“It’s quite mind-blowing that all of this happened autonomously!” said the “victim”, a company with exactly the same interest in AI hype as the “perpetrator”. www.ft.com/content/9db7...

Goodnight from same

Germans to be forced to wait for delayed trains sober www.businesstraveller.com/news/deutsch...

Hello from south of Tunis

Pete Hegseth: "We need our warriors to embrace the Spartan mindset" U.S. Military: *suffers crushing defeat to the Persians*

Local plumbers two steps ahead of every university administrator in america 👏

The FT on the side of light: Shame they include the best argument against it (Phoenix, AZ) as an example of its benefits. Air-condition Paris, not the Sahara! www.ft.com/content/cbee...

short answer: no long answer: nooooooooooooo lol

Downfall.gif

There are two pieces of advice I would give LLM users. The first is don’t get them to do your tax returns, and the second is for the love of big-pawed puppies don’t do this: www.macrumors.com/2026/07/16/1...

People forget this. Austerity was a purposeful, economically unnecessary, political decision which hurt those who can’t work the hardest. These deaths were entirely predictable & avoidable, but for my whole life, people have argued in favour of austerity. share.google/oTRdJYHfO3mn...

Raymond Geuss devastating on Hillary Clinton's FT piece on Gaza newleftreview.org/sidecar/sear...

New Zealand's lack of capital gains and inheritance taxes, and zero-commitment investor visa, helping make it #2 (!) on a list of wealthy person bolt-holes. (I only hope Thiel doesn't read this and go back.) stocks.apple.com/ATv7aeLY-Tem... (Apple Stocks+ Link)

Live a life where people talk about you after you die like they do Sam Neil.

This is not what “wearing the game like a loaded gun” was supposed to mean

Yesterday the Telegraph reported on my comments about air conditioning. The comment section is quite something. I have apparently become a hero of the anti net zero crowd by saying something what I think is sensible about air con. Allow me to point out three ironies in this 🧵

“Straightforwardly left-wing government”

Stormy heatwave evening across Rue Leschot

Both-and, please. (What does “short term relief” even mean here? Opening your fridge door gives short-term relief; air conditioners go until you turn them off.)

Dear Mr Farage, thank you for your application for the post of Steward. After careful consideration we have decided to go in another direction. Sincerely, the Chiltern Hundreds.

'Mysterianism' - great word to describe this attitude

A bee in Lal Bagh

“Incorporated into the metropole” is also a distinction I’ve heard Spanish people make re: Gibraltar vs Ceuta & Melilla, but I’d bet quite a lot of money that giving Gibraltar a Westminster seat wouldn’t improve their view of the UK’s ownership.

The UK tourist industry breathing a quiet sigh of relief about Brexit: www.ft.com/content/3ed7...

You can't trust any of the wildlife in Australia, including the accountants. www.ft.com/content/f0f8...

this is amazing, will be using this to teach about social construction of colors in my philosophy class #philsci moultano.wordpress.com/2026/06/19/w...

Today in "don't let Libertarians run your public services, you'll get bad services obviously but also corruption because there are no genuine Libertarians in government, duh": thespinoff.co.nz/politics/30-...

This is very well done.

I don’t think “unconditional” means what Adm Sir Tony (ret) thinks it means.

“It’s only as good as the information you train it on” is too kind. It can take in only accurate information and *still* hallucinate, because you’re asking it to generate (hence the name) things that aren’t in its training materials. And it doesn’t know how to do that.

My advice to people using LLM-AI for information (search summaries, medical queries, whatever) is to make sure to double-check the response with a reliable source, and then rely on that second source instead.

Ford has rehired hundreds of senior engineers after replacing them with AI backfired and has cost the company billions of dollars. AI adoption is blamed for Ford being the most recalled automaker in the U.S. with 51 recalls covering over 11 million vehicles in the first half of 2026 alone.

Weird language fact, learned while looking up whether “Bengaluruan” was a thing: “Adjectives ending -ish can be used as collective demonyms (e.g. the English, the Cornish). So can those ending in -ch / -tch (e.g. the French, the Dutch) provided they are pronounced with a 'ch' /tʃ/ sound”

Less than 30 degrees outside at 1pm; delightful to escape the fierce European heat here in *checks GPS* South India.

And another one. Schools are closing and people are dying, you’re gonna have to fix the climate another way. (Solar power!) With a bonus appearance from the UK’s legendary one-way insulation.

“It is absurd to have people die because of the heat,” said Le Pen. Mélenchon hit back: “Absolutely not. Installing air conditioning everywhere would only mean increasing the damage” Brb, getting my Joker makeup www.ft.com/content/b9ab...

Dube and Krugman discuss how economics discovered that common sense—employers have wage-setting power—was right after all. paulkrugman.substack.com/p/arindrajit...

It reminds me of “the word neoliberalism is meaningless and a slur”: just a total inability to see things from any outside perspective.

It’s also one of the great funders of philosophers who agree with Aquinas. And the “living in a palace” thing was lifelong house arrest. Just in a nice place.

The Starmer government was very left-leaning, if you ignore all the right-wing things it did

Ladies and gentlemen, the British press

Do journalists not get tired of participating in this sort of thing? www.ft.com/content/e586...

The medical result here isn’t about LLMs. It’s about machine-learning recognition of tumours, a very successful tool which the study took away on random days. So this is maybe less a case of Claude eating our brains, and more one of forgetting how to use slide rules?

May: arstechnica.com/health/2026/... Now:

I suspect if you said to one of those responsible—a propos of something else— “Most terrorists these days are middle-aged white women” they would not rush to agree with you. Anyway, thread.

Ten years on, a reminder that the problem with Lexit wasn’t that the EU is progressive and awesome, it was that the UK under the Brexiteers wouldn’t be better. www.ft.com/content/e775...

Oh, oh, I have been tortured. I have been broken on the wheel. My left leg has fallen off, and my right hand is coming out of my left arm. Such pain as this has not been felt since the making of the world. But it’s ok, I can play on.

Without a Israeli-Lebanese agreement on full Israeli withdrawal from south Lebanon, the next regional escalation is just around the corner. It would involve Israeli attacks on Beirut, Iranian missiles on Israel, Israeli attacks on Iran, and the suspension of movement through Hormuz Straits.

Lede complaint here coming from Coinbase is chef's kiss. First they came for the previous generation of grifters... stocks.apple.com/ApBCJ_kNXQfa...