to servers hosted by Blacksky Algorithms. Hopefully this de-risks things for folks.

My last post about digital ID today, but reading this Independent piece (in which I'm quoted) and what is this quote from Morgan Wild at Labour Together? Using the NHS app doesn't mean "your data is online". If this is the level of digital understanding of people writing digital policy, god help us

Nick Offerman says his new conspiracy theory film (about sovereign citizens) is ‘too smart’ for Americans: www.the-independent.com/arts-enterta...

macOS Tahoe kills FireWire permanently "For those of you who mistakenly believe that you are immune if you have a converter from FireWire to Thunderbolt, you are not." I still have and use FireWire drives. I wont be updating any time soon #postchat www.provideocoalition.com/macos-tahoe-...

Weird how the biggest artist ever would need to do stuff for exposure? When does exposure end? When is it sufficient? Is there an end?

Only $600 billion more? I know the rich are richer than ever & dumber than ever but still seems like a lot. The main problem with letting the rich just get richer is real opportunities are finite. There's only so much real activity that richness can buy. So when they run out you have to invent them.

Weird how chatbots think a Dyson Sphere is a dumb idiocy if you ask about energy policy. They rightly just poo poo it. Yet if you have a gallactic empire to run then it's obviously a necessary & inevitable tool regardless of theory. Physics be damned. Politics wins if you just mention bigger scale.

God I love Angela Collier. She's here ripping the shit out of the original Dyson Sphere paper that inspired so much dipshit sci-fi. In the paper is gems like "Of course if you have an advanced civilsation it will disassemble Jupiter. It just makes sense." youtu.be/fLzEX1TPBFM?...

This is a box crab 📦🦀, likely Calappa calappa (from a Malay word meaning "coconut"). They're also called 'shame-faced crabs' because they pull their massive claws (chelae) in front of their face when alarmed. Why are they squirting? This is a way of moving water over their gills to keep them wet.