I won’t be the only person to have noted the very specific definition of ‘Commonwealth’ in this question. Having said that, it’s not unreasonable to assume that any issues of national security will involve Canada more than, say, Botswana.

I’m seeing a lot of “I didn’t want to go to university” posts on LinkedIn by people who think they’re more successful because of it. Plus there’s a lot of media coverage about degrees not being worth the debt you incur. When did all this anti-intellectualism take hold?

This Iannucci/Lee programme on R4 is basically a podcast. Two middle-aged blokes sitting around making fun of people they don’t like. It’s very good and funny, and I agree with most of what they say, but we shouldn’t ignore that it’s a bit lazy. Also, odd time of day to schedule it.

I win.

A Dune With a View.

I’m glad to see people protesting Discord forcing IDs for age verification, but what I need everyone to understand is that there’s immense bipartisan pressure to make the entire internet like this, and they are likely going to succeed unless something drastic happens

What if you already are the change you want to see in the world, and it doesn’t seem to be helping?

Age verification? I remember Bohemian Rhapsody’ being Christmas No 1.

Labour's structural position is bad (terrible inheritance etc + unwillingness to grasp certain nettles) but has been hugely damaged by an obsession with winning over people who will never vote for them, based on a misread of the 2024 election

Just finished shift. How badly are Wales doing?

I understand there’s some ‘Kamala ‘28’ talk. I thought she ran an absolutely fantastic campaign, one of the best I’ve seen, in an unwinnable environment. I think she’d have been an indifferent president, but that’s not the point.

This comes up a lot so I do want to let you all know that the option of turning the existing building into a heritage/museum site has been costed out and it is substantially more expensive

NO. NO NO NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.

I don’t remember asking to live in interesting times.

No wonder Streeting sounded so excited on the radio this morning.

Boringly, mine would probably be ‘It’s the End of the World As We Know It’ although ‘I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind of Thing’ (Pet Shop Boys) is a strong contender.

Half my feed think Starmer will be gone by the end of the day, the other half think he just scraped through. Personally I’ve given up making political predictions.

It has not. Stopped. Raining. All. Day.

Good morning mostly there is a lot of this, this morning, but before they dumped 3m files last night, FT Weekend had a very fine collection of reads. Let's have a thread of highlights and giftlinks which will expire (and your mission is to resist the urget to complain when that happens)

A new study from Anthropic finds that gains in coding efficiency when relying on AI assistance did did not meet statistical significance; AI use noticeably degraded programmers’ understanding of what they were doing. Incredible.

Do we know how many people were actually sent to Rwanda?

Updated my handle as I now have a LinkedIn account, may God help me.

Enjoyably dotty comment on a Martin Lewis video. It’s alarming just how many people really do think this way. Also, “whilst at the same time” is redundancy.

According to BBC News this morning, Hamlet was first staged in 1948.

Running first aid in Apple’s Disk Utility for my partner. It’s taking for ever and there’s no way to abort it other than pulling the plug.

I honestly thought Braverman was already in Reform.

Fascinating thread. I run in what I might call some pretty woke circles - here and elsewhere - and I find myself biting my tongue a lot. Not because I don’t agree with people, but because I spend so much time trying to work out the nuances of what I say that I just give up and post nothing.

Back down to 75kg. Phew. Self-restraint is being slowly restored post-Christmas.

In this AI world, my immediate instinct was to count the fingers.

I’ve never watched The Traitors, as I’ve barely watched any television in the last decade. Is it basically Among Us but in human form?

I need a Scottish investigative journalists to look into the explosion of tartan and tweed shops, and how the island of Harris is producing so much tweed.

FINALLY. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Counterpoint (sort of): I grew up pre-videogames. Gary Gygax’s wordy, nerdy D&D manuals were my escape from ‘productivity’. But they also massively widened my vocabulary (it’s how I discovered what ‘ecology’ meant, for example) and made me comfortable with handling statistics.

It depends if the underling (and their underlings all the way down) is also relying on the AI summary. At what level of responsibility does a human generate the info, and what are the chances it can be communicated to CEO level if the AI misses it?

No new pictures. Where are you mentally?

Life your life in such a way that people don't immediately start hoping you're dead on news that your plane has turned back mid-flight.

This is the way to stand up to racism and support your people. Thank you @bromleyfc.bsky.social

You know, for most of us between thinking we can't do things because we're too young & inexperienced and thinking we can't do things because we're too old and tired there is a sweet spot where we both know stuff and have the energy to do it. We're just too busy at the time to really appreciate it

Europe has - in technical terms - an absolute sod load of potential economic leverage over the United States. It has turned the other cheek due to security concerns. The US seems intent on demonstrating that it will not guarantee European security. So Europe may start using that leverage.

Much is made of the last 10 years of PM ‘churn’ but it seems very odd not to have noted that 5 of the 6 churnees have been churned by their own party. Perhaps this is telling us something as much about the Conservative Party as of some innate ungovernability?

My list would probably be vetoed by the BBC for having too much ‘difficult’ classical music on it. But I do genuinely enjoy Messiaën, Berio and Ives. Luckily it’s not going to happen, so it doesn’t matter.

Note to UK weather app users. Please time travel back to yesterday and stop your Met Office app from updating. It has dropped the single-screen view and clear design in favour of a long-scroll monstrosity which looks like every other shitty overcrowded weather app. WITH ADS.

Duolingo appears to have introduced a facility whereby you can smack someone in the same league as you in the face. Their avatar, not their actual face. Still, it might finally be time to move on. This stinks.

This thread is utterly fantastic, and a good antidote to *waves at absolutely everything else*.

Delighted to see my old Labour MP @ruthcadbury.bsky.social posting on Bluesky - the one person who would definitely make me vote Labour next time because she’s good on so many levels. Sadly because of boundary changes I can’t vote for her any more.

The BBC absolutely determined to shove America down our throats because of the 1776 anniversary. I don’t think we want to have America in the front of our minds just now.

I just realised who Starmer reminds me of: the character of Mr Barrowclough in Porridge. Notionally in charge, but incapable of handling confrontation and easily manipulated.

@littlemavis.bsky.social Lovely service today, Mary. I think he’d have liked it.

The Prisoner. It made no sense whatsoever, but in retrospect it was probably the only logical conclusion to events.

Aching after the first proper (ie trainer supervised) gym session of the year yesterday. Feel like I’m back in the virtuous cycle, though. Over Xmas I was eating tons because “it’s Xmas”. Now I’m not eating ‘bad’ things because it isn’t Xmas.