IMPORTANT UPDATE: The person who originally saw this broadcast and took the pictures of the TV is currently the Icelandic Ambassador to the US.

God-tier NYT correction: Correction (left), original (right) www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/n...

This is dismissive of the proud human tradition of @secondmentions.com

A law of headlines where if it says "whisper it" then they're talking fanciful bollocks they want to be true but isn't

ENORMOUS spider in my living room. I (very bravely) trapped it under a glass and threw it off my balcony. But the wind caught it on its descent, and it landed on the balcony two floors below.

I enjoyed this piece on AI writing, which is alternately deeply pessimistic and enjoyably aggressive. (I agree with, I don't know, two-thirds of it, maybe?) samkriss.substack.com/p/if-you-let...

Always liked the Buffett analogy.

I occasionally remember this anecdote about Dylan and just start laughing.

“Right now, book people appear to be hostile to AI in general and lenient about its use in literary prizes. That seems like the wrong way around.” (I only read up to the paywall, but good piece with a somewhat trolly headline, imho.) www.ian-leslie.com/p/why-writer...

It is actually the same artist who does the New Yorker headshots, Stanley Chow, who lives in Manchester. www.instagram.com/p/CG2c7nTHsLD/

Am I the only one who thinks this picture looks like Andy Burnham is now a staff writer for the New Yorker?

Oh, wow. openai.com/index/model-... For the mathematically curious non-expert, like me, I recommend Thomas Bloom’s summary in Section 4 of cdn.openai.com/pdf/74c24085...

I’ve written more about statistics of the Guardian’s 100 best novels list, including: – Books that just missed out – Two errors in the data (Cather and Camus lost out) – Best novelists – Alternative rankings – Weirdest and least-weird ballots mpaldridge.github.io/blog/guardia...

I think there’s a calculation error in the Guardian’s 100 best novels list. My Ántonia looks like it had one of its votes missed, and it should about 25 places higher (~75th instead of 100th). github.com/mpaldridge/g...

Can’t work out if I actually want Ed Miliband to be prime minister or if I’m just joking.

Douglas Hofstadter: "I refer to these pictures and the accompanying words as a 'horsies-and-doggies proof'" doi.org/10.1080/0025...

Marking a student essay that is sufficiently competent that it seems likely it was written by an LLM. But then notice they have spelled "separate" wrongly, so it must be their own work.

Really just making a note for myself looking back in a few year's time, but: I've been trying to learn some new maths over the past few days, and, for the first time, I've found going back-and-forth with GPT has been quite a bit more helpful than reading papers/textbooks.

"Are you a horse?"

If only there were a tram-based policy Starmer could adopt that would lead to guaranteed popularity in areas that switched from Labour to both Reform (Ardsley, Cross Gates, Killingbeck, Temple Newsam) *and* the Greens (Armley, Beeston, Chapel Allerton, Kirkstall, Little London).

"I would judge the level of the result that ChatGPT found in under two hours to be that of a perfectly reasonable chapter in a combinatorics PhD." -Timothy Gowers gowers.wordpress.com/2026/05/08/a...

WH Smith / TG Jones: "the paperclips to books chain" @secondmentions.bsky.social www.theguardian.com/business/202...

Lines, ranked www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/lin...

No these are not “midterm” elections, thank you for your attention to this matter

This is fun on English-language films that have different (yet sometimes still English) titles in France. letterboxd.com/journal/film... (From the Bluesky comments, I learn that “Cruel Intentions” was called “Sexe Intentions” in France.)

Some dates, when formatted as YYYY-MM-DD, have all unique digits * The earliest was 1345-06-27 * The most recent was 1987-06-25 * The next is 2345-06-17 * The last will be 9876-12-30

I finally gave in and subscribed to the New York Times for £20 for the first year. I feel I've already saved more than £20 in getting-around-the-paywall annoyance, although lost some of that back on trying-to-upsell-me-a-family-subscription annoyance.

Greggs: “the sausage roll and sandwich retailer” @secondmentions.bsky.social www.theguardian.com/business/202...

Leeds trams update

New citation metrics: chalkdustmagazine.com/regulars/the...

I see the Greens are opposing (checks notes) solar power now.

I like Sierpinksi Triangles so I made this - because tortilla chips are trianglar too, do you see? TBH I think it worked better in my head...

Some interesting discussions about a genuine AI breakthough on Erdős problem 1196 www.erdosproblems.com/forum/thread... going on over at the other place; eg. this thread by Thomas Bloom x.com/thomasfbloom... or this one by Jared Duker Lichtman x.com/jdlichtman/s...

Increasingly going to start calling myself part of the 'Lost Leeds Tram Generation. My last words to my grandchildren before the Dignitas injection takes me will be that Leeds is the biggest city in Europe without a mass transit system.

“The root cause is that the Department for Transport is based in London, the Treasury is based in London, the political decision was taken in London. There needs to be local tax-raising. If we had devolution we would get this stuff done.” www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

It's a bit depressing that in 2026, a Labour leader is promising to block a congestion charge. I have no particular knowledge of the Glasgow plan, but history shows us that in almost every case, congestion charges work for basically everyone.

This is exactly why we need to take on the CIBABs. open.substack.com/pub/chriscur...

1. I think this is (mostly) right. 2. It’s reassuring that there are MPs out there thinking about serious problems as methodically as this. 3. I will post anything that advocates for the Leeds tram. chriscurtismk.substack.com/p/to-grow-th...

Had fun in the bookshop pretending to browse the fiction section but actually eavesdropping on the staff discussing marketing and sales for reissued old books. (“We sold 200 copies of [redacted], even though everybody hated it,” they said, referring to a book I have bought but not yet read.)

“The final tankers from the Gulf will arrive in Europe around 10th April, and I fear that soon after that is when things will start to get messy.” bristoliver.substack.com/p/the-gather...

I thought that if I redrew that Bluesky graph (bsky.app/profile/jame...) with the number of daily likers on a log-scale, then it would reveal lots of extra information on trends that would be helpful for understanding. But it turns out it looks exactly the same. But I made the effort, so:

CREATION Happy April Fool's Day! xkcd.com/3227/

Am ill in bed today, but it means I could watch the Dwars door Flanderen cycling race, and the last 10 minutes was a banger!

Some thoughts of mine have ended up in the most recent ISBA Bulletin (isba-bulletin.github.io/ISBABulletin/); I think mostly consistent with what I've been posting here, but was anyhow a good exercise to try to articulate my thinking a bit. May try to blog more on this topic later.

Are we sure that NYT book review wasn’t just Good Old-Fashioned Plagiarism? Everyone seems very willing to believe the author that it was due to their using AI. But I could imagine thinking “if I blame this on misusing AI, maybe that will seem less bad than admitting I just plain copied stuff.”

Extremely intriguing top three search words on Oxford English Dictionaries at the moment

A fun one for the typography nerds! www.inconspicuous.info/p/h-bomb-a-f...

Always fun when the "list of corrections to errors introduced into our paper by the publishers" reaches its tenth page...

Earlier today, a colleague mentioned in passing "you know, that massive book about the American ... architect??", and the eagerness with which I immediately butted in with "THAT'S 'THE POWER BROKER' AND I'M CURRENTLY READING IT, ACTUALLY" is now, in hindsight, very embarrassing to me.

Given I’m a 40-year-old man with a mildly unhealthy interest in US politics, New York, walkability of cities, state capacity, etc, I suppose it’s time to make a start on this. (See you in, like, nine months.)