I would like to hear funny things that people have done while on mushrooms. I have never taken mushrooms because I absolutely do not trust my brain not to hallucinate spiders but my partner's friend once spent 8 hours trying to cut down a tree with a penknife (not much to do in the country)

Ethan Stern, 37, was appointed to the position at the start of the year, after a lifetime of keeping up an ongoing bit because there are apparently no lengths he won’t go to for a punchline.

The impact on children is going to be horrific. Apparently we learned nothing as a nation from the damage caused by Section 28, and having grown up under it, I wish that were not the case.

When I was at secondary school they tried to make the girls wear their hair up at all times. We staged a sit-in in the tennis courts (honestly, most of the entire girl contingent) and they capitulated. Young people could make an important statement here.

Looooolololol

The entire British media fabricated a "scandal" at Tavistock and there were only 8 complaints over an entire decade. Yet the most actual common issues were about access to care and waiting lists. www.thepinknews.com/2026/02/11/n...

Note the surnames www.independent.ie/irish-news/6...

good morning, #linguistics 🐦🐦 pals the University of Essex wants to cut 50% of our Language & Linguistics department, close our foundation programme & our Southend campus, + cut 400 jobs academic departments and professional services jobs across all depts join us in the fight against these cuts!

One amongst many reasons I won't use "AI". I'm autistic. By definition that means my brain thinks differently to the majority. AI spits out the average of its training set. By design it will water down my thoughts into mediocrity. I've done a lot of work to learn to celebrate my square-peg brain.

Read this last night and I think it fits "So take the pen. Write in your own voice…the story of liberation through honesty, compassion, and self-designed truth." (from "Evolution in Progress: Rethinking Neurodivergence" by "J.K. Hamilton")

It is a weird state of affairs that I'm feeling uneasy about next week's teaching, new this year, which reiterates that LLMs are wrong by design, criticises the Natural Language Acquisition intervention for autistic communication, and tells the horror story of Wakefield & MMR

Remember when various gvts solution for the fact covid wasn't going away was to simply stop testing for covid?

Microsoft, Google, Meta and Amazon paying influencers $400k-$600k to post months of AI hype content. Absolutely busted, failed industry, embarrassing era www.cnbc.com/2026/02/06/g...

I did a PhD in part because I was tired of being referred to as stupid when I was a secretary.

Not read the article because of the paywall but a three layer autoencoder with 11 neurons can do that very scrutably indeed (see French and Mareschal, 2000 I think?). This is hilarious.

😂

This is, of course, a wishlist. Gen AI is meant to undermine the relative power of the people machines couldn't replace. The list is meant to make capitalists salivate. But Gen AI can't do any of these things.

Nerds assemble! I need recommendations for a speaker who can talk not only about the growth in awareness of ADHD/autism in the UK, and the importance of accommodations etc., but also the sociological aspects of underdiagnosis/stigma in women/minority communities etc. Pls repost for wider reach, ta.

There's nothing for you here!

Age verification? Look bravely through the dragon's eeeeeye and flyyyyyyy

This isn't a sustainable way of running something that determines, ultimately, people's job security. I barely have to be involved in the REF but even from the outside it looks chaotic, a source of a huge amount of stress and an infuriating time-sink

This new season of Industry is about the AI bubble isn't it

The UK's "free AI training for all" program may offer free courses, but there is a cost to society for the government's approach. Elinor Carmi, Tania Duarte, Mark Wong, Susan Oman & Tim Davies argue it deepens Big Tech dependency while sidelining critical AI literacy and community organizations.

HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW: “.. In our in-progress research, we discovered that AI tools didn’t reduce work, they consistently intensified it.” hbr.org/2026/02/ai-d...

I started a podcast. It’s called Six Things. Each month, a guest brings six things and we talk about them. It’s as simple as that. Massage your ears with the first episode, featuring @joannawyld.bsky.social’s fine selection. Available on your favoured ear-massaging platform. pod.link/1873642106/e...

When you do a Town Hall on AI and you get 26 pages of questions, the vast majority of which are negative, should you reconsider maybe? Just a bit?

This is because a statistical model of word frequency is not a useful tool for modeling the complex interactions of the human body

⚠️ Despite all the hype, chatbots still make terrible doctors. Out today is the largest user study of language models for medical self-diagnosis. We found that chatbots provide inaccurate and inconsistent answers, and that people are better off using online searches or their own judgment.

Good

Looks like a fantastic opportunity ⬇️⬇️⬇️

Apart from the difference in art (the kids stuff radiates joy a life and the ai stuff is just dead on arrival) the kids experience something while doing it. That experience is communicated in the art too. Art isn’t just the end result.

Why relying on AI may lead to poor decision making say researchers led by Dr Sophie Nightingale @natureportfolio.nature.com www.lancaster.ac.uk/news/why-rel...

New study in Lancet eClinical Medicine (N=20,358) found that mental healthcare utilization initially increases (consistent with assessment requirements under guidelines), then drops substantially, following gender-affirming medical care. #transgender #mentalhealth #medicine

For months, people have asked me about the popular Telepathy Tapes podcast, and its premise of non-speaking autistics reading minds. And I’m here to tell you: The Telepathy Tapes is a hot, complicated mess—but not for the reasons you may think. At TPGA: thinkingautismguide.com/2026/02/the-...

What's going to happen is private healthcare companies starting to offer human-only procedures for exorbitant amounts of money

Sigh, twas ever thus: “You had thought that maybe, oh, because you could be more productive with AI, then you save some time, you can work less. But then really, you don’t work less. You just work the same amount or even more.”

omg everybody go draw a horse this is what the internet was made for gradient.horse

Who are our favorite #EDS and #hypermobility specialists, #NEISvoid and beloved community? Someone you've seen teach or at least talk about it. A clinician friend wants to learn ❤️ Share, pls!

It’s practically a work of art that he thinks we’re all that stupid.

Hey! You! Have you played my game about strangling a horse? You should! It's free to play, and you will die LOADS! 13,500 words of comedy choose-your-own-adventure silliness, just for you! brainmage.itch.io/i-will-stran...

Whoops

Well there goes the evening neal.fun/sandboxels/

I made a map of 3.4 million Bluesky users - see if you can find yourself! bluesky-map.theo.io I've seen some similar projects, but IMO this seems to better capture some of the fine-grained detail

I like the way Powerpoint's slide designer function suggests designs which then get flagged as inaccessible by Powerpoint’s accessibility checker

As an Irish citizen (from Cork) born in England let's not dig up those skeletons.

My theory that AI maximalists don’t know how to use a computer remains undefeated so far

Yes this, so much. We've gone backwards so quickly in a handful of years.

This is the joy we all need at the moment

Ron SwanStone

Short thread on our new paper. We use face mask efficacy research as a “stress test” for systematic review methods. We analysed 66 systematic reviews of face mask efficacy; they reached widely different conclusions (~half said they work, half said that evidence of efficacy was lacking). 1/